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“What happened with Clara?” she asks.
Fuck me. No- she can’t have seen through me that easily. Iris is perceptive, but I’d like to think I’m not that transparent, even to her.
Just in time I realize she’s talking about Clara running away and me retrieving her, and not Clara and I fucking in my car. I breathe an internal sigh. “Raleigh left her at a bus stop, and three men found her there.” I remember for the first time the IDs I took out of the men’s wallets and retrieve them from my pocket for her to see. “Look familiar?”
Iris frowns down at the cards. “This one does,” she says, tossing one back onto my desk. “He’s Morgan’s for sure.”
I rest my elbows on the desk. “Then we have to assume the other two are as well. They were trying to put her in a car when I got there. They’re dead now.”
Iris hisses with disapproval. “You couldn’t have given them a concussion instead? Morgan’s going to burst a blood vessel when he finds out you killed three of his men.”
“One can only hope,” I say stiffly, and she purses her lips at me. “What is more important is that Morgan is tracking Clara somehow. He would’ve had to have known the moment she left the estate, if not sooner, to send three men to get her after we left him in Cooper’s.” That’s the only timeline that makes sense to me, at least.
Iris finally sets my coffee on the desk, and I snatch it. “But that means he would have known before brunch this morning that she was with us. Is he tracking her, or does he have someone on the inside who couldn’t get word to him until today?” she asks pensively. A mole would be her job to sniff out, and I can’t imagine her failing at it, but we can’t be too careful at this point. Two close calls in twenty-four hours is not a good sign.
“He would have given himself away the second I got his blood pressure up,” I disagree. “He only found out Clara was with us when I took her to brunch. Maybe after that, and before he called our meeting, he sent men to keep an eye on the estate and followed Raleigh to the bus stop.”
“I’ll organize a patrol then,” Iris sighs. Then, “You’re moving forward with Lindman.”
“I’ll talk to him about organizing raids on Morgan’s territory at his banquet this weekend,” I confirm. I almost tell her about my ultimatum with Clara, but decide to wait until I get an answer.
I may have suggested something bad would happen once she became a loose end, but I never actually told Clara I would hurt her. I couldn’t force the words out, even as a lie. That’s why I decide to say nothing to Iris.
She hates loose ends.
CHAPTER 14
Thomas
Now that I’ve given Clara a choice between her future happiness and her family’s lives and deceived my most trusted general about the extent of my plans, I decide a stern conversation with Raleigh can’t make this day any worse. At the very least, I can’t keep her confined to her room like a misbehaving child. We need to come to some kind of understanding about Clara, or this antagonism between us will boil over.
And I really do not have time for that.
Raleigh doesn’t answer my knock. I listen carefully, but there’s no sound from inside. Call it sibling intuition, but I get the distinct feeling that I’m being ignored.
“I’m coming in,” I warn, and open the door.
I find Raleigh lounging carelessly in bed with her laptop in front of her. She leaps up when she sees me, slamming it closed like I caught her watching porn.
“What the hell, Tommy!”
“You didn’t think I’d just ignore the fact that you helped a hostage escape, did you?” I ask, crossing my arms.
“Did she?” Raleigh demands.
I resist the urge to grind my jaw. “She didn’t, and she wouldn’t have even if I hadn’t gone after her. You want to know what happened when you left her on the side of the road? Three of Morgan’s men jumped her and tried to drag her back to the Speares.”
Raleigh opens her mouth, then closes it again. Mulishly, she settles herself back on the edge of her bed. “Did they hurt her?” she asks.
I think about picking Clara up off the sidewalk. The scrapes on her arms from when she was dropped. But as soon as those images pop into my head, so does all the rest of it.
Her labored breath as her naked body lined up with mine. Her softness, her heat. The way her cries of pleasure made every inch of my skin feel alive.
I cannot fantasize about having sex with my little sister’s best friend in front of my little sister. I refuse.
Unfortunately, my mind is rebelling against me. I can’t think of Clara objectively right now.
“Not badly,” I manage to say. “But she could have been. So for the second time today I’m going to try to understand what the hell you were thinking.”
