Page 33 of Groom Gamble

“Dex!” I grip his lapels. His black tuxedo hides everything and for a second the shimmering over my eyes and the yellow light convince me there’s blood everywhere.

“Mrs Streatham.” The voice of one of the Streatham men comes from behind me.

Then Dex’s eyes snap open. “Sophia. Are you alright?”

The relief makes me lightheaded as Dex grabs my shoulders and scans my face and body. “Darling. Are you hurt?”

“No, but?—”

“Boss, your arm…” His man says tentatively.

“What?” I yank back, and for once Dex doesn’t hold me.

Immediately I see why. There’s a tear in his tux at his upper arm.

Dex groans and winces as he pushes up to a sitting position. “Fuckers.”

I’m suddenly aware that I’m kneeling on the prickly tarmac. We both are.

“We have to get inside.” I try to help him up and he lets out a tired laugh. “What if they’re still?—”

“They’ve gone. Didn’t hang around,” the Streatham man says as Dex rises to his feet.

Dex pulls me into his arms, even as I protest about the actual bullet wound that he needs to deal with. “It’s okay,” he murmurs, turning us towards the house.

“What…? Oh shit…”

He stops abruptly, looking at my legs. For a split-second I think I’m injured and with all the adrenaline I don’t realise.

“Poor Tiptree.” Dex’s expression goes dark.

I follow his gaze. On the ground beside us is a severed human head. I jerk in fright, and Dex grips my waist harder with one hand.

It’s a man in his sixties, or maybe even older. His eyes are closed, and his pale blond and silver hair is sticking up at all angles. Bile jumps up my throat. I recognise that face. He came to the office once, and I took messages for him. Brian Tiptree.

And he’s dead. Brutally murdered by the Essex cartel because he tried to work with the London Mafia Syndicate.

“Inside,” Dex says in a tone that brooks no argument. “Now.”

He doesn’t let go of me once we’re in the house, and I don’t release his hand either. I hold it stupidly tight as the Streatham doctor cuts Dex’s shirt and jacket off him, and tends to his wound.

I play the whole event through my mind as Dex demands answers about how the Essex Cartel got through his security.

Dex is hurt. Either one of us could have been killed. He instinctively flattened me to the floor to save me, and was shot in the process.

I’ve never worried about working for a mafia boss. In fact, I’ve felt safer with Dex than at any other time. But as the doctor cleans and stitches up Dex’s bullet wound, it’s impressed on me that life is precious.

Life is short.

We’ve been messing around, waiting for me to be at peak fertility before he comes inside me, and it might have never even had the smallest chance. An aim a few inches lower, or if Dex hadn’t reacted as quickly as he did… We could both be dead, or worse still, he’d have died to save me, and left me alone again. Without the man I need most in the world, or even his baby to comfort me in my grief.

He would have died never knowing that I love him with all my heart. Or I could have taken my secret feelings to the grave.

“Go to bed,” Dex says when the bleeding has mainly stopped. “Get some sleep. I need to find whoever did this, so don’t wait up.”

“No.” I’m aware that it was partly my fault that this happened. Dex wanted to kill the men he suspected of treachery, and I convinced him not to. “When you’re injured is not the right time. You don’t even know who it was. You could be going up against the whole Essex Cartel.” And that would be suicide, even for a London mafia boss as powerful and connected as Streatham.

“You’ve just been shot, Boss,” the doctor chides gently. “Your wife has a point.”