by Chloe Cox
“We’re not all dumb muscle.”
“Well, not dumb, anyway.”
“You didn’t answer the question.”
Sierra sighed.
“Will it provoke him? Probably. But it’s nothing you have to worry about. He’s just…my brother.”
She looked away again, not wanting Conor to see her face. Just as well. He had to drive the damn car.
But the sadness in her voice broke his heart. He could suddenly imagine her as a little girl, all alone with a distant father and a vicious brother. And now, as an adult, her only family was Jared Fiore. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that tied up in that sadness was the sound of hope. Not a lot. But some.
She still had hope for her brother.
She had no idea.
He growled slightly as he turned down Newbury Street, the rain picking up, battering the windshield.
“Thanks again for looking out for me,” she said, so soft he could barely hear it.
Well, she’d hear this.
“It’s my job,” he said, coming to a stop at another red light. Then he turned around and looked her right in the eye. “But in a situation like that, I’d do it anyway.”
She blinked at him. Didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know how to recover. Slightly panicked.
Distract her.
“Why do you pretend to be someone you’re not?” he said. “Weird job.”
That got her attention.
“Who says I’m pretending?” she said. “You don’t know me.”
“I know your videos,” he said.
In the mirror, he saw her eyes flash.
“I like my videos,” she said. “And I like my fans. And they’re not dumb, and they’re not shallow. They’re regular people that just want to enjoy themselves, and—”
“And who are you trying to convince?”
This time the look in her eyes was harder. Guarded. He didn’t like seeing it. If she were his sub, he knew just what he’d do with that.
But she wasn’t. Kid gloves.
“Good point,” she said, finally. “Why bother when some people never see past their assumptions?”
Conor almost laughed. Stopped himself just in time. He may be using kid gloves with her, but she was going all out.
More than that — she’d nailed him. He had made assumptions about her. Lots of them.
Assumptions he was revising.
“I’m not kidding,” she said. “I really do have to keep doing my job.”
“Why?” he said. “If you hate it? You got money.”
“That’s not the point,” she said, suddenly angry. He looked up at her, eyes locked. The light ahead of him turned green. They were one block away from her apartment building, but they weren’t going anywhere. He wanted an answer.
“What is the point, Princess?”
There was a pause. When she spoke, her voice was hard.
“I won’t let him win,” she said.
Conor knew immediately who she was talking about. The reason she’d hired him. The one thing she had been reluctant to talk about.
The stalker.
‘Course, Sierra still didn’t know she was talking about her brother, too.
“If I live my life scared, he wins anyway. And this is all I have, Caveman,” she went on. “So I can’t be scared all the time. I won’t be. I’m going to live my life the way I planned, and to hell with some coward who likes to scare women.”
Conor looked up in the rear view, locked eyes with her one more time. He just nodded and drove forward. She was brave as hell.
Good girl.
He brought the car to a stop in front of her building and waited for the valet to run out into the rain. He got out of the car swiftly, putting one hand up until he could see the valet’s face. It checked out. Right guy on duty.
Conor tossed him the keys and told him to wait. Then he opened Sierra’s door and looked down at her as the rain soaked him.
“Look at me, Princess,” he said.
She did. Automatically. Obediently.
Christ.
“I’m not going to let anything happen to you,” he said. “No matter what.”
Sierra swallowed, but then she nodded. Conor took off his suit jacket and held it up so she could duck under it, and he walked her inside like that, keeping her dry. She was close enough that he could feel the heat coming from her body, could feel the way she leaned against him as he opened the door. She was soft. Warm, and soft.
But it didn’t stop him from noticing there was something wrong.
“Who are you?” he barked, his arm going out to keep Sierra behind him, his other hand on his weapon.
The guy behind the doorman’s desk let his eyes get real wide and stupid before he answered.
“I’m Henry?” he said. “Henry Costigan?”
Conor recognized that name from the file too. Management company employee. He just didn’t have a visual.
“Where’s Lenny Berra?” Conor said. “He’s supposed to be on shift.”
“Family emergency,” Henry said, voice shaking. “I was called in to sub.”
“Conor, I’ve seen him before,” Sierra said behind him.
All normal.
Conor still didn’t like it.
He looked down, saw Sierra was getting scared again. That wasn’t acceptable either.
“I’m walking you upstairs, Princess,” he said.
The security contract didn’t require it. But Conor did.
Sierra didn’t argue. They were quiet as she took out her key and turned the special penthouse floor lock. Conor kept himself calm, not wanting to spook her—but something didn’t feel right.
He didn’t have a reason for it. Just a feeling. An uneasiness.
Tonight had been a goddamn crash course in things Conor had forgotten about — wanting a woman so badly you could taste it, laughing, and now fear. Conor could handle whatever danger presented itself, but Sierra, even if he kept her safe, would have to be afraid. He didn’t like that. At all.
As the doors opened, he kept her behind him, remembering the layout of the penthouse floor. There was only one apartment, one hall. Emergency exit to the right, Sierra’s front door to the left. Mirror in one corner, camera in another.
Emergency exit was visible in the mirror—clear. He stepped out, covering the angle on Sierra’s front door. The door itself was closed.
But there was also a basket in front of it.
A gift basket.
“Expecting something?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
“Don’t people normally leave things with the doorman?”
This time, her voice was quieter.
“Yes.”
Conor checked that the emergency exit hadn’t been rigged, then approached the damn basket. No obvious electronics, fairly small. Nothing explosive, unless whoever this was had access to some serious military gear, which they didn’t. He pushed the tissue paper aside with his shoe and grimaced.
“What is it?”
“Nothing you want to see,” he said. “The coward went to a butcher shop.”
It was, if Conor was any judge, a goddamn pig’s heart.
Eight
Conor was livid.
He was livid while he cleared Sierra’s apartment, going room by room to make sure there weren’t any more surprises waiting for her. He was livid while he used his suit jacket to move the basket with a pig’s heart in it to the side so Sierra wouldn’t have to see it while they waited for the cops. And he was royally pissed off when he called the police, Kane Lyons, and the building’s management company.
There was no excuse. With the security set up Sierra paid for, no one should have been able to get to her front door. Someone had screwed up or been paid off, and Conor was going to find out who.
But in the meantime, there was Sierra.
He watched her, while the cops crawled all over her apartment, taking notes, poking into all her stuff. She winced when
they went into the third bedroom, a room that mostly had art supplies in it. He remembered one blank canvas up on an easel in the center of the room and big, draping sheets covering boxes or frames lined against the walls. Looked like it hadn’t been used in a while, but it killed her to see other people in there. He could see on her face that she hated every moment of this, and he realized that this was another way that Jared tormented her.
She handled it like a champ, though. Unfailingly polite and kind, even though he could tell she was exhausted. Unfailingly guarded, too. The police relaxed when they saw she wasn’t in hysterics, but Conor could see the tightness in her shoulders, her neck. She was scared.
He caught himself wondering how he’d only known her a few hours. Felt like longer. Probably it was all the research he’d done. That, and the insane chemistry they had. The same connection that told him he’d know how to make her come until she forgot her own name. The same thing that made him feel something other than cold vengeance in his chest.
Whatever it was, he’d damn well make use of it.
It took hours before everything was done, the evidence bagged, the report filed. Conor would have a talk with Kane in the morning, bring things up a notch. Sierra had declined extra security overnight, but Conor could see she was overwhelmed. No way in hell she wanted more strangers around her.
So as soon as he closed the door on the last cop, he made it plain.
“I’m not going anywhere tonight,” he said. “Unless you want me to.”
Sierra was curled up on the couch, as tiny as could be. She’d changed into old sweatpants and a t-shirt as soon as she could, and she’d washed her face while they waited for the cops to arrive. It wasn’t the first time Conor had seen a woman take her face off, but it was the first time he’d known, without a doubt, that she was even more beautiful without all the armor.
And when he said that, she looked up at him with the biggest eyes he’d ever seen. Her mouth opened, closed. Looking for words, not wanting to admit she was still afraid. Eventually, exhaustion won.
“Thank you,” she said, quietly.
She got up from the couch then, almost on autopilot. He watched as she went to a closet in the hall, got a bunch of pillows, blankets, all that stuff women always had on hand for some reason.
“There’s a spare bedroom,” she began. “I’ll just go make it up, and—”
He stepped into her path. Took the pillow, took the blanket. Tossed them on the couch.
“I’ll be out here, where I can see the door,” he said.
Sierra stood in front of him then, suddenly with nothing to do. And she started shaking.
Her eyes filled with tears, and she started shaking.
Conor didn’t think about it. He stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her tiny body, drawing her in, holding her close. With a shudder, he felt her begin to cry, and he held her like that until the shudders stopped, thinking of nothing at all but the woman in his arms and the feeling in his chest.
By the time he got to sleep, hours later, he knew how far he would go, not just to get his man, but to keep her safe.
Conor was already awake, waiting for Sierra’s brand new daytime bodyguard to show up, when Sierra got up.
Either she’d forgotten he was there, or she just always looked like that. She walked out into her own living room wearing nothing that he could see but a terrycloth robe and bedhead, and Conor had to stop himself from growling.
It didn’t work.
“You’re up,” she said, a little startled. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“You didn’t,” he said.
He didn’t volunteer anything else. Certainly not anything about his aching cock or his thoughts about what she would feel like around it.
He was saved by the buzz of the front desk phone. His replacement had arrived.
Conor didn’t waste any time. He gave his replacement, a former Marine named Bobby, a rundown of the previous night and of the current security arrangements while Sierra was getting dressed. When she came back out, she was different.
Withdrawn. Quiet. A shadow of the woman he’d met the previous day.
Conor didn’t like that at all, but it would have to wait. He gave her his phone number, ordering her to use it if she needed it — that brightened her up a bit — and got to work.
Which was tougher than he expected. He spent all day calling in favors from contacts, chasing down leads, the usual. But he did all of it with this weird fucking feeling in his chest, down his back, in his gut. This itch to move, to do something, like an electrical charge building up in his body.
Something that Sierra Fiore had awakened.
Conor was a disciplined man, and he kept his focus. But by the time he met with Kane Lyons and Rourke Donegan in the Club Volare library, he was starting to lose his patience. Sierra Fiore was his client, not his sub. And Jared Fiore was the target.
Nothing else mattered.
“You look like shit,” Kane said as Conor sat down across from him.
Conor grunted. Kane Lyons never looked like shit, even after a ten-mile obstacle course. The man had a striking resemblance to a criminal who’s mugshot was so pretty that it had gone viral, netting the guy a modeling contract. Kane had never been arrested, as far as Conor knew, but the man was pretty. If you could describe a six foot four heavyweight as pretty.
Contrasted with Rourke Donegan, who looked like a grizzled mountain man, but was actually a white-shoe lawyer from old Boston money.
Both men were founding Doms at Club Volare Boston — Kane put up the capital, Rourke did the lobbying that got the old Massachusetts blue laws repealed. Both men were solid. And both of them were as determined to get Jared Fiore as Conor was. Kane had served with Mikey before Mikey got hurt. Rourke knew Jared was poison to his city. If Conor ever had any doubts, he lost them the second those two joined his team.
“I look like shit because I’m pissed off,” Conor said, at last.
“No argument from me,” Rourke said. “Did you figure out how the stalker got in?”
“We pulled the tapes last night,” Kane explained. “And talked to the security guard who left. He got a bogus call that his kid had been in an accident and was rushed to the hospital.”
“No wonder he left without waiting for his replacement,” Rourke said.
Conor filed that away. “And the tapes?”
“He wore a hoodie and something around his face as he approached the building,” Kane said. “And he used a refracting spray on the cameras. Looks like a white guy, average height, average build, no visible tats, but with the hoodie we couldn’t see much. Nothing useful.”
“What about the elevator key up to the penthouse?”
Kane exhaled. “Yeah, we still haven’t tracked that.”
“So an inside job, but they couldn’t get in to disable the cameras,” Conor said. “They just had the elevator key?”
Kane nodded. Rourke frowned. They were all thinking the same thing.
“Guarantee you Jared has that elevator key,” Kane said.
“Not anymore.” Conor stood up suddenly, needing to use his muscles. He was getting that itch to move again. To do something. “I had the locks changed today while she’s home.”
“How far are we on tracking the actual stalker?” Rourke asked.
“I need you for that,” Conor said. He didn’t like admitting it. “I need a list of all the known associates of Jared Fiore who are known or suspected to be in some kind of trouble. Debt, gambling, whatever. The real list. From your District Attorney friend. Or the FBI. Both, preferably.”
It was a big ask. Rourke just shrugged, looking for the world like someone’s hired muscle. “He owes me. You’ll have it by Monday.”
“How’s your access?” Kane said, suddenly. “You think you’ll be able to get evidence on Jared?”
“Jared and Sierra are not close,” Conor said. He tried not to look happy about that.
He was happy about that.
&nbs
p; “Jared won’t keep anything incriminating in the city,” Rourke said, leaning back.
“Then where—”
“Gentleman.”
They all turned.
Standing in the doorway to the lobby was a petite redhead with a hand on her hip and an eyebrow halfway up her forehead. Conor couldn’t figure out how, but even though the redhead was looking at Rourke, she was somehow managing to very pointedly not look at Kane. If he thought about it too hard it would make his head hurt. Women were wizards.
Kane, on the other hand, wasn’t hiding what he was staring at.
“Did I do something, Bridget?” Rourke asked.
“Only to yourself, sweetheart,” the redhead said. “I told you all we were switching to the shared calendar and you, Rourke, have not done it yet, which is sad, because I just had to kick you off Thursday night in the main room.”
Rourke looked pained. “Can’t you make an exception?”
“No,” Bridget said, sweetly. “Isabella and I have the ropes class scheduled that night.”
The way Bridget said “no” perked up Conor’s ears. He wasn’t the only one. Kane practically growled.
Bridget would be a very particular kind of sub.
Rourke, on the other hand, was always a gentleman. He nodded, promised to fix his scheduling snafu, and Bridget turned and left with another smile.
Never once looking at Kane, even while the energy between them was palpable.
There was a moment of silence while Kane followed her with his eyes. Conor looked at Rourke, who just shook his head silently. ‘Don’t go there.’
No problem there. Conor didn’t do drama in his own life. He sure as hell didn’t do it in anyone else’s.
“Where’s Jared’s dirt?” Conor said, pointedly.
“It’ll be on the family compound up on the Cape,” Rourke said. “If there’s anything at all. But the rumor is that Jared is extremely particular about things like that. He likes to know how much money he has, who owes him, things like that. He keeps souvenirs of all of his…deals.”
“Creepy,” Kane said. “Think you can get access to that compound, Conor?”
Conor frowned. This case was always going to mean lying to Sierra. He still didn’t like it.