Leon (Dance with the Devil 2)

by Carole Mortimer

  Leon’s expression remained cold as he nodded to Kieran to throw the rousing bucket of water over their guest’s head and shoulders.

  It worked, one swollen eye opening wide enough for the beaten man to look up. “Oh fuck,” he muttered as he obviously recognized Leon was now the man standing in front of him.

  “Indeed,” Leon drawled in a hard voice. “Who are you and who are you working for?” So far as he knew, Kieran and Jericho hadn’t received an answer to either of those questions, despite the “incentives” given.

  “Is she still alive?” was all the slurred answer he received.

  “I’m asking the fucking questions!” Fuck, there he went with the word fucking again. And then again in his thoughts. What the hell…

  “Just tell me I didn’t kill her,” the younger man pleaded.

  “If you’d killed her, you would already be dead,” Leon grated.

  “Grazie a Dio.” The shooter’s shoulders deflated with the same relief as could be heard in his voice. His words also confirmed Leon’s initial impression that, from his swarthy complexion and dark hair and eyes, this young man was of Italian extraction.

  “Your Dio won’t be of any help to you now,” Leon promised him.

  Defiance gleamed in the one dark eye still visible after his beating. “Fuck you.” Blood and spittle left the young man’s mouth with the vitriol. “I failed to kill you, so I’m a dead man anyway, whether I answer your questions or not.” He grimaced after glancing down at his bound feet, his hands also secured behind his back.

  Leon felt a grudging respect for the man’s defiance. It didn’t mean he wasn’t going to die, and slowly, but for what it was worth, he’d have Leon’s respect when it happened—

  “As long as I didn’t kill Carla by mistake, I don’t give a damn,” their prisoner stated scornfully.

  Leon stilled, and a coldness entered his chest where his heart should be.

  Because this man had just called Carla by her name.

  Implying he knew her.

  How?

  Why?

  “How do you know Carla?” he demanded, nodding in Kieran’s direction when Calabro glared at him but didn’t answer.

  The younger man’s head snapped back from the force of Kieran’s blow. “You can all go to hell.” Blood and spittle once again frothed from his mouth.

  The coincidence was too much. The man had been at the hotel, intent on killing Leon when Carla was attending a wedding reception at which she knew Leon would also be present.

  Leon didn’t believe in coincidences.

  Did that mean Carla was part of the plan to kill him?

  Yes, she’d moved in front of Leon and taken the bullet meant for him, but there could be several reasons for her doing that.

  She could, belatedly, have changed her mind about being involved in the plan to kill him.

  Or, having supposedly saved Leon’s life, she could just bide her time and kill him when she felt like it.

  Either way, Calabro knew Carla, and Leon wanted an explanation as to how he did.

  In the meantime, that coldness in Leon’s chest turned to ice. An ice that was becoming deeper and harder by the second.

  He scowled as his cell phone vibrated in the inside breast pocket of his jacket. His expression darkened once he’d taken it out and read the text on the screen from Killian.

  Miss Andretti left the hotel. Padraic followed her, and he is now standing guard outside her apartment.

  Adding to the possibility of her guilt?

  Chapter Eight

  Carla felt so much more like herself, and in control of her own life, after swimming off some of her excess energy. Frustrated sexual energy, she acknowledged self-derisively.

  Because her body—the traitor!—had remained aroused long after she left the hotel.

  As Leon had remained front and center in her thoughts.

  If the take-charge way he’d kissed her was an example of his prowess, then his lovemaking would have taken her to her knees. Again, she added with self-mockery. Being allowed to touch him intimately, sucking his cock until he came in her mouth, was the single most erotic experience of her life so far.

  Single most being the correct description.

  Because she had no doubt Leon would forget she even existed while questioning the man who tried to kill him. That he would return to New York without seeing her again. For all she knew, there could be a woman in his life there. Obviously not someone he’d wanted to bring to the wedding as his plus-one, but a woman he nevertheless had regular sex with.

  Carla knew from experience that she didn’t share.

  No doubt Leon, if he thought of her at all, would pity poor naïve Carla Andretti for even thinking she had meant anything more to him than a quick fuck to pass the time while he was in London. Her getting shot in his stead hadn’t been part of the plan, but if Natalia hadn’t interrupted them, Carla felt sure she would have become just another woman Leon bedded before walking away from her.

  She really had enjoyed her swim, but she took a cab back to her apartment building two hours later, feeling too exhausted now to make the walk back.

  She came to an abrupt halt when she reached the top of the third-floor stairs and saw the door into her apartment was slightly ajar.

  She was sure she’d locked it when she left.

  Hadn’t she?

  Of course she had.

  Unless that injury to the head had affected her more than she realized?

  Didn’t matter whether she had or hadn’t locked the door, it was now open.

  What might be waiting for her on the other side of it was enough to make her hands tremble and her breathing grow shallow.

  Carla approached that door quietly and slowly, her shoulder bag clutched in her hand, ready to hit anyone who jumped out at her. Then she snorted. As if being stealthy or wielding her bag as a weapon was going to make the slightest bit of difference if there was an armed or violent burglar. Or, God forbid, an axe-murderer waiting inside the silence of her apartment, ready to strike when she walked through the doorway.

  She became aware of the aroma of a familiar aftershave the moment she pushed the door wide enough for her to enter the hallway. “Leon?” she questioned uncertainly, taking the four strides that took her straight into the sitting room.

  He was sitting very upright in one of her armchairs, wearing a tailored dark suit, snowy-white shirt, and meticulously tied gray silk tie.

  Carla hadn’t seen him before he’d left the hotel earlier, so she couldn’t say whether or not he’d been wearing the formal clothing then.

  He remained utterly still, to the extent he didn’t even turn his head in Carla’s direction when he answered her. “Were you expecting someone else?”

  “No.” The coldness of his tone and the bleakness of his expression sent an icy shiver down the length of Carla’s spine. Because she had disobeyed him and left the hotel during his absence? Seemed a bit overkill to her. “But I wasn’t expecting you either.”

  “You didn’t see Jericho and Padraic on your way in?” he mocked.

  “No.” She hadn’t been looking for the Irish bodyguards, but she also had a feeling that if they didn’t want to be seen, they would ensure they weren’t. If they were outside, they’d also obviously been instructed not to impede her returning to her apartment. “Are they in a black SUV?” She’d noticed the parked vehicle, but her apartment was near the shops, so there were always cars parked outside that didn’t belong to the residents.

  Leon nodded. “I asked them to wait downstairs.”

  “While you came up here and broke into my apartment?” She still felt incredulous that was, apparently, what he’d done. People didn’t really do that. At least, not the people she knew. Until Leon.

  He finally turned to look at her, the bleakness of his expression even deeper in the storm-tossed gray of his eyes. “That lock couldn’t keep out a six-year-old with a paperclip.”

  Carla had no way of gauging exactly
what his current mood meant, beyond knowing it chilled her to the bone. This man didn’t have to stand up to his full and threatening height or raise his voice for him to be as intimidating as hell.

  “I doubt a six-year-old with a paperclip would want to break into my apartment,” she came back dryly.

  “When I left you earlier, I told you not to leave the hotel.”

  She winced. “Reality check—you don’t get to tell me what I can or can’t do.”

  His mouth tightened. “You’ve been to a gym in a leisure center since returning home. Why?”

  Only one thing about that statement meant anything to Carla. “Did you have me followed?”

  “Of course.”

  Her temper rose. “How dare you!”

  “Reality check,” he tauntingly drawled her earlier words back on her. “You don’t get to tell me what I can or can’t do either. So.” His eyes narrowed. “What did you do at the gym?”

  “Padraic didn’t tell you that?” Process of elimination told her that Jericho had left with Leon this morning, and now Jericho was downstairs with Padraic. She had no idea what Kieran was doing.

  “They wouldn’t allow Padraic into the gym because he isn’t a member.”

  She nodded. “Good to know their security is working.”

  “Carla,” Leon bit out in warning.

  “Oh, for the love of… I went for a swim, okay?”

  His eyes widened. “A swim?”

  Carla sighed heavily. “This conversation is going to go much quicker, and you can leave all the sooner, if you stop repeating my questions back to me.”

  He scowled. “No way should you have been swimming with a head injury.”

  The looming headache creasing her brow had already told her that. “I covered the gauze with a waterproof plaster so the wound didn’t get wet.”

  “That isn’t—”

  “Why are you here, Leon?” she demanded.

  His eyes narrowed, his expression remaining rigidly uncompromising. “How well do you know Benito Calabro?”

  Carla was so taken aback by the randomness of the question, her heart stuttered and then stopped.

  Where the hell had Leon’s question about Benny come from…?

  Having Leon continue to look at her with those cold, unblinking, and accusing gray eyes wasn’t helping to alleviate the shock she’d just received. “I don’t remember mentioning Benny’s name to you.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Then how do you know about him?”

  Leon’s nostrils flared. “He and I had a…conversation earlier.”

  She swallowed. “You and Benny?” She couldn’t even begin to imagine it.

  Leon was not only powerful, but suave and sophisticated, whereas Benny was a typical jock and enjoyed going to the gym several times a week and watching sports on television, at home and at work.

  “Yes,” Leon bit out.

  “In regard to what?”

  “You, eventually.”

  “What?” Her voice was hushed in the tense silence.

  “Is he who you saw outside the reception room at the hotel yesterday evening?”

  Her cheeks warmed. “I thought I saw him,” she corrected. “But he wasn’t there when I got out into the hallway. When did you speak to Benny? Why did you?” She couldn’t think of a single circumstance under which the two men would even have met, let alone had a conversation.

  “A short time ago.” Leon grimaced. “And it seemed like a good idea under the circumstances.”

  “What circumstances?”

  He gave a shrug. “I believe at the time, Jericho was in the process of blacking Calabro’s other eye in an effort to persuade him into revealing who his employer is.”

  “As far as I know, Benny works for Graham Reed, the owner of the sports bar… Jericho was blacking Benny’s other eye?” She gasped as she realized what he’d said.

  Leon nodded tersely. “Kieran had already had the pleasure of blacking the first one earlier.”

  Carla stared at him in disbelief as realization of the situation hit her squarely between the eyes with the force of a blow.

  Leon had left the hotel earlier because his team of bodyguards had caught the man who had tried to shoot him.

  Was he now saying that man was Benny?

  Her hands became icy, and her cheeks felt as if they were carved in stone. Her tongue also felt as if it had swollen too large for her mouth and would surely prevent her from speaking. “You can’t seriously be telling me that Benny was the man who tried to shoot you last night?” She shook her head in denial of that even being possible.

  Benny might not have been the best boyfriend in the world, but he’d never hit her or shown even the slightest violent tendencies.

  Leon snorted. “Are you seriously trying to tell me you didn’t know exactly who he was last night?” He rose gracefully to his feet, able to look down at her now she was wearing flats and not the four-inch-heeled sandals from yesterday. “That you weren’t assisting him in trying to kill me?”

  Carla’s eyes grew even wider at the accusation. She would never… She had never… How could Leon even think she would be a part of something so…

  She stilled as images of last night’s shooting suddenly flashed through her head like a broken reel on a movie spool. Images of the shooting she’d thought might be lost to her forever.

  Of a man stepping out in front of her and Leon after they’d exited the elevator.

  Of the man’s arm rising, and finding herself looking down the barrel of the silencer on the gun he held in his slightly shaking hand.

  Of her shock at seeing, and recognizing, the man’s face as he pulled the trigger.

  Benny’s face.

  Then her head had been engulfed in pain and blood spurting from her right temple and into her eyes, blinding her before dark unconsciousness engulfed her and she felt herself falling to the marble floor.

  All of them memories Carla had blanked out until this moment.

  Because she simply couldn’t believe Benny, the man she’d once been engaged to marry, was also the man trying to kill Leon.

  Benny would never… He wasn’t capable of…

  But Benny had, because Carla had seen him with her own eyes, holding the gun pointed at Leon before his finger pulled the trigger and he shot her instead of Leon.

  All Benny.

  The same man she’d thought she’d seen earlier that evening outside in the hallway where the wedding reception was being held. He’d been talking to another man, she’d thought, but he’d disappeared by the time Carla had hurried out into the hallway. Leading her to think she must have imagined it because the wedding had brought back unhappy memories.

  But if what Leon now said was true, then she hadn’t imagined anything, and Benny was the person who had tried to shoot Leon later than evening.

  Football-watching, beer-drinking Benny.

  Too-lazy-to-get-off-his-arse-most-of-the-time Benny.

  Unfaithful Benny.

  “Is it all coming back to you now?” Leon taunted in a hard voice.

  She frowned her irritation. “As a matter of fact, it is. I couldn’t remember what happened last night before now. The part where Benny fired a gun at you, at least.”

  “Is he your lover?”

  “That’s none of your business!” she snapped, outraged at what was starting to feel like an interrogation.

  Leon’s mouth twisted. “If it’s any comfort, Mr. Calabro expressed his regret about shooting you instead of me and hopes you will make a full recovery.”

  Carla swallowed at the complete lack of a similar regret in Leon’s tone. “Where’s Benny now?”

  Leon’s nostrils flared. “You know where he is.”

  The same warehouse down by the docks where she’d first met Leon. Which also told her exactly where Kieran was too. “Is he still alive?”

  “He was when I left.”

  She flinched. “Is he going to stay that way?”

  Leon ha
d no intention of lying to her. “That all depends on you.”

  She eyed him warily. “Me?”

  Leon hardened his heart against the vulnerability he could see in Carla’s expression. If she was a part of the attempt to kill him, he would have no choice but to mete out the same treatment to her as he had Calabro. “If you tell me the name of the man who employed you both, then I won’t have to beat it out of you, and I might even be persuaded into sparing your own and Mr. Calabro’s life.”

  “You, personally, would beat it out of me, or would you have one of your men do it?” she scorned.

  He’d spoken the words, but in reality, the thought of doing anything to hurt Carla, or ordering anyone else to do it, was anathema to him.

  Nor was there any reason why he should have Carla’s or Calabro’s blood on his hands. Once their employer caught up with them, he would order one of his men to put a bullet in the other man’s head for having failed to kill Leon, as Leon had already surmised when the shooting failed to kill him.

  Even Leon knowing Carla had betrayed him, the thought of her with a similar bullet hole in the middle of her forehead, the light in her eyes as dead as she was, made him feel ill.

  Right now, he didn’t know who he was angry with the most. Himself for having succumbed to Carla’s beauty and feistiness. Or Carla for enticing him into wanting to possess that feistiness for himself.

  She was the first woman he’d been attracted to in a very long time. Open and honest, he had thought, to a degree her fearless bluntness made him laugh. Her beauty, that glossy dark hair and deep brown eyes, along with her curvy figure aroused him to a degree he’d thought of little else but her for weeks now.

  Yesterday, she’d seemed to return that attraction, even if somewhat hesitantly. A reluctance, Leon freely acknowledged, which had only increased his desire for her. She’d made love to him this morning as if she meant it. Had him completely at her mercy, with his cock in her mouth and his balls in her hands.

  Why the hell hadn’t she found a way to kill him there and then?

  He wouldn’t have fought her, and it would have been a lot less painful than the feeling of betrayal that had been eating away inside him since he spoke to Benito Calabro and realized Carla had to be the other man’s accomplice rather than his victim.