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Slipping off her shoes, she kicked them under the bed. “With you, Rigor, and Tuck spending so much time drinking and playing cards, I wasn’t sure you’d notice that I wasn’t there.” Lifting her foot from the floor to put it on the bed, she began to unroll her stocking.
“Leave them on.”
She paused. Good humor hadn’t joined her this week and that wasn’t his fault, she just hated feeling so hollow all the time. “Is that supposed to be funny?”
He remained expressionless. “Worked the first time I said it.”
She slid her foot to the floor. Worked was a matter of opinion, taking a long-term view, yeah, the mysterious stranger act had worked. But his memory wasn’t that sharp if he thought the night he’d first said those words to her had had a happy ending. “We didn’t have sex the night you said that.”
Inhaling, he rose from the chair to cross to her. “Didn’t take you long to surrender your panties to me.”
“Why are you here?” she sighed when he took her neck in one hand and her face in the other, holding her in place with his entitled grip.
“That’s what I came to ask you,” he said, drumming his heavy fingers on her cheekbone. “You should be with us.”
Nothing made sense to her anymore. Fraught by the conflict within herself, she couldn’t handle conflict with him too. Which was why she hadn’t coveted talking to him this week. She’d never gone as far as to ignore his calls, though she did have a missed “Unknown” call after her morning shower a couple of days ago that she had never tried to return.
“Us?” she asked, wondering if he was here for the Kindred or for himself. “You don’t need me out there anymore. I understood staying in the neighborhood to monitor the compound. I understood going in after Benedict choppered out. Investigating the building satisfied your curiosity. But Sutcliffe is dead and his plan went with him. He’s no threat anymore. Rigor has moved in and turned the place into his own private drinking den.” Rigor got pissed when he talked about Leatt, but he and his men didn’t have the drive of the Kindred. Another question had plagued her this week, in the nights she was missing her love’s attention. “Why are you still there? How can you hang out and laugh a few feet from where your brother fell?”
Now he became incredulous. “You ditched me because of Saint?”
“No,” she sighed and tried to remove his hands from her, but he wouldn’t let her go.
She tried to stay relaxed so as not to further arouse his suspicions. If she put up too much of a fight, then he’d begin to think she was hiding something from him or she was in some sort of trouble.
“Then why?” he asked, strengthening his hold.
She hadn’t ditched him, she’d just been trying to find something that didn’t want to be found. His entitled touch marked her. He had to feel her skin to restore his connection to her. It was his way of reassuring himself that she was safe and within reach. Having such a physical show of his feelings for her typically encouraged her, too, but the half-truth she had to tell him poisoned her tongue.
“I had to be at CI,” she said. “Someone has to keep up appearances.”
CI was supposed to remind her of who she was because she’d always been assured there, it hadn’t. Warring with her feelings about Grant’s death had made being there a struggle too. She shouldn’t be pleased that he was dead, but part of her was because he’d threatened her love. In her mind, he’d become two men. She mourned the first with the weight of devastating grief, the man who had been her friend and employer. The second, was the conniving, back-stabber who’d wanted power and to destroy Brodie.
It was this second guy that made her question the essence of herself. Before the Kindred she would never have imagined herself pleased that someone had lost their life. Being relieved after watching someone be murdered made her question her own moral center. Was she as evil as Sutcliffe and the others because she was willing to go to any lengths to protect what she held most dear, Brodie and the Kindred.
He drew his index finger around the curve of her jaw, it came to a stop on her chin. “I’ve made a call. Soon, you won’t have to worry about CI.”
FOUR
As proud as he sounded of himself, she was suspicious. That statement could mean any number of things. Could he be planning to abandon the company? Or was he thinking about ruining it, planting a mole who could dismantle generations of work? Whatever he meant, she planned to find out.
Brodie didn’t make external phone calls, as far as she’d seen. So, did he set the plan into motion? “You made a call or Wren did?” she asked because if the doctor had signed off on the plan…
“No, this is a phone call I had to make myself,” he said, running his finger down her throat and into her cleavage.
“I’ve never seen you make a phone call,” she said. Never having seen it with her own eyes, she knew he did make them because he’d called her. Except she liked to think she was in a unique position being his girlfriend. “Did Wren refuse?”
She trusted that if Thad was against making the call, he didn’t support whatever Brodie had done. Brodie scoffed. “Wren does what he’s told.”
Which suggested Brodie hadn’t told him to do it and had elected to act on his own. “You chose to do it yourself?”
“I had to. She wouldn’t have come otherwise.”
All the elements of her internal war came to a deafening halt. “She?”
“Like you said to me so many times, the CEO goes missing, someone notices. I called on an old friend who knows everything there is to know about running a multinational.”
Zara might not have the qualifications but she’d been doing fine at CI and had needed the distraction. Although she’d avoided going into Grant’s office so far. But Brodie had called someone who was going to take everything away from her?
