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Her voice distracts me from the obvious bite of her words. She sounds like a birdsong filling a meadow on a warm summer day, and I crave to be right there with her.
“Careful now, that sharp tongue and those steel eyes will get you in trouble.” I lower my voice, reveling in the shock painted vividly on her parted lips. For a split moment, I forget it’s not just us.
“What my partner means to say…” Erika says quickly, “is that we do not wish to waste our time or yours. We are positive that you will be pleased with the piece.”
“Friday. Eight o’clock. The Rosenberg,” I almost rasp, my throat constricting, my lungs close to heaving.
I’m suffocating.
That woman… she’s infusing the oxygen with her seemingly innocent black magic, and I need to break the damn spell.
I have to walk past her to leave, and I can’t stop myself from glancing over my shoulder. She turns her head slightly, but our gazes never connect.
I’m not sure if it makes me feel better or worse, but she’s trying hard not to look at me. As am I.
It doesn’t matter. The heat of her body as I brush past her seems to have the same effect.
* * *
We’ve just passed through the gates of the garden, my steps heavy and quick, eager to get the fuck out of there, when my brother gives me a forceful nudge.
“What the hell was that, man?! Do you even know what happened in that meeting?”
I roll my eyes, heading toward the driver’s side of the Range Rover parked across the street, Finn falling into step behind me.
“I think we all know what happened there,” Vin says, to my dismay.
Most people have an irrational fear of Vincent Sinclair’s attention on them. I am no exception. It’s the darkness of his black eyes that I try to avoid when I look in the rearview mirror. I swear to the gods the man can look into your soul, peel all the layers until he finds the exact information he needs to hold against you. He’s five or six years younger than my twenty-seven, yet his talent doesn’t show his age. He gets better the more he practices, putting the fear of God into people. Only, those people have begun calling himThe Serpent, and they don’t think it’s God they should fear when they fall under his gaze.
He’s a good kid, though—all four of them are.
My brother, Finnigan, the pretty boy who has been turning heads with his baby blues and curly blond locks, long before he started filling those shoulders and pecs with muscle.
Maddox Severin, who has never looked his age, towers over all of us. His wide, muscled frame growing month by month, nurtured by his hunger for grueling workouts and fighting. He’s the one who trains all our men and we’ve had to build him a gym so he can focus his brute force there, not on our guys.
Then there’s Carter Pierce, the man with peculiar dark blue and hazel eyes, that are as beautiful as they are empty. He’s always prim and proper, with his white shirts, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, tweed waistcoats, and impeccable slicked-back hair and undercut. He doesn’t really look like he’s from this time. He’s quite something—different. A man of few words and the ones he sometimes chooses make me wonder about the skeletons in his closet. Or maybe severed heads in the fridge. Yet he’s the one I gravitate toward the most, and even after all these years, I still don’t understand why.
We started this organization more or less together, even though Carter and Finn were away at university for a portion of it. It worked to our benefit. All the connections they sought there have proved fruitful, while Vin, Madds, and I built the bases here.
“There he goes again. He’s gone.”
“Fuck you!” I spit at Madds, who kicks my seat from behind.
“Wouldn’t mind being lost in that blue-eyed little thing either,” Finn teases.
“Gray…” I whisper. But it comes out more like a grunt. A visceral need to smack my brother’s head against the dashboard arises, and I can’t make sense of it. Even aware that the asshole is just messing with me.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
The engine roars to life, covering the rest of the bullshit coming out of their mouths. But it does nothing against my intrusive thoughts about the woman who almost took my damn breath away. I don’t even dare ask myself if they all noticed it. I already know they did.
Fuck!
I put my foot down, the streetlights of Queenscove blurring as I drive through the night, knowing full well I’m stupidly attracting the attention of both the residents and the tourists of this seaside city. The majority of them are currently out on the streets since it’s Saturday night.
Does it really matter, when we have most of the police in our pocket anyway? They won’t stop us.
