“If I told you this glass held a very deadly substance, and asked you to take it to my father, what would you say?”
“I’d say yes, asshole, what do you think I’d say?” C.C. replies, sticking a toothpick into his teeth and letting it dangle there. We’re outside my dad’s bedroom, where he’s monitored by his medical team 24/7. The door is opened partway, and we can see my father talking to Eric, oblivious to us watching.
“Good. Since you’re the only one I trust, I say you better go. So go.” I hand him the glass. “Take it, discreetly.”
He looks at me. “I know how to be discreet. Just tell me. Will it be painful for the dude?”
“Not as much as he deserves, but yes.” I edge back and watch C.C. maneuver the liquid into my father’s medications. The motherfucker carries it over, murmurs to my dad, “Are you thirsty, Slater?” and makes sure my father slowly drinks it. He comes back and sits. “It’s done,” he says calmly.
C.C. is about as coldhearted as I am. Ice under all circumstances.
We sit in silence. “It wasn’t poisoned, was it, you dick?” he asks, spitting out the toothpick in anger and betrayal.
“No.” I stand. “I just needed to be sure.”
I could so easily end my father. Slip something into the IV bags and he’d be gone. But even a criminal has to have a code, and I have mine. I don’t kill for pleasure or even for myself. I don’t kill family.
That doesn’t mean I don’t think about it. Constantly, I do. I’ve dreamed I’ve killed my father many times and I wake up relieved. Until I remember I didn’t kill him—he’s alive.
Rage pulses through me that I have to even look at him, let alone do his fucking dirty work.
C.C. follows me down the hall of the yacht, where we’re parked a couple of miles away from Los Angeles. One of the rooms is set up with phones and charts—the gambling bookkeeping, tracking all the bets of every fight of the Underground. “We’re your guys, Z, you can trust us. I know it’s not in your nature to, but you can.”
“I’m working on a couple of other names; in the meantime call Tina Glass. Tell her I need number ten in a compromising position with her. She’s not to deliver the evidence to anyone but me, personally. I have another target to work on this weekend. I’ll be leaving town—use the code if there’s an emergency.”
“Eric wants the rest of the team to support.”
“I don’t need their support. But I need you to help me nail number ten. He’s squeaky clean and he’s pissing me off.”
“I know what else is pissing you off!” C.C. laughs.
I growl and tell him where he can shove it. He knows there’s “a skirt”—he suspects, at least, and trips me when he catches me staring at my phone unawares. I am never caught unawares. I trip him back then pin him up by the collar to the wall. “Stop fucking with me, C.C.”
“I’m not the one who’s fucking with you.” He taps my temple, then hisses, “Get her out of there, dude, before your father finds out.”
I feel so messed up I’m getting pissed that I ever thought it was a good idea to touch her in the first place.
But there’s that one phone I haven’t disarmed, and it’s only because I get these little texts from her.
Are you there?
Fuck, I wish I wasn’t. I wish I wasn’t sitting here, staring at this screen, poleaxed in the goddamned chest every time I read it.
I keep thinking I imagined you.
I haven’t answered her, but I feel like typing:
Princess, you have no idea how close you’re dancing to the flame.
It’s a day since this last text. I keep pulling it out to look at it, tempted to tell her to fucking forget about me, princess; I’m going to use you, abuse you, and throw you the fuck away when I’m done cause that’s what I do.
Sometimes I tell myself if I’d stayed one night longer, maybe even one fuck longer, I wouldn’t be so obsessed. But she has a mouth made for oral, thick, full lips and a crazy hungry tongue. Fuck me, I’ve been jerking off like crazy because the mere thought of her going down on me gets me hard.
But no. Even if she’d sucked me all night long, I’m sure I’d still be hungry to push her head down and feed her more of me, make her eat me, every last drop.
The fact that I got pissed because our night together ended too soon, and I actually wanted to lie there, in that bed, for a couple more hours and see what it felt like to hold her for a while, only confuses me further.
I call Tina myself on my other phone. Tina Glass, aka Miss Kitty. She’s exactly who you need to frame a man. She’s clean, good looking, and lethal. “My men call you?”
“Absolutely,” she purrs.
I slip on my gloves as I talk to her. “I want the evidence delivered personally to me.”
“With my absolute pleasure. I’ll make contact when it’s done.”
I hang up and stare at Melanie’s text again.
Just trash it, you fucking *.
She’s a hot button, but this is me.
Do I really need a hot button? Do I need to wake up in the middle of the night with a hard dick? A twenty-five-year-old with a bunch of whores asleep so near, I can probably stumble over a couple just by opening my bedroom door. But those green eyes like forests, that * tight around my cock. And those sounds she makes. Do I really have to torture myself, remembering how good it felt, how fucking clean and sweet she smelled?
“This can’t happen,” I whisper down at my own phone, my blood roiling in my veins when I think of how stupid I was to think I could have one night, just one night, of what a normal man does. “It can’t happen again,” I say.