Page 2 of Confession
“Your shoulder, dumbass.”
Annoyance is written all over his face. “It’s fucking fine. I don’t know why you refuse to believe me.”
“I don’t know why you refuse to show me if you want to get back to work so goddamn bad.”
His nostrils flare. I’m manipulating him, offering something he wants in exchange for something he doesn’t want—my attention. I get that. But come on, I’ve seen him shirtless plenty of times.
When Quinn sees that I’m not going to budge on this, he exhales loudly to tell me how irritated he is and yanks the tie on his apron. He pulls it over his head and tosses it onto the counter. He starts unbuttoning his shirt.
Okay, I do have to admit that forcing Quinn to undress has a different vibe than I was imagining. I should step back, grab my coffee, make this whole thing more casual, but I just stand there two feet from him as button after button of his green plaid shirt flicks open, revealing his muscled chest and abs. He tugs his shirttail from his jeans and finishes unbuttoning until I see the new reddish scar slashing his side from the bullet graze. Other, older scars litter his body.
Quinn tugs his shirt off his shoulder, baring the fresh round scar of a bullet that went through his delt. Shoulder wounds can be really bad. He was so damn lucky the bullet went through all that muscle instead of bone.
I clamp my hand on his shoulder, squeezing harder by degrees, watching for a wince. It’s hard for me to believe that it doesn’t still hurt, but he just stares back at me, annoyed.
“Well?” he prompts when I give up and let go. He straightens his shirt and starts buttoning it. “Are you done torturing me with this sideline shit? I’m fine, Vitali.”
Quinn rarely says my name. It’s weird to hear it in his voice. I’m sure that’s why it makes my heart jump.
“Be ready at ten.”
Quinn huffs out a breath, and a tiny smile flicks across his lips.
Quinn’s irritation didn’t make me step back, but his smile does. Something pings inside me when I see it. I don’t know what it is, but it makes me suddenly uncomfortable. I snag my coffee from the counter, turning to go. That’s when I see Sasha standing in the doorway in her customary black fatigues, her dark braid draped over her shoulder.
There’s an overly attentive look on her face that makes me snap, “What?”
“Do I finally get a night off?”
“Yes,” I reply, “thank god. I’m sick of you eating tacos in my office.”
Sasha snorts and looks past me to Quinn. “You sure you wanna be stuck with his snobby, judgmental ass all the time?”
I hear Quinn suck in a breath. With my back to him, I can’t read his expression, but I take the sound to mean that he agrees with her.
“Oh, fuck you both,” I mutter. A wicked light dances in Sasha’s eyes as I walk past her.
***
When Quinn and I get to Eclipse, we find the nightclub short staffed. My manager, Keith, assures me the remaining staff can handle the bar, but one of our most popular DJs is on stage, and the club is packed.
Quinn shakes his head no before I even open my mouth because he knows what I want him to do. When he was a bouncer here, I used to make him fill in at the bar all the time. He was honestly more useful there because he would draw all the women to the bar, where they would order drinks just to interact with him. Working the floor, he’d draw themawayfrom the bar, which meant that not only were they not spending as much money, their hovering made his job harder.
He always managed to do his job anyway, a fact fully proven when he saved my life one night. That’s where one of his scars came from—and his job offer as my bodyguard.
“Just for tonight,” I tell him.
His eyes flash. “I can’t help you from the bar. I can’t see you and I can’t hear you. I’m too far away if something—”
“I need you down here.”
A muscle feathers in his jaw. “This is not my job.Youare.”
That kind of pisses me off. I mean, it’s not inaccurate. He’s my bodyguard, my employee, so I literallyamhis job. But I didn’t like that.
“Just do what I fucking said, Quinn, Jesus.”
I spend the next two hours in my office on the mezzanine level. Doing the books is boring as fuck, but laundering money through the club is too dangerous to trust an accountant. Hell, it’s hard to trust anyone after what happened with my uncle.
