Page 10 of King of Temptation

The thing pressed against her side dug in harder, and fear once more clawed at her throat. Oh, right. The guy with the gun. That’s who the fuck he thinks he is.

Because she wasn’t actually as stupid as he seemed to believe she was, she did as she was told and climbed over her console to the passenger seat. Which took some doing, as it was currently crowded with bags of cookies and chips and a box of her favorite snack cakes.

“What the hell is all that?”

Nothing about being discovered staking out a mob boss’s house and then having that mob boss’s second in command pointing a gun at her should have been funny. But the pure horror in his voice was kind of hilarious.

“Stakeout snacks,” she explained as she moved them to the backseat. “I didn’t know how long I’d be here.”

“Do you eat like this all the time or just when you’re being a fucking menace to society?”

Maybe it made her a perverse creature, but she couldn’t help but feel a burst of pride at being called a menace to society by a man who was, by all rights, an actual menace to society. “Well, this is my first stakeout, so I probably went a bit overboard. When I’m on a tight deadline I do pretty much live on junk food, though.”

Another of those low growls rumbled through the car, and again she thought how fucked up she must be for that sound to have her pussy spasming in response. “Jesus Christ. You need a keeper. Buckle your goddamn seatbelt.”

Okay, well, if he was worried about her safety he probably wasn’t planning to kill her and feed her to the fishes.

Right?

Clinging to that hope, she did indeed buckle her seatbelt without argument. “So… where are you taking me?”

“Home.”

Disappointment stabbed at her, followed by the logical side of her brain wondering what the fuck was wrong with her that she was disappointed he wouldn’t be dragging her to some dark warehouse to question her. “Boring.”

One corner of his mouth kicked up in a smirk as he guided her car away from the curb. “Trust me, menace, you won’t be bored for long.”

Again her heart kicked into high gear as her stomach twisted itself into a giant pretzel. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Why were you staking out my cousin’s house?”

“Answer my question first.”

Glancing over, he raised a ruddy brow in a look she’d written about many times but hadn’t actually seen in person. And her reaction to said look was exactly like what she’d written about.

She was starting to think he was the one who was full of shit and not her books.

“Do you really think you’re in a position to be making demands, little girl?”

Ah, fuck. That shouldn’t be hot. She was a woman, a professional, successful woman, thank you very much. She should not enjoy being called ‘little girl’ in that growly voice.

But she did. So much so that she had to press her thighs together against the sudden ache between them. “Why not? You’re not actually going to shoot me.”

“You seem very sure of yourself.”

“I am. Because if you were going to shoot me, you would have done it already. And because you’re too smart to risk taking out a cop’s daughter.”

Her father’s job wasn’t something she wielded for her own selfish purposes very often. She’d never been the type of cop’s kid to see how much she could get away with, always assuming her father would be there to bail her out. No, she’d very much been the opposite, always following the rules, never making trouble for her father if she could help it. Hell, she didn’t have so much as a parking ticket to her name.

But telling Brody who her father was just seemed smart, given the circumstances. She knew damn well the O’Rourkes were dangerous men, and while she was fairly confident in her assessment of Brody’s current motivations, she couldn’t be guaranteed they would always stay that way.

“Not bad, menace.” If she wasn’t mistaken, there was a note of pride in his voice. “You’re forgetting one crucial detail, though.”

“And what’s that?”

Again with that damn smirk. “It’s my job to make sure that when someone needs to disappear, they do so without a trace, and with nothing that could remotely connect them back to my family. And I am very, very good at my job.”

Fuck.