Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 76022 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 380(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76022 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 380(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
“The guy and… and Irina.”
“Don’t be silly,” another voice, feminine this time, said.
I turned, finding a woman moving out from the back room.
She was tall, slim, but slightly curvy, wearing tight black pants, a black tank, and black combat boots.
Her hair and eyes were also inky.
And she had the most striking face I think I’d ever seen. Her bone structure was very feminine, but a little sharp in the jaw and cheekbones.
Lethally beautiful was the term that crossed my mind upon seeing her.
It was the same kind of gorgeousness that had become very familiar to me.
The family resemblance was uncanny.
This was a Novikoff.
A sister, I would bet, by her age.
“Konstantin and Mikhail are far too moral to murder a woman,” she said. Her accent wasn’t as thick as her siblings’. But I would guess she was five to eight years younger than them, so maybe the family immigrated when she was still young. “I, however, have no such hangups.”
“Stas,” Konstantin said, the name holding a warning.
“But you were going to…” I started, looking at the brothers.
“Hold onto you while I drove into town?” Stas asked. “Yes, they were.”
“Anastasia,” Konstantin barked.
“What? She’s been bought, hasn’t she?”
Wow.
I wasn’t sure I’d ever met anyone as cold as Konstantin before. But his little sister took the ice cream cake.
Konstantin barked something in Russian.
Stas answered back with a little curve to her lips.
“Yes, big, bad bikers. Very scary. Anyway,” she said, looking back at me. “Irina will no longer be working here. It looks like I need to keep an eye on things from now on.”
Oh joy.
“Saul, hm?” she asked, her gaze moving over me.
“Yes.” I lifted my chin, refusing to feel intimidated. I had a feeling that Stas was the kind of person who looked for any small chink in your armor, then launched a ruthless attack through it.
“Nice pull,” she said, nodding. “Anyway. I can’t find a single decent cup of coffee in this damn town. I will be back later.”
With that, she was gone.
Feeling oddly a little safer with the brothers, I exhaled hard.
Konstantin gave me what might be called a soft look. At least for as hard a man as he was.
“Certainly, you didn’t think they would get away with it.”
“Certainly, I wasn’t thinking past wanting to get home to my dog.”
“If it eases any of your guilt,” Mikhail said, shrugging, “we would have found out who it was eventually.”
It didn’t.
But that was just something I was going to need to live with.
So I just… threw myself back into work, solely because I knew the guilt would eat me alive at home.
Then there was Saul.
And his eyes that saw too much, and his brain that shouldn’t have been able to put things together so effortlessly.
And, yeah, sexual distraction came into play.
But it was therapeutic for me as well.
After the sex, we fell into bed for just a few moments while he told me about Rafe and Steve leaving town for their new life, taking Raff and Syn with them for a road trip.
When he asked again about my face, I fed him the handy lie I’d thought up when I’d been up all night obsessing over this potential moment.
“I fell,” I told him as I got back into my clothes so we could walk back to my place and pick up Trix. It helped not having to look him in the eye when I fed him the lie. “Tripped over Trix and fell face-first into my bedroom floor. Carpet-burned the hell out of my cheek. I forgot how much that hurts,” I went on, figuring a well-layered lie was a more convincing one.
“What about your mouth?” he asked, getting up and finding his shirt too.
“Oh, completely unrelated. Can you help me with this?” I asked, deciding to distract him with clasping my bra while I gave him the slightly less believable lie about my mouth. “I had girl dinner.”
“Girl dinner?”
“When you just throw random stuff together and call it a meal. I had a cheese stick, a clementine, and a ton of chips and salsa. I cut the hell out of the corners of my mouth.”
I moved away, grabbing my shirt, giving myself a valid excuse not to make eye contact.
“You ready?” I asked, adding more cheer to my voice as I turned to look at him, a smile plastered on my face.
He didn’t believe me.
I could see it—along with no small amount of disappointment on his handsome face—but he didn’t press me.
That somehow only made it harder not to confess everything. But, dammit, I had a lot of hush money in my trunk. The kind of money that would ensure that I would never again sob my eyes out in the parking lot of an all-night convenience store, having no idea when I would have money for a motel room, let alone an apartment or home.