Page 79 of Sting
It had been a tempting proposition, but he remained undeterred. “We wait on your fed.”
Having grown increasingly lightheaded, he’d been lying down for the past twenty minutes. Jordie sat beside him, her knees raised, her forehead resting on them in a posture of despair.
He thought back to how she’d looked in that seedy bar. A knockout. Upon getting his first up-close look at her, his center had tightened and warmed with awareness and want, and he’d thought, Damn.
Of course the male animal in him had immediately zeroed in on seeing her naked.
But his more objective professional side had also kicked in and registered the details of his target: the casual but smart outfit, the pale manicured fingernails, the dark and satiny hair left to do its own thing, plush lips brightened only with a transparent sheen. All of which had told him that she was well maintained but unembellished. Classy without fuss or muss.
Comportment-wise, she’d been cautious, but controlled. Cool.
By contrast, her clothes were now stained with blood. It was caked underneath her fingernails, some of which had been broken when she was scrabbling for the propeller fragment. Her hair had lost its shine and was gathered into a makeshift ponytail; her lips were dry and tightly seamed together.
He’d reduced her to this. No two ways about it: He was a bastard.
She stirred, raised her head, and looked down at him. No longer controlled and cool, she looked desperate and close to unraveling. “You won’t kill anybody else, will you?”
“All depends on how it goes.”
She sniffed. Until then, he hadn’t realized that she was crying. For the first time since Mickey had been shot dead right in front of her, she was shedding tears but doing so silently and with admirable dignity.
“I don’t want anyone else to die because of me,” she said. “Please. Don’t do that to me. Promise.”
He held her gaze for several seconds, then closed his eyes. “No promises, Jordie.”
She made a near inaudible hiccupping sound, but said no more and bent her head over her knees again.
“Know what I keep thinking about?” he asked. “Panella.”
“What about him?”
“I’ll bet he’s fit to be tied, wondering if you’re dead yet. He probably expected me to get back to him within minutes of our last conversation and tell him you were history and ask how to go about collecting my money. You know he’s gotta be climbing the walls. He doesn’t like to be crossed.”
“No. He doesn’t.”
“Huh. Spoken like you know that for fact.”
She didn’t respond. Shaw raised his right hand, the one cuffed to hers. Hers remained limp against his as he gently tugged on a strand of hair that had worked itself out of the bandana holding her ponytail. He kept pulling at it until she turned her head back to him.
“You got on Panella’s fighting side? How come? Wha’d you do?”
“I avoided him.”
“I’ve seen pictures. He’s not bad looking. In fact, Mickey called him a pretty boy.”
“Only on the outside.”
“So you do think he’s attractive.”
“I admit he’s handsome, but I dislike him intensely and have made no secret of it.”
“Ah.”
All this time, he’d been absently playing with the strand of hair still in his grip. Now she pulled it away from him. “Don’t say ‘ah’ like you know what I’m talking about. You don’t.”
“I can take a couple of guesses. One, Panella treated Josh like a lackey. That crawled all over you.”
“True. They were supposed to be equal partners, but the Panella Investments Group bore only one name, and there was no question as to who was in charge. Panella relied on Josh’s acumen. Without it, he couldn’t have made the numbers work for as long as he did.
