Page 28 of Price of Angels

She stared at him, uncomprehending.

He lifted one of her hands, wrapped it around the mug, and didn’t let go until he felt her take hold of the thing. Then he sat down on the foot of the bed, a respectable distance away, his arms crossed.

Holly glanced down at the mug in her hands, dark lashes beating quickly against her cheeks. She took a shaking breath. “I’m not enough,” she said in a soft, broken voice, lifting tear-filled eyes to him, “am I? I can’t pay you, but I’m not enough to sway you.” She attempted a smile. “It’s okay. I was sort of expecting that I wasn’t.”

He cleared his throat. “If you’d made that same offer to one of the other members, you’d have your knees up around your ears right now.”

Her mouth pressed into a flat line, face going scarlet.

“I don’t take contract hits,” he told her. “I don’t accept payment for killing.”

“What makes you kill, then?” she came back at him, quicker and harder than he’d expected. “What’s it take?”

“Loyalty. I’m not a hit man.”

She regarded him a long moment, sitting up with the covers around her waist, sipping coffee with her breasts trying to spill out of her red bra. “Then what are you?”

“Most of the time, I don’t know.”

She nodded, and swallowed; closed her eyes, and glimmers of moisture gleamed in the outer corners. “Oh, God.”

He waited, studying her.

“I’m not a stripper,” she said, eyes opening again, full of tears. “Or a prostitute. At least, I don’t want to be. But I don’t know what to do, Michael.”

“You could get a divorce. Move to California.” Though the idea of her leaving put a strange tightness at the base of his throat.

She shook her head. “Dewey would never agree to that. My father would never let him.” She gave him a level, sure look. “They have to be dead. That’s the only way to stop it. Trust me: I’ve thought about it, and thought about it, and there’s no way to make it all end if they’re still alive.”

“Go to the cops, then.”

She sighed. “I tried that.”

He sucked at the corner of his lower lip, feeling uneasy with what he was about to say, but unable to keep from saying it. He had to give her something. Some kind of solace. “Do you know how to shoot a gun?”

Her eyes widened. “No.”

“A knife? Can you use one of those?”

“Only when I’m cooking.”

He sat forward, something very much like emotion moving through him, exciting him in some way. Not that he projected it outwardly. “What if I show you how?”

She’d never felt like this before: wanting to throw her hot coffee in a man’s face and to hug him at the same time. After about five seconds of careful thought, she realized something. No, he didn’t want her, didn’t find her attractive, wasn’t going to accept her offer of sex in exchange for murder.

But he wasn’t abandoning her either.Teach me to shoot?she wanted to ask him.Throw me to the wolves, how ‘bout it!She’d be dead in no time, if he left it up to whatever shooting skills she could acquire on such short notice.

And yet…

“You can’t just do it the easy way?” she asked. Genuinely curious, though flickering at the edges with relief. Her offer of anything he wanted had seemed only fair, but had scared the hell out of her.

Michael watched her with more of his unshakeable composure, eyes narrowing further as he considered. “Sex terrifies you,” he said, and she shivered, caught by the razor-edge of the truth. “And maybe you need someone to show you that it shouldn’t,” he continued, without one scrap of innuendo, “but that’s no way to bargain for three lives.”

“Biker with a heart of gold?” she asked, feeling the wistful smile tug at her mouth.

“With a president to answer to.” He stood, and she was sorry for the loss of his body heat seeping into the covers at her toes. “I’ll meet you in front of the bar tomorrow, three hours before you have to be in for work.”

“It’ll take three hours?”

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