He didn’t have to explain.
I sighed again.
“I want to know who did it, and I want them to pay. And…”
“And?” He tilted his head.
“I…” I looked down at my fingers. “I don’t want you to get arrested for this.”
He gave a sigh. “I might get immunity if I testified.”
“Can we take that chance?”
He considered. “We should, shouldn’t we? I said I’d help you.”
“Yeah, but—”
“I said I’d help you. I will. Whoever hired me—” he thankfully didn’t stress the word “—they’ll pay for it, I promise.”
Chapter 19
Jack
“What if you end up paying, too?” She was staring at me like I was some kind of hero.
I wanted to be. God, I wanted to be the man she thought I was.
I wasn’t, though.
“I went there to kill you,” I said brutally.
The blood drained from her face, and then her chin came up.
“But you didn’t.”
“Lara, that was the first time I went back on—”
“You didn’t just leave, either,” she interrupted me. “You could have. You could have said it wasn’t your place to meddle and walked out, and you’d have been right, wouldn’t you? But you helped me get out.”
“Lara, listen to me—”
“And you came to get me at Cecilia’s.”
She didn’t understand. “I have killed people before,” I told her. “For money.”
She turned her face away.
“I am not a hero.” My words were flat.
And then, breaking my heart: “Well, you are to me.”
“Don’t say that.”
“You saved my life,” she whispered. She curled up in a ball. “You came to the police station today because—oh, God. Adrian was there, wasn’t he?”
She knew. No matter what I said, she was going to know.
“He isn’t going to get you,” I promised her. I tried to stay in my seat but I was drawn forward to kneel next to the bed. “I promise you that. He’s never going to get his hands on you again.”
“He is!” Her voice went high and terrified. “Because you were right. He’s going to be all nice and no one will think it was him and someday I’m going to slip up and he’s going to kill me!”
I gathered her close, cursing myself and cursing Adrian and wishing I had the first goddamned clue what to say to this. “Whatever happens…” My voice trailed off and I cleared my throat. “Whatever happens, I will make sure he cannot come for you.”
“How?”
I didn’t want to tell her, because I didn’t want to remind her what I was. My fingers must have tightened, though, because she twisted up to look at me.
“You would…” She let the words hang in the air. I could see her struggling with it.
This. This was what people didn’t understand. They wanted to be safe, and some distant part of their mind knew just how to make that happen. Lara, like every person on the planet, had been born knowing how to protect what she cared about. But that disappeared beneath a veil of civility, and Lara, especially—a woman who had learned that her very survival depended on pretending not to want anything at all—had never allowed herself to be one of the things she would protect.
But she wanted to be safe. No matter what her morals said, no matter what society said. She knew that one day, Adrian would come for her—and her desire for safety was at war with her revulsion at murder.
She bit her lip.
“I will protect you,” I said. That was an allowable sentiment. “Whatever that means, Lara. I will protect you.” Almost I said, whatever you want that to mean.
I didn’t. She might not be willing to tell me to pull the trigger, and I wasn’t going to promise to hold back.
And if she did tell me to, she would carry the guilt for the rest of her life.
“I don’t know how to do this,” she whispered against my shoulder. “I really don’t.”
“Hey. We’ll find proof. Whoever it was, we’ll find proof.”
“But what if it wasn’t him? Then I have to go back, and—”
“You don’t have to go back.” I pulled away to look at her. “You can leave him.”
“I can’t.” Her voice was panicked.
I dropped my hands. It felt wrong, touching her when she was telling me her intention to go back to Adrian. I didn’t even have enough space in me to feel angry at her. All I could feel was bewildered.
“Why?”
“Because you saw how Cecelia lives! I’m never going to live like that!”
“You don’t have to live like that.”
“If you don’t…if you don’t…” She shook her head. “I can’t.”
Then you’re going to die. But I didn’t say it. “We’ll figure it out. In the meantime—”
I broke off. I’d nearly called her baby, and I needed to remember…well, my place here. The hit man. The hit man who was being useful. I stood up and returned to my chair.
“Why are you—” She didn’t finish the question. “Right. So we need evidence. How do we get it?”
“I can go to the person who passed along the job to me.” I considered.
“Will he have video or something?”
“She,” I said absently. “And probably not. It’s not much use in our business.”
She chewed her lip. “Well, we might as well start there, right?”
“As good a place as any. In the meantime…I wonder if we can disable your phone and get a new one. I bet we could.”
“Why?”
“Because if he starts harassing you, then you’ll have a trail.” I lifted one shoulder. It was unlikely that he’d fall into that trap, but…
Then again, it was the second-in-command who had the brains. Adrian, I sensed, was just the money. The stupid, easily provoked, vengeful source of money.
“Tell me about Adrian’s friends.”
“Well, there’s Damien.”
“Tell me about him.”
“He’s nice.” Her face softened, and I fought back the urge to punch Damien Kane in the face. The man hadn’t exactly deserved my enmity. “Like I said, we all went to high school together.”
“How?” I frowned. “You keep saying you were poor growing up. Sorry, I don’t mean to…”
“No, it’s fine. I was a charity case at Deerfield. Deerfield Academy,” she clarified, when I shook my head. “It’s one of the big…yeah. It’s a prep school. Damien and Adrian were always hanging out, and Damien…well, he had a crush on me. I liked him, too.”
“But you didn’t end up together.” I didn’t want to hear about her first kisses. I didn’t want to think about her with anyone else at all, but I had to know this. Anything might help us unravel this if we looked closely enough.
“No, I—well, to tell the truth…” She sighed. “This sounds terrible. He adored me, and it was…nice to be adored.”
“And?”
“Well, I feel like maybe I led him on. I didn’t realize until later. I just thought, he was so nice and so handsome and really kind, and I thought I could make myself love him, d’you see? I know it was wrong.”
In the grand scheme of things, it seemed minuscule to me, but what did I know? “Why did you break up?”
“It was the summer before college. He was going off for a gap year and Adrian and I were going to be at Yale together. Adrian started—he was just always there. He would bring me gifts, he would take me out. I was lonely, I was worried about Damien leaving, and it was like Adrian turned into the best friend you could ever have. I guess it started there. I told Damien there was something before it went anywhere. I didn’t cheat.” Her back was ramrod straight.
She had lived her whole life by these petty rules. I wanted to push her over on the bed and show her just how little I thought of them, make her come with my name on her lips and me inside her, show her what it felt like to take what she
wanted for once—
Now wasn’t the time.
“So you left him for Adrian. And Adrian…” Suddenly, I knew. I knew all of it. “He started to slip away as soon as he had you, didn’t he?”
“No, it’s just been—” She broke off. “Oh,” she said quietly. And then, “Oh. Do you think…do you think that was why he wanted me? Just that? That I was Damien’s girlfriend?”
I kept tearing this woman’s world apart and I was beginning to hate myself for it.
“I think so,” I said gently.
“Then for all these years, he’s just been tolerating me? And I’ve just clung on as this woman who—” She looked away.
I started to laugh.
“It’s not funny.” There were tears in her eyes. “It’s not! Stop laughing!”
“It’s not, it’s just—Jesus Christ.” I had to stop laughing long enough to make her see it. “God, you must have been perfect.”
“What?” That broke the tirade I could see building in her.
“He didn’t even want you. He just couldn’t deal with having someone else be happy with something that he couldn’t claim. I bet his family was richer than Damien’s, right?”
She nodded.
“Yeah, so he has this poor friend he gets to feel superior to, and all of a sudden that friend is the happy one with the beautiful girlfriend, and Damien just has to show everyone that he’s better. So he makes himself the best friend he could be, and then you’re his—but, of course, he was never in love with you, so he doesn’t actually want to keep you. So why does he?”
She was staring at me. “I don’t understand.”
“People must have been telling him how nice you were, what a wonderful wife you were going to make. He was trying to get rid of you and the members of the board thought you were perfect and he knew if it fell apart with you, they’d think less of him.”
“But he never liked anything I did!” She shook her head. “He was always telling me what a disappointment I was.”
“Yeah, about that…did it ever occur to you that maybe he told you all of that to keep you from leaving?”
“How would that…” She sank her face into her hands. “Don’t answer that.”
“I know it’s—”
“Please don’t.” Her voice was slightly panicked.
I waited, watching her. She rested her head on her knees, face turned away, and I thought she was thinking, unraveling all of it. I could understand that.
Then I saw that her shoulders were shaking.
“Lara. Hey. What’s up?” I was at her side.
“It was all—he never even wanted me.” Her voice was thick. “I’ve spent nine years trying to be good enough for him, and he never wanted me at all.”
“Hey. Hey. I don’t know the guy, okay?”
“But you do!” She pushed herself up to pace, leaving me behind. She couldn’t even look at me. “You’ve never met him, and you can’t just see things. I’ve been so stupid.”
“I can see those things because I don’t know him,” I pointed out. “It’s easier to see how people are when you’re not in their circle. Once they start working on you…you’re part of it. It’s hard to see beyond that.”
She said nothing.
“Lara, you’re not stupid. You’ve been trying…to stay safe. You were trying to play by the rules.”
I would call her stupid as hell for that, but she hadn’t seen what I’d seen. She hadn’t seen the world chew up and spit out people like her.
“If we’re gonna get anywhere with this, you have to let go of past mistakes.”
She looked at me.
“For what it’s worth? I don’t think it’s unreasonable not to see it coming that your fiancé would hire a hit man. As…well, as you know, I didn’t really see that part coming, either.”
“God, this is so fucked.” She flopped back onto the bed.
I laughed. She was blunt when she wasn’t paying attention. I liked that.
She grinned over at me. “It is funny, isn’t it? Just…all of it. He…” Her chest shook. “Okay, I see it now. There I was, trying to be perfect enough to make him happy, and he’s hoping I’ll screw up because he wants to be rid of me. It’s funny. It is. I just, you know, wish it had happened to someone else.”
Her voice was getting slower as she spoke, the laughter loosening something in her, and before I knew it, she was fast sleep.
I had seen this before, though. Until a few days ago, she had led a sheltered life, and then all of sudden there were guns, and people trying to abduct her, and a man who said her fiancé had hired him as a hit man. She had adrenal fatigue. She’d be quicker to anger for a few days—and quicker to cry, and quicker to fall fast asleep, all at the wrong times. I should know. I’d seen men pass out as artillery streaked overhead. She was exhausted.
I slid my hands under her gently and tried to move her up the bed to get her head on the pillow. I pulled the comforter up over her and brushed her hair out of her eyes, and she curled, sleepily, into my arms.
I froze. It took everything I had to listen to myself and disentangle myself from her. Even then, she reached out sleepily to take a handful of my shirt, and all I wanted was to crawl under the covers with her and drift off to sleep with her in my arms.
If I hadn’t been sure before, I was now: this was the stupidest thing I had ever done. If I had any sense of self-preservation at all, I would walk out of this hotel room right now and make sure I never saw her again. The only problem, of course, was that I knew I wasn’t going to do that.
I was so fucked.
Book 4: Captured
Chapter 20
Lara
I woke up blearily in the middle of the night, tucked into bed and cozy, but also—for some reason—still wearing my bra and my shoes. I pushed myself up and squinted around the room. What had happened? We’d gone to the police station, we’d come back, had a meal…
I didn’t even remember falling asleep. Not only that, it had been lunchtime at that point, and it was fully dark out. I had clearly slept since then. Had Jack tucked me into bed?
He must have. Would I really have gone to bed in my shoes?
I swung my legs out of bed and rested my head in my hands. I might have slept for over 12 hours at this point, but I was still tired. I was tired of everything: of watching what I said and ate, watching every gesture I made, watching for Adrian’s bad moods.
I was tired of living. The should come with horror, but there was only dull acceptance. I was tired of everything in my life. The thought of going back to it was enough to make me want to cry.
I pressed my hands hard into the mattress to steady myself. From the sound of Jack’s deep, even breathing, he was asleep, and I didn’t want to wake him. He’d already seen me at my worst, crying and terrified. He shouldn’t have to hold my hand through this anymore.
My eyes traced over his profile in the beam of light that came from the bathroom. I wondered if he always left a light on. Did he not like the dark? If so, there was no sign of it now: his face was as relaxed as I had ever seen it. In sleep, his brow smoothed and the line of his jaw, though no less sharp, didn’t carry the tension I’d grown used to. I found myself smiling as I looked at him. His lips were full, soft—
His eyes drifted open, and I jumped.
“What’s going on?” His voice was a little slurred. He went to push himself up.
“No, no.” I reached out to push him back onto the bed, and pulled my hand back hastily before I touched him. “I’m sorry to wake you. Go back to sleep.”
“Something wrong?” He hadn’t moved. He was staring at me, frowning.
“No. I just…woke up.” I took a stab in the dark. “Thanks for tucking me in.” My cheeks were flaming, but hopefully in the dark he couldn’t see that.
He wasn’t pleased by my thanks. He shrugged his shoulder and turned on his side, away from me. I waited, but he said nothing else.
I refrained from sighing as I sat back on
the bed. I had no idea where to go from here. I was wide awake now, with nothing to do. I looked around myself for something to read and found…nothing. A TV guide I couldn’t use. A bible. My mouth twisted. Right now, I had zero desire to hear someone tell me that God would work it all out. God seemed to be doing a pretty terrible job of that.
My mother would hate to hear me say that. Then again, she was the one who’d first shown me that God wasn’t paying any attention to a poor little girl.
And it was a good thing, too—because if God had seen what I did the other day at Cecelia’s apartment, he’d be pretty pissed.
Somehow, between then and now, I had managed not to think about it. Whether it was because I didn’t want to remember Cecelia betraying me, or because I didn’t want to think about what I had done myself, I’d put it out of my head.
Now it was back: the roar of the gun going off in my hands, metal and plastic sliding in the sweat on my palms, reverberation jerking up into my shoulders. The man’s body twisting as it fell, with a hole—
I was up and running for the bathroom. I didn’t even close the door behind me, there wasn’t time. I was on my knees on the cold tile floor, all of the sensations too clear, too bright. My stomach heaved and I pressed one hand over it. My eyes were squeezed shut; it was too bright. My stomach heaved again and this time everything came up.
“Lara?” Jack was there. He laid a hand on my back. “Are you—”
My stomach heaved again.
“Are you sick?” One big hand pressed over my forehead. Then his voice changed. “Are you…pregnant?”
It was funny. I was still throwing up when I started laughing, which was an experience I hoped never to have again—though I was still amused enough that I didn’t care. I wiped my mouth and sat back on the tile floor, laughing like a madwoman.
“No,” I said finally. “No, that’s not something you have to worry about.”
He’d been looking at me like I was crazy, which I might actually be at this point, and his brow only furrowed now.
“Look, I know…I know you might not want to think about it,” he said carefully. “But, trust me, anything can go wrong. And…it usually does at the worst time.”
HUNTED: A Bad Boy Romance (Books 1-5) Page 9
