“Hush, you,” Gigi scolded.
“I’m not a villain.” Rohan had never before felt compelled to clarify that. “More of a moral nihilist, really.”
“But not anactualnihilist,” Gigi said, her big doe eyes searching Rohan’s. “Because the things that matter to you matter deeply.”
There is only one thing that matters to me.Rohan shouldn’t have had any trouble believing that. He certainly never had before.
“Guy’s not your friend,” Knox told Gigi. “Or your sister’s.”
Rohan took no offense. He’d never had friends per se. He’d learned young that people were tools to be used, the connections between them little more than levers to be pulled.
“I’m a right bastard,” Rohan agreed, “which raises a question.” He deployed his most charming smile at Gigi. “If I told you I was irredeemable, how badly would you want to help your sister find a way to redeem me?”
Knox scowled, his eyes still closed.
“Don’t mind the way his fingers are curling into fists,” Gigi told Rohan. “Knox is a teddy bear, really.”
“Metaliterally or litaphorically?” Rohan replied.
Gigi grinned. “Oh, I like you.”
Rohan was not accustomed to beingliked. “You shouldn’t,” he told Gigi, just as two other voices spoke the same piece of advice in his unison with him: Knox… and Savannah.
Savannah Grayson might have been the kind of person to sleep on a plane and even the kind to allow her head to list onto her sister’s shoulder as she slept, but she did not disappoint when it came to waking up. She was fully cognizant, fully herself, and fully capable of pinning Rohan with a look the moment she opened her eyes.
“I assume we’ll be landing soon.” Savannah was not one for questions. “If there’s anything we should know about our destination, Mr. Landry, now would be the time to share.”
Knox ignored the command inherent in those words. Fortunately, Rohan excelled at making himself difficult to ignore.
“Will we find Brady Daniels at his mother’s house on Cedarbend Court, I wonder, or out in the bayou?” Rohan fixed his gaze on Knox. “Stargazing, perhaps?”
And just like that, Knox’s eyes opened.
Hit a nerve, did I?“I always make it a habit to know my competition,” Rohan told Knox. “I’d run deep background on the top ten finalists in last year’s game long before this year’s commenced. I’m well acquainted with both you and Mr. Daniels.”
And yet, when it came to the fact that the duchess had approached Brady, recruited him… Rohan had somehow missed it.
What else am I missing?That was what Rohan was going to find out. Tonight. But for now, he kept his focus—and his sights—on Knox. “For what it’s worth, you weren’t Orion Thorp’s only player in this year’s game, Mr. Landry, merely the only one to successfully locate a golden ticket.” Rohan had dispatched at least one of Thorp’s men himself.
“I’m well aware that I’m nothing to a man like Orion Thorp.” As much as Knox tried to sound like he’d stepped right off Wall Street,every so often, Rohan could hear a telltale bit of twang in his voice, rising up like a snake just barely lifting its head above the grass.
“As for our destination…” Knox reeled his accent back in. “You don’t need to know a damn thing about St. Adelaide Parish. We get in. We find Brady. We get out. And we leave Brady’s mama out of this.”
“The bayou, then?” Rohan concluded. “Ah, memories.”Yours, not mine, Mr. Landry.
Sometimes strategy dictated putting others at ease, and sometimes it called for the opposite. Rohan wanted Knox on the warpath, primed to make this search as quick as possible. “You might be nothing to Orion Thorp,” Rohan continued, poking at the bear just a little bit more, “but out in the bayou, you weren’t nothing to his daughter.”To Calla.“Were you?”
And there it is—a clench of the jaw.
“I take it back,” Gigi told Rohan. “I don’t like you.” She turned to Savannah. “I don’t like him.”
“Neither,” Savannah replied, “do I.”
“We’re all in agreement, then.” Rohan smirked. “I’m detestable and easy on the eyes.”
“What do you want with Brady?” Knox stared Rohan down like he’d never even heard the wordblink. “Or is it Calla you really want?”
“If your lost love shows herself, I wouldn’t object, but I’ll settle for a chat with Mr. Daniels.” That was a lie. Rohan did notsettle, and he hadn’t expended his own limited resources to charter a plane to Louisiana with the goal of picking Brady’s brain.
