Chapter Eight
Ava’s heart was thumping painfully in her chest. Jack must have felt it when she was pressed against him a few minutes ago, and even the warmth and comfort of the hot tub—and it was a nice hot tub—did nothing to calm the racing of her heart.
She’d managed to catch Jack off guard when she’d pushed her knife against his belly. So she’d bought herself time, at least.
Fuck.
What was she supposed to do now?
Everything was happening faster than she could catch her breath.
But then it had felt that way ever since—
“Ava?”
Jack was leaning against the doorframe, one hand resting on the handle of the sliding glass door. His posture was casual, but the look in his dark eyes was so intense she nearly had to look away.
“What do you want?” She was not going to pretend to be casual. Not when she had just agreed to work with a hit man. For fuck’s sake. Some things should not be normalized, actually. She lifted the knife at the edge of the hot tub and looked back at him, a challenge on her face.
And in her hand. That too.
“I was wondering if we could talk.” Jack’s voice was soft.
This was a far cry from the man who had dragged her off Cale’s prone body earlier that day or snapped orders at her as if he just expected her to listen to them. He sounded hesitant now. Uncertain.
“As long as you don’t have any more lectures ready about how I work for you and have to love, honor, and obey you or whatever.” Ava shrugged, turning the knife over in her hand carefully as Jack stared at her, mouth slightly open as if he couldn’t quite believe her.
In fairness to him, she couldn’t, either.
She had been a librarian before all this.
But the craft nights, the meditative work of reshelving stray books, the soft-spoken conversations in the romance section, the preschool story times with stuffed bears and eager parents and distracted three-year-olds—all of it felt like a lifetime ago now. Because that was before.
Before she’d lost everything to Cale Jacobson and his evil fucking company.
If Ari could see her now, would she even recognize Ava? Stark naked in a hot tub, twirling a knife and staring down a hit man as they planned a murder together?
Scratch that. The Ava of a few years ago wouldn’t have been able to recognize the person in the hot tub today, either.
“No more lectures,” Jack interrupted the racing chaos of Ava’s thoughts. “I thought I could go first. To build trust between us. I share what I’ve learned, and then you tell me any intel you’ve picked up along your way.”
“Awfully convenient.” Ava stood, water running in rivers down her shoulders. She shook her head, sending water droplets flying. To her satisfaction, Jack was standing close enough to receive a shower across his neatly pressed shirt.
He grimaced a little, shaking slightly as if he could rid himself of the mess Ava brought with her.
“What do you mean convenient?”
“I already know everything you know,” Ava said. She hadn’t really had time to peruse his little murder manual, of course. But it was better if Jack thought she had more leverage than she actually did. “I had your stupid little book, remember?”
“My stupid little book?” A flicker of anger crossed Jack’s face, but it passed, his look stony and impenetrable again. “You keep calling it that. You mean my case notes?”
“Case notes are something social workers and grad students have,” Ava said. “You have a murder manual. Or a stupid little book. Whichever you prefer.”
“A murder ma—no, I do not,” Jack said. “That’s not what we’re calling it. And did you actually read all of this? I caught up with you pretty quickly. And you were in the shower a long time.”
Of course she hadn’t read the whole thing, or even much, but it was insulting that he didn’t think she had, either.
Ava resisted the urge to splash more water at the hit man standing in front of her. “I read most of it,” she told him primly. “And I know your hit was planned for tomorrow, which is no longer an option, so you need a new opportunity. Which I can get for you.”
Which she could maybe get for him. If nothing else went terribly wrong, and that was a big if.
Jack arched an eyebrow at her. “Can I get you a towel? Some clothes? We can talk about this over drinks, and I’ll tell you everything I have. Promise.”
“You have to be the first man who wanted me to put my clothes back on after they came off,” Ava grumbled, stepping past him. As she did, her foot slipped on the deck, slick from the water she’d splashed out, and—
A firm hand closed around her bicep, his other arm hooking around her waist. He’d dropped his book—the murder manual itself—catching her, and now their faces were inches away again, his dark eyes piercing hers like he could see all the way through her.
“Don’t,” Ava said softly.
Jack released her like she was a live wire, snatching his murder manual from the ground as he did. “I wouldn’t have,” he said tightly. “Now, can you please let me get you a towel and some clothes so we can make a plan?”
“You’re bossy.”
“I’m in charge. There’s a difference.”
Ava gaped at him. “Who died and made you king?” she demanded, even as the low growl of his voice chased a shiver down her spine. “This is a partnership.”
When he didn’t look like he knew what to make of that, she snapped her fingers in his face.
Because Ava had always been a brat, but these days she was a brat with an impossible mission and very little remaining self-preservation.
“Does that usually work for you?” she asked, her laugh hard and sharp from disuse. “You drop your voice into the lower register, tell people you’re in charge, and they all just bend over for you?”
Jack shrugged one infuriatingly broad shoulder. “Yes,” he said. “More or less. Generally, people are pretty obedient. They like being told what to do, and they like it even more when you sound like you know what you’re doing. But I didn’t tell you to bend over.”
“I meant ‘bend over’ metaphorically,” Ava snapped, waving her hand at him in frustration. He shouldn’t be able to make her blush. Especially at a time like this.
“How do you bend over metaphorically?” Jack asked. He looked genuinely baffled. “I’ve only had people bend over physically, and I don’t really see how that’s relevant to the objective—”
“I meant submission,” Ava cut him off, her face flooding with heat at the word. It always had made her blush, even in the good days when she’d had Ari around to tease her gently about it.
Jack looked more confused. “You’re blushing,” he said.
She stomped past him into the house, a trail of water dripping behind her as she did.
When she looked over her shoulder, Jack was following with a towel, wiping up the water as he went, a small frown etched on his face.
Ava grabbed a cutoff tee and pulled it on, not bothering with a bra. She pulled shorts on next, glowering. “All right,” she said. “Happy now?”
Jack raised an eyebrow, his eyes sweeping low, just for a moment, where her nipples stood erect against her T-shirt. “Not remotely,” he said. “Cale Jacobson is still breathing, my clients are displeased, and you aren’t taking this seriously.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Ava told him pleasantly. She dropped onto the gray sectional that wrapped around the living room, letting out a sigh as she did. The furniture was soft, and she sank into it.
Jack came to stand in front of her, towel still in his hand. He surveyed her cooly but completely, his gaze sweeping her from head to toe as if cataloging every bit of her. “You haven’t eaten,” he said finally.
Ava stared at him, taken aback. She had eaten a few Dove chocolates. She’d forgotten breakfast, but he didn’t know that. He couldn’t. “I’m fine,” she said.
He hummed thoughtfully in response. “I’ll make you some grilled cheese,” he said. “They have a Blackstone I can use. And I’ll put a salad together, too.”
“Why?” Ava asked, glaring up at him. She couldn’t be bothered to stand up, though. The sectional was deliriously comfortable, and it had been a long, long day. “Are you going to poison me? Get rid of me via grilled cheese?”
It hadn’t seemed like an outlandish theory to Ava, who was still reasonably sure Jack was less interested in partnering with her than he was in neutralizing any threat she posed, but Jack grinned, surprising her at just how it brightened everything about him.
His eyes sparked fiercely, the corners of them crinkling into laugh lines.
“There are easier ways to kill somebody, Sunshine,” he told her. “Besides, poisons are messy work in their own way, and some toxins are as easy to trace as bullets.”
“That’s the least comforting thing you could have said,” Ava shot back, but she closed her eyes.
Not least because looking directly at the grin on Jack O’Sullivan’s face was like looking directly into the sun.
“If there was an award for ‘Least Likely to Successfully Comfort Someone in Distress,’ that would have been next to your face in the yearbook.”
“I actually got ‘Most Likely to Start a Podcast,’” Jack told her. “It was pretty embarrassing.”
“That can’t be real,” she said, leaning back against one of the pillows. It was so damn comfortable.
He hummed again, the sound soft at the edge of her consciousness.
The next thing Ava knew, she was waking up on the sectional, tucked beneath a knit throw blanket. It was dark outside, but the lamp next to the couch was on, and a plate with grilled cheese and salad waited for her, a bowl of soup beside it.
Ava rubbed at her eyes, her vision clearing a little.
Jack sat opposite her, a needle and thread in his hand. He was steadily working on something, though he looked up when she started stirring.
“Are you—are you fucking crocheting?” Ava searched for the right word, coming up short. In her library days, she’d helped out at a craft club run by an elderly woman named Betty who had liked everyone there except Ava. Fuck Betty for that, honestly.
“It’s cross-stitch,” Jack said.