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Strange packages.
The calls to the office that hang up when I answer.
Dad and Grant arguing about accidents at work.
And then a few nights before, someone ran into me while waiting on the subway, and if it wasn’t for a man who grabbed me, I might have gone headfirst in front of the oncoming A train.
Last night, Uncle Grant told Dad that someone called JM could help us. The cost didn’t matter. Until they worked out who was threatening the family, they needed the kind of help JM could provide.
Owner of Orchid Lane.
A powerful, non-affiliated man.
Not mafia.
And… I let out a shaky breath and take a big gulp of my wine.
I have money.
This is for my family. So I took it upon myself to find this guy JM.
“Five more minutes,” I mutter.
There’s a very thin line between need and pushover, and I’m coming dangerously close to that line. I faced one visit to Orchid Lane; I can handle another. The lower levels, the blonde told me, were members only, hard-core. I can deal with a kink-heavy, sexually free bar. No one was actually fucking, but there was a lot of naked flesh. And?—
“Seat taken?”
The tone’s low and dark and beguiling. It’s the type that can be velvet sex or latex and whips. Layered with erotic promise. That’s what the voice is. And I’m aware of a hint of a scent in the air around it. It’s dark and boozy with a hedonistic edge. Like leather and unlit cigars, like the most complex sugared rum. The kind of scent that could lean toward comfort or toward heat and thrills in dark places.
I swallow. Hard. But I don’t look.
“I’m waiting for someone.”
The man pauses and I’m aware of the burn of his gaze. It’s familiar and intimate, and I know this is who’s been watching me.
“You know,” he murmurs, leaning in a little, the heat of his body lighting me up where he almost touches, down my right side, along my cheek. “It’s polite to look at the person you’re speaking to.”
“You’re speaking to me, not the other way around.”
And inexplicably I throb deep between my thighs like my body’s answering a call only it can hear.
“Now that’s a lie. You’re talking now.”
Irritation at the smug note with the warm center makes me turn to give him a piece of my mind. But that vanishes the moment my gaze hits the vivid, wicked green of his eyes.
The man is beautiful. Blond hair, green eyes, and a mouth that’s wide and full, lips that look like they could do the most depraved things to you and lift you straight to a certain kind of heaven.
He holds a ringed finger up to the bartender. When the guy arrives, he orders a Macallan 18.
“I’m waiting for someone.” The moment the words leave my lips, they hang like a lie in the air.
They make me feel absurd and I don’t know why.
He merely raises a brow. “And a man leaves someone like you alone?”
“Maybe I’m early.”
“He should be earlier.” The hot blond god waits for my response and my skin pricks and tingles like nerve endings popping.
