Page 4 of Last Shot

Luca would not be looking her up. But Grey would. To ensure she left quietly, that there were no loose ends.

‘Get my jacket back,’ Grey mouthed at Jett as Freedom Girl snuggled into his jacket like a baby bird into its mother’s wing. The angry woman’s frown deepened in suspicion, trying to decipher their top-secret morse code.

As they walked back through the car park, the woman adjusted her bra straps in a way that made Grey avert his gaze, her breasts now pushing up and over the tiny singlet as though the world needed more evidence of their existence.

‘Wouldn’t get your hopes up,’ he said as they returned through the glass doors to the hall. ‘Stiff competition tonight.’

‘As far as I’m aware, the only criteria Luca Barbarani has for women isalive, and even that could be narrowing it too far.’

‘You seen the women on his Instagram?’ Grey said. ‘You’re not exactly his type.’

Well, actually, Luca’s type was Northern Italian, curvy and forbidden. So, in his pursuit of antonyms, he had settled on a cliched rotation of supermodel, tall and low risk of exile from his family. But this woman fit none of those criteria. Sure, she was striking, in a terrifying, breath-stealing way, but she’d never be able to compete with the women in the hall tonight. Besides, she wasn’t exactly acting the way Grey would expect of someone with nothing better to do on a Thursday night than bid stupid amounts of money for an hour with Australia’s most coveted bachelor.

‘And what exactly does that mean?’ she asked. ‘What “type” am I?’

Not mine.Something primal inside him growled in resistance to that thought. But he muzzled it quickly, like he’d been practising ever since the last time he’d fucked it up so completely.

He didn’t like tattoos. Nope. He didn’t like bad girls.

And women who could hold their own in an argument and still take your breath away when you looked at them were definitelynothis type. Not anymore.

‘Not Luca’s,’ was all he said.

‘I will never understand the male need to categorise women into boxes like we’re brands of cereal.’

‘You are literally participating in an auction of a live human,’ Grey snapped. ‘I don’t think you have the moral high ground here.’

She opened her mouth like she was going to argue – that seemed to be her default setting – but then the auctioneer’s voice called everyone to their seats, seeming to jolt her back to reality. If anyone could callthisreality.

‘Who even are you to them?’ she asked, watching as Grey tracked Luca from the crowd of dispersing women to the stairs of the stage.

‘It doesn’t matter who I am tothem,’ Grey said, ‘it’s who I am to everyone who tries to hurt them.’

He hoped she tasted his threat. Hoped it burned all the way down her throat as she watched him walk away – to the shadows by the stage, where he belonged.

2

Max

You’d have to be clinically out of your mind, signed off by at leastthreeexpert medical professionals, to voluntarily participate in something like this. But no one would ever accuse Max Conrad of being in her right mind. Especially not since June two years ago.

The bidding was up into quadruple digits, the two girls in the front row still raising their hands as if they were starving mothers fighting for the last drop of medicine for their sick children rather than an hour with the defending champion of the Australian Sleaze-Ball Cup.

For the billionth time this evening, Max wondered where the auction money was actually going.

A new yacht for Luca Barbarani?

A G-Wagon for the cut-throat, heartless lawyer Antonella? Trying to hide her nepo-baby upbringing behind the façade of social justice?

Or was there a chance the only semi-human among them, Francesca, was raising money for one of her environmental causes? Though she was likely only motivated to save the world out of guilt about her unearned childhood privilege. And looking around at all the contraband plastic straws floating in glasses of gin, Max could see there was nothing environmentally friendly about this auction.

She didn’t know much about the eldest son, Tomaso, except that he was a pretentious, wine-swirling dick (hell, these people probably DID swirl wine with their dicks) and had most likely organised this whole event along with their father – Giovanni – as a tax write-off.

But it was too late. She couldn’t help it if the money was funding a federal anti-abortion campaign or a new coal mine on sacred land. There was no other way into the gated Barbarani Estate, and no time, not with the ticking clock that had taken up residence in her heart, taking over its beats like a cuckoo bird.

‘Eight thousand, four hundred ... Do we have eight thousand, five—?’

‘Nine thousand!’ screamed a woman with a long red braid, sitting at the front of the room.

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