It made it impossibly easy to be around him.
“Phone call,” he explained with a jerk of his chin at the townhouse.
When was he not … “Has he always been this busy?”
He shrugged in that noncommittal way that only ever made her more curious. “Since the day I met him.”
“When was that … exactly?”
Skorpion had the sort of smile that made her think he was perpetually amused, but she suspected he knew her curiosity wasn’t as innocent as she tried to make him believe. Thankfully, he answered anyway.
“He found me after I finished my last tour,” he explained, before holding out his hand, palm up. “Keys.”
She didn’t argue—knowing there’d be no point, especially if she wanted to get secrets out of him—before she dropped the Range Rover key into his hand then followed him back over to her truck.
“Said he needed someone of my particular skill set,” Skorpion further explained as he popped the trunk and eyed the contents. “Considering how much he was paying, I couldn’t exactly say no. Besides, he grows on you after a while.”
This, he said with a wink as he lifted the boxes from her trunk, the muscles in his arms straining with the movement. It had taken her multiple trips to get them all downstairs and into her truck. He only needed the one.
“You didn’t ask questions?” she asked, the concept seeming … odd to her. She couldn’t imagine agreeing to anything without knowing the details first.
Then again, hadn’t she blindly gone along with the things Uilleam had asked of her? Maybe it wasn’t such a foreign concept after all.
Skorpion shrugged, seeming unbothered by the thought. “Even before he was the man he is now, he had that way with people—win you over first before he reveals his hand.”
“So you don’t mind?” she asked. “You wouldn’t care if he was playing one of his games with you?”
“Something I learned early on,” he said, gesturing for her to walk in ahead of him. “He’s going to play one regardless of who you are. It only matters if you decide to play it with him.”
It was one thing to see a potential house in passing, but it was something else entirely knowing that it was now her own home.
“I’m curious,” Karina said later, passing Uilleam a knife and fork before she joined him on the floor, smiling at the trio of candles lit in the middle of the floor. “When was the last time you didn’t visit a five-star restaurant?”
To her surprise, it hadn’t taken her any effort at all to convince him to have dinner with her like this—sitting on the floor of the unfinished living room, the lights out and curtains open, letting only the glow of the waxy moon outside the windows and candlelight illuminate their surroundings.
It was such a simple thing, really, this moment she was sharing with him. Something she didn’t want to take for granted.
Sure, there were the finer things in life, and she knew he could very well afford them all and probably more, but she was finding it imperative to bring him back down to earth on occasion.
“I’ll have you know,” he said with a slight grin as he picked up his wine glass, “I often venture to more diverse than award-winning restaurants. Depends on the day.”
“How do people find you? I’ve always wondered.”
If he went through so much trouble concealing his identity—or his name, rather—she couldn’t imagine it was a matter of searching his name on the dark web. She quite clearly remembered doing the same not too long ago without a single result.
She doubted very much he was doing the calling.
“Six degrees of separation, poppet. Everyone knows someone who knows me.”
Karina forked a piece of broccoli, pulling it slowly off the prongs. “How do you decide who you’ll do business with?”
He tilted his head to one side even as he cut into his steak. “You’re full of questions tonight.”
“I’m playing catch-up here,” she said with a laugh. “Besides, I’d be more than happy to tell you anything you want to know.”
He seemed to accept that. “It varies. Whether what they want is of any interest to me, or if they’ve annoyed me within six months of their proposal.”
She didn’t mean to laugh at that, but the shock of it brought a smile to her face.
“I have feeling you never mention when you’re vexed.”
“You’re not wrong,” he offered with an immodest shrug.
“And by the time they realize the mistake”—she caught on quickly—“it’ll be too late.”
A flash of a smile crossed his face. “If people were half as smart as you are, I’d have twice the amount of fun.”
She maintained her smile even as she looked away from him. “You’re not the only one with secrets. Have you considered that maybe you don’t want to know mine?”
One thing she loved about him was he always seemed to consider her words before he responded. Though Uilleam inevitably did or said whatever he wanted, he did actually listen first.
“Give me your secrets,” he said in that way of his that made her want to offer him her heart if he asked for it.
Her smile was wistful. “I … well … I can give you one.”
He nodded, maybe a little eager. “One is good.”
She had a long list of memories to choose from—early days at boarding school during her childhood or the latter years learning about what her mother truly did for a living—but there was only one that sat in the back of her mind most days.
One that had sparked her interest in journalism in the first place.
In righting wrongs committed by powerful men.
She had never, in all the years since it had happened, shared this particular story with anyone, but it felt right to share it with him.
“You guessed once that I wasn’t originally from New York, but I never told you that you were right.” She didn’t miss the way his lips kicked up at the corners—he liked being right. “The first nine years of my life were spent in this tiny little town north of London.”
A truth.
A lie.
Just enough of both. She wished she could tell him everything—all the things he thought he knew and everything he didn’t.
She forged on. “My mother remarried after my father … left. Her new husband, John, came shortly after.”
“Did you not care for him?” Uilleam asked.
“It wasn’t that, so much that it always felt awkward around him.”
Uilleam readily agreed, his expression understanding. “Naturally. You had only recently lost your father.”
That, and … there had always been something about John that made her uneasy, though she had never been able to explain it even to herself.
“What happened to him?”
She hesitated, her fork hovering in front of her mouth as she asked, “What makes you think something happened to him?”
“It’s the way you speak about him. Detached but wistful.”
Only he would be able to form that conclusion. “He died.”
“That’s unfortunate.”
“My mother killed him.”
Only Uilleam could hear those words and not react to them.
She waited, expecting him to ask questions about what happened or at the very least, why it had happened, but he remained silent, giving her all the time in the world to answer.
“It happened in the middle of the night. We’d eaten dinner and gone to bed. There was arguing later, much late …” She trailed off, thinking back to that night.
Even now she could hear that gunshot, louder than she had ever expected to come from such a small weapon.
She didn’t think she would ever forget it.
“By the time we got downstairs,” she continued after a moment of silence. “He was already dead in the snow.”
He seemed thoughtful for a moment before saying, “I imagined that changed you.”
More than she would ever be able to explain clearly. Sometimes, it
was hard to remember what her life had been like before that moment.
As if everything had ceased to exist before she’d seen that spatter of red.
“Sometimes it feels like I’ve seen the worst the world has to offer,” she said softly, not elaborating any further on her former stepfather.
It was why she didn’t mind the man he was and the things he did for a living.
She saw past all of it, even if for all the wrong reasons.
19
Pity
Was this what addiction felt like?
To want something—someone—so badly it defied reason. As if a plague had infected his blood, and the only thing that made it better was having her.
It defied reason.
You were everything that I knew was wrong for me, but that didn’t change the way I felt.
It was as if she’d peeled him open and repeated what she found lurking inside his mind.
He should have already left by now with everything he needed to do, but instead, he found himself lingering in bed, listening to her as she showered as he imagined what she looked like.
The way the soap and water would glide over her skin, or the flush in her cheeks from the steaming hot water.
It didn’t take more than that thought to spur him into motion.
He was completely naked by the time he made it into the bathroom. The stark white of the tiles and marble made the room appear even more bare than it already was, but he didn’t mind it.
He wanted her to do whatever she wanted, no matter what it looked like or the cost. He wanted her happy.
To stay.
She turned and looked over her shoulder as he stepped into the shower. Her expression didn’t change as she regarded him.
As if she knew exactly what he needed from her. That driving desire that he had long since stopped fighting setting in. This was better than what he’d felt before. He hadn’t known anything would be able to fill that emptiness he’d carried around for so long.
He wrapped his fingers around her throat, feeling the rapid thump of her pulse point before he dragged her out from beneath the fall of the water.
He didn’t think twice before taking her mouth the way he wanted, before he delved in as much as he possibly could.
Walking her backward until he had her pressed against the wall, he held her there before he kissed down her front until he was on his knees in front of her.
He didn’t miss the way her stomach clenched and quivered beneath his touch as he peeled her thighs open and draped them over his shoulders. His gaze was rapt on the heart of her—where his mouth was already watering to be.
A taste was all he needed.
Just a taste and it would be enough. To sate that need inside him, but even as he imagined that would surely accompany what he was about to do to her.
He outlined the shape of her with his tongue, finding all the spots that made her gasp the way he liked. So long as he lived, he doubted he would ever forget that look on her face when he looked up at her.
The way her brows pinched together as she chased that high he was sending her hurtling toward. How her eyes remained squeezed shut, her bottom lip trapped between her teeth.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her.
“Yes, right there,” she whispered above him, her voice carrying, wrapping around every one of his senses.
He needed this.
To remind himself of his end goal. To calm his ragged mind.
And as he mapped out her cunt, her hips kicked forward when he sucked her clit into his mouth.
He gave himself over to the way he felt, and by the time she was shaking from her orgasm and he had come up off his knees to slide his cock inside her, peace calmed his mind.
By the time he was rolling to a stop in the secluded, sweltering jungles along the southern border of Antigua hours later, Uilleam was still in a rather pleasant mood.
Still riding the high of his morning with Karina.
And he hadn’t missed the bemused smile on her face before she’d left. A certain level of pride came with the knowledge that he had put it there.
But as much as he wanted to bask in that latest memory, there was work to be done. And considering the reason she was here in the first place, he certainly needed to ensure that he paid attention.
After all, the man he had come to meet was planning to kill him.
Which wasn’t anything new. It was a hazard of his profession, but that didn’t make it any less annoying.
Skorpion had advised he skip the meeting entirely and they handle this little problem off-site—meaning he would handle the dirty work himself without Uilleam’s interference. Normally, he would have agreed simply because he detested getting his hands dirty, but he thought he’d make a special trip for the man in question.
It was a wonder he hadn’t had this idea before.
To have mercenaries act when he couldn’t.
Now?
The means to the success he wanted were practically resting at his feet, and he had no intention of ever letting it slip away. And while he’d been capable of a great many terrible things, that had been before he had a security team that put others to shame.
Now, there was no mistaking the look of fear on the man’s face as they rolled to a stop, the truck’s headlights illuminating the man’s face and the expression that betrayed him before he could think to hide it.
Over the years, Uilleam had met with a great many individuals looking for his services—and had accommodated them more than a few times, no matter where it called for him to go—but arriving at a private hangar in the middle of the Brazilian jungle hadn’t been one.
And had he not already needed to visit the country on other business, he might have ignored the man’s call altogether. Had he, Tas wouldn’t have gotten the opportunity to annoy him.
So much so that instead of returning to where he could enjoy what was meant to be a holiday for him, Uilleam agreed to meet.
If only so he could teach the man a lesson in respect. It seemed like the right thing to do.
“If you’re going to get out of the car, you’re gonna need a vest,” Skorpion said with a glare.
Wouldn’t be the first time in their many years together—especially since the incident in Paris.
“If you can’t shoot him before he shoots me, what the hell am I paying you for?”
“To put up with this shit,” Skorpion grumbled, making it obvious he had intended for Uilleam to hear him.
No, if he had his way, there would be no chance of Uilleam getting this close to anyone who would surely attempt to kill him the first chance they got, but Uilleam believed Skorpion was far more skilled than the men he was about to face.
No time like the present to find out whether that was true.
Uilleam stepped out of the car and into the sweltering heat, wondering whether this demonstration would be worth sweating in a four-figure suit.
He wasn’t standing there long before the man he’d come to see climbed out of his own car, dressed in jeans and a sweat-stained T-shirt, his brow dotted with sweat.
There was no mistaking his cool attitude as if he had everything figured out and the only thing left to do was go forward with it.
He actually believed that this day would end with him putting a bullet in Uilleam’s head or torturing him in some grisly fashion that would have him begging to die within a few hours.
Tas had no idea he was wrong.
Not just because he was grievously outnumbered, though he didn’t know it yet, but because he didn’t beg anyone for anything.
He would always have the last word.
“Runehart,” the man greeted with a jerk of his chin, doing his best not to sound impressed. “Wasn’t expecting you to come alone.”
“There might only be one of him,” Uilleam said with a nod of his head at Skorpion, “but he’s a one-man army, I assure you.”
“One-man army,” the man said with a laugh as if he found the thought comi
cal. “That might be true, but what can one man really do against an actual army?”
There was nothing quite like the notch of a hammer to make his senses wake up. He might have complete confidence in Skorpion and the others hidden among the foliage, but that didn’t stop him from reacting to the guns currently pointed in his direction.
Getting shot wasn’t fun, and he tended to avoid it.
He’d brought twelve men with him, all carrying assault rifles. All lacking the intelligence to realize when there was an enemy one just truly didn’t fuck with.
Unfortunately for them, they would never learn from that mistake.
Or … maybe one …
“You’re becoming a problem,” Tas said, needlessly explaining why he was betraying him. “Nobody likes a middleman.”
“I can’t say you’re wrong about that.”
Because he was becoming a problem.
He made sure of it.
“But I can say I won’t be a problem for you for much longer.”
Tas didn’t notice them until each of his men had a gun pointed at the back of their heads. They couldn’t save themselves let alone protect him because they were seconds from losing their own lives.
Pity.
He watched the dawning horror as it spread across the man’s face, not bothering to hide his satisfaction. He lived for these moments—dreamed of them. The sort that lingered with him, and when he was in the mood to bask in his good work, he could think back on them and smile.
Nothing would ever compare or feel as good as the way Tas’s expression shifted as he realized the odds weren’t in his favor—that everything he had hoped to accomplish in coming here would end in ashes.
“Don’t beg,” Uilleam demanded with a shake of his head. “There’s nothing I despise more than someone playing the victim.”
Tas worked his jaw, his gaze jumping from Bishop to Skorpion standing on either side of Uilleam to the line of mercenaries all ready to inflict as much damage as humanly possible the moment he let them.
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