Page 16 of Desperate Needs

“Where are we going, Boss?” the driver interrupted my thoughts.

“I thought dessert at that French place by her house,” I said, and he got to work, contacting them to reserve a table.

It was one of those pretentious places where you needed to book months in advance. But not her. And not me, either.

Her family had clout, but I was no slouch in that department either. People knew my name. Or they were starting to remember it.

As they said—the infamous they—money talked. And I had enough to secure me whatever fucking table I wanted.

The December breeze blew against me once more, but I hardly felt it. I was too amped, waiting for Clementine outside her uncle’s house.

I thought I would have to resort to using my powers of persuasion—in other words, I’d fuck her into a stupor and take what I wanted. I needed to push all my fanciful notions of having a personal life out of my head.

But tempting little Clementine was proving harder to resist than I thought. She was a conundrum. She was so damn pretty it broke my heart to look at her for too long.

Pale ivory skin.

Fiery red mane.

Curvy as hell body.

Bright eyes.

Killer smile.

I ran a hand over my face as I stared at the encrypted file with all the information I’d collected on Clementine in my drive on my secured cell phone while she grabbed her things inside.

I knew she liked horses. Used to compete, in fact.

I knew there’d been a kidnapping attempt when she was twelve.

Unadulterated anger filled me as I imagined how scared she must have been for the six hours she’d been held by some fucking punks who thought they could ransom her for a quick buck.

I made a mental note to find out more about the culprits. If any had slipped past Josef Aziz’s ire, they could deal with mine now.

That’s a fucking promise.

I kept reading and my heart squeezed when I learned that had happened only months after her mother had been diagnosed with cervical cancer.

They’d caught it early enough that Mrs. Aziz was completely fine now, but I could only imagine how tough that must have been on the whole family.

If there was one thing I’d learned from working with Liam O’Doyle and witnessing firsthand the Volkov, the Ramirez, and the Aziz families, it was that those men loved their women fiercely.

My eyes roamed over the rest of the file, and I frowned as I came to the list of men she’d dated.

Six dates in the past year.

Six fucking patsies who couldn’t make it past one drink or dinner.

“They weren’t for you, Darlin’,” I murmured roughly, clicking the button that opened the folder of surveillance images I had of her.

My darlin’ Clementine.

I grinned, taking in the flashes of red hair and the sparkle of her eyes in the random pics I had of her.

Goddamn, she was pretty. Too pretty for me.

I knew what I looked like. I was a big tatted up bastard with a short-cropped beard and my hair shaved almost bald on the sides. The short faux hawk I kept was still dark, but I was slowly going gray.

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