Constant (The Confidence Game Book 1)

by Rachel Higginson

  The man was paranoid.

  Like me.

  It was what the job had done to us, made us always look over our shoulder and assume everyone we met had ulterior motives.

  I took a tentative step inside. “Sayer?” I called out. Still no answer.

  Okay, so I had two options. I could assume he was just fine and leave the towels on the bench next to the door. I could leave before he noticed me and avoid talking to him altogether.

  Or I could pretend to be concerned about his well-being and take a look around. Discreetly, of course.

  And noninvasively—lest he try to get me fired.

  I went with option two.

  Carrying the towels sandwiched between my hands, I stepped all the way inside Sayer’s rental cabin and kicked the door quietly closed behind me. I didn’t find any of his belongings in the front room save for two pairs of discarded shoes—a worn pair of running shoes and a newer, nicer pair of dress shoes. There was also a book on the coffee table by an author I didn’t recognize. It looked like nonfiction.

  So Sayer was boring now. Interesting.

  Tiptoeing into the kitchen, I found more of the same—interesting if I were doing a character study on how Sayer had changed over the last five years, but useless for investigational purposes. There was a six pack of local beer on the counter and English muffins. A look in the fridge revealed eggs, bacon, stuff for sandwiches, a marinating piece of meat, a Caesar salad kit and a flat of bottled water.

  Huh.

  I had never seen Sayer so much as make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich before. When he lived with Gus, he let their housekeeper make all of his food and later, when he’d moved out on his own, he only ate out or bought meals that could be microwaved.

  Lack of culinary skills was one of his more tragic traits in my opinion. He’d never been domesticated, never had someone to make him meals or show him how to make his own. Once we became an official couple, I’d cooked for him as often as possible to remedy that, but he had never once shown interest in learning how to do it himself.

  There was a laptop on the table that caught my attention. Looking around, I stepped closer to it. It was closed and didn’t look like it was on. I nibbled my bottom lip and weighed the consequences of snooping. I would have to turn it on probably and that would take time. And I didn’t know what I was looking for exactly. I doubted he kept files labeled Sayer’s Devious Plans open and ready for my perusal.

  A sound at the back of the cabin drew my attention and I decided to wait for a better opportunity to explore his computer. He would have to go into work, wouldn’t he? And I had master keys to all of the cabins.

  I would break in later and find all the secrets he thought he could keep from me.

  Skipping the second bedroom for now, I headed straight for the master suite. I heard movement, but couldn’t see anybody from the hallway.

  “Sayer?” I called out in a half-hearted effort to get him to finally answer me. When he still didn’t, I walked in and prepared to face him.

  Only nothing could have prepared me for what I found.

  Which was Sayer buck naked.

  Oh my God.

  The door to the bathroom was wide open. I turned the corner to set the towels on the edge of the king size bed and caught sight of him in all his nude, muscular, holy-hotness glory through the mirror over the dresser. It provided a perfect view of the bathroom and the opaque glass that walled the shower did nothing to give the man privacy.

  His head was bent under the shower and he had one arm braced against the wall while he ran the other through his hair, rinsing shampoo out. My mouth watered and I had to swallow quickly to keep from drooling.

  I had his profile, a straight side view of his rippling back, those ridiculously toned arms and sides that tapered to a narrow waist, corded with muscle. And then there was the lower half.

  I must have made a sound because his head snapped up and his gaze targeted me. Busted.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded with such force it caused me to back up a step.

  “I, uh, I brought you towels.” I lifted them as proof. “I didn’t mean to… Uh, I called your name, but you didn’t answer so I thought I would… Here are your towels.”

  He shut the shower off, still facing me, giving me a giant view of his giant… umm, ahem. “Well, you might as well bring one here.”

  Was he serious? I all but threw the towels on the bed and started backing up. “I’ll just leave them here for you.”

  “Caro.” He stilled me with just my name. “I’ll drip all over the floor. I just need one.”

  “Oh my God,” I hissed at the stack of towels as I picked one up. This was crazy. I should have run away. But I didn’t.

  With trembling hands and a flopping stomach, I walked a towel into the bathroom where he still stood bare-ass naked.

  “It’s not like you haven’t seen it before.” he reminded me as I tried to look anywhere but at his body covered in droplets of water and surrounded by steam. The scent of his soap left a heady aroma in the room. His presence seemed to take up ninety-nine percent of the space.

  I had seen everything before. We’d been naked together more times than we’d been clothed—or at least that was what it seemed like to my teenage hormone-rattled mind. But I wasn’t sure I had ever seen this before.

  How did that happen?

  He was twenty-three when he’d gone into prison, barely a man, barely a grown up. But he’d come out the full package of manhood.

  Literally.

  Finally finding the wherewithal to look at the ground, I held the towel out in front of me and shuffled toward him. His toes wiggled as I approached, catching my attention. It didn’t seem possible, but they had also changed in our time apart. They were hairier, more masculine looking. They shouldn’t have also gotten more attractive. That didn’t seem fair.

  I looked at my feet hidden in black Merrells. Had my feet changed? Aged? Were they prettier? Or just older looking?

  “You’ve changed.” His low voice echoed in the long but narrow bathroom.

  I decided not to take the bait. Instead, I wiggled my hand holding his towel, reminding him to take it.

  He reached for it, our fingers brushing in the exchange. It was like a lightning bolt had rocketed through me. Such a simple touch, but not at all simple in the same breath.

  My head snapped up and I found those brilliant blue eyes that had always signified my downfall. He was watching me, waiting for me to lift my gaze to his.

  They were like locked doors. I couldn’t see past the surface. I had no idea what was hiding behind them. Only that something was. Only that he was doing his best to hide as much from me as possible.

  And it nearly broke me.

  I didn’t leave Sayer because I stopped loving him. I left him because I found someone else that needed my love more. And the temptation to tell him that made my knees lock and my hand reach out to steady myself against the wall.

  But I couldn’t tell him. He was still working for the Volkov. He had to be. Otherwise he’d be dead and not here. There was no way to leave the brotherhood other than death. Forty years in the future, they’d let him retire. But he’d just spent five years in prison for them. And on top of that, he had been one of their most successful soldiers ever. They would never let him go.

  Consequently, he could never know about Juliet.

  Because I would never take her back to DC to live that life. And I would never give them leverage over my life by revealing my daughter.

  They could all burn in hell, because we had gotten out and we planned to stay out.

  “What are you doing here, Sayer?” I was breathless with anticipation and too many emotions and crippling fear.

  He secured the towel around his hips, making it possible to breathe a bit easier. Maybe his nakedness had something to do with my inability to catch a full breath…

  “This was my idea, Caro. Do you really not remember?”

  I remembered. I
remembered everything. But that idea was a plan for both of us. A hypothetical escape for when we got out of DC.

  But he never planned to leave DC. He’d made that abundantly clear. He’d always intended to stay. And to work for the bratva. I had been the idiot to fall for his lies. For his game.

  I pulled my mustard cardigan tighter around my chest, hiding the scoop-neck navy blue tunic and all of the pain pinned to my exposed heart. “So what, you’re really here to put down roots? To run your bar and pay your taxes and stay out of trouble?” I waved my hand around the bathroom, my expression wrinkled with intense frustration. “This is all about getting on the straight and narrow?”

  He scrubbed two hands over his face, hiding an elongated sigh. When he looked back to me, he looked ancient, worn and dragged through an eternity of something horrible. “You have no idea, do you? You have no idea what I’ve been through the past five years or how fucking hard prison is. You have no idea how many times I had the shit beaten out of me or dodged attempts at my life. You have no idea what the last five years have been like for me because all you think about is yourself.

  “But that’s fine. That’s totally fine. That’s your right. You can do that if you want. But let’s talk about that. You. Let’s talk about how you left me, since we still haven’t really addressed the fucking heartbreak I went through. You didn’t show up and you didn’t show up and you didn’t show up and then finally I woke the fuck up and started asking around about you. Did someone take my girl? Did something happen to my girl? But nobody knew. Fucking nobody. Then they started asking me the same questions. First your dad, which was fine. I can handle Leon Valero. But then the bosses showed up, Caro. Just imagine what I thought when they came to visit me, asking for your whereabouts. And then the FBI came. ‘Where’s Caroline Valero? Where the hell is Caroline Valero?’ Nobody seems to know. Least of all me, the asshole trapped in a federal penitentiary with zero chance of early parole.

  “So yeah, Caroline, by the time I got out, I was tired. Tired of the life. Tired of fighting every day just to keep breathing. Tired of it all. So I grabbed the only person I had left in this world and we made our way west to set up a life I had only dreamed about. And then what happened? You fill in the blank.”

  When I didn’t immediately respond, he growled, “Go on, Six. Fill in the blank. What happened next?”

  I wiped at tears I only just now realized were falling. But there was fire in my voice when I bit back, “I don’t know, Sayer. I can’t fill in the blank because I don’t know what happened next.”

  “I found the girl everybody’s looking for. The girl that promised she would stick by me through all the shit, the girl that swore she would never leave me. She was here all along. Had I thought that my ex-girlfriend was going to take my dream and turn it into her own without so much as a postcard to deliver a proper fuck you, I would have handed over that information a long time ago. The brothers? They can have you. The FBI too. I don’t care what you’re doing here Caroline, but whatever it is has nothing to do with me. And the same goes for my business here. It doesn’t have anything to do with you. So stay out of it.”

  He was warning me to stay out of his business? Hilarious.

  “Did you just bring a whole bunch of trouble into my life, Sayer? Is an army going to come looking for you and find me instead?”

  Something flashed in his eyes. Something I couldn’t decipher. But it was sharp enough that I didn’t trust his next words. “My business with them is settled. If they come here it will be for you. Not me.”

  “Your business is settled, huh?”

  “Settled.”

  “Then what’s with the note? What’s with the cabin? If you want a life of peace and quiet why do you keep causing chaos in mine?”

  His jaw ticked once. Twice. His tell. But what was he telling me? “You’ve somehow managed to stay under the radar for five years. The note was a favor. You run now and they will find you. They have not stopped looking. They won’t ever stop looking. At least not for Frankie. You run again and it’s only a matter of time.”

  “Frankie’s not with me.”

  “Don’t pull that shit with me. I know better.”

  Chewing on my bottom lip until I tasted blood, I decided it wasn’t worth it. Clearly Sayer had done enough research on me to know the basics of my life here. It wouldn’t have taken anything to find Frankie once he found me. I just had to hope that he hadn’t discovered Juliet yet.

  “Do I have your word that you’re not going to bring the hounds of hell down on me? Can I trust you not to run back to your brothers and give all this away?”

  His head tilted and for the first time since we’d started our conversation I noticed the elongated scar across his middle. After all these years, he had never told me how he’d gotten it. He’d never shared his secrets. And yet I was the one surprised when he turned out to be a liar. Silly, Caroline.

  “Do you trust my word?” he asked.

  I lifted my chin and stared him down until I couldn’t see straight. I stared until I knew I was seconds from breaking down in tears, until there was no breathable air between us anymore. “No,” I answered him simply.

  Before he could say anything else, I spun around and fled the bathroom. I noticed his glasses on the bedside table and that was the last straw. There was something about seeing them that broke me.

  My reaction was stupid. So stupid. I should be scared for my life. I should be angry he was staying in Frisco. But there was something about that tiny weakness that dug at my armor. When did he get glasses? How bad was his vision? Was it simply because he was closer to thirty? Or was it because of something that happened to him while he was in prison?

  I covered my mouth to stifle the sob that would not wait and ran to the ATV. I got out of his driveway and down a secluded access road before I had to pull over. I covered my face with my hands and finally let the tears fall.

  It hurt to see him. So much. He had every right to rail at me, to throw my sins back in my face. But damn, it hurt.

  And this place. Oh God, this place.

  I had never given him credit for this town. Not once. It had been my idea. I had been the one that wanted to run away to some obscure place in the middle of America. I had been the one that decided on the mountains. I had been the one that had researched whether or not we could hide here.

  “So if you’re off the whole Midwest corn and country kick, what about Frisco?”

  “Where’s that?” I slung my bare leg over his naked thigh and pressed my body closer to his, loving the feel of us fitted together like this. Our feet rubbed together, teasing and enticing and comforting.

  “Colorado,” he said simply. “It’s the one with the mountains.”

  “I know Colorado has mountains.”

  I felt his smile when he kissed the top of my head. “I just like the sound of it. Frisco. It’s got to be a real cowboy town, yeah?”

  “I didn’t know we were looking for a cowboy town,” I laughed. I’d started tracing the lines of his stomach with my pointer finger, following the length of his raised scar, enjoying the way he squirmed but let me have my way.

  He lifted up, looking down at me with the devil in his eyes. “You’re in love with a cowboy. Of course he wants a cowboy town.”

  I tried not to laugh. “Oh, really? You’re a cowboy, huh?”

  I squeaked from surprise when he ripped his arm out from underneath me and pounced like a jungle cat. He straddled my waist, keeping his weight elevated. He leaned over me, slowly pushing my arms over my head by sliding his rough palms along them.

  I shivered, anticipating what he was going to do next.

  “Oh, I forgot. You’re the cowboy.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Do you mean cowgirl?”

  His smirk was wicked. “Do you mean reverse cowgirl?”

  I shook myself out of the memory, knowing it didn’t lead anywhere helpful. Fine, Frisco had been his idea. But he’d never mentioned it again. Not even once
. And after that night, we’d talked about leaving less and less until he was finally arrested and there wasn’t talk about leaving ever again.

  Frisco wasn’t his to claim. Not even a little bit.

  I dried my tears and headed back to the office. I saw him leave a little later in his Jeep, the tires kicking up dust in his wake.

  That was it, I determined. The last time we needed to speak. He’d said his piece. And I didn’t have anything more to say to him. So if he wanted to set up a life here, that wasn’t my problem. He could do his thing. And I would do mine.

  Until I figured out how to get us out safely.

  Then I’d go find a town that was truly mine. A town that had nothing to do with Sayer or my memory of him or our past.

  And that would be that.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I managed to avoid Sayer for a week. Well, avoid wasn’t quite the right word. Maybe ignore would be better because I still had to see the bastard every day at work.

  It wasn’t like we were forced to interact, but I couldn’t exactly pretend he didn’t exist either. Especially since I had to call him every morning to wake him up.

  And he found lots of reasons to come to the office. He needed more towels. He was forever out of towels. It got so bad that I had to interrogate the housekeeping staff whether or not they were replenishing his supply. And when they promised that they were, I made them start counting the towels they gave him just to make sure he wasn’t stealing them for some mysteriously nefarious reason.

  Once his Wi-Fi wasn’t working correctly. We discovered later that a chipmunk had chewed through some wires behind his cabin. Another time he needed to remind me to refund him the hot tub discount. He stopped in to grab activity pamphlets and cups of free coffee and replace his keycards that he kept too close to his stupid cell phone.

  He was everywhere I was. And under different circumstances, I would have thought it was on purpose. But the way he glared and growled at me, and tried to speak to anyone that wasn’t me, I knew he didn’t want anything to do with me. He was just obnoxiously high maintenance.