But I can’t leave. I can’t walk away. I can’t quit the assignment and leave her. Because I will die in her absence. I know this the way I know my own name.
I am dying in a tank, and the only hand that can help me belongs to a woman I desperately love. And that woman doesn’t care whether I live or die.
I pull my fist back and drive it into the mirror.
The glass cracks, radiating from the point of impact. My reflection splits into different versions of the same broken face. Pain shoots through my knuckles and up my wrist, and I lookdown and see blood. Bright red, running in thin lines between my fingers, dripping onto the white sink.
My hand is bleeding and I feel nothing in it. The pain in my chest has consumed every nerve ending I have. There is no room for a cut hand. There is no room for anything.
She is so far above me.
So far outside the perimeter of what I am allowed to want. She is a woman who moves through the world with power and beauty and money and intelligence, and every single one of those things is a wall I can’t climb. I am a twenty-five-year-old disaster held together by rage toward a father who didn’t want me.
I slide down the wall. The tile is cold against my back. I sit on the bathroom floor with my knees up and my bloody hand resting on my knee, and I stare at the opposite wall.
The tears don’t stop.
I don’t wipe them. I don’t have the energy to pretend anymore.
What a life. What a fucked, rigged, loaded-dice life.
I came to this city to destroy a man, and instead, a woman destroyed me. And she didn’t even have to try.
9
Diana
THE BASEMENT PARKING garage is quiet at eight. My heels are the only sound, and even those are softened by the rubber mat between the elevator and the row of black SUVs.
I watch my bodyguard from my periphery, watching but not really watching, else he’d think I’m a creep, and can’t have him thinking that.
Kai Romero is a walking temptation. That’s the most honest way to put it. Buzz cut, dark. Skin that holds a gold tint even when the sun’s been gone for hours. A mouth that hardly moves when he talks, but does unspeakable things when it’s somewhere on my body.
I toss him the keys without warning. He catches them without looking. His reflex is always two seconds ahead of his brain, and that never fails to turn me on.
Kai is a great cut of steak, the type that ruins you for everything else on the menu. My taste has leveled up since him. He’s what my appetite expects these days, what gets my blood moving in the morning before coffee does. The eye candy a woman could have every day for the rest of her life and never once get bored with. And I say that with the palate of a woman who has sampled the entire menu.
His future girlfriend doesn’t know what’s coming for her. A man this physically gifted, this grounded, this sensible. A man who listens when you speak and answers with weight behindthe words, not the empty filler most men offer to fill the silence between their own sentences.
I am surrounded by men. My entire career is a parade of them. Sharp men, wealthy men, men with opinions and agendas. There is no shortage of men in my life.
But Kai is different.
Talking to him relaxes me. Not the way the sex relaxes me, though the sex with him relaxes me in a category that deserves its own filing system. But talking to Kai is something else. His company, when the work is done and the suits are off and we’re drinking whiskey in my office, is a quiet I haven’t had since I was a girl on my grandfather’s porch.
My grandfather, he spoke in slow, measured sentences and treated every question I asked with the seriousness of a Supreme Court appeal. Kai has that. That old soul weight. The feeling that when he looks at me, he is seeingme. Not the title. Not the legs. Not the figures on the bank statement.
It’s funny because Kai is so much younger than me. Or I’m so much older than him. Depends on whether the glass is half empty or half full.
A soul connect. That is the only phrase I can find for it. Two frequencies that happen to match.
I catch myself.
My hand is on my chin. I am staring at the side of his face from the backseat with an expression I would mock in any other woman.
I laugh at myself quietly. This is the old woman talking. Getting sentimental over a young bodyguard because he has nice eyes and listens well.
I am forty. I am not old. I am not sentimental. I am a woman in the peak of her life.
