Chapter 4
Goldie
God, she was bored.
Her stupid listening device thing was a bust. Not once tonight had she gotten so much as a whisper of sound from inside the stupidly large house the O’Rourkes inhabited.
So mostly she’d just been sitting here, working her way through the pile of junk food in the passenger seat, and waiting for something interesting to happen.
She was just about to give up and head home when the front door opened, spilling light out onto the porch and illuminating a tall, broad figure. Brody? Or one of his cousins?
With the light behind him, she couldn’t see, at least not from this distance. Setting her useless listening device aside, she grabbed her binoculars and zoomed in on the house.
Damn. Not Brody. Just as tall and broad, but he was salt and pepper—heavy on the salt—where Brody was all ginger. Whoever he was, he moved aside for a tiny, timid-looking woman to step out onto the porch, followed by a man who looked like a much thinner, much younger version of the first man.
Father and son, maybe? It made sense. The mob, at least from her research, were big on family.
Truth? Or the bullshit Brody had said her books were full of?
He would know, as much as it grated to admit.
Maybe instead of stalking him, she should try to talk him into an actual interview.
She wasn’t really getting anything out of her surveillance, other than the thrill of doing something illicit, but that thrill had worn off about an hour into her stakeout, around the time she’d polished off her first box of cookies.
The soft snick of her car door opening alerted her that she was in trouble a split second before something hard pressed against her side. Terror rose up in her chest, choking the breath from her lungs.
“Don’t make a fucking sound.”
Her heart, which had taken off at approximately the speed of light when she’d heard her door open, slowed to a gallop. “What the fuck, Brody?”
A low growl rumbled in her ear. A literal growl, and she had to fight the urge to visibly shiver.
Well that’s one thing in my books that’s not bullshit, at least.
“Get in the passenger seat. And not another sound until I give you permission to speak.”
Permission to speak? Who the fuck did he think he was?
The thing pressed against her side dug in harder, and fear once more clawed at her throat. Oh, right. The guy with the gun. That’s who the fuck he thinks he is.
Because she wasn’t actually as stupid as he seemed to believe she was, she did as she was told and climbed over her console to the passenger seat. Which took some doing, as it was currently crowded with bags of cookies and chips and a box of her favorite snack cakes.
“What the hell is all that?”
Nothing about being discovered staking out a mob boss’s house and then having that mob boss’s second in command pointing a gun at her should have been funny. But the pure horror in his voice was kind of hilarious.
“Stakeout snacks,” she explained as she moved them to the backseat. “I didn’t know how long I’d be here.”
“Do you eat like this all the time or just when you’re being a fucking menace to society?”
Maybe it made her a perverse creature, but she couldn’t help but feel a burst of pride at being called a menace to society by a man who was, by all rights, an actual menace to society.
“Well, this is my first stakeout, so I probably went a bit overboard. When I’m on a tight deadline I do pretty much live on junk food, though. ”
Another of those low growls rumbled through the car, and again she thought how fucked up she must be for that sound to have her pussy spasming in response. “Jesus Christ. You need a keeper. Buckle your goddamn seatbelt.”
Okay, well, if he was worried about her safety he probably wasn’t planning to kill her and feed her to the fishes.
Right?
Clinging to that hope, she did indeed buckle her seatbelt without argument. “So… where are you taking me?”
“Home.”
Disappointment stabbed at her, followed by the logical side of her brain wondering what the fuck was wrong with her that she was disappointed he wouldn’t be dragging her to some dark warehouse to question her. “Boring.”
One corner of his mouth kicked up in a smirk as he guided her car away from the curb. “Trust me, menace, you won’t be bored for long.”
Again her heart kicked into high gear as her stomach twisted itself into a giant pretzel. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Why were you staking out my cousin’s house?”
“Answer my question first.”
Glancing over, he raised a ruddy brow in a look she’d written about many times but hadn’t actually seen in person. And her reaction to said look was exactly like what she’d written about.
She was starting to think he was the one who was full of shit and not her books.
“Do you really think you’re in a position to be making demands, little girl?”
Ah, fuck. That shouldn’t be hot. She was a woman, a professional, successful woman, thank you very much. She should not enjoy being called ‘little girl’ in that growly voice.
But she did. So much so that she had to press her thighs together against the sudden ache between them. “Why not? You’re not actually going to shoot me.”
“You seem very sure of yourself.”
“I am. Because if you were going to shoot me, you would have done it already. And because you’re too smart to risk taking out a cop’s daughter.”
Her father’s job wasn’t something she wielded for her own selfish purposes very often.
She’d never been the type of cop’s kid to see how much she could get away with, always assuming her father would be there to bail her out.
No, she’d very much been the opposite, always following the rules, never making trouble for her father if she could help it.
Hell, she didn’t have so much as a parking ticket to her name.
But telling Brody who her father was just seemed smart, given the circumstances. She knew damn well the O’Rourkes were dangerous men, and while she was fairly confident in her assessment of Brody’s current motivations, she couldn’t be guaranteed they would always stay that way.
“Not bad, menace.” If she wasn’t mistaken, there was a note of pride in his voice. “You’re forgetting one crucial detail, though.”
“And what’s that?”
Again with that damn smirk. “It’s my job to make sure that when someone needs to disappear, they do so without a trace, and with nothing that could remotely connect them back to my family. And I am very, very good at my job.”
Fuck.
Brody
He was an asshole.
But goddammit, the woman had no sense of self-preservation. He had, of course, already known she was a cop’s daughter. Which was a not insignificant part of the reason he needed her to stay far, far away from his family.
The way she’d stated it so matter-of-factly, though, like that would have made a fucking difference, had his blood boiling with barely restrained fury.
It was a good thing she was dealing with him and not the Italians.
Or worse, the goddamned Russians or Richard Williams. If any of them figured out they had a cop’s daughter sniffing around…
Red colored the edges of his vision and his fingers tightened on the steering wheel to the point his knuckles actually turned white. The thought of any of his family’s enemies even knowing her name filled him with enough fury to burn their city to the ground around them.
Luckily for Goldie, she stayed quiet the rest of the ride back to her apartment. It wasn’t far, but it gave him enough time to get his fury in check. He’d never once laid a hand on a woman in anger, and he damn well wasn’t going to start with her.
“Where do you park?” he asked as he pulled the car into the garage beside her building.
“Fourth level, spot four-one-seven.”
With a grunt of acknowledgement, he drove up to her spot and parked.
“All right, here’s how this is going to go.
We are going to walk into your building, and you are going to act perfectly normal.
As far as anyone we might run into knows, we are just two people, coming home after a nice date.
If you do or say anything to try and tip anyone off, I will call my cousin Lochlan to come take care of them.
And believe me, menace, when I tell you that you do not want me to call Lochlan. ”
A glance to his right revealed that all the color had drained from her face. Good. She should be scared. Not being scared enough was how people got themselves killed.
Still, there was a prickle of guilt at the back of his mind he ruthlessly ignored.
He was laying it on thick for her benefit, and he felt like an asshole for scaring her, but it was ultimately for her own good.
Maybe if he succeeded in putting the fear of god into her tonight, she’d finally heed his warnings to stay the fuck away from his family.
“Tell me you understand, Goldie.”
“You know this is absolutely insane, right?”
“I do.” There was little about how his family handled complications that wasn’t a bit insane. “Now, tell me you understand the plan.”
Huffing out a breath, she flopped back against her seat and rolled her eyes. But her color was still off, telling him the sulky defiance was just a defense mechanism against the fear he could practically smell rolling off her. “Fine. I understand.”
“Good girl. Stay there.” Palming his gun, he climbed out of the car and made his way around to the other side to open her door. He didn’t want to feel the rush of satisfaction that she had, for once, done as she was told but it was there anyway.
She could be a good girl when it suited her, it seemed.
When she climbed out, her nose tilted in the air, he had to bite back a smile. Ornery little thing. If their circumstances had been different, maybe they could have had some fun together.
But their circumstances were what they were, and he doubted she’d want to have much to do with him after tonight.
Sliding the hand that still held his gun beneath her jacket and shirt, he let his hand rest at the base of her spine, the cold metal pressed directly against her skin. “Lead the way, menace.”
“You think you’re insulting me, but I am rather proud of the fact that a man like you finds me menacing.”
“I didn’t say you were menacing,” he corrected as they walked toward the elevators that would take them back down to the main level. “I said you are a menace. An annoyance.”
Apparently untroubled by his correction, she sniffed delicately. “Good. I’d imagine you don’t have enough people in your life who dare to annoy you.”
She had a fair point there, though he sure as fuck wasn’t going to tell her that. Instinct told him that if he agreed, she’d make it her personal mission to become even more of a menace, and that would completely ruin his plan to scare her into keeping her distance.
And he desperately needed her to keep her distance.
No matter how badly he wanted her as close to him as he could physically get. Preferably beneath him, screaming for Daddy while he forced pleasure on her beyond even what her rather impressive imagination could conjure.
Another lifetime, maybe. In this one, he had other reasons to make her scream.