Page 79 of Last Shot

‘We need to recall all that batch. Discreetly.’

‘With all due respect, Tom, I don’t see how we can be discreet about this. People’s lives are at stake.’ Grey had already recalled the tainted batch of Barbarani Sangue, but he didn’t think he needed to tell the Barbaranis that. At this point, from the police report Grey had received, no one else who’d drunk the wine was sick.

Grey hadn’t forgotten Libby’s words. The poisoned ‘kids’. Was it just a random slip-up, or did Libby know something? If she’d just said ‘kid’, Grey would have assumed she’d caught the news story that was being covered by every outlet in the country – Poppy’s death was headline-worthy: young, pretty, innocent. But ‘kids’ suggested Libby hadn’t seen the TV. Why would she assume it was more than one person?

‘If we pull the wine, people are going to ask questions!’ Tom was ranting. ‘They won’t trust us ever again ...’ Grey let him go, like a frothing dog finally unclipped from a lead. ‘Greyson? Greyson? What are you going to say to that?’

Grey squeezed his eyes shut and ran a hand down his jaw. Fuck, he still hadn’t shaved. He dared a look over at Max. Had he been too rough? ‘Tom, I can’t do this right now.’

‘This is your job.’

‘My job is to keep you safe. Right now, you are safe.’

‘We are not safe, our reputation—’

‘Will survive.’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘No.Youdon’t understand. I’m tired, Tomaso. I haven’t slept more than three hours in the past two days. I’m going to bed.’

There was silence and then Tom spoke in a strange voice Grey hadn’t heard since he was much younger. ‘Never thought I’d hear you say that.’ He hung up.

Grey wanted to throw his phone off the balcony. He wanted to sink to the floor and put his head in his hands. He wanted the woman on the bed to take him in her arms and kiss him, to trace his skin like she’d done outside, to keep whispering that she was there, that it was all okay even though it obviously wasn’t. He wanted to forget what she’d said to him and who she was. He wanted Poppy Raven to wake up and tell him exactly what happened to her and how the Barbarani wine had tasted. He wanted someone else to take charge for one goddamn moment of his life.

Instead, he stared at the cold, dead phone in his palm. There’d be hell to pay for how he’d spoken to Tom. Grey had never spoken to him or any of the others like that before.

I’m trying to keep you safe, he silently screamed into the phone.My whole life is lived for yours. Can you just give me five fucking minutes?

Who knows what would have happened if Tomaso hadn’t called? Would he have questioned what Max had meant? Or would he have stayed so overcome with arousal and emotion that he’d have fallen back into their own world where no one else existed and there were no murder plots and prisons and poisoned wine? A selfish world where Grey only had to think about one thing.

Except that was the problem – he hadn’t been thinking. He didn’tthinkaround Max. She made him forget his place, his position, his role. She made him feel ...

He didn’t want to think about it.

‘Is everything okay?’ Her voice was heavy. He glanced over and wished immediately that he hadn’t. Her bare skin glowed in the moonlight, long black hair down her back, green eyes only for him. Her skirt was pulled down again but he could still feel the stiffness of that leather as it had so willingly pushed up for him. The feel of the skin that was under that skirt ...

For fuck’s sake. He looked back at his phone. The screen was blank but he checked the time just to distract his eyes. ‘I don’t know,’ he replied honestly.

‘Grey, we should ...’

‘We don’t need to talk about it.’ He was using the same tone with her he’d used with Tom. He hated himself.

‘I—’

‘Don’t, Maxella.’

He saw the hurt, the confusion; they were familiar to him, calming even. He knew how this went, how this ended. It was the right thing to do, ending it now before they went further.

‘I know you think you know me because I lost my shit about that moment in my past more than once with you. But you don’t know me, and I don’t know you. And it can’t ever be different.’

As he watched her gear up to reply, his father’s image ballooned every other thought out of his mind. He had to protect the Barbaranis. And he couldn’t do that if he was distracted by her. ‘I just don’t see you that way,’ he said.

He’d always hated hunting, but it was one of those things his dad had thought would toughen the softness out of him. That softness that his dad had tried to sand down, to reshape into something masculine and thick – a hide that couldn’t be pierced. Grey had been a pretty useless shot, so his dad had made him skin the animals instead. Grey had always hated that first cut of flesh. But afterwards, all the other cuts were easier. He cut and sliced and skinned until he could pretend it wasn’t even his hands that were doing it. What he’d said to Max was like this. The first word almost didn’t come, but each word after that was easier – he could pretend it was someone else speaking, someone else cutting.

‘Because I’m not your type?’ she said, one hand on her hip. She’d never looked more like a cop than in that moment, about to reach for an invisible gun. To puncture his heart with a thousand bullet holes.

But he’d wrapped his heart in Kevlar a long time ago.

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