Chapter 12
12
W e hadn’t engaged again after Ophelia left, and I was quickly approaching the end of my three hours. I’d learned his name, or at least his code name, and I was pretty sure I knew what he did for a living, but I hadn’t discovered anything I could use against him on this computer. I still had a last-ditch trick up my sleeve, though, if I could distract him long enough to plant it.
“How would you do it?” Reaper meandered around his office, filing paperwork after his interviews were over.
“What?” I looked up from the computer screen.
He perched on the edge of the desk in front of me. “How would you impress me? I know you’ve been sitting there thinking about it, wondering what you’d do if you were in their shoes.”
He wasn’t wrong. Each time one of them had come in, I’d wondered what I’d do if faced with the same command. I tried to hold back a smug smile. I might not have bedroom skills, but I was a goddamned wizard with numbers. “You’ve got three million dollars missing. And I know where it went.”
It took him a second to register what I’d said. Then his smile dropped. “Show me.”
“They’ve covered their tracks pretty well, moving it around the accounts first. The way you’ve got all this accounting segmented out makes it a nightmare to track. It ended up being exactly three mil after the final transfer was completed a few months ago.”
I walked him through where the money was moving and the account it was all ending up in.
He opened something on his phone. “What’s the account number?”
I read it off.
He was silent for a minute, studying something on his phone. “Interesting…” He scribbled the number down on a sticky note with the initials TW .
“Do you know whose account it is?”
He didn’t bother to look up from his phone. “Of course.”
“If I asked, would you tell me?”
He smirked. “For a price.”
I laughed. “I wouldn’t make another deal with you if my life depended on it.”
“I’ll remember that,” he said, closing files on the laptop and putting it into a case.
“So you’re a pimp? That’s what you do for a living?” I asked.
He shrugged, perfectly at ease. “I guess you could say that. I facilitate connections.”
I crossed my arms, trying to sort through everything I’d just seen and heard. “You facilitate connections ? Using euphemisms to distance yourself from your affiliation with sex work is a bit cowardly, don’t you think?”
He threw his head back and laughed. If someone found a way to bottle his laughter, they could use it as a weapon to bring people to their knees. “Darling, I’m being polite for your sake, but if you’d like me to spell it out…I own a sex club and employ only the finest sex workers to provide the types of erotic services powerful people don’t dare to ask for elsewhere.”
Nervous excitement thrummed through me at the mention of an illicit sex club. “And that’s what they were candidates for?”
He shook his head. “None of them were experienced enough to work for me in that capacity yet. They were auditioning to be the entertainment at my monthly party. First Thursday of every month. I’d invite you, but you’ll be otherwise… engaged .”
I narrowed my eyes. “So you use sex workers to get information?”
“Hardly. Powerful people are only too happy to trade information to gain a favor.” He tilted his head back and forth like he was thinking. “That, and as an escort myself, I’ve fucked half of them…or their wives. Or their wives and their daughters .” His eyes flashed on the last word.
He was a sex worker too? He must have a waiting list a mile long.
He was watching me expectantly like he’d just wound up a toy and released it.
“You’re trying to shock me.”
He grinned wickedly. “Is it working?”
I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of blushing and cowering. “What’s it like?” It was a completely inappropriate question, but when was I ever going to have another chance to ask it?
“Surely you’ll be able to tell me soon enough… Isn’t that what you’re about to do with Kevin King?”
I gasped. “Are you calling me a whore?”
“My darling, I have nothing but respect for my profession. I hope your marriage brings you the same joy that fucking people for astronomical sums of money brings me. And if it doesn’t?” He winked at me. “Well, you have my card.”
There was a facetious bitterness to the way he said it that told me he didn’t actually want me to hire him.
“How did you first… Sorry, it’s none of my business.” I looked away.
He tucked his thumbs into the top of his pants, teasing me with a glimpse of body hair. “What, turn my first trick? Fuck my first John? Stop being so scared you’ll use the wrong words.” He shrugged. “It’s just work.”
“So…?”
He looked up like he was searching for the memory. “This older guy wouldn’t take no for an answer, so I joked that he’d have to pay me. Then he offered me enough to live on for months in exchange for one night.”
I studied his expression. “How did you feel afterward?”
“You mean did I hate myself because I was now a dirty hooker? Hell no. I felt like a fucking god. In those early days, it was my clients who seemed pathetic to me. I didn’t respect them. Hell, I didn’t even like most of them. And that was how I discovered my true calling.”
“Which is?”
“Kink. Being a Dom. The meaner I was to them, the easier it was to stay hard. And the more they were willing to pay me for the privilege. I know better now—know all about consent and aftercare and the textbook way to do things. But back then I was pissed and raw, and I didn’t give a fuck about anyone’s feelings. And they loved me for it. Because that’s the thing…the textbook version of kink is safe and healthy, but it never quite feels real…I gave them real.”
He paused like he was surprised he’d said so much. This was a glimpse into a world I’d probably never get to see again.
“How did you go from that to owning a sex club?”
“I thrived when I started working in a dungeon. But it was too restrained for me, too polite, too controlled. To stay on the right side of the law, there was no sex allowed—no penetration, no exchange of bodily fluids. What’s the fucking point if you’re going to hold back the good stuff?”
I could only nod in agreement like I had any idea what he meant.
“So I went independent, working for myself for a while until other pros came to me looking for a safe space to push the boundaries. My business partners, Az and Grim, and I found ways to make it safe.”
Like blackmailing and manipulating powerful people.
I was so out of my element, I didn’t know what to say. The silence dragged out, and with it, my uncertainty grew. My task was done, my time was almost up, and that meant I was about to go and face my real challenge. I couldn’t make another mistake with Kevin.
“King thinks I seduced the senator,” I blurted.
He stopped what he was doing to look at me quizzically. “And?”
I sighed, surrendering to my mortification. Better now than later. I twisted my fingers together nervously, unable to meet his eyes. “Now he has…expectations. For me to be some kind of ruthless seductress.”
I expected him to mock me, but he was still studying me. “And you don’t think you are?”
I gave him a sideways look.
He sighed dramatically and hopped down from the desk. “ Fine , I’ll give you sex lessons.”
“What? No! That isn’t what I was getting at.”
He gave me a suggestive smile that made my stomach flip.
“That!” I said, pointing at his stupidly attractive face. “Teach me how to do that.”
“How to smile?”
“You walk into a room, and I think about sex. You lean on a doorframe, and I think about sex. You smile like that, and I feel it all the way to my goddamned toes. You have this…magnetism. Teach me that. Or at least the beginner’s version of that.”
He came towards me, and my breath hitched when I backed into the desk and realized I had nowhere else to go. He planted a hand on either side of me, leaning into my space to graze his teeth along my earlobe. “Princess, you walk into a room? I think about sex.” With his hands on my hips, he lifted me onto the desk, and I instinctively tried to part my knees to let him stand between them, but my dress prevented it. He grabbed the fabric and hiked it up around my hips, and I let him because it meant he could get closer.
His smile was gone, replaced with an intense look of longing. “You bite that full bottom lip, and I think about sliding my cock into your mouth.”
I gasped when he jerked my hips forward, my body rolling instinctively against him and the hardness I could feel through his leather pants.
“You gasp like that, and it makes me rock-hard.” He planted a tiny kiss on my temple. “Darling, there’s nothing to teach you.”
I looked up into his eyes, seeing a question there and a tether he’d snap if I only answered it. I panted, feeling wild and desperate for him to simply take what I didn’t dare offer.
“For thirty more minutes, I have to do anything you ask,” I said softly.
He looked disappointed. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? To do what you want but still tell yourself you didn’t have a choice. You want me? Come back when it’s not part of a bargain and own it.”
Duty and safety and common sense be damned, I needed this with him. I’d spend the rest of my life wondering if I didn’t explore it. “I don’t know what time I’ll be back from my date later, but?—”
He looked surprised, but then he swiped a hand across his mouth. “You won’t. Be back later that is. He’s taking you to Rome and planning to stay for a week. He’ll propose before you come home—already has the ring.”
I sucked in a breath, feeling like the room had suddenly gone topsy-turvy. So fast—everything was moving so fast!
“How do you know these things?!”
“You asked me to get you info. What’s important is if you go on this date, that’s it. The rest of your life is decided.”
I laughed bitterly. “It was decided before I was born. I don’t have a choice.”
“Why? Because of your sister?”
Of course, he knew what my father had threatened. “And a thousand other reasons. If you know my family history so well, how can you even ask that? Do you know what happens to people who defy my father?”
“I defied him.” He dropped it like a lead weight between us, indisputable proof that someone could cross Nathaniel Bryson and escape the consequences. “Stay with me.”
“It’s not that simple.” I was his daughter. There was no escaping.
“One day, you’re going to learn that it is. Until then, you’re wasting my time.” He backed away so quickly that my ass slipped off the desk, and I had to scramble to keep myself standing, tugging my dress back down in a losing battle to regain some of my dignity.
He held out the laptop I’d been working on. “You can return this for me.”
I frowned in confusion. “Return it?”
“To Kevin King.”
I gasped. “You just had me snoop through his files?!”
He poured himself a drink from a liquor cart that he’d pulled out from behind a cabinet door. “I suspected he was bribing someone, and I needed to know who. You got there faster than I would’ve.”
“What will you do with the information?” Had I just accidentally conspired with my future husband’s enemy? My future husband …I was going to be someone’s wife, and no one was going to give me any say in the matter. Would my mother have been able to intervene if she were still alive, or had those always been empty promises that she’d make sure I got to choose who I married? I was irrationally angry with her, angry she’d left me alone and angry that she might’ve told me what I wanted to hear, all the while knowing it was a lie.
Reaper smiled wickedly. “I’ll make them a better offer.”
“Why?”
“Because if King is up to what I think he’s up to, I’m going to need help to bring him down. If he’s marrying you, he’s obviously got political aims, which will only make it easier for him. I’d prefer he didn’t succeed.”
“Then why did you let me blackmail Macallan to drop the investigation? Why not stop him that way?”
“Because having Kevin King’s wife wrapped around my finger is the stuff of wet dreams.”
I’d been so mortifyingly na?ve. I felt something special with Reaper, some inexplicable pull that made me want to be in his arms. From what I’d seen with those interviews, though…so did everyone else. I wasn’t special, and this was all part of some bigger game to him.
“I thought you just told me you wanted me to stay.”
His face was beautiful even when his expression was ice-cold. “And you made your choice. Now run along, darling. Mr. King won’t like it if you’re late.”
“What about the remaining twenty-five minutes?”
He didn’t bother turning back on his way out of the office. “I got what I needed. Your debt is paid.”
On my way out, I braced a hand on one of his shelves, pretending to balance as I adjusted the strap on one of my shoes, but it really let me place a tiny camera next to his books.
He was fifteen moves ahead of me, but I was swiftly learning his game.
Let’s see how you like it when the tables are turned…