Page 37 of Her Keeper
So this wasn’t entirely my fault.
But I had information Jimmy Rossi and his guys didn’t have. We knew about Monica because of my involvement. And now we knew that she was talking to someone even more important than me.
Jimmy might still think I was the rat, and that he needed to kill me. But he didn’t know that there was another rat out there. A far larger rat.
If he did, would he take his hit men off my trail?
Would he take them off if I could promise him that I’d find out who the bigger rat was?
I bit my lip, trying to hide my grin at the thought. Right now, Joseph, Michael, Sloane, Brooks, and I were all in danger because we’d gone rogue and disobeyed Jimmy’s ruling. He definitely had someone gunning for me, and he might have someone gunning for his own sons as well. But if I could give him a bigger target to chase after...
Michael would never hear of it, of course. He’d be furious at me for putting myself out there again. He’d insist on taking care of it himself.
But he was also wounded and in need of at least a day to recover, and we didn’t exactly have a lot of time. If Monica published that article, we’d all be in trouble and the price on my head would climb even higher. I needed to get to Jimmy before that happened.
And what Michael didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
Especially if it meant I was saving his life.
16
MICHAEL
Ididn’t feel well enough to actually start paying attention until the next morning at breakfast. I’d spent the hours after Brooks’ ‘surgery’ recovering from said surgery—and the memory of how it had felt—and leaving most of the thinking up to Joseph, Sloane, and Brooks.
I didn’t see much of Penny, but I also wasn’t in any shape to notice that.
The next morning, as she scooped eggs onto my plate, it occurred to me that she was being quieter than usual. I put it down to the situation, but the more I thought about it, the more it didn’t make sense. Penny was a lot of things. Innocent, sunny, incredibly funny. Smart. Charming.
She’d never been quiet. Even when she was in over her head and trying to figure out how to navigate an office full of killers, she hadn’t been quiet.
I watched her walk back into the kitchen and return with nothing more than coffee, her eyes serious and her cupid’s-bow lips unsmiling. She glanced at Brooks and Sloane, looking like she was considering something, and then turned and walked out of the room again.
Right. She was definitely up to something.
When she came back, I gestured for her to come sit next to me.
“You’re quiet,” I said, hoping she’d somehow just come clean without me having to push her.
She shrugged. “It’s been a pretty intense couple of days.”
And that was all she said.
“Are you okay?” I asked. Still foolishly hoping she’d just come out with it.
When she turned to me, I could see that she wasn’t. She was paler than usual and her eyes looked big and very wet, like she’d been crying on the sly, though they weren’t rimmed with red the way I would have expected. The moment her gaze met mine, hers slid to the side, and that was another mark against her.
Even when she was afraid of me, in the beginning, she’d met my eyes with a defensiveness that had both challenged me and turned me on. This wasn’t a girl who backed down easily. And now suddenly she couldn’t manage to hold my gaze?
What the fuck was going on here?
“Penny, what’s going on?” I asked bluntly, tired of beating around the bush.
Her eyes came back to mine and narrowed, and I could almostseeher trying to come up with a lie. The girl was a terrible liar. You could see whatever she was thinking right there on her face. I’d teased her about it before.
I’d never thought I’d be sitting here sporting a wound I got defending her—at least sort of—and watching her try to figure out how to lie to me.
I’d already been angry and frustrated about a number of things. From the moment I figured out that Penny was doing something she wasn’t supposed to be doing, things had gone wrong. My father had been attacked and then found out what Penny had done. He’d ordered a hit and I’d found myself on the run, Penny tucked under my arm. We’d had to go into hiding, and though that should have been enough, a part of me had known right from the start that it wouldn’t be. I was a powerful man and I knew how to work the system. I’d always been able to do it before.
