Page 11 of Snake

Autumn was about seventy-percent sure she’d give SBC the contract for the Homestead, as an olive branch if nothing else, as long as they didn’t try to screw her over the details. Her thirty-percent reservation on that decision was one-hundred-percent petulance. These ignorant meatheads had made her life difficult for months. It galled to reward them with a multimillion-dollar construction job. However, hiring them would employ more Signal Bend citizens than merely the Horde, and that would show them all that she was walking her talk. She’d get over her pettiness soon enough.

But why the hell was Cox here?

Chapter Three

Cox had drawn the short straw, and he was, to put it mildly, salty about it.

Badger had decided that having someone ‘on her ass’ while Miss Big City Developer was in town this weekend meant actually being on her ass. He didn’t simply want tabs, he wanted her followed. Shannon had called him when she’d checked in, and he’d roped Cox into the first shift.

Sometimes working at the compound, and therefore being convenient to saddle with fresh club jobs, sucked ass.

He was sure Badger meant some cloak and dagger, superspy kind of bullshit, lurking in the shadows so she didn’t know she had a shadow, but fuck that. He wasn’t going to creep behind a woman while she went about her life. He didn’t give a soggy shit about her comfort, and he wasn’t following for her safety, but he’d be damned if he’d be taken for a psycho stalker pervert.

He looked up from his phone, where he’d been scrolling baseball news on ESPN, and found Autumn Rooney frozen at the foot of the staircase, staring at him like he was a psycho stalker pervert.

As soon as their eyes met, she looked away, squared her shoulders, and strode toward the door; she’d apparently decided she had no reason to interact with him. And as far as she knew, she didn’t.

Cox stood up while she walked across the wide lobby. “Hey,” he said, loud enough for her to hear, but not so it sounded like a demand or a warning. Yet.

She stopped and turned. “Are you speaking to me?”

Obviously he was; there was nobody else in the lobby. He had no intention of playing linguistic games with her, but if he started out sniping, he’d end up having to stalk her like a psycho perv.

“Yeah, I’m talking to you. I’m here for you.”

His phrasing must have sounded like a threat; she took a step back. “What?”

“People above my pay grade decided you should have somebody with you while you’re goin’ around town. Right now, that’s me.”

She crossed her arms, and Cox noticed she didn’t have a handbag or briefcase tonight. In fact, she was dressed more like an actual person than he’d ever seen her: in jeans, a white button shirt, brown boots with an almost-reasonable heel, and a fitted corduroy jacket in a dark gold color. Usually she dressed like Going to Work Barbie, in sky-high heels and skirts so snug he couldn’t figure out how she managed to walk.

“I don’t need an escort or a bodyguard. Nor will I tolerate a babysitter.”

Fucking hell. He was the wrongest possible patch for this job. No skill with sweet talk and no desire to try. He didn’t like to talk at all. He didn’t even like to smile, because it made people think he wanted to talk. How the fuck was he supposed to convince her to let him go with her wherever she was going, which he did not want to do?

Subterfuge fucking sucked, so he said it straight out. “Look. It’s my job to keep up with you tonight. I wish it wasn’t, but nobody gives a shit what I want—or what you want. So I’m either with you tonight, or I’m following you tonight. You pick which one.”

Her arms still crossed, she shifted her weight from one leg to the other. She was tiny, not much over five feet, but something in her posture made her seem to grow. And the look on her face was pure, bloody murder. Her eyes flashed wildly under a stormy brow, and ... huh. Maybe it was the color of her jacket, but her irises seemed golden. Her ponytail lay over one shoulder like a wide vein of copper.

She was really pretty; he’d not noticed that before. Other patches had made comments about her good looks, but he’d never understood what they were seeing—probably because her Going to Work Barbie getups were like bright neon signs to him: Nothing to See Here. In more normal clothes, he saw the woman, and yeah, she was pretty.

Her looks meant absolutely nothing in any possible case, she was still a carpetbagging, money-grubbing, corporate snake, but it was a noteworthy fact he filed away.

They stood and stared at each other for a while. Cox watched her face shift through an array of emotions and thoughts until she settled for a moment on ... calculating. After she figured out her angle, her expression became friendly. Wide-eyed, even.

“Okay, then,” she said in a syrupy voice, “If you’re joining me, be useful. Show me Signal Bend through your eyes.”

He shook his head. “I’m goin’ where you go, not the other way around.”

She smiled. Cox could imagine her deploying that sharkish hook at the critical moment of one of her business deals, probably when she was stealing the shoes off orphans’ feet or something.

“If you’re going where I go, then you’re going to have to follow me like a stalker, Daniel. If you don’t want to do that, you’re going to have to show me around.” Her smile gained a gleam of triumph. “You pick which one.”

“Don’t call me Daniel. I’m Cox. Just Cox.”

She cocked her head to one side, but said nothing.

He fucking hated this snaky bitch.

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