Page 227 of Modern Romance Collection December 2024 Books 5-8

There wasn’t a flicker of reaction on his flawless face or even in those dark gold eyes, but she felt the air snap tight. ‘Clearly not. If I were, you wouldn’t be earning a living committing cyber crimes or spending your evenings sipping whisky with random men who pay you to commit those crimes.’

‘Crime,’ she said quietly.

His eyes locked onto hers. ‘I’m not sure that makes an awful lot of difference in law.’

‘I think it does. It’s my first offence and there were extenuating circumstances.’

‘I don’t think greed qualifies.’

She changed tack. ‘What about coercion? Blackmail? What does the law think about that?’

‘Whatever I tell it to think.’ He was staring at her, a flare of incredulity lighting up his eyes. ‘Are you seriously threatening me?’

‘Yes. No.’ She fought to keep her voice steady. ‘I don’t know, Tiger. I’ve never done this before. I don’t even know what this is.’

‘This is you throwing away your life for a man who doesn’t even value your sacrifice.’

‘I didn’t do it for him. I did it for my brothers.’

There was a long silence. Tiger stared past her, his chest lifting and rising infinitesimally.

‘Sometimes you can’t save people. Sometimes they don’t want to be saved. Or maybe you don’t have what it takes to save them. Sometimes all you can do is protect yourself.’

Yes, she thought, remembering the moment when she had called Connor. It was as if Tiger knew. She was suddenly shaking inside and there was a tense silence broken only by the water lapping gently against the jetty.

But she didn’t notice the silence or the water. She was too transfixed by his taut silhouette because Tiger wasn’t talking about her and her brothers. He was talking about himself, and that jolted her, only it was so snarled up with the tumult of emotions swirling inside her that it took a moment for her to reply.

‘Sometimes you can’t even do that.’

Tiger breathed out unsteadily, Sydney’s words drowning out the world so that the breeze coming off the water grew still and the jetty and the speedboat and the balustrade seemed to lose shape and fade into the darkening light. Only the woman standing beside him stayed vivid and as sharply drawn as a pen-and-ink sketch on vellum.

‘Sometimes.’ Make that never, he thought, remembering his father’s last, bedridden days, and he felt that same helplessness and sense of waste and loss, and anger. Always anger.

‘They can be hard to bear, those times.’

A ripple of water lifted the jetty and he felt it judder through his bones as he shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He wouldn’t allow it to matter.

He felt her move closer and he wanted to touch her then, wanted to touch her so much, to pull her close and not feel alone. Only that was the reason he couldn’t, shouldn’t.

To need Sydney like that, not for sex but because she was the only person who could soothe the ache in his chest, would be a sign of weakness and for so long now he had resisted emotional entanglement.

But Sydney had followed, and he was no longer alone. And he found that he didn’t want her to go, not when her brown eyes were steadying him as she waited for him to speak, and he was more than tempted, he was struggling to hold back.

That she was here, and that she cared about him enough to put her own feelings aside, stunned him, and swept away the anger that he could now acknowledge was disproportionate and misplaced. She had scraped against a poorly healed wound, but it was Harris who had caused that wound. And it was partly that he had never called him to account that rankled, but also it had stung, finding out that Sydney had this connection with the man who had cast his friendship aside, and over a woman.

More than stung, it had hurt a lot. On more levels than he cared to acknowledge.

And in that moment, he hated that he’d revealed that hurt to Sydney.

But what was worse than all of that put together was knowing that he was no better than Harris. They had both spotted a vulnerability in Sydney and exploited it, and knowing that made him want to smash things.

‘It does matter. You matter,’ she said in that quiet, husky way of hers and everything tilted sideways as if the jetty were moving beneath them, but he knew that it was him. He was unmoored.

‘It doesn’t change anything though, does it?’ he said, almost angrily because, more than anything, he wanted to believe what she was saying. Wanted it more than anything he had ever wanted, only that would mean straying from the path he’d chosen and following in his father’s footsteps.

‘If you mean the past, then no, you can’t change that. But you can change how you feel about the past.’

‘I doubt that.’

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