She didn’t respond to his statement immediately. Instead, she studied him as if she were trying to put the pieces together herself. “And I hadn’t actually stolen anything because I hadn’t left the property.”
He nodded once. “And taking your profession into account, I was fairly sure you wouldn’t leave your fingerprints around, so there was little chance of you contaminating the crime scene.”
“You truly thought of everything, didn’t you?”
She sounded surprised by that fact. Surprised … but impressed.
It was hard to miss the way she appraised him as if she were seeing him for the very first time again. “Does that satisfy your curiosity?”
“Not even close.”
“You’d have all the time in the world if you came to Paris with me.”
“And why, Uilleam,” she said with a little shake of her head, “don’t I think that’s a good idea?”
“That’s the question I’ve been asking myself.”
“Why this interest?” she asked, her voice a bit softer now. More earnest, somehow. “Why are you being so persistent about this?”
Why, indeed.
That, too, was a question he asked himself repeatedly.
Why this time?
Why her?
What was it that made his thoughts run in circles? Why did she make him want to seek her out when he knew little good could come of it, considering what she did for a living.
He didn’t have an answer any more than she did.
20
Yours
Karina was running out of reasons to stay away.
When he wasn’t around, he was all she could think about. When he was around, nothing else in the world mattered other than him.
Uilleam wasn’t awful to her. Quite the opposite, actually. He was charming, a little mischievous, and had the sort of face that made her wonder how many women threw themselves at him on a daily basis.
Which was why when she received a text from an unknown number with only an address, she went.
No questions asked.
She still hadn’t figured out whether that made her an idiot or not.
But as she let herself into the building and followed the directions listed in the text, she couldn’t bring herself to care either.
The door was unlocked, so she let herself in, scanning over everything before she walked inside.
She found Uilleam sitting at a rather large round table, waiting for her.
“You wanted to have dinner?” she asked, looking from him to the table where he sat.
“That comes later. For now, I want to play a game.”
If he meant to make her speechless, he succeeded. She stood there, rendered mute, unable to fully grasp what he was saying. That he didn’t seem concerned at all about anything outside of this room.
Their polar opposite careers.
The reason they had even crossed paths in the first place.
But she had always been attracted to dangerous things. “What sort of game?”
Almost to the moment she finished her question, a butler appeared carrying a tray.
No, not a tray, a board. With thirty-two pieces on top. She easily recognized the checkered pattern, though this particular set was made of clear and frosted glass. Each piece looked hand carved, so intricate that she marveled at the price someone must have paid to have it commissioned.
She remained standing, drawing her own conclusions as the man finished setting up the board in the middle of the table before turning to leave. “You want to play a game of chess?”
He nodded once. “Have you played?”
She thought of one of her old tutors who’d had a love for the game. The matronly woman had tried, on various occasions, to teach her how to play, but she had never been very good. Though if she were honest, she didn’t know how anyone could be good at a game like this.
“Have you?” she asked, turning the question on him, wondering if he would answer.
He was very good at not answering questions about himself. So much so that even she would forget what she had asked him until much later when she realized he had never actually given her an answer.
His smile was slight. “On a few occasions.”
“Your humble way of saying you’re good at this, right?” Which wasn’t much of a surprise. “Why do you want to play is a better question, I think.”
“I thought we could make a wager.”
“Hardly seems fair. If I had to take a guess, I’d say you would win each time.”
“Which is why we’re not playing to win.” He gestured to the board with a wave of his hand. “For each piece of mine you collect, I’ll answer one of your questions.”
The rules sounded simple enough, so much so that she found herself sitting, resting her elbows on the table. “And you? What do you get?”
“You.”
He said it so casually that she couldn’t help but look up and try to read his expression. To see if he meant those words the way she took them. “I can tell you now that you won’t win my body through a chess game.”
“No, I want that freely given, poppet. I’ve told you that. This is merely a way for you to learn more about me. That’s your reason for not coming to Paris with me, no? Because you don’t know me.”
That was what she had told him, and she’d even meant it at the time. But she hadn’t expected anything more to come of that. She thought he would get bored, or at least move on to easier prey—even as the thought made her stomach turn—she hadn’t, for a second, thought he would do this.
“You don’t even know what questions I would ask.”
“I’m not a shy man.”
“I’m a journalist.”
“And if you planned to do a story on me, you would have done it by now. At least one that was worthy of a second read,” he amended, remembering what she had already written.
But they both knew that had only been a means to get his attention and nothing more.
She also knew, despite his words, they were betting on more than a few innocent questions. The only question now was what she was willing to give to sate her curiosity.
“What are the rules, exactly?”
Apparently, she was more than willing to go along with what he wanted.
“For every piece you collect,” he said with a nod of his head to his side of the board, “I’ll answer one of your questions. The more value the piece is worth, the harder the question could be.”
That sounded easy enough, and fair on both sides.
“And you?” she couldn’t help but ask. “What do you get out of it?”
His smile was his answer. “Should I explain the rules?”
Though she was fairly sure she knew them all, she nodded for him to continue, listening closely as he explained what each piece was and how it moved around the board.
This, she realized, was a little bit more than just a ploy to get her interested in him. The detail in which he spoke, the way a small fire seemed to be burning inside him, made it so clear that chess actually meant something to him.
“Confident enough?” he asked as he placed the king’s piece back on its square.
Even if she wasn’t, there was no way she was walking away from that table until she got what she wanted.
Karina moved closer to the table, looking from him to the board. The first move felt like it should have been easy, effortless even, but if she had any chance of having her questions answered, she needed to think about every move she would make.
After careful consideration—and a calming breath—she moved her first pawn forward two spaces.
“What made you suspect someone else was involved with Paxton?”
She looked up in surprise, taken off guard by his question.
“I said you could ask me anything you wanted should you capture a piece, I never said I wouldn’t be questioning you.”
“Semantics.”
He winked. “Keep up, poppet.”
“
It wasn’t any one thing you did,” Karina answered, pausing when he reached forward to move his own pawn forward, this one several spaces away from her own. “I’d heard about the merger, thought maybe it was one of his competitors, but when that didn’t add up, I figured it had to be someone who was trying to make it look as if he was guilty.”
Over the past few weeks, she had kept most of her thoughts to herself, only asking questions of a certain few. She didn’t realize, until this moment, that she had never shared just how she had reached the conclusion she had.
More than once, she found herself peeking up at him as they played, trying to gauge his reaction from his emotionless face as she spoke.
By the time she finished, she almost suspected this had been his plan all along, to learn the faults in his actions so that he could be careful not to repeat them again, but once she trailed off, watching with a bit of annoyance as he easily captured one of her pawns almost as an afterthought before finally meeting her gaze.
“Your mind must be a beautiful place.”
Because she thought like him, she reasoned, but she accepted the compliment all the same.
The reason didn’t matter entirely. Not when it still made her feel jittery inside.
How she found herself ducking her head and tucking her hair behind her ear.
When he took her knight, she asked, “What’s your next question?”
“I want your hand.”
“My what?”
He stretched his arm across the length of the table, turning his palm up, giving her a peek at the scar that lanced across his hand. As if someone had dragged a knife across it.
“Your hand,” he said, taking hers.
His thumbs rested across the back of her knuckles, his other fingers beneath. Two pressed softly against the underside of her wrist.
“Continue,” he said, going back to the game as though this weren’t remotely out of the ordinary.
“What was I saying?” she asked, still distracted from her hand in his.
“How did you learn about me?”
Here, she hesitated. “Debra Tucker,” she said, glad when she saw the recognition light up in his eyes. “Her pupils were dilated.” She smiled as she knocked his bishop aside. Another question for her then.
She hadn’t realized Uilleam was staring at her until she looked back up. “What?”
“How do you know about her? What’s the connection?”
“She was a beautiful woman in her fifties. I imagined if she was anything like they said in the magazines, her beauty routine would be extensive. Which got me on the topic of these eye drops I remember”—she caught herself before she said my mom. The last thing she needed was him asking questions along that vein—“a woman I knew who had talked about these special eye drops that were controversial because of their belladonna content.”
The idea of it sounded so ludicrous to her—that anyone would want to risk putting poison into their body was astounding—but a great many people had done drastic things in the name of beauty.
“But there was no mention of any belladonna anywhere. Not in police reports or anything that I could find. And considering the cost of them, I doubted the boy they suspected could have bought them. So where did they come from?”
“And that brought you to me?”
“To someone.” She’d had no idea it would be anyone like him. “There were pieces to the story that didn’t make sense, just like with Miranda.”
He remained silent for a long while, just studying her.
“Final question,” he said with a nod of his head at the board.
She needed to make this one count. “Why me? Why do you want me to come on this trip so badly?”
It wasn’t as if this were the first time he had sought her out. And after she had denied his request the first time, he still came back time and again. It didn’t make sense for the man he was.
“I can’t help it?” he said, his voice softer now.
His brows drew together as he asked the question, his fingers briefly tightening around her wrist. A flush of awareness swept through her, her focus straying onto the contact between them.
“I want to hear every whisper and sigh and gasp. I want to feel you make those sounds.” His expression was almost pained. “It’s driving me insane. So to answer your question, I want to indulge my curiosity as you indulge yours.”
She swallowed past the lump in her throat. “Are you always so forthcoming?”
“Honesty usually gets me what I want.”
She didn’t have an answer for that. “It’s your move.”
He barely glanced at the board before taking her final knight, leaving her with very few options. “I’d love to give you a slow and methodical explanation for what I want to do to you when I get you in my bed, but I’d rather show you.”
Her heart galloped at the thought, and she couldn’t help but wonder if he noticed. If he could feel it from where his fingers were pressed against her skin.
“Is there a question in that?”
“Your blush was enough.”
She focused back on the board, scanning over each piece until she saw something she couldn’t quite believe. At first glance, it didn’t look as if there were an opening, but if she took the rook sitting right next to his king, she would checkmate him.
He would lose.
“No, I do have one final question for you,” he said, interrupting her train of thought.
“Ask,” she answered, confident now in her chances of winning this game.
“Will you come with me to Paris?”
The smart, logical part of her said to turn him down. To walk away before things got out of hand. Walk away while she still had the chance.
But the rest of her wasn’t agreeing with what her brain was telling her. “Yes,” she finally answered. “I’ll go with you.”
She grabbed her queen and moved it across the board, replacing his rook with her queen and caged his king in.
Checkmate.
“Beginner’s luck,” he said with a nod of his head.
“You were distracted.”
His mouth jerked up in a smile. “Maybe so. I’ll have my rematch.”
She was pleased with herself, for as long as it took her to realize just how gracious he was being about her winning at a game that was, as he’d said, his favorite.
She stood, looking from the board to him. “You let me win.”
He arched a brow. “Did I?”
“So I would say yes to going on the trip with you.”
“You were going to say yes regardless,” he answered confidently, “which was why I didn’t wait until after you took my rook to ask you to come with me.”
Maybe the man in him had always known that she would say yes, but she couldn’t help but think the notorious fixer had ensured no matter how this game ended, he would get what he wanted.
The world was like a chess game to him, and he was exceptionally good at it.
21
Another Life
Nine months ago, when she had been sitting on the floor of her apartment with a cup of tea in one hand and a pen in the other, thinking about a man without a name or face, she hadn’t imagined she would be here now, packing to go away with him.
It didn’t seem plausible.
She wasn’t the sort of girl who ran off with a man—especially a man like Uilleam Runehart.
Yet there was no mistaking the sound of her zipper as she yanked it closed on the smaller of her two suitcases. She lugged it over to sit in front of the front door next to the other one, returning to her bedroom to make sure she didn’t forget anything.
She’d thought packing for a vacation, even if only for a weekend, would be easy—something she didn’t have to give much thought to. That, at most, she would need to toss in a few dresses, stockings, jeans, and a coat or two, considering the rapidly cooling weather over there, but ever since she had requested time off from the paper, she had been giving this too much thought.
No matter what she selected, even if it was something she had worn on numerous occasions already, she still tried it on and checked her reflection in the mirror, gazing at herself critically from every angle. She wasn’t just considering how she thought she looked.
She was also thinking of Uilleam and his thoughts.
Whether he would think this particular shade of cerulean blue complemented her skin tone, or if the hem of her skirt was just short enough to make the view of her legs tantalizing as opposed to scandalous.
Not for the first time, she realized she was thinking about this too much.
By the time she finished, she had enough to wear for a week, and she was prepared for practically any scenario.
The only thing she had to do now was meet him at the airport hangar.
She had considered briefly, after he’d extended the invitation, whether he was making it a point not to offer to drive her. If only because he wanted the choice to be hers.
That her presence, there or not, would be answer enough since she would be going of her own volition.
But she also found that it was much easier to worry about what she was going to wear rather than what would happen once she was actually in Paris with a man whose motives were murky at best.
Not that she minded really.
She rather liked the mysterious side to him. No matter how many layers she attempted to pull back, there was another one waiting.
He was a puzzle she was having far too much fun trying to piece together.
But now was her chance.
This was more than just a trip to one of the most romantic cities in the world—it was a date.
One of the few life skills she didn’t have much practice in.
Growing up the way she did—sheltered from the world during boarding school, then at Ashworth Hall with Mother as she learned more about what it meant to be an Ashworth woman—she had never had the opportunity really to talk to boys.
The ones she’d known at school were either incredibly boring, all chasing after the three most popular girls at her school, or were focused on sports and other matters.
White Rabbit: The Rise (The Kingmaker Saga Book 1) Page 18
