Page 31 of Last Breath (Blood Wine Dynasty #2)

Nella

She couldn’t stand still as Jett drilled into the safe.

Her organs and tendons were strung together, not with veins and arteries, but the buzzing of a heavy-duty electric fence.

The moon was werewolf full and flooded the transparent box of an office with light – if someone walked past the glass walls now, there was nowhere to hide.

‘Did Nigel teach you how to do that?’ she whispered in between the stomach-clenching whirring sounds.

‘How to break into a safe or how to use a drill?’

She tossed him a look as she walked over to Clarkson’s bookcase. Legal textbooks, dictionaries and a few start-up company how-tos. Nothing personal, nothing that gave away anything about the kind of man Clarkson had turned into.

‘Neither,’ Jett said before the noise reverberated again, rattling Nella’s bones.

Had the police been here? The office looked undisturbed.

What had she been expecting to find – the murderer’s driver’s licence under Clarkson’s desk?

A bloody footprint leading out the door?

His mahogany desk was empty except for a blue desk pad, a pen holder shaped like a cactus and a dog-eared copy of Maps of Italy .

So Clarkson was a desert enthusiast who was maybe planning a holiday to the Amalfi Coast?

There was nothing here. Certainly nothing to distract her from her conversation with Jett.

Nothing to distract her from watching his broad shoulders tense and loosen beneath his shirt as he drilled further into Clarkson’s safe.

She thought about the three letters inked onto his bicep beneath that shirt and had an unsettling urge to rip his sleeve right off and pierce her nails through his skin, tearing those letters off.

Puncturing the wound with her mouth and sucking out the poisoned blood, until the skin healed over.

Until he got it through his thick skull how she saw him. How most of the world saw him ...

‘You never told me why you didn’t go back.’

He stilled for a nanosecond while he changed one of the pieces on the drill.

‘To Nigel, like he said,’ she pushed.

‘I don’t go back, Nella.’ More drilling.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means I move forward. I never stayed in one place more than a year when I was a kid. I wouldn’t know how to do it. I don’t want to do it. One year’s always been my rule, for homes, for ... jobs.’

‘Because you’re afraid.’

‘I’m not afraid.’ The drill started again.

‘You’re afraid of making connections with people,’ she said. ‘You don’t want to repeat what happened with Emily. You’re afraid of getting hurt.’

‘You’re a lawyer, Nella. Save the psychoanalysis. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He spun a loose screw between his fingers.

‘Well, I’ve been in enough therapy to know what self-sabotage looks like.’ She stalked around to the safe, but he kept his gaze resolutely on the half-opened safe door. His lips had parted slightly at the therapy comment.

‘So you’re never going to settle down anywhere?’ she demanded, when the silence had strained too much.

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I have this ... timer inside me, and it gets louder and louder the longer I stay, until I can’t take the ringing anymore.

Some people want the white picket fence, others want to travel and be completely untethered.

Movies and pop culture convince us we need the first one in order to be fulfilled, because it benefits society if we’re all imprisoned in our own little suburban fortress with two point five kids and a sedan.

But that’s not for everyone. That’s not for me. ’

He wasn’t telling her everything. She could feel it like pins and needles crawling over her.

‘Does your girlfriend know imprisoned is the adjective you use to describe a long-term relationship?’

‘She’s not my girlfriend. We’re not even exclusive.’

‘Shocking.’

‘I know you want stability, Nella. I know your dream was always to carve your own mark on the world and dig your roots deep into the ground so your father couldn’t cut them out.

I know you wanted your own family tree far away from his, and I know that hasn’t changed even though he’s gone.

So I don’t expect you to understand me, just like I’ll never completely understand you. ’

She swallowed. ‘I don’t want kids.’

His hands stilled as he dug his fingers beneath the metal to pry the door away. ‘What?’

‘You’re right about making my own mark and all that crap, but not about the family tree. I don’t want children.’

She knew what he was thinking. You’ll change your mind.

It was everyone’s reaction whenever a youngish woman made that assertion.

But she wouldn’t. She’d made up her mind about this when she was ten.

And, unlike everything Nella had done to build a life for herself away from her family name, this was one decision that wasn’t made to spite her father.

Although, admittedly, that had been a satisfying bonus.

The man’s death had only nailed her decision deeper into her skin.

She knew she didn’t have long before the door was off. ‘So when you leave us, you’re never coming back?’

‘That’s the way it has to be.’ With one final whir, the door crashed to the ground. It was a good thing, because it meant he was too distracted to see her face.

She ignored the thundering of her heart as Jett reached into the dark square hole and pulled out an iPad with a brown leather case that made it look like an old novel from the 1700s. He opened the flap and pressed the power button.

‘It’s flat.’

‘Fuck. We’ll charge it in the car. Put the door back, we don’t have—’

Voices filtered through the cracks of the office door.

Jett lurched up, eyes wild. They stared at each other. ‘What do we ...’

‘Just trust me,’ she hissed as she closed the space between them. Not thinking. Not anything.

She clasped her hands around his neck and pulled his lips to hers.

She pulled him underwater, underground, down, down, down, until he wouldn’t be able to see or think or remember who he was before he felt her mouth.

Except that wasn’t what was happening. She’d never be able to make Jett feel like that.

He tasted like something she shouldn’t know. Was never meant to know. Eve chewing the bitter sweetness of the apple. Coffee and mint. The mints he kept in his glove box. The coffee he put too much milk in.

She knew too much. She didn’t know enough.

A tiny, thorny part of her stung with guilt for what she was making him do – for the part she was demanding he play in her schemes. But god, he was good at pretending.

Jett understood the assignment better than if they’d sat down and planned this out alongside the safe-cracking.

His mouth met hers with the same furious desperation she felt deep inside.

It was like someone had been squeezing her lungs and now, her body pressed up against Jett’s, her mouth devouring his in greedy, hungry kisses, she was finally breathing.

She could still smell the peppery, leather musk and faint aroma of the garage.

But it wasn’t just a kiss. They both knew they had to make it look good.

That was why he lifted her up onto the desk.

That was why she pulled him closer, her fingers gripping those shoulders that had diligently done her bidding, rescuing her and driving away from crises and now, unwillingly, this.

What would it feel like to have those muscles, this body, these hands, touching her like this in reality and not this make-believe simulation of desire?

It’s pretend , she tried to remind herself as his rough jaw grazed her neck.

She arched up and wrapped her legs around his torso, one of her shoes falling to the ground.

His mouth burned hot and excruciatingly not enough against her skin, setting her alight.

It’s pretend. Her thighs were bare, the stupid little dress not enough against Jett’s acting.

His warm hands slid up to cup her butt as she wrapped her legs tighter around him.

The moan that reverberated through his throat as she slid her tongue deeper was almost believable.

Maybe she’d imagined the voices.

Maybe some parts of her weren’t pretending.

‘Nella.’ His voice was a plea, a surrender, a sound she could not interrogate because in this moment she wasn’t a woman or a lawyer or a mourner, she was a creature on fire, and she was burning ...

‘What do you think you’re doing?’