Page 22 of A Taste For Trouble
“From Todd at the bar,” she replied. “He had a couple of guys down there late last night, asking a lot of questions. One of them went out to make a phone call, and Todd followed him out to eavesdrop because he was worried for you.”
Fuck! The last thing Rose needed right now was to be on the hit list of a cartel. If they thought Joe cared for her, they would hurt her just to get to him.
“Get Logan to up the security around this building. And I need a security team with Rose every minute of the day,” I ordered, and Trevor pulled out his phone to update Logan.
“Hold it, darlin’. Extra security is not going to solve the problem. You need to send a message to the cartel that Rose is not to be messed with,” warned Gran. “And that only works if she’s with you. Even a drug cartel will hesitate before it messes with the Carlisles. Especially if the woman in question is Dominic Carlisle’s girlfriend.”
“She’s right, Rose. We have to keep up the appearance of dating,” I said, and Rose scowled at me.
“And you’ve got to make it convincing,” added Gran.
CHAPTER 11
ROSE
Ididn’t know much about drug cartels except what I saw on television, but what I did know made me want to curl up in a ball and hide under the bed.
“But why do they think I’ve got the coke?’ I wailed. “I have nothing to do with any of this.”
Trevor, who had wandered away to speak to Dominic’s chief of security, looked very grim when he returned to the table.
“Boss, Logan’s putting out feelers as we speak. We have an in with the cartel through one of his cousins.”
I raised my eyebrows at Dominic in surprise because why did his security chief have a cousin who had ties to a drug dealer?
“I trust Logan with my life,” he said, replying to my unspoken question. “He can only controlhisactions, not those of his cousins. And in this case, you’re lucky he has someone with connections to them so we can fix this before things get worse.”
Hmph! It was easy for him to act like this was a minor inconvenience, but fixing this would require me to pretend I washis girlfriend. And if I had to rely on my acting skills to keep me alive, I was so screwed. Even now, my impulse was to kick Dom in the shins for everything that happened last night. Not the part where he fed me, but the part where he drove me crazy with desire and walked away so calmly while I was reduced to a puddle of need. It wasn’t fair that I had spent the whole night dreaming about different endings to that scene, and the only thing each of those dreams had in common was the fact that none of them ended with Trevor interrupting us just as we were getting to the good part.
I gave Dom a baleful stare while he was talking to Trevor, and as if he felt the heat of my glare on the back of his head, he turned to look at me.
“What?” he asked irritably.
“What do you expect me to do while you guys arefixingthis?” I demanded.
“You have to prove to the cartel that, despite what Joe might have told them, you were never involved with him as more than a friend because you were dating Dominic all along,” broke in Grammy Cora. “Therefore, you had no reason to hide Joe’s stash for him.”
“Who’s going to believe that, Grammy?” I asked with a snort. “Just last week, Dom was spotted having dinner with Cece Blair.”
“So make it believable. We can spin that dinner as a business meeting, saying we want her to be the brand ambassador for one of our smaller brands. You’ll have to throw that woman a bone and hire her to represent our luxury perfume line or something, Dom. I’ll leave that to you to decide.”
“Thank you for that bit of autonomy,” said Dom dryly, and his grandmother scowled at him.
“I’m not leaving anything to chance, Dominic. Not where Rose is concerned. We have to nail every little detail in this caseif we want to save Rose’s precious little neck,” she snapped. “No loose ends.”
“Well, you’ve wrapped up all the loose ends so neatly, Gran, that there aren’t any left. All that’s left is for you to name our firstborn child,” he shot back, and she grinned widely.
“That’s an excellent idea! I think a pregnancy rumour might be the perfect little touch to your whirlwind romance,” she cackled, and Dom slammed his hand on the table, making us jump.
“Don’t you dare,” he yelled at his grandmother. “You’ve meddled enough in this matter, Gran. This isn’t one of your matchmaking projects. This is ourlife! Mine and Rose’s. After all this settles down, we need to be able to get back to normal, and that won’t be possible if we have to battle a pregnancy rumour.”
“It’s not meddling if it works,” argued Grammy Cora, looking far too pleased with herself for my taste.
“No pregnancies - either fake or real,” I said hastily. “I’ll do whatever else it takes to make this look convincing.”
“Fine! But I have to say, you young people aren’t fun at all. If this had happened in my time, I would have taken so much pleasure in spinning an absolutely outrageous story out of it,” complained Grammy Cora with a pout.
I didn’t trust the innocent look on her face. Not one bit. Because she was famous in Maplewood for her matchmaking efforts. And I knew it was her dream to have Dominic married off as soon as possible. Well, if she thought she was going to use this incident as an excuse to hogtie us and drag us to the altar, she was gravely mistaken. I was going to play my part of fake girlfriend to the best of my abilities because it was my neck that was on the line, after all. But after this was over, I was going to retire to my little cottage, heart-whole and crush-free, and become a crazy cat lady. A rich, crazy cat lady, after my books took off.