Page 225 of Modern Romance Collection December 2024 Books 5-8

He pushed away from the desk and walked towards the window and after a moment she got up and sat down in front of his laptop and pushed in the flash drive.

Somebody, possibly Tiger’s head of IT, had finished running the program she had set up and she clicked through the images on the screen. They were all of some kind of drill bit. More importantly, there was a tiger’s head stamped across each image: the tiger’s head trademark of the McIntyre Corporation.

Her head was spinning. She sucked in a breath. ‘This is your property?’

‘Correct.’ Tiger nodded.

‘So you didn’t steal this from HCI.’ Which meant that things were back to front. Black was white. Day was night and she wasn’t some caped crusader righting wrongs, but simply the thief Tiger had accused her of being.

And all because she had taken Harris Carver’s words at face value.

Obviously, she had heard of Tiger, but, up until that meeting with Carver, everything she’d known about him had been based on the third-hand gossip and hearsay and rumours that swirled around the Internet.

But Harris moved in the same circles and he had confirmed what she’d already believed to be true. That Tiger McIntyre was just another fat cat, or, in his case, a lean, muscular big cat who played the system and thought the rules applied to everyone else. So, stealing back something that belonged to someone else had felt more like meting out natural justice than theft.

And then there was the money.

With hot, slippery panic swelling inside her every time she thought about her brothers, she had been eager to find a benefactor. And Harris Carver had known that. That was why he had shown her the amount he was prepared to pay her, because he’d known that seeing it made it real, made it feel as if it were already hers, and then it was that much harder to say no.

It was basic psychology. Fish and bait. Donkey and carrot.

Basic.

But effective.

And the depressing truth was that it was most effective on the people like her who were desperate to ignore the fact that the wriggling worm was on a hook on the end of a line attached to a rod held by a fisherman.

‘Doesn’t feel good, does it? Being deceived? Played?’ Tiger’s gaze felt like an insistent, living thing tearing and mauling her and for the first time she wondered if she had completely misunderstood what had happened when she’d sat down in that quiet, wood-panelled room.

‘Because that’s what happened. Carver saw that you were someone who could be turned and so he lied to you and used you.’

His words echoed around the room, stark and undeniable, and she shivered inside because Noah had seen something in her too. A weakness, a vulnerability, a need to be something more than the rest of her family and he had exploited it, flattering her, offering a future away from petty crime and financial insecurity, then isolating her and slowly taking her off the bone.

And she had always thought that a part of why her ex-husband had targeted her was her youth and her hunger to be something more than just another Truitt clogging up the courts.

But she wasn’t eighteen any more. She was nearly twenty-five. She owned her own, admittedly small business, but it was still hers. And a year of marriage to Noah had taught her enough about the dark side of life to immunise her against lowering her guard. Curled up on the back seat of Connor’s pick-up, she had made a promise to build her barricades high.

Only then Harris Carver had come along with his money and his offer of a way out just as Noah had, and she hadn’t questioned his opinions or his motivations. At least not enough to stop herself from making a bad situation worse.

‘He did use me,’ she said slowly.

She could see that now, and yet she could still see Carver’s face, see that shadow of something that was darker, deeper, weightier than professional rivalry. It hadn’t been important then. What had she cared about the cause of their conflict? Now, though, it seemed to matter a lot.

‘But I don’t think he lied to me. In fact, I know he didn’t. He believed what he was saying.’

Tiger’s face stiffened. ‘Because he’s the hero of this story, right?’ he said, and the harshness in his voice made her chest tighten. ‘Let me guess, you started believing him right after he told you how much he was going to pay you.’

‘No,’ she protested. ‘That’s not true.’ Except in a way it was, she thought, replaying the timeline of that conversation with Carver. And Tiger, of course, correctly interpreted that realisation on her face.

‘It’s amazing how convincing money can be,’ he said, and the steel beneath the softness in his voice was so ferocious that it sharpened something inside her.

‘It wasn’t just about the money. I thought I was righting a wrong.’

Two weeks ago, she had been so sure of Carver’s story but now those certainties were collapsing. And yet there was still something nagging at her.

‘That was what he said to me,’ she said after a moment. ‘That he wanted me to take something back from you.’

‘And now you know he was lying.’

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