Game of Shadows

by Amanda K. Byrne

  The water’s incredibly clear, a bright turquoise you don’t see off the coast of California. Sugar-white sand absorbs the sun’s heat and burns the bottom of my feet, so I’ve learned not to take my sandals off. I’m getting stronger. I’m no longer out of breath by the time I reach my tiny hut.

  A little over a month into my stay in Phuket, and the doctors pronounced earlier today I could go home. The surgeries on my scars, the one on my stomach, the random ones on my arms and legs, are healing well. They’ll be much fainter when it’s all said and done.

  Yup, everything’s just swell.

  I’m so fucking lonely here, cut off from everyone. I’ve spoken with Denise twice a week since I arrived, and even Scott a couple times. I was desperate enough for human contact I even called my mother.

  The rift in our relationship isn’t anywhere near being closed, but it’s getting there. Bridge building takes a hell of a lot longer than burning.

  No contact with Lia or Constantine. Definitely no contact with Nick.

  I thought a month apart would have caused my feelings to fade. It hasn’t. If anything, they’ve been replaced. I left to keep him safe, but I made sure he knew where I was. So yeah, part of me hoped he’d be in touch somehow. E-mail, a phone call, hell, a text message would have worked.

  The rift in my heart is harder to heal than my scars, and my ongoing game of if only has taken on a new facet—if only I’d kept my hands to myself.

  Lonely as I am, I’m not ready to go home yet. I need to resume my classes, find a new place to live, get on with the business of being Cass Turner, college student. I need to find an actual part-time job, preferably one that doesn’t involve bloodshed.

  The steps creak under my weight as I climb them to the front door. I dig through my bag for my key. The rough edge scrapes my fingertips as I pull it out. I unlock the door and step inside, the dim interior noticeably cooler. It might be November, but this close to the equator, the heat never really lets up around here.

  “Your note left a lot to be desired.”

  I squeak and drop my bag. Nick’s sitting at my kitchen table, sprawled in a chair. I will my heart to calm as my eyes adjust to the shadows. “You were going to be busy with your family. Giving you specific information seemed pointless since you wouldn’t need it.” Rather than sit across from him, I curl up on the shabby, small two-seater couch in the living area.

  “Would have been nice if you’d let me be the judge of that.” He huffs out a breath and crosses his legs at the ankle. “It was a smart move, though,” he admits. “Didn’t mean I wasn’t still thinking about you.”

  In a guilty way or a non-guilty way? “Me, too.” Definitely in a non-guilty way. I missed him like a piece of me was gone.

  “Your dad picked this place?”

  The abrupt change of subject was a little startling. “Um. Yeah. Thailand ranks at the top for most gender reassignment surgeries, so their plastic surgeons are excellent. They worked on a couple of my scars.”

  He stands, crosses the short distance to the couch, and sits on the other cushion. He raises a hand and traces the faint ridge of the wound on my arm. “That’s pretty fucking good.” He lowers his hand and glances at my stomach, covered by the thin cotton of my tank top. “Can I…?”

  The heat of his touch on my skin already caused my mind to blink out. His hand on my stomach might render me incapable of speech. “It’s still pretty visible. The damage was more extensive, so they weren’t able to cover as much.” I cover my stomach with my hands, unwilling to pull up my shirt to let him see.

  A faint line appears between his brows. “Your father has some very definite opinions on where you should stay when you return to the States.”

  I figured he would. I shrug. “I’ll probably stay with my parents until I can find a place. There are plenty of roommate listings on Craigslist, and there’s probably a campus bulletin board or something I can check.”

  The line grows deeper. “Isaiah hasn’t been found yet.”

  Now it’s my turn to frown. “I thought…since you were here…”

  “That everything was back to normal?” He shakes his head. “The weed-out didn’t go so well. Media’s calling it a crime wave. We’re pulling back, reevaluating. But no, it’s nowhere close to being over.”

  He takes my hand and threads his fingers through mine. “Cass, I came here to get you. It’s time to go home. Your father and I talked, and we agreed the safest place for you would be with me.”

  Great. More guilt, more responsibility. I tug my hand free, get to my feet, and walk to the kitchen area for a bottle of water. “I’m so glad you and Turner are okay with making important decisions for me. Because I’m totally not capable of doing it myself.” I uncap the water bottle and drink half, hoping to drown the anger surging to life. It doesn’t work. “I’d rather stay here, thank you very much. I can afford it.” Maybe. I haven’t accessed the off-shore account Turner had set up for me years ago in a few months. I’m not sure how much money is actually in there, but it should be enough to buy me several months’ worth of lodging here.

  He rakes a hand through his hair. “Fuck, Cass—”

  “No, we’ve tried that already. It was fun. Let’s do something else. I know! How about we remember that Cassidy is an adult, just like you, and as such, has opinions and thoughts and feelings and really appreciates it when people acknowledge that? I’ll stay here if it’s not safe to go home, Nick. Hardly anyone knows where I am.” I drain the rest of the bottle and toss it into a nearby bin.

  “Cassidy.” He gets to his feet and stalks over. “I want you to come home.”

  I edge away. “Look, I get that you feel responsible for what happened to me. I’m trying to make this easier. I stay here, you don’t have any responsibility to me.”

  He clamps his hands around my biceps. “Where the hell did you get that idea?”

  “Does it matter? I may not know you very well, but I know you feel guilty about what happened. I brought it on myself. It’s not your job to protect me.”

  “No, it’s not,” he says slowly. “You managed to take out Josef on your own. You get scarily cold when you’re in danger. You can handle yourself. But I don’t feel responsible for what happened to you, not the way you’re obviously thinking. I care about you. I want to protect the people I care about.”

  “That’s…great. Fucking fantastic. If you ‘care about me,’ then why didn’t you call, you asshole?”

  He bares his teeth in a vicious smile. “Phone works both ways, love.”

  I throw the bottle cap at him, hitting him on the forehead. “Nuh-uh. You are not pushing this off on me. I told you where I was so you wouldn’t worry. You knew how to reach me. I wasn’t about to endanger you further by contacting you first. So this is on your shoulders, bud. Not mine.” I cross my arms over my chest and give him a bland stare.

  He growls. He actually growls.

  “Still not an answer, Dominic.” I turn away and grab another bottle of water. “So you’re here. You care about me, and you’ve made the decision I’ll be returning to your house where you can watch out for me. Gee, that sounds like such an exciting time. When do we leave?”

  Plucking the bottle from my hands, he scoops me up and carts me to the couch. He imprisons me in his arms when I try to squirm away. “Stop being a brat,” he mutters. “I feel guilty as fuck for this, Cass. You can take care of yourself, no doubt about that, but you never would have gotten into this if it hadn’t been for my family.”

  Disappointment pierces the anger, doubt on its heels. “Is this the part where you tell me it’s been great, but we shouldn’t sleep together anymore? For my own safety?”

  He jerks his head up. “Where the hell did you get that idea?” His eyes narrow. “I thought we’d been over this already. The night before you got knifed, I thought we agreed we were giving this a shot. Or did they surgically remove that memory when they patched you up?”

  A
nd here’s where my immaturity rears its ugly head. “I remember,” I whisper. “But in the hospital, you wouldn’t leave, and it made no sense. We barely knew each other. We still barely know each other.”

  He cups my face, thumbs sweeping over my cheeks. “Think about it. If you died, we wouldn’t have a chance to get to know each other better. That fuckin’ pisses me off.”

  I grin. “Can’t have that.”

  His thumb finds my lower lip and rubs it. “You got to me. I’m not ready to let you go. We can slow this down. Sleep in separate rooms. When it’s all over, I’ll help you find a place to live. Whatever you want, I’ll give it to you. The timing’s shitty, but I want this.”

  It’s a good thing I’m already sitting down because his words make me all melty. It’s scary how badly I want this to work. How badly I want this man, and no doubt, Nick is definitely a man. One who’s seen some of the darkest parts of me and isn’t turned off by them.

  I cannot screw this up. I need to figure out how deep I want to go. Until then, keep it light. Fun. Or as fun as it gets when you’re recovering from a traumatic injury. “Nick. Nick Nick Nick. Could you just shut up for a minute and kiss me already? I mean, I haven’t seen you in a month and—”

  He uses his mouth to stop the flood of words, and I couldn’t have asked for a better gag.

  Meet the Author

  When she’s not plotting ways to sneak her latest shoe purchase past her partner, Amanda K. Byrne writes sexy, snarky romance and urban fantasy. She likes her heroines smart and unafraid to make mistakes, and her heroes strong enough to take them on. Amanda lives in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, and no, it really doesn’t rain that much. Visit her website at Amandakbyrne.com, find her on:

  Facebook at www.facebook.com/authoramandakbyrne

  Goodreads at www.goodreads.com/Byrneafterreading

  Twitter @amandakbyrne

  Coming October 2016—the second book in the Game of Shadows series!

  Game of Vengeance

  An eye for an eye, blood for blood.

  UCLA student Cass Turner was hoping to move on from the family business—but when the business is professional assassination, that’s easier said than done. And sleeping with the man she was supposed to kill only complicates things. Her relationship with Nick Kosta, a lieutenant in LA’s largest crime family, was supposed to be no-strings-attached fun. But if the two of them want to stay alive, they’ll have to keep each other close.

  Nick’s traitorous cousin, Isaiah, is out for blood, so Cass can’t afford any distractions as they try to hunt him down. Yet she can’t help puzzling over Nick’s motives—does he really share her deepening feelings or does he just feel responsible for her? And if their relationship is for real, will they even have a future? Because with their enemies several steps ahead of them, one false move could bring disaster for everyone Cass holds dear...and in this game of cat and mouse, no one will leave unscathed.

  Chapter 1

  “No.”

  I huff out a breath. “What else am I supposed to do? Sit at home, twiddling my thumbs?”

  “Nah. You’d be sitting on the couch in my office twiddling your thumbs.” Nick’s trailing his fingers over the scar on my stomach as if he’s trying to reassure himself it won’t split apart at the slightest provocation.

  “You can’t force me to come into work with you every morning. Unless you’re planning on handcuffing me and tossing me in the trunk of your car.” I try to scoot away from his touch and almost fall off the bed, biting back a sigh when he tightens his hold.

  I liked my little beach hut when it was just me, and I could walk around in my underwear because it was too damn hot to wear any clothing. For the last three days, I’ve liked it even better, but two full-grown adults crammed into a double bed isn’t exactly my idea of a good time. There’s not a lot of action happening in said bed, though I have to admit I’ve slept a lot better tucked against his side. My libido’s taking a vacation while I recover, and Nick hasn’t so much as hinted at sex.

  “You remember the handcuffs?” he asks, a lazy smile on his face. It’s distracting, that smile, causing my brain to misfire even as I want to smack him for it.

  I shoot him a death stare. “Do I remember the handcuffs?” He cuffed me to the door of his car with a set of fuchsia fuzzy handcuffs a few days after we’d met. It’s pretty hard to forget those things. “You’re not seriously saying you’d use them?” I pull his hand off my waist. “I can’t keep the rest of my life on hold, Nick. I want to go back to class.”

  He slips his hand free and glides it over the curve of my hip. “It’s only for a little while longer.”

  A little while longer could easily turn into not just yet, and the next thing I know, I’m a college dropout, forced to either work a dead-end job or continue killing people for money. I struggle to keep my annoyance in check. He’s worried. I can work with worried. I roll off the bed and pad across the room to the miniscule kitchen for a bottle of water. “You can’t know that. I’m not made of glass, and I can’t live in a bubble.”

  He gets to his feet and stalks toward me, brows lowered as he glares. He nicks the bottle from my hand and drains it. “You died. Twice. I don’t want to find out if the, and, during the day, full of students. The student body is huge.

  “It’dtake some mad skills and serious cojones to pull something off there. I’m more likely to get jumped in the parking garage again than on campus.”

  He threads his fingers through my hair, rubbing the muscles of my neck until I want to purr with contentment. “You’re not helping, love.”

  My heart sputters at the endearment. I went a month without hearing him say it. A month where I hadn’t heard anything from him, and as the days bled into weeks, the doubts started creeping in. He’s ten years and a world of experience older. I wouldn’t blame him for not wanting to be tied to someone as young as me.

  Yet every day since he’s been here, he’s proving it’s not just heat and blind lust between us. The things we went through together and the forced proximity have thrown us directly onto the I really like you and not just in the I want to fuck you senseless track, and I’d be foolish to think the connection we forged isn’t strong enough to withstand a few weeks apart.

  It’s not love. But it’s getting closer every day, and it’s scaring the poo out of me.

  “C’mon. You’ve seen the campus. You’ll have a copy of my schedule. You can have someone pick me up instead of letting me drive myself.” I tip my head back. I hate the glimmer of fear in his dark eyes, hate that it makes me question his motivations, because it’s the one doubt I can’t lay to rest. A part of me is convinced this protective bent he’s got is simply because someone in his family tried to kill me.

  Not because he cares about me.

  Whenever I stumble down that rabbit hole, though, I claw my way back out, determined to give him the benefit of the doubt. He came for me. He could have ushered me onto a plane as soon as he arrived or moved us to a hotel where we could have separate rooms. Instead, he stayed. I lost a lot of strength and stamina confined to bed for two weeks in the hospital, then off and on over the past month, recovering from plastic surgery. So all we’ve really done is wander at a snail’s pace through Phuket, trying to get the other to eat the fried grasshoppers from the various food carts. And that’s only when we’re not staying out of the heat of the day in my hut.

  Honestly, those are my favorite times. The times when we’re just sitting here, talking. The times that mimic the evenings in his condo in Manhattan Beach, where he distracted me from my guilt enough to eat.

  It might have come out eventually that Nick’s favorite food is an In and Out burger, but because we’re here, with little else to do, I learned it earlier. Like I learned his favorite color is green, his favorite movie is Stand and Deliver tied with Billy Madison, and that he and Constantine grew up like brothers, much like Marc and Isaiah.

  He presses his thumb into my lo
wer lip, then lets it slip down to my chin. “How many classes?”

  I can’t stop the giddy joy rising in my chest and smile. A normal life. I get to go back to a normal life. Or as normal as I get. “Four. If they have the last courses I need to graduate during the summer term, I’ll be done by September.” Then I have to worry about getting a job, what to do with the rest of my life, and my lack of work history. Somehow I don’t think putting “assassin” on my resume will score me any interviews.

  His hand drifts farther, brushing over my neck and along the faint scar left by Josef, a member of the family who tried to kill me on Isaiah’s orders. The doubts stir from their slumber at Nick’s constant touch tonight. They should make me happy. I am happy. I step back and tell those doubts to shut up.

  He studies me a minute more, the light on the little porch buzzing when another fly gets trapped. It’s so damn loud, that buzzing, filling the silence. “Fine,” he says. “I get a copy of your schedule?”

  The worry line between his brows makes my heart sputter just as badly as when he calls me “love,” only in an entirely different way. “Yes. A copy of the schedule, and anything else you think I need to stay safe. Except a babysitter. I’ve still got Josef’s knife.” Somewhere. It’s probably buried in a bag at Nick’s.

  “I’m getting you your own. Something that fits your hand better.” He picks up my hand, holding it palm out, using his thumb to trace the creases.

  My excitement dims a smidge. Carrying my own weapon is a permanent sort of thing, one that speaks of Nick’s faith that I can handle myself and the scrapes I get into. It’s also part of the life I’m trying to leave behind, if only Isaiah would pop up from whatever rock he’s hiding under.

  And I wonder, not for the first time, if staying with Nick means I can’t shed that identity. If it’ll dodge my steps like an unfriendly ghost.

  Nick’s phone rattles angrily across the table. He kisses my palm, drops my hand, and reaches around me to pick it up. “Kosta.”