Page 27

“And what? I went straight home.”

“No stops along the way?” Really, I was just prodding, and Moneybags isn’t a fount of information.

She shakes her head in response, her curious gaze trying to keep up with her galloping brain. She is dying to know why I’m asking such seemingly random, unimportant questions.

“What happened when you got home?”

“Tate ripped into me.”

“Why? Does he do that usually?”

“All the time,” she mutters, rolling her eyes and turning away. “Guy is like a poisonous thorn in my side.”

“That poisonous thorn has been your father’s right hand man since before you were born.”

“No matter,” she huffs. “My father’s gone now, there’s no use for him anymore.”

“Is that so?”

I look at her curiously. There is obviously no love lost between Moneybags and Tate. I wonder if he knows that she’s planning to cut him off.

After a long silence in which she looks out the window at the midnight landscape as we travel along dark roads, she turns to face me again, her dark eyes mesmerizing as she chooses her words carefully. Everything about Moneybags is measured. Her words. Her thoughts. Her actions. The way she conducts her life. Even the extent to which she would open that door and let you in to her world – she always holds something back.

“I don’t much care for him.”

“I don’t much care for him either,” I inform her. “That doesn’t mean I don’t respect the hell out of him for being able to keep your father safe for so many years, especially when your father had such a vivid target on his back.”

Moneybags visibly flinches at the reminder, then lifts her shoulders in a shrug and resumes her interest in the passing night beyond the window.

“So back to the night in question…” I pick up my line of questioning again, hoping she’ll comply with answering my questions long enough to give me an idea of what we’re facing. I am under no misguided delusions that Moneybags is the one that planted the tracking device in my car. She wouldn’t be so bothered. “Does Tate usually wait up for you on your night forays?”

I watch her carefully as she turns her head, frowns, then digs inside her brain for something that is obviously challenging her.

“Obviously, no. Or else he would have put a stop to it from day one.”

“So what was different about this particular night?”

“Why are you asking such ridiculous questions?”

“Answer the question.”

“And if I don’t?”

She is challenging me at every question. I lift my arm and indicate the chain binding us to each other before I bend my head close to hers, our faces almost touching. I turn so my lips nick her ear, like a lover about to share a secret, and breathe against her skin. I hear the shake of the thready breath she releases. I have her right where I want her.

25

KINGSLEY

“Iwant you compliant.”

His voice oozes sex and charm and comfort and sin all at the same time. So many things. So many feelings. His words echo through me, through every crevice of my being as I finally realize where we stand. I am chained to this man. Well, handcuffed.

Safe.

For now.

If he wanted me dead, he would have done the deed already. So there was that.