Page 134 of Wife Number One

I frowned, irritated by the fact that moment had been watched by someone else when I hadn’t even been aware of it. I still remembered the prickle of heat that had passed over me at being so close to Hawk while we’d argued. “So you’ve just been watching me when you’re not there?” I accused. “What the fuck for?”

“I make it my business to know everything about the people I get into business with, Hayden.”

The words sounded eerily familiar. “You sound like Caleb.” The prick who’d blackmailed me into keeping Kara hostage in the first place.

Luca scoffed. “Don’t be insulting, comparing me to that piece of shit.”

Anger flushed through me. “If the shoe fits.”

“Don’t you do your research on who you work with?” Luca asked. “You didn’t have your brother look into me and my business practices before you signed that contract?”

I ground my teeth, because of course I had.

Luca took my silence as confirmation. “Exactly. Don’t act like it’s a bad thing.”

“It is if you’re blackmailing someone with the information you found.”

“Am I blackmailing you? Have I threatened your family? Your life? Your three fucking cats? Honestly, why do you have so many cats anyway? You can say you like pussy without turning your house into a cat sanctuary, you know.”

It was truly disturbing how much he knew. But he was also right. Unlike Caleb, Luca hadn’t forced me to do anything.

Yet.

Luca sighed. “I only called to ask if you could come in an hour early tomorrow for a delivery. But I don’t like seeing you all tangled up like this either. It’s been going on for weeks. You’re distracted. I need your head in the game.”

“My head’s in the game,” I argued.

“Your head is full of daydreams of big brown eyes, tits, and hips.”

I clenched the steering wheel harder. “Don’t talk about her like that.”

“Am I wrong?”

He wasn’t. The thing between me and Kara was so much more than just physical. Hell, I’d met her when she was days away from giving birth, dirty, and helpless, Caleb’s prisoner.

But it hadn’t mattered.

Something had clicked between us that couldn’t be undone.

“No,” I answered Luca, hating he was right. “She’s in that fucking compound, and there’s Slayers’ chapters pouring in by the minute.”

It was one thing for her to be staying with the Saint View guys. Her sister was one of them, and maybe that afforded Kara some level of protection.

But with a hundred extra men in there tonight, all drunk and high and handsy, no clue who was a club woman, free for use, and who was off-limits, no woman would be safe.

Especially not one as tempting as Kara.

The thought of those men circling her, outnumbering her thirty to one, came on so strong it obliterated any earlier sense I’d talked into myself. What the fuck was Hawk doing, keeping her in there?

What the fuck was I doing, driving away?

Luca sighed, and I would have bet anything he was shaking his head at poor, stupid Chaos, twisted up in knots over a woman. “She means a lot to you, huh?”

“Yes,” I admitted. What was the point in denying it? He’d already seen me running down the street after Hawk, begging him for information about her. That wasn’t the behavior of a man who didn’t care.

“And I want your full concentration for opening week, and I’m clearly not going to get that if you’re worrying about her. You want your girl? Meet me at midnight. Somewhere near the Slayers’ compound. On the bluff road.”

I didn’t want hope to light me up inside. I didn’t want to trust Luca, because I knew that no matter what he said, how smooth his words and promises were, he couldn’t be trusted.

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