Uilleam offered her an apologetic smile before he joined her on the couch, pulling her into his embrace even as she moved closer to him, as if a gravitational pull connected them.
“He gave me the final numbers on the properties I needed him to look over back in New York.”
“Oh?” She reclined back, her hair sliding over his arms as she turned to look up at him. “What kind of properties?”
She almost regretted the question as soon as it was out of her mouth.
Before her mother’s visit and their conversation, she would have been curious about what he was doing, but now, she couldn’t help but feel as if she shouldn’t ask.
That whatever he told her could be used against him at some point …
But no, she thought quickly, she would never betray him in that way.
His secrets were safe with her … because she kept her own from him.
“New business ventures,” he said, seeming distracted as he twisted a lock of her hair around his finger.
Her curiosity was running rampant.
She had noticed he was in New York far more frequently these days—though that wasn’t hard to imagine, considering he spent a great deal of that time with her—but he seemed to be moving his operation there as well.
Which made her wonder … “Where were you before you came to New York?”
He blinked as if the question threw him for a moment. Sometimes, she too felt as if they knew every little detail about each other, then the rest of the time she realized many details had just never been talked about.
“I’m never in any one place for too long,” he said after a moment. “A few weeks at a time is the most I’ll ever stay in one city, and even that’s a touch too long for me. But if you’re asking where I lived, I have an estate in Wales.” Her laughter made him smile. “Why’s that funny?”
“Of course you would have an estate,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “Nothing as mundane or as simple as a house or an apartment. I bet it has at least seven bedrooms.”
“Thirteen, actually,” he said, fighting a smile.
“And you live there by yourself?” she asked, losing a bit of her humor.
“Yes. It was my family’s estate, actually, and for a long time, it was left abandoned. I’ve spent the past couple of years restoring it.”
He said it so matter-of-factly that she almost didn’t think anything of it, at least until she thought about her original question. “That must be very lonely, though, isn’t it? Staying in a place that big all by yourself.”
Uilleam shrugged as if it didn’t bother him at all, and had she not been with him over the past few weeks, she would have thought he didn’t mind it—that he preferred to be alone.
But not once in all the time she’d known him had he ever given her that impression.
She couldn’t remember a single night since he’d finished with Gaspard that she hadn’t shared a bed with him. It didn’t matter if they went the entire day without seeing each other, or if she had already climbed into bed to sleep for the night.
When she woke up, he was there with his arm curled around her.
Sometimes, she was almost sure he didn’t like to be alone.
“It suits my needs,” he said now, leaning against the back of the couch and putting more distance between them.
Something she also noticed he did when she read him too easily.
He spent so much time reading others that she caught him off guard when she read him. He grew defensive as he did now.
Why did that make her ache for him?
“A family estate, you said?” she asked, thinking it was better to change the subject for now. She had plenty of time to get into his head. “How long has your family owned it?”
That quickly, he lost the tension around his eyes, and his expression grew wistful. “All my life.” His eyes, turned down to her. “I’d be more than happy to show it to you.”
“So you can dazzle me with how rich you are?” she asked, sitting up, her hair spilling over her shoulders. “When do we leave?”
He laughed, the sound making her feel lighter than air, but before he could respond, his phone rang again. She was growing to greatly dislike the thing.
He smiled apologetically. “I’m sorry about this.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said easily. “But make it quick or else you’ll miss out on the hot tub.”
“For that, I’d ignore this call entirely.”
Karina laughed, getting to her feet even as she set her mug aside. “Duty calls,” she said with a nod of her head to his still ringing phone. “I’ll be waiting for you.”
She turned away from him then, pulling her shirt over her head as she went. By the time she was rounding the corner out of sight, he finally answered the call, only to bark in Russian that it better be life and death for why the person was calling.
These moments reminded her why it was so incredibly easy to fall in love with a man like him. He might have been a criminal and could even be considered heartless at times, but Uilleam also had a sweet side that so few got to witness.
She felt lucky in that way.
Momentarily retreating to their bedroom to change out of her clothes and into the swimsuit Uilleam had insisted she bring, she grabbed a towel and headed down to the basement of the cabin where the hot tub was.
At first glance, the remote cabin had looked cute, sure, if a little quaint, and that hadn’t bothered her at all. But looks were deceiving and despite how it might have looked from the outside, the place was rather big on the inside.
There were three floors—one with the main living area and the three bedrooms the cabin consisted of. The top floor was something of an observation area complete with a telescope to look out at the stars and a minibar set up in the corner; but the last floor … well, it couldn’t really be considered a floor at all.
Through the door at the bottom of the spiral staircase was a hot tub that stretched from wall to wall, reminding her more of a heated pool. Except it had jets that sent ripples through the water and one side of the room had a wall of windows with a view of the forest at the back of the property.
She knew, having been on the other side of that glass, that one couldn’t see into the cabin itself even though she could see out. It only made the view of the snow falling outside all the more better.
Tossing her towel on a nearby chair, she dipped her toes into the water before walking down the gilded steps. The different shades of blue of the Moroccan tiles on the bottom made the water appear to glimmer.
She had only just submerged herself to waist level when her own phone chimed, making her frown as she looked over at it. She considered not answering it at all, but her curiosity got the best of her as she quickly darted over and grabbed it.
Isla …
Her gaze immediately went to the open door, wondering how long it would take before Uilleam finished his own conversation and joined her down here.
Finger hovering over the decline button, Karina seriously considered sending her to voicemail but thought better of it at the last minute.
This was Isla, after all, and they were closer than that.
“Iz—”
“I knew you liked him,” Isla said almost immediately, the wind whipping in the background, “but I didn’t realize you liked liked him.”
Sometimes, she made it easy to forget which one of them was the oldest. “If—”
“Mother has been in a state,” Isla continued, though she sounded a little thrilled by the prospect as opposed to upset. There was never any telling how Isla would feel about any one thing—her moods changed daily.
“I’m not sure why,” Karina whispered, walking back over to the edge of the hot tub and sat so she could dip her feet into the heated water. “I’ve always said I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to join the family business.”
While Uilleam was a fixer, Skorpion a mercenary, and her good friend, Orion, was a smuggler of sorts—or a jack-of-all-trad
es as he liked to call it—there was no official name for what Katherine and Isla did.
She had once heard the term “black widow” and thought that was the closest description, but it lacked a certain nuance. It was merely the cusp and didn’t go into the full gravity of how they worked.
Isla didn’t hesitate to follow in their mother’s footsteps from the moment she turned seventeen and was sent on her first mission.
By the time she had come home months later, she hadn’t been the same since.
Over the years, Isla never talked about what happened, no matter how many times Karina asked, but it had changed her, that much she knew.
Her smiles had gone from innocent to a little more dark. Her temper more at the front.
That, though Karina had never confessed it out loud, had been one of the reasons she hadn’t been all too eager to do what they did.
She rather liked who she was at the moment and didn’t want to see that changed.
“Well, I told you she thought you would change your mind with enough time. To be honest, I think she thought your lover would be the one to make you come home and join us.”
Right … as if she needed another reminder that her meeting Uilleam hadn’t been happenstance.
The very idea that it had been some sort of plot didn’t sit well with her.
“Well … it didn’t.”
Isla whistled a low warning sound. “I’m merely the messenger. Let’s not be cross with me. Besides, I warned you of the perils of falling in love with dangerous men. It never ends well.”
“Uilleam isn’t like most men,” she said, more sure of that than anything else.
He was unlike anyone she had ever met before.
“How long do you expect to keep us a secret?” Isla asked. “Or me, rather. I’d quite like to meet him. He must be one hell of a man for you to go against Mother’s wishes.”
Her tone had changed as she asked that last question. From curious to … not quite envy. It was as if she didn’t understand that there could possibly be someone who was worth forsaking everything their mother wanted.
“One of these days,” she hedged, not quite sure of the answer.
Because Karina didn’t have an answer.
Until she could find a way to explain who she was, who her family was, and everything in between, she had to hold off.
“Well, let’s get on with it, shall we? You know I’ve never been fond of being anyone’s secret.”
That, despite the direction their conversation had taken, managed to get a laugh out of her. “How could I ever forget?”
“Good. Now, that we’ve gotten that out of the way, go on and enjoy your holiday with your lover. We’ll talk soon.”
“Bye, Iz.”
The call clicked in her ear before she pulled the phone away, smiling down at it before she turned to toss it back on the chair, nearly jumping a foot in the air at Uilleam’s voice behind her.
“Who is Iz?”
2
Feel It
Running an empire was not for the faint of heart.
It took a certain finesse—a level of specific detail that many weren’t willing to implement.
Most preferred what was easily attainable—they saw what was right in front of them.
While others played checkers, Uilleam Runehart played chess.
There was never a point in his life when he wasn’t moves ahead of everyone around him. It made it far easier to predict how someone would counter him.
Which was why he was ready for anything now.
More so than he had ever been.
But clearly, the universe was determined to make a mockery of him, considering this was the second call in less than twenty minutes though he was sure he was abundantly clear he was not to be disturbed.
He watched as Karina disappeared around the corner, her top dangling from her fingertips before she dropped it behind her, a siren’s call that had his hand tightening around the mobile in his hands.
She was going to be the death of him.
Finally connecting the call once she was out of sight, he couldn’t begin to erase the annoyance from his voice as he spoke to the man on the other end. “This better be a matter of life and death, Pyotr, because otherwise you’ve signed your death certificate. What is it?”
He hated nothing more than a man who stumbled over his words. It made it too easy to discern who feared him and who didn’t. And clearly, despite his assurances to the contrary, Pyotr didn’t have an iron will.
Pyotr cleared his throat, and Uilleam could almost picture him sitting behind his desk at the shipyard, his jowly face flushing. “I understand you’re busy, but—”
“If you understood that very simple fact, you obviously wouldn’t be calling me, would you?” Uilleam asked the man, not even bothering to maintain a cordial tone. “Now, speak quickly.”
“We’ve got a problem,” he said.
Contemplating that a moment, Uilleam moved to his feet, following the trail of clothes Karina had left in her wake. “Apologies, you mean you have a problem, and you want me to fix it. That is, the last I checked, the nature of this arrangement.”
“Of course, of course. I’ll be brief, I swear.”
A small part of him considered it wouldn’t behoove him to be nice to the man. He had been instrumental in acquiring many of Uilleam’s client’s imports, considering Pyotr oversaw the shipyard where he did most of his smuggling. But being nice hadn’t gotten him this far, so there was no need to start now.
“Go on,” he said, attempting to adopt a more acquiescent tone. “I’m listening.”
“The owner, my uh, boss, he’s been getting an offer to sell.”
If he hadn’t found the very tiny shorts Karina had been wearing right then, he might have said something he regretted because that was a problem—one he hadn’t anticipated.
He’d already struck a delicate balance there with the men who already worked at the shipyard as well as the people who oversaw them. While he might not have dealt with any one of them directly—he often had Pyotr relay whatever he needed done—he was not in the position to nor did he particularly want to deal with a shift in power.
There was too much on his plate already.
“Then explain to him, in no uncertain terms, that it would be in his best interest not to do that. He is your uncle, after all.”
Which was one of the reasons he had chosen the man in the first place. Not to mention the fact that he’d had a considerable gambling debt with a shark out of Hell’s Kitchen. Had Uilleam not stepped in, the man would have already had his thumbs cut off.
“But the woman who’s offering. She’s … well, she made him a helluva offer. He’d be a fool not to—”
“Deny it,” Uilleam finished for him. “Because the momentary gratification you feel at having whatever amount of money she’s offering will not in any way compare to how I respond. I suggest you relay the message.”
Before he could think to say another word—not that Uilleam was willing to hear anything other than “I’ll see it done”—he ended the phone call and tossed the phone on the bed, not caring now whether he got another phone call.
Whoever it was could wait—Karina couldn’t.
He made quick work of his own clothes, leaving them in a pile on the floor before he ventured downstairs in nothing more than the black boxer briefs he had on.
The temperature rose considerably as he reached the lower landing, the door to the pool room already open, practically beckoning him inside.
After the last many weeks he’d spent with her uninterrupted, he thought he would be used to the effect she had on him. It went beyond simple pleasure at seeing her—he felt it all over. The thump of his too active heart, the way he noticed that he breathed a little easier once she was near.
He had never in the more than twenty years he had been living felt anything quite like this before. He felt like an entirely new man.
And like a man obsessed, he stood there a
t the door staring at her—drinking in the sight of her in the tiniest green bikini he had ever had the fortune of seeing. He couldn’t be sure, but he doubted she would give him more than a secretive smile if he asked whether she had bought it for him.
God, he hoped that answer was yes.
While he had been too busy noticing the way the long spill of her dark hair contrasted prettily with the paleness of her skin, the way a tiny waist flared into shapely hips he loved to dig his fingers into, or even the love bite he’d left behind along the space where her neck met her shoulder, he hadn’t realized she wasn’t merely sitting there staring out at the falling snow.
She was on her mobile.
It was baffling, he realized at that moment, that he had never seen her take a call beyond the one he had interrupted at the Royal Eve Bistro. More often than not, if they were together when she got a call, she stepped into the other room to take it. Considering she respected his privacy and didn’t mind when he took his conversation elsewhere, he hadn’t thought much of it.
But now, he was far more curious than he cared to admit, if only because he still knew very little about her beyond what he could find connected to the Gazette Post. She had been an orphan, her biography said, having grown up in a group home of sorts.
Since he’d been in the middle of things with Gaspard, beyond how they had even met in the first place, he hadn’t asked about her past. He’d been just as captivated by the woman with him. But now that they had nothing but time on their hands—though he had to finish up a few minor details that would inevitably get the ball rolling—he had questions.
It wasn’t often that he met someone as private as he was. Not only would he never allow anyone to have information they could use against him, but he couldn’t think of very much that had happened to him as a child that he found worth sharing.
He frowned as he considered that. He would be opening the door to questions about his past, he realized, should he ask her about anything so intimate. He also knew her well enough to know that she would have questions of her own.
Was he prepared to answer them?
White Rabbit Page 3
