by Zara Cox
But there’s an SUV waiting to take us on the half-hour ride to a farmstead on the outskirts of Vancouver.
Petra and her adoptive parents, Doris and Paul, are waiting on the wide porch of the farmhouse when we arrive.
Although I’ve seen pictures of Elyse’s sister, meeting her shows me once and for all why she sacrificed everything to save Petra. Her open, honest face matches a kind heart and a passion for life. Plus she’s almost as beautiful as her older sister.
“I’ve been dying to meet you. Heck, I was beginning to think Elyse made you up,” she says as she hurries to reach us.
“And you are just as she described you,” I reply.
“Don’t tell me, she said I was awesome, right?” Her smile is as infectious as her bubbly spirit.
“Indeed.” I smile back, see the stunned expression on their faces, and burst into laughter.
Everyone joins in. And that organ in my chest dares to flip over again. And again.
Three hours later, after a very late dinner has been cleared away, I hear Elyse approach the back porch where I’m standing, staring up at the bright, starlit sky.
My heart leaps when her arms go around my waist. “I’m so thankful I met you, Quinn. You saved me, and you gave me back my family. Thank you.”
I turn and wrap my arms tighter around her. I’m never letting her go. “You saved me, too, Elyse, against all odds. And now I can dare to dream of a family with you. You made that happen, my brave little firecracker. For that, you own me forever.”
I was a wife, once. Had hoped to be a mother too. But that all came to an end, and then there was only Killian. Arrogant, dangerous, undeniable. I submitted to the fire that blazed between us—and I got burned. Now I should hate him. Maybe even fear him. But I don’t. I still want him. And so, I run…
A preview of Arrogant Bastard follows.
Chapter One
Killian
I’ve found her.
After four years and two months.
I stare at the screen, my blood pumping relief and shock and fury and joy through my veins. The cocktail of emotions paralyzes me for several minutes.
Then I force myself to analyze what I’m seeing.
Her hair is different. Longer. Darker. Pin-straight and rigid where soft, friendly waves used to be. The curve of her jaw captured by the camera lens also shows the difference. She’s leaner. Meaner. Even from this obscure angle, I can tell any trace of softness has been wiped clean. Eroded by sin and tragedy.
To anyone else, the picture would seem ridiculously vague, the image nothing more than a blurred black and white pixilation of chin and shoulder.
It’s the reason my algorithm spat it out almost reluctantly, a last batch of possibilities in the dregs of to-be-discarded possibilities, and then dumped it in my supercomputer’s equivalent of a spam folder, the code scrolling impatiently as it waited my command to delete, delete, delete.
But I know it’s her. Despite the dark leather cap pulled low over her forehead. Despite the bulky jacket designed to hide her true shape. Her evasiveness speaks volumes.
It’s her. The Widow.
My hand shakes as I hit the zoom-in key. My gut churns, and I feel a little sick as my ever-helpful brain supplies me with all the ways she could’ve continued to elude me—if I’d turned away, for a second, to stare at one of the other three screens on my desk. If I’d trusted my supersmart computer and accepted the prompt to delete without reviewing the content. If I hadn’t tweaked the code yet again last night to capture just such an obscure image.
Hell, if I’d blinked at the wrong time. I torture myself with infinite possibilities as I stare at that mesmerizing combination of chin and shoulder.
A chin I’ve trailed my treacherous fingers over.
A shoulder I’ve rested my guilty, weary head on.
There’s so much more to her. And I treasured every single inch of her forbidden body, fucked her at every opportunity she granted me. Until she systematically erased herself from my life.
But why New York? And why now?
I know how good she is. Hell, she’s the best or she wouldn’t have eluded me for this long. The thought of another four years without her punches a cold fist through my gut.
The Widow.
I can’t see her eyes. But I don’t fool myself into thinking they’ll hold an ounce of softness. What we did changed us forever. And not for the better.
I lean back in my chair. Exhale slowly. Terrified of blinking in case she disappears from my screen. It doesn’t matter that I’ve copied and stored the longitude and latitude of her location in a dozen vaults on my server and memorized every single piece of data on the screen.
New York City. East 53rd Street. CCTV camera. A one-in-a-billion shot.
Without taking my eyes off her, I reach for my phone and press the voice-activation app. “Good evening, Mr. Knight.”
“Nala, how many times do I need to tell you to call me Killian?”
“You have yet to change my default settings, Mr. Knight.”
My lips twist but a smile doesn’t quite form. “I changed them last week. You reset it, didn’t you?”
“I assure you, I’m quite incapable of doing that.”
“Yeah, right. Fine. Place a call for me. Pilot. Home.”
“Dialing, pilot. Home,” the female AI obliges me.
Nelson, my LA-based pilot, picks up on the second ring. It’s 3:00 a.m. but he answers as if it’s normal working hours. Which it is, to be fair. Everything is normal for me in my line of work.
“Good morning, sir.”
“How soon can you get to the airport?” I snap.
“As soon as I put on my trousers and chuck a bucket of water over my son to wake him up,” he replies with a dark chuckle.
My fingers fly over the keyboard as I save her information in a few more electronic vaults. “Give William my apologies,” I say.
“No need. He’s been chomping at the bit to take the new girl for another spin.” The new girl being the Bombardier Global 8000 I added to my collection of private jets last month.
“In that case, I expect to see you at Van Nuys within the hour.” At this time of the morning, traffic from their Santa Monica apartment should be light enough.
“We’ll be there.” He clears his throat. “I expect the paperwork regarding out-of-curfew flights—”
“Will be taken care of. I’ll text you the details but we won’t be straying far from the usual parameters.”
“Very good, sir. Destination?”
My gaze tracks that chin. That shoulder. The hair. Four years’ worth of emotion threatens to rip free. My chest burns with it, but I contain it. “New York.”
“And do I need to file a return flight?” Nelson asks.
“Not yet. I anticipate being there for a while.” Until I find her. Until she’s back in my arms. She won’t come willingly, but that’s another problem for another day.
“Got it.”
I hang up, staring at the picture for another minute before I blink and turn to the next screen. It takes less than five minutes to hack the database I need and input the relevant information.
Russell, my driver, is waiting when I sprint downstairs. The advantage of owning homes around the world is the ability to pick up and go at a moment’s notice. All I need are the clothes on my back, my computer, and other clandestine electronics.
“All set to go, sir?”
I nod but don’t answer as I slide into the backseat. I’m already itching to power up my computer again to make sure her picture is still on my home screen. When it flares to life, I breathe easier.
There’s very little traffic at this time of night, but I stare at the screen for the short drive to the airport. The photo has got me whipped. I can’t look away from it. Just like I couldn’t look away from her the first time I saw her.
God, was that only five years ago when I almost didn’t make it to her fateful birthday party? When I dragged my darkness through
the side gate of a house in the middle of Xanaxville and felt the earth shift beneath my feet?
I feel like I’ve known, and lost, her through several lifetimes. She wishes she’d never met me in even one of them, I know. But that matters very little now.
It happened. We happened. And this time…I don’t plan to lose her again. My fists clench as I debate the lengths I’m prepared to go to make it that way. She’ll fight me. That’s her nature. I might even lose this particular fight. But there’s a reason the phrase or die trying is more than mere words to me. To us.
“Another medical emergency, Mr. Knight?”
I look up from the screen. I have no recollection of leaving the car and entering the terminal building reserved for private flights.
“Unfortunately, yes,” I respond, my gaze already sliding away from the uniformed officials gathered around and back to the screen.
“Damn, you must have the worst luck in the world, huh?” The customs guy is standing next to the immigration guy. They’re both staring at me. Because what…they think I’m going to fuck up and confess that I hacked into their system to input the information that is allowing me to fly outside the aviation curfew?
“These things can’t be helped,” I reply insincerely.
He laughs, and we both shrug. He follows me across the reception area, and I slip him a couple hundred-dollar bills even though he’s getting paid triple time for a half hour’s work. We part ways, each feeling marginally satisfied but a little screwed over and a little dirty. The money means less than nothing to me, and although nothing would make me feel bad about faking an excuse to fly outside curfew hours tonight of all nights, I detest the lies I have to tell to achieve what I want.
Which is beyond laughable considering what my chosen profession is.
I hurry toward my plane, the grip of anticipation getting tighter with each step. Nelson, trim and tall and much younger-looking than his early sixties age implies, emerges from the plane first, followed by Will. The father and son piloting team have been in my employ for three years. Between them they have forty years of experience, which gives me one less thing to worry about in the grand fucked-up landscape of my life.
“We’re ready to hit the skies as soon as you are,” Nelson says as he signs the requisite preflight papers and hands the clipboard back to the official. “I’ve been informed your doctor will be on stand-by at Teterboro,” he adds, tongue firmly in cheek.
“That’s excellent news, Nelson. I’m assuming my doctor is also capable of doubling as my driver?” I ask as I follow him up the steps into the plane.
“He’s willing to be whatever you need him to be, sir. He has a helicopter license if you want him to be your chopper pilot. He’s very versatile that way.”
“Remind me to add a little extra to your Christmas bonus this year, Nelson.”
“Don’t worry sir, my reminder email will be right on time.”
I allow myself a little smile, but it’s soon eaten away by razor-sharp memories, acid guilt, and churning anticipation. I wave the flight attendant away as she arrives beside me with my usual preflight shot of Hine cognac.
She quietly retreats, and when I’m finally alone, I dare to glide my finger over the screen, across her cheek. One artificial touch and my insides go into free fall.
The shaking could be from the power of the engines thrusting me and my crew into the sky. Or it could be the cataclysmic chain reaction that has only ever come from her.
It’s a universally held belief that you can’t help who you fall in love with. There are a fuck-load of novels expounding that theory.
I call bullshit.
I could’ve walked away that day. Waited another three years to see the brother who hated my guts twice as much as I hated his. The half continent I had placed between us was no problem for me, especially since he chose to continue living in the house of horrors we grew up in, long after my parents’ death.
I should’ve walked away when the crackle and flash and roar of flames warned me the fires of hell were consuming what remained of my pathetic soul.
I could’ve stopped myself from soiling her goodness. From falling ass over feet in love. But I carried on walking. And with each step I took, I knew we were doomed. Because with each step, I glimpsed her potential, absorbed her genius and her beauty and her flaws.
She was everything I’d been waiting for without even knowing it.
And somewhere between the sparkling pool and the shitty Tupperware strewn on the floral-clothed table where she stood cutting her birthday cake, I decided to just…take.
The only problem was that Faith Carson, the woman I eventually turned into The Widow, the woman who fucking conquered the world, wasn’t mine to take.
She belonged, legally, according to the laws of Arkansas anyway, to another man.
Did I change course? Retreat?
Fuck, no.
Chapter Two
The first step was easy.
I’m a spy. Albeit a reluctant one. But I’m fucking great at it. Or I was. Until I met The Widow. She made me think recruiting her was easy. I soon discovered out the truth.
She was way better than I was.
I wasn’t even upset when I found out. She is a genius, after all. Beauty and brains are an insane combination in any given scenario. With her it was lethal. When she wasn’t slaying me with her mind, all I thought of was her killer body and the new and inventive ways I could fuck it.
That day, even while I walked by her side through the introductions to people I would never willingly mingle with again, even before I finished the slice of too-dry chocolate cake I didn’t want, I knew our destinies were already aligned. And it wasn’t because my utter preoccupation with her insulated me against the quiet vitriol spilling from my older brother’s smiling lips. Before I became a spy, I often wondered how he could do that—smile so affably to everyone else while ripping me to shreds with his words. I wondered why he bothered when anyone with a lick of sense could tell we hated each other with a vengeance.
Two things became clear soon enough. Matthew Knight was a born politician, right down to the sleaze running through his veins. And becoming a spy opened my eyes to the existence of smiling assassins.
But I digress.
The Widow. She was the only recruitment I actively campaigned for, gleefully ignoring the shrieking alarm bells that training taught you to heed. I had no problem ignoring them. She was supposed to be my last, my reluctant victory lap before I retreated into the cave the government had dug me out of. At the ripe old age of twenty-eight, I was done serving my country or, more accurately, letting it chew me up and spit me out.
Hell, who am I kidding? She was supposed to be the present I gave to myself.
Until it all went wrong. Until we went too far.
Still, we were supposed to pay whatever penance we owed together. Not apart. And not in silent darkness.
My shaking finger drops from the screen. The deep breath I take barely hits my lungs before it ejects itself back up again. Agitation spikes through me, and I finally release my death grip on the laptop long enough to dump it on the sofa beside me. I head for the cockpit and pull the door open.
Father and son glance over their shoulder, a little startled by my presence. I should say something bosslike and reassuring.
Fuck it.
“How long before we land?” I snap.
They exchange glances. “We took off forty-five minutes ago, sir?” William says.
I raise an eyebrow.
He clears his throat. “Not for another four and a half hours, sir.”
Way too long. “Is there any way to shave some time off that estimate?”
Will frowns. “Uhh…”
“Are you sure we can’t get this tin can to go faster?” I look down at the controls, make some quick calculations. “We’re not doing anywhere near our top speed.”
“That’s correct, but we need permission from the aviation authorities for that.”
“Get the permission. Bribe someone if you need to.”
Nelson stares at me for a beat before he shakes his head. “I don’t advise doing that, sir. Not without getting our knuckles severely rapped. And frankly, I’d much rather not rekindle memories of Mrs. Butterworth and her wooden ruler.”
Will sniggers under his breath. The look I send him dries up the sound, and he clears his throat.
“But you are welcome to keep us company,” Nelson offers after an uncomfortable few seconds.
I drop into the jump seat behind the copilot’s, even though every particle in my body is straining to return to my laptop.
“Can I get Stacy to bring you something to eat or drink?” Will asks.
“No, but you know what I’d like?”
“No, sir.”
“For you to nudge that throttle lever up a fraction. Think you can do that?”
Father and son eye each other again and then turn resolutely to face forward without replying.
I close my eyes, slam my head back against the wall, and grit my teeth to keep from unleashing the demons of frustration running rampant through me.
Five hours. New York City.
The Widow needs to be there when I land.
Any other scenario besides her in my arms at the earliest fucking opportunity is more than I can bear right now.
She needs to know that a small part of me never meant to drag her to hell with me. I won’t be insincere and confess a wholehearted regret I don’t feel. But maybe that small admission might achieve…fuck knows. Something. Enough for her to let me in? Enough for me to touch that goodness again, to calm the ravaging nightmares that are eating me alive?
Or just drag her back down because hell wasn’t such a lonely place when she was right there beside me? The truth doesn’t cause me discomfort. There had to be a degree of moral bankruptcy to do what I do, achieve what I have achieved.
And if I need to exploit it for the sake of getting her back. Well…fuck it, I’m already damned.