Page 52 of All Out of Love

Then he took another gulp of his beer. He stood up and looked at his capos in the club. “You, you, and you come with me,” he said, and the men at the card table he singled out got up.

Pauly wasn’t asked, but he was always at Vinnie’s side. He got up too. And they hurried out of the club.

“You said Eddie Hudgens in there.”

Vinnie glanced at Pauly. “Yeah.”

“Is it about that thing we had to do for that other thing?”

Vinnie nodded. “Yeah.”

“Shit. Who for? Because I know it ain’t for him,” Pauly said as they made their way across the sideway to the waiting SUV.

“Not for him. Don’t be an idiot. For my brother. Who else?”

Pauly didn’t like it, but he was Vinnie’s ride or die. They’d been best friends since childhood. But he also saw how those Carringtons treated him, which left a bitter taste in Pauly’s mouth. He didn’t like those Carringtons then, and he still didn’t like them now. Their arrogant-asses gave them more trouble than they were worth, if you asked him. But Vinnie loved his kid brother. He’d move mountains for that man. But his kid brother was a Carrington, too, and that was all Pauly needed to know.

But for Vinnie’s sake, whom he looked up to and adored all his life, he dutifully got into that SUV beside him, like the bodyguard and protector he’d always been to him, and they took off.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

After sending everybody home, including Miss Javits and his entire household staff, Grayson ordered the guard on the gate to keep all employees out. He didn’t know who was behind the attack, and he wasn’t taking any chances. He wanted his entire downstairs cleared of people. Then his entire attention was on Latoya.

She was seated on the sofa inside his private residence as he handed her a glass of wine.

“But it’s too early for wine.”

“You need it. Drink it,” he ordered her, and she did take a sip. She was still so shaken by the events she’d just endured that he could see the tremble in her hands as she held onto the glass. He sat down beside her.

“I feel like I’m struggling to make sense of what happened,” she said. She was seated on the edge of the sofa, with her legs folded, while he sat all the way back with his legs crossed too. “One minute I’m in your car driving to your office building when one car hit me one way, then another car hit me another way. At first I’m thinking it must be an accident. Until I realized it can’t be. So I speed away, trying to get away, but both of those cars followed me. But even that wasn’t so bad, because I was driving a fast car, but then they started shooting at me.”

Grayson felt a pain in the pit of his stomach when she made that statement.

But she kept telling it. “That’s when I knew they weren’t just trying to scare me or run me off the road. They were trying to kill me. So I had to drive even faster and even more recklessly. And I could hear the bullets hitting the car and it was just awful.”

She was trembling even more. But he needed to hear the whole story.

“Then the next thing I know I’m spinning out of control while one of their cars is flipping out of control. That’s when the other car speeds away.” Then she looked back at Grayson. “They said the man in the car that flipped died.”

Grayson nodded. “He did, yes.”

Toya shook her head and then leaned it back. Then she looked at Grayson again. “I can’t understand why this is happening. Why would somebody be targeting me?”

“They weren’t targeting you, honey.”

Toya stared at him. “How would you know that?”

“You were driving my car. They apparently thought I was driving it. They were targeting me.”

For some strange reason, hearing they were targeting Grayson concerned Toya even more. “But why would they target you?”

He looked her dead in the eye. “Because my father has many enemies, and I’m my father’s son.”

“Oh. But are these enemies from his days as governor?”

Grayson wished it was that simple. “And beyond, yes.”

“So what are we going to do?”