Page 41 of King of Temptation

She should tell him. Fuck Brody, and the rest of the O’Rourkes. She didn’t owe them an ounce of loyalty after this stunt.

But something stopped her, and instead of blurting out the truth, she just shook her head. “Please get me out of these, Dad. I just wanna go home.”

“Okay, baby.” His movements were jerky as he nodded and reached into his pocket for a key. “I’ll get you out. Give me just a minute.”

It probably took less than a minute, but it felt like an eternity waiting to be freed. And then she was up out of the chair, in her father’s arms as the shaking started. Someone draped a blanket around her shoulders and her father led her out of the building to a waiting ambulance.

The next hour or so was a complete blur. She had a vague memory of an EMT asking her lots of questions, trying to assess the extent of her shock. And then her father insisting she should go to the hospital, and when she refused, putting his foot down about her going home alone.

Which was how she found herself sitting at the battered old kitchen table in her childhood home, her hands wrapped around a steaming mug of hot chocolate, as her father paced the floor in front of her.

“It doesn’t make any sense. Why would someone target you like this?”

“I don’t know.” The lie rolled easily off her tongue, though the guilty knots in her stomach tightened, making her worry that her dinner was about to make a very rude reappearance.

Dinner. Dessert. That bastard stole her cheesecake.

One more reason to hate him, she supposed.

Stopping his pacing, her father turned and frowned. “They didn’t say anything? Make any demands?”

“No.” Other than telling her to stay the fuck away, which was not information her father needed.

“Marigold.” Pulling out the chair opposite her, he sat, his expression hard and flat as leaned his forearms on the table. And in that instant, she recognized that he was no longer just her father. He was a cop, down to his bones, determined to get the truth out of his witness if he had to pry it out of her.

Fuck.

“Dad,” she answered back, deliberately meeting his gaze head on as she lifted the mug to her lips and sipped.

“What aren’t you telling me?”

Everything. “I already told you what I know.”

Leaning back in his chair, he studied her with those shrewd ‘cop eyes’. She’d only had that look directed at her a few times in her life, as she’d generally tried to stay out of trouble after her mom had died. Back then, she’d figured he had enough on his plate, becoming a single dad and grieving the love of his life, so she’d done everything in her power to make things easier on him. And whenever she’d failed, whenever she’d given him a moment of worry, she’d felt so fucking guilty it had kept her out of trouble for months afterward.

That old guilt came flooding back with a vengeance now.

“Your story is that some man, whom you can’t describe in any kind of detail, kidnapped you for no reason, handcuffed you to a chair in an abandoned warehouse, and then called me to come rescue you. And you have absolutely no clue why.”

“Yes.” One lesson she’d learned early on was that the shorter the answers, the better. Liars got tripped up trying to add too much detail to their stories.

“Don’t fucking lie to my face, Marigold. You’re better than that.”

Heat flooded her cheeks, and she lowered her gaze, unable to hold the eye contact any longer. “Can we just drop it, please?”

“Drop it?” Her father’s voice turned sharp with disbelief. “You want me to just forget about the fact that some bastard had his hands on my daughter? You have fucking bruises on your wrists, Marigold.”

Pulling her hands away from the mug, she slid them under the table to hide the telltale marks forming on her skin. “That was my fault for yanking at the cuffs so hard.”

“Your—For fuck’s sake, Marigold!”

Irritation poured off him in waves as he shoved back from the table to pace again. Silence enveloped them, thick enough to cut with a knife. The guilt threatened to crush her, to squeeze all the air from her lungs.

And still she stayed silent.

Finally, he seemed to wear himself out and he dropped down into the chair across from her again. “Look, honey. Even if I wanted to just forget this happened, I can’t. We called in a literal SWAT team to get you. There’s going to be an investigation and I can’t protect you from the fallout if you don’t tell me what the hell is going on.”

Now fear—for herself and, fuck her, Brody and his family—joined the guilt in tying her system up into messy, nauseating knots. “What kind of investigation?”