TWENTY-TWO - JAMESON
Roman was taking longer than I would have thought, and for some reason, his lingering absence made me very uncomfortable. Considering he didn’t want to be away from me at all, I’d expected him here within ten minutes or less of my departure from his proverbial grip.
Regardless, there was still work to be done, with or without him.
I’d managed to get updates from Kelly about the upcoming gala, make sure everything was still running on track. It is. Then, I texted Chris to see how he was doing. His only reply? I’m fine. Chris was mad-mad. I didn’t blame him.
I tossed my phone down on my desk and got lost in my own work. By the time I looked up, almost an hour had passed, and I still hadn’t heard from Roman. A part of me wanted to call or text and ask him if he was okay, but I also didn’t want him to think I cared too much about him.
There was a knock on the door. “Hey, boss?”
“What?” I called out to Jordan, who was still standing guard outside my office.
“You got company,” he notified me.
“I’m not in the mood right now.” I couldn’t even imagine who wanted to see me. I didn’t have anything blocked out or scheduled on my calendar, and no one had let me know they were on their way.
“Um, I think you’re gonna want to hear what they have to say.”
“Unless they’ve got Girl Scout cookies, I’m not interested.”
“He said it’s about Magnolia?” Jordan’s voice was low, barely audible through the wooden door. “Said you’d understand.”
My heart sank into the pit of my stomach. Magnolia? Until last night, not so much as a word had been breathed about my dad’s estate. Not to my face, anyway. Now, someone was standing outside of my office door with a message for me regarding it?
Against my better judgment, I buzzed the door open with a security button installed underneath my desk. The locking mechanism released, and Jordan swung the door open.
I stood up to greet my mystery guest. A man I didn’t recognize appeared in the doorway. He wasn’t very tall, maybe my height, and barely had twenty pounds on me. Odds seemed in my favor if I needed to defend myself.
Hell of a time for Roman to not be here.
Jordan stood behind him, just off to the side.
The man grinned. “You’re even prettier in person.”
“You didn’t come here to compliment me. Say what you need to say, then leave.”
He stepped through the threshold, crossing into my office. “In private.”
He nodded toward Jordan as if to say he goes.
Jordan gave me a what would you like me to do look over the man’s shoulder. Shoot him in the back of the head came to mind, but I hated the idea. I’d just had this office repainted.
“You can shut the door, but he stays there,” I told the guy. This way, at the very least, if he did shoot me, he wouldn’t make it past security upon his departure.
The guy shrugged. “Fine.” Then, he used his foot to shove the door closed without taking his eyes off me. As soon as the door shut, he reached under his shirt down the front of his pants, pulled out a gun, and aimed it at me.
I rolled my eyes. “Jesus Christ,” I mumbled under my breath.
“You’re gonna need him if you get squirrely. Now, hands up where I can see them.”
“Could you be any more predictable?”
“Now,” he ordered.
I slowly raised my hands in the air at shoulder level. Shit. Now I couldn’t unlock the door from my desk if I needed to. They’d just have to find another way inside.
The idiot had a gun pointed at my face. One twitch and I was toast…guess I’d grossly underestimated this guy, and he definitely didn’t have cookies for sale.
“You think you’re gonna shoot me?” I asked, keeping my voice steady despite having a probably loaded gun pointed at me.
“I might if I have to.” He half shrugged.
“Honestly, I don’t give a fuck at this point,” I lied. I did give a fuck, kind of. “I’m sick of dealing with shit around here, anyway. Feel free to take me out,” I challenged him.
“You’re making this way too easy.” He smiled. I almost flinched. This guy was missing half of his teeth, and the ones left were hanging by a thread.
“Maybe. But you won’t get away with it. As soon as you open that door, we’ll both be dead.”
If this was one of Kane’s idiots, I knew he wouldn’t dare kill me and think he was going to get away with it one way or the other.
Kane wanted to make my death a spectacle, and this wasn’t it.
Whoever this guy was had to have known that much.
He could be new. Kane was known to blow through cronies faster than a hooker giving blowjobs to make rent. Maybe he just didn’t give a shit.
“My, uh, boss. He said you need to stay away. Quit getting nosey.”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“He said you’d say that, but you know exactly what he’s talking about.”
“Tell your boss he can fuck right off. Better yet, tell him if he wants me to do something, then he can come see me himself. I don’t take third-party orders.”
“He isn’t gonna do that. You’ve been creeping around places you shouldn’t be.” He waved his gun carelessly in the air as he spoke. Amateur.
“I go wherever the fuck I want to go. If that’s a problem, tough shit.”
“You’re a real smart-ass.” He cocked the hammer back.
Oops. Maybe he was dumb enough to shoot me. That’s if he could fucking aim straight.
Where the hell is Roman? The one damned time I actually needed him for what he was here to do, and he was MIA.
“So I’ve been told. If we’re done here, feel free to leave.”
“Stay away from Magnolia.”
“Yeah, you said that already.”
I wanted to know who in the hell knew where we went last night. How did anyone know I went to my dad’s estate? The only people who would have seen us leave were in the surveillance room.
There was another knock at my door. “Now’s not the time,” I called out.
“James?”
“Who’s that?” the idiot wanted to know.
Roman knocked again. “James?” His voice was laced with warning. The door handle shook. “Open up.”
I had flashbacks to last time I didn’t answer the door. I knew if I waited long enough, Roman was getting inside of here one way or the other. Now, whether or not he’d find me alive was a whole different story.
I shrugged with my hands in the air. “Now what?”
“Tell him to come in. Let’s play.”
This moron. “I can’t. It’s locked.”
He stepped to the side as he waved the gun toward the door. “Open it.”
“I can do it from here, but I have to move my hands.”
“Naw. I don’t think so. Come open this fucking door the old-fashioned way.”
Keeping my hands in the air so he could see that I was unarmed, I cautiously rounded my desk, removing the only barrier between us.
As I reached for the door handle, Roman knocked again. Hard. “James. Last warning. Open this fucking door, or I will.”
“Do you always let your peasant workers talk to you like that?”
“Hold on,” I called out.
I’d barely twisted the handle to release the latch before Roman came barreling through it, his own weapon drawn.
The intrusion caused me to stumble backward into my desk. The door flung wide open, bounced back against the bookshelf behind it, then closed and locked again. Now, it was the three of us—me, Roman, and this squirrely guy, who I still didn’t know if he was actually harmless or not.
Roman leveled his gun with a steady grip directly at the idiot’s head. The idiot pointed his gun from me to Roman, only his arms were a lot shakier.
I wanted to laugh at how comical this situation had become. Roman had at least six inches in height over him and probably six inches in dick. Not to mention, he had a body built of solid muscle. This guy’s body was made of years of Southern fried fat that had solidified into a skeleton.
“Who the fuck are you?” Roman demanded, gun aimed at the intruder.
“Who the fuck are you?” he spit back at Roman.
“You don’t get to ask the questions around here.” Roman cocked his gun.
The idiot smiled. “Oh, you must be that new pussy bodyguard who apparently can’t do his job. I heard ’bout you.”
Roman flicked his gaze at me, then back at our guest, never moving his aim from his target. “Honestly,” Roman said, “I don’t need to know your name to kill you. The less I know about you, the better. I’m not even counting to three. You’re just going to leave.”
Roman slowly inched his way further into the room with his back to me.
He made a wide circle around my desk, positioning himself between me and the idiot until he was completely blocked out of my view by Roman’s body.
This left the doorway—our only exit—blocked by the idiot but left him exposed to security from behind… and where the fuck were they, anyway?
With Roman’s back to me, I carefully reached up and wrapped my hand around the grip of the gun that he’d wedged in the waist of the back of his pants.
I glanced down. Our lives were on the line, and what did I do?
Checked out his well-defined muscles tensing through his custom-cut button-down shirt and his tight, bubble ass wrapped up in his perfectly fitting dress pants like a present that had been personally wrapped and gifted to me by Santa himself.
“I’m not scared of you,” the guy said.
“I’m not trying to scare you. I’m trying to get you to leave without having to blow your fucking brains out in front of the lady and have you dragged out of here by your feet,” Roman assured.
“You’re not very bright, are you, bodyguard boy?”
“Smart enough to know where to shoot you without making a mess, just dumb enough to send you back to Kane with your head on a platter.”
The last thing I heard were the words “fuck you, boy” and the sound of a click.
Then another.
And another.
“What the hell?” Our intruder looked down at his gun, confused.
“Safety’s on, fucker.” Roman pulled the trigger of his own gun. The guy screamed out as the gun he’d been holding went flying from his hand across the room.
I yanked the gun from Roman’s waist just as the idiot hit the floor on his knees, clutching his hand, screaming and crying.
Someone pounded on my door. “James. Open up.”
I pressed the lock release button underneath my desk, and the office door flew open. Jordan and Ivan both appeared in the doorway.
“What the—?” Ivan started first. He looked between us, then at the guy screaming on the floor. “What the hell is going on?”
“We had a visitor,” I said.
“Yeah, no shit.”
The idiot rolled around, clutching his hand to his chest.
“You shoot him?” Ivan wanted to know, looking at the gun in my hand.
I shook my head. “No. Roman beat me to it.”
The guy continued screaming in pain. “Fuck. You shot me. Motherfucker. I’ll kill you. Ahh, god damn it.”
“I can’t believe you only shot his finger off,” I said to Roman, who was still standing in front of me. “You know he’ll be back.”
“I never intended to not kill him.” He faced me, then wrapped his arm around my waist and pulled me into his chest. “Cover your ears.”
I did what he told me to, and then, without taking his eyes off me or so much as a blink, he leveled his gun to the side and pulled the trigger. I flinched from head to toe in his arms at the crack of his gun going off.
The room fell silent as the screaming ceased.
“Hope you got your body bag ready,” he said, his gaze still locked in on mine. “It’s time to send Kane a real message.”