Chapter 26
26
Grey
It was impossible to listen to what Tomaso was saying with a raging hard-on and the sight of Max pulling her red skirt down – as though that would erase everything.
I imagined you’d fuck girls up against the wall, or the kitchen bench.
He should have been expecting it. Should have been reminding himself between each poisoned kiss that this high was not meant to last. Maxella Conrad was not the type of woman he wanted, and he clearly wasn’t the type of man she’d expected. And to be honest, that wouldn’t have been so bad. He could have been that guy, for a night. The guy who didn’t give a shit. Who took what he wanted and felt nothing, using her body as a release, nothing more. But if that’s what she thought he was ...
Why does it matter? The question splintered through his skull like a rusted rod. Why did it matter what she thought of him? Why couldn’t he just have sex with her and then go back to being mildly annoyed and impressed and aroused by her the next day? It wasn’t like there could be anything more between them – she broke all of his rules, everything his father had warned him against. Everything Sophie and most other women before her had taught him. And there was the (small) fact that she’d kept that piece of information about Libby screaming at the news story on the Barbaranis pretty damn close to her chest – a part of her that he would not think about ever again. Not that he believed a word of it. They were simply the desperate, conspiracy-seeking ravings of a woman who blamed the whole world for the fact that she was a fuck-up.
But he’d fucked up. He’d told Max too much about that night. He’d never spoken to anyone about what happened, not even Sophie and she’d been there. And now he couldn’t stop thinking ...
He had to focus. ‘Say it again, Tom?’
The eldest Barbarani growled like Greyson had asked him to walk the three-hour drive to Perth in Nella’s stilettos. ‘Frankie’s tree-humping friends are here. And I think Luca’s been hoarding strippers in the basement since Wednesday night.’
‘Tree-hugging,’ Grey corrected, looking automatically at Max, ready to roll his eyes but snapped them back when he remembered.
‘What the fuck does it matter? And your security team? Did you hire them from Temu? There’s a woman here who comes up to my belly button.’ Tom’s condescension was something Grey could normally tolerate but now, with his defences down, with everything about that night splayed open in front of him, Max’s scent still lingering over him, he wanted to strangle him through the phone.
‘That’s Kelly Aung. She’s ex-CIA and could murder you five different ways without touching you.’ Grey blew out thirty-two years’ worth of frustration into the phone. ‘I know what I’m doing, Tom.’
‘She’s plotting to let the chickens loose!’
‘Kelly is absolutely not doing that.’
‘Not your security! Francesca’s friends! And I know someone’s in the house who shouldn’t be there. Concetta heard thumping against the walls, and there’s food missing from the kitchen. I’m telling you – Luca’s hoarding whores!’
Grey pinched the bridge of his nose. He’d turned away from Max, hoping that, combined with Tomaso’s voice, would fix the situation below his belt. But her scent was still on him. He needed new skin. ‘Let them stay.’
‘The strippers?’ Tomaso’s voice shot back to its pre-puberty pitch.
‘Frankie’s friends. There’s no one hiding in the house, Tom. This is a classic Frankie move. She wants you to kick her out. I need you all together, safe.’
Because Kaine Skinner’s going to try and kill someone. And then Max Conrad is going to kill him.
No. She said she was never actually planning on killing Skinner.
How was Libby Johnston going to react when there was no death notice in the paper? He didn’t know if Libby read the paper or if they even got delivered to prisons – or anywhere for that matter. But Libby had contacts in the outside world. Someone would tell her. Maybe those people who’d visited ... Alexandra might not be able to give him their names, but Grey would get to the bottom of it, of Libby’s game – starting with the names of all of the inmates on Libby’s block, which he’d already passed onto his PI.
It wasn’t for Max’s safety. It was for the Barbaranis. He was not making professional decisions based on his—
‘Where are you anyway?’ Tomaso hissed. ‘What did the coroner say?’
Grey gathered the discarded coroner’s notes he’d dumped on the floor, flicking to a random page. ‘Cause of death was multiple organ failure.’
‘From drinking too much?’ Tom didn’t even try to disguise his hopeful tone. Or was it something else? Was he a little too eager to know official findings on Poppy’s cause of death?
That Barbarani boy killed my son.
‘No.’ Grey scanned the report, which he should have been doing instead of pushing Max up against the glass doors. He could almost feel Tomaso’s eyes on him, like he knew what Grey had been doing. ‘It’s consistent with poisoning. There were traces of rat bait in her system.’
Tomaso was silent for a full five seconds, which meant he’d died or had gone into cardiac arrest from shock. ‘So the wine was tampered with.’
‘Is that a tone of relief, Tom? Are you relieved someone is dead?’
‘I ... How dare you!’
But Grey was right, wasn’t he? He’d heard the pressure releasing in Tom’s words – despite his bravado, the thought that the poisoning might have been the first public mistake Tomaso Barbarani had ever made had clearly been weighing on him. But if someone tampered with the wine after Tom’s part in the process was done, then he was clear.
‘We need to recall all that batch. Discreetly.’
‘With all due respect, Tom, I don’t see how we can be discreet about this. People’s lives are at stake.’ Grey had already recalled the tainted batch of Barbarani Sangue, but he didn’t think he needed to tell the Barbaranis that. At this point, from the police report Grey had received, no one else who’d drunk the wine was sick.
Grey hadn’t forgotten Libby’s words. The poisoned ‘ kids ’. Was it just a random slip-up, or did Libby know something? If she’d just said ‘kid’, Grey would have assumed she’d caught the news story that was being covered by every outlet in the country – Poppy’s death was headline-worthy: young, pretty, innocent. But ‘kids’ suggested Libby hadn’t seen the TV. Why would she assume it was more than one person?
‘If we pull the wine, people are going to ask questions!’ Tom was ranting. ‘They won’t trust us ever again ...’ Grey let him go, like a frothing dog finally unclipped from a lead. ‘Greyson? Greyson? What are you going to say to that?’
Grey squeezed his eyes shut and ran a hand down his jaw. Fuck, he still hadn’t shaved. He dared a look over at Max. Had he been too rough? ‘Tom, I can’t do this right now.’
‘This is your job.’
‘My job is to keep you safe. Right now, you are safe.’
‘We are not safe, our reputation—’
‘Will survive.’
‘You don’t understand.’
‘No. You don’t understand. I’m tired, Tomaso. I haven’t slept more than three hours in the past two days. I’m going to bed.’
There was silence and then Tom spoke in a strange voice Grey hadn’t heard since he was much younger. ‘Never thought I’d hear you say that.’ He hung up.
Grey wanted to throw his phone off the balcony. He wanted to sink to the floor and put his head in his hands. He wanted the woman on the bed to take him in her arms and kiss him, to trace his skin like she’d done outside, to keep whispering that she was there, that it was all okay even though it obviously wasn’t. He wanted to forget what she’d said to him and who she was. He wanted Poppy Raven to wake up and tell him exactly what happened to her and how the Barbarani wine had tasted. He wanted someone else to take charge for one goddamn moment of his life.
Instead, he stared at the cold, dead phone in his palm. There’d be hell to pay for how he’d spoken to Tom. Grey had never spoken to him or any of the others like that before.
I’m trying to keep you safe , he silently screamed into the phone. My whole life is lived for yours. Can you just give me five fucking minutes?
Who knows what would have happened if Tomaso hadn’t called? Would he have questioned what Max had meant? Or would he have stayed so overcome with arousal and emotion that he’d have fallen back into their own world where no one else existed and there were no murder plots and prisons and poisoned wine? A selfish world where Grey only had to think about one thing.
Except that was the problem – he hadn’t been thinking. He didn’t think around Max. She made him forget his place, his position, his role. She made him feel ...
He didn’t want to think about it.
‘Is everything okay?’ Her voice was heavy. He glanced over and wished immediately that he hadn’t. Her bare skin glowed in the moonlight, long black hair down her back, green eyes only for him. Her skirt was pulled down again but he could still feel the stiffness of that leather as it had so willingly pushed up for him. The feel of the skin that was under that skirt ...
For fuck’s sake. He looked back at his phone. The screen was blank but he checked the time just to distract his eyes. ‘I don’t know,’ he replied honestly.
‘Grey, we should ...’
‘We don’t need to talk about it.’ He was using the same tone with her he’d used with Tom. He hated himself.
‘I—’
‘Don’t, Maxella.’
He saw the hurt, the confusion; they were familiar to him, calming even. He knew how this went, how this ended. It was the right thing to do, ending it now before they went further.
‘I know you think you know me because I lost my shit about that moment in my past more than once with you. But you don’t know me, and I don’t know you. And it can’t ever be different.’
As he watched her gear up to reply, his father’s image ballooned every other thought out of his mind. He had to protect the Barbaranis. And he couldn’t do that if he was distracted by her. ‘I just don’t see you that way,’ he said.
He’d always hated hunting, but it was one of those things his dad had thought would toughen the softness out of him. That softness that his dad had tried to sand down, to reshape into something masculine and thick – a hide that couldn’t be pierced. Grey had been a pretty useless shot, so his dad had made him skin the animals instead. Grey had always hated that first cut of flesh. But afterwards, all the other cuts were easier. He cut and sliced and skinned until he could pretend it wasn’t even his hands that were doing it. What he’d said to Max was like this. The first word almost didn’t come, but each word after that was easier – he could pretend it was someone else speaking, someone else cutting.
‘Because I’m not your type?’ she said, one hand on her hip. She’d never looked more like a cop than in that moment, about to reach for an invisible gun. To puncture his heart with a thousand bullet holes.
But he’d wrapped his heart in Kevlar a long time ago.
‘Yeah.’ Meeting her gaze was a gamble; she’d either see through his lie straight away or he’d be able to hold it like water cupped in the palm of his hands, just long enough for her to drink before she looked away.
He almost baulked at the piercing stare of her green eyes as they bore into his wretched, tattered soul. But he held them until she looked away, his lie now safely hidden as a glimmer in the corners of her eyes.