Chapter 6
Kai
THOSE FUCKING MEN don’t leave until eight.
A catering spread arrived by lunch, another by dinner, and I didn’t eat because the barrister carried a plate from the kitchen to the office himself, and that tells me he knew where the plates were kept. He’d been here enough times to know.
I sit with that for a while.
While I battle the aftermath of hearing her come for a man who isn’t me, I Google him.
He’s from Weston Bay. Jack Rutherford brought him in specifically for this case.
He is about Jack Rutherford’s age, give or take, and he is a Queen’s Counsel.
Forty-seven years at the bar. By every measurable standard, the man is one of the finest barristers in Weston Bay and the country.
I scroll through every result.
I can’t find anything about a wife. I don’t know what to do with that information, but I don’t like what it tells me.
I close the browser and put my phone face down on the nightstand, and then I pick it up again and search his name one more time, adding married to the query.
Nothing. Adding partner. Nothing useful.
Adding Diana Jensen, and my thumb hovers over the search button for a beat before I lock the screen and set the phone down.
I don’t need to know. It isn’t relevant to the mission.
It isn’t relevant to anything.
I sit on the edge of my bed with my elbows on my knees and my hands clasped together, and I try to work out what the hell I am doing here.
The plan was to get even. Make Jack Rutherford bleed. When the tabloids ran a photo of him with a woman and captioned her his girlfriend, I saw my opening.
And so I planned. I made sure I was the one standing in this penthouse, hired to protect a woman I was never supposed to care about.
I press my palms flat against my thighs. The woman part, that’s the problem.
Because what I had not planned for was Diana Jensen. I hadn’t planned for any of it, and now my plan isn’t in the driver’s seat anymore. It’s in the trunk, suffocating.
I am not hurting Jack Rutherford from here. I am hurting my fucking self.
I should have gone to Weston Bay instead.
Walk into Rutherford the sky is clear enough that the coastline is visible even in the dark.
A quiet night. But quiet nights are the worst kind.
Quiet is when the noise inside my head gets loud.
I sip the whiskey. It burns clean going down. I hold the glass on my knee and stare at the lights, and I can feel her watching me the same way you feel a hand near your skin before it touches.
“I heard you,” I say. “Earlier. In the office.”
Momentarily I’m stunned by what I just said.
I wasn’t planning to say it. My brain has been circling the thing for hours, dragging it around the inside of my skull since the moment I heard her. But I didn’t expect it to be the first thing out of my mouth. I expected small talk first. Not this grenade.
But there it is, pin pulled in the open.
I turn to her, and there is nothing in her eyes except attention. Full, undivided, unhurried attention.
“Did you have sex with that man?” Ballsy of me. I bet that’s what she’s thinking. That I have the nerve to ask her that, sitting in her home, drinking her whiskey.
Her smile doesn’t rush itself.
“Are you jealous, Kai?”
The question lands square in my chest. Not because it is unexpected, but because the honest answer is yes, and the honest answer is a problem.
A bodyguard doesn’t get jealous. A man running a con doesn’t get jealous.
A twenty-five-year-old with a revenge plot doesn’t sit across from a woman fifteen years his senior and feel his blood go hot because she fucked someone else.
But I do. I feel all of it. Every stupid, useless degree of it.
I take a sip of whiskey.
She is watching me over the rim of her glass, and there is no mercy in it.
“I’m your bodyguard.”
Even that statement doesn’t make sense in this context, but I keep my face still. She isn’t going to answer me directly. I know that already. She is going to make me work for every inch of it, and even then, she’s only going to give me what she decided I could have.
“Is he forcing you?” The words rush out on their own. “Is there something going on? Is this some kind of—”
“Forcing me?”
“Is this… are you trying to climb some kind of corporate ladder? Is that what this is?”
“Kai.” She sets her glass down on the side table. “I am the top of the ladder. There is no ladder that I’m trying to climb. You clearly don’t know who I am.”
“Then tell me.”
She picks the glass back up. “Mr. Jones is a barrister. One of many on retainer. There are half a dozen at his caliber I can call on. He is not irreplaceable. He is not special.” She pauses. “He is a consultant.”
I hold the whiskey glass and say nothing.
“Does that answer your question?”
It doesn’t. It answers the question about the professional arrangement, and it answers nothing else.
“Then why?” I ask.
She raises an eyebrow.
“If he’s disposable.” I rub my jaw with my hand. “If there are six others just like him, why?”
“Why what, exactly?”
“Why are you having sex with him?”
Her whole face opens up, warm and unguarded.
“You are very cute when you’re jealous.”
“I’m not jealous!”
“Sure.”
“I’m asking,” I say, and I can hear the edge in my own voice, the thing climbing up my throat that I have no intention of letting out but can’t swallow back down. “Why you need to have sex with him.”
I stand up. Because the sounds I heard behind that door are a drill bit boring into my skull, and they won’t stop replaying. My chest is a loaded weapon with nowhere to aim.
“Are you… are you doing that with all of them? All those other six? The other lawyers? The men who walk in and out of your office. Is that what this is?”
She unfolds her legs and stands up, tips the rest of the whiskey back in one clean swallow, and sets the glass down on the table. “Ah, such a long day.”
She crosses to where I am, on her tiptoes, lacing her arms around my neck.
“What if…” she murmurs against my mouth. Then she pulls back just enough to look at me, her eyes unblinking, and completely at ease with the question she is about to detonate. “What if I am having sex with all of them? What is that to you?”
I don’t say anything.
I don’t trust my mouth to produce language. The question is a key turning in a lock I have no business owning.
I hate the position this woman is putting me in right now. Standing here, rendered without words by a question we both know the answer to.
I take a breath. Let it out.
“You remember who you are, right?” she adds, then walks out of the room.
I slump into her chair.
I know exactly who I am.
Fuck it.