Page 14 of Falcon's Prey

When I turned to face her, we both laughed. Getting comfortable in the car, I pulled out a water bottle for Lilah and some aspirin. After years of coasting through life drunk, I was more than prepared. Lilah took the aspirins, then turned to me with a mischievous grin.

“Hey, you. Mr. Gunman.”

“His name is Ren,” I said, pretending not to care that my so-called friend was talking to my bodyguard. I tried to hide my satisfied smile when Ren kept driving without answering her.

Lilah, however, didn’t let that stop her. “Has anyone ever told you that you have a lovely shade of brond hair?”

My eyes went to the front of the car, where my gaze collided with Ren’s through the mirror. I couldn’t read him. And that bothered me more than I wanted to admit to myself.

Since I was young, I’d developed an instinct for reading people. My life was a revolving door of fake friends and conquests. As I got older, it got easier to tell why someone was in my life. The answers were always the same: influence, drugs, sex, money. Ren might work for me, but there was something he was hiding. I could practically smell it on him.

“It’s like blond but not too blond, you know?” Lilah’s question snapped me out of staring at him.

Ren didn’t bother to answer her; instead, he put up the partition.

“Rude!” Lilah screamed so Ren could more than hear her.

I turned to face her silently, glaring at her to not say more.

She smiled. “I like him.”

Of course she did.

“Lilah.” I leaned into her, careful to not be heard. Lilah did the same. “You aren’t allowed to fuck him.”

The ride to Hill Hotel was silent. Ren parked in my private parking. Once there, he opened the door to Lilah’s side of the car even though I was behind him.

Whatever.

Ren and Lilah took off in the opposite direction of my entrance. I got out of the car, slammed the door, and started walking to my elevator entrance. I needed a drink now that I was home. Maybe a line or a blunt. Remembering that I had hidden a tin with blunts in the phone box, I grabbed that first. It took me a minute to light up. Once I took a hit, I pressed the button to go up.

“Ember, hold the door!” Ren shouted.

You know what I didn’t do? I didn’t hold the fucking door.

“You’re doinga stellar job of protecting my friend,” the leggy blonde said as I walked her to her private entrance.

“Marcus is on cameras; if your friend had been in trouble, he would have paged me by now.”

“Hmm.” Ember’s friend made a face.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Marcus used to be Ember’s bodyguard. There’s a reason they’ve removed him.”

No wonder the fucker lost her in the five minutes she was in his care.

“I’m pretty sure you know the way to your place from here.” I pointed toward her elevator door. It was a few steps away when I left Ember’s friend and took off running in the other direction. Ember had a blunt in her fingers as she pressed the elevator button.

“Ember, hold the door!” I shouted.

Ember looked up, her brown eyes dark and intense. She smirked at me and pressed the button, closing the door before I could reach her.

“Son of a bitch.”

I’d grown up in the streets. The only person who’d ever mattered was myself, and now I was in charge of one of the most self-centered women I’d ever met.

By the time I walked out of the elevator door, I was fuming. It shouldn’t have taken me nearly ten minutes for the elevator to go down. Marcus was waiting for me in the lobby with a smirk on his face. “She spent ten minutes opening and closing the elevator doors. “

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