Page 36 of Sweet Revenge
Reagan flicked a glance at Declan and waited for his nod before replying. “The butcher knife. If I can help with anything else, let me know. Evie, it’s good to see you. I mean that,” Reagan added before disappearing, the door closing behind her with a soft whoosh.
Evie said nothing, just slowly bent until her torso rested on the table, her head cradled in her arms. He reached over to brush her curls off her face and let his hand linger for a moment.
“What are you thinking?” he asked softly.
“I’m thinking,” she began, voice muffled in the crook of her arm, “that nothing about this makes any fucking sense.”
He couldn’t disagree. None of his men had reported any murmurings about anything O’Brian might have been tangled up in. He’d had Brogan monitoring activity on other organizations in the city to see if anyone’s patterns or behaviors had changed. So far, nothing.
They needed a lead soon, or he was going to start burning shit to the ground. Anything to get that haunted look out of Evie’s eyes and punish the bastard who’d put it there.
He rose from the table and reached for her hand, pulling her to her feet. When her body brushed his and she didn’t pull away, he lifted his hand to skim his knuckles along her jaw.
Her eyes dropped to his lips, and need surged through him. He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her since he’d first seen her standing, shaken, in her parents’ living room. Her lips, her skin, her body under his.
He shouldn’t. It was a terrible idea, all things considered. But he’d had terrible ideas before. This one couldn’t be so bad.
When her lips parted, he slid his hand around to cup the back of her neck and tilt her face up. He’d thought about these lips, their taste, a million times in the last decade. He yearned for them like water in a desert.
Just as he bent down to taste her, the door opened, and Evie jumped back. He was going to kill Helen. Finding a new assistant would be a pain in the ass, but he’d muddle through.
“What?” he said through gritted teeth, turning to see Helen’s look of shock.
She shrank back at the look on his face. “I, ah, you have a phone call from Councilman Rodriguez. About that solar project. I saw Reagan leave, so I thought you were…I thought that…” Helen cleared her throat, fought to keep her voice even. “I can tell him to call back.”
“No,” he snapped. “No,” he said again, eyes drifting back to Evie standing almost a foot away now. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
Her face was unreadable. The only thing that gave her away was the way her fingers worried the frayed edges of the pocket of her jeans and the fact that she wouldn’t meet his gaze.
He sighed. “Give me thirty minutes. Tops. Then I’ll take you home.”
When she only nodded, he slipped out of the room and down the hall to his office, lifting the receiver and pressing the blinking hold button.
“Councilman Rodriguez, sorry to keep you waiting. I hear you’re finally ready to get that solar project off the ground.”
He listened to the man drone on about his idea to get solar technology into tiny homes he wanted to build in underserved neighborhoods. Declan didn’t need to be sold on it. The tech was a good investment, and the philanthropic donation was an even better way to maintain his image.
So while Rodriguez rattled off statistics and figures, Declan let his mind drift to Evie and every sinful thing he wanted to do to her. As soon as possible.
ChapterNineteen
Evie expertly evaded Declan and any further discussion about their almost kiss for days by staying holed up in her room, writing down every single detail she could remember about her job in Morocco. She’d done her best to sort her notes into a chronological order of events and fanned them out around her on the bed in a semicircle. There had to be something in here, some tiny thread of information she could unravel.
Peter Waltzman wasn’t his real name. At least she assumed it wasn’t since her internet search had yielded zero results. It wasn’t surprising. No one used their real names in her line of work, but then she’d never had reason to care if they did or didn’t before now.
She pulled out a blank piece of paper and used her pen to sketch what she could remember of his face. She was rusty but had been fairly good at the occasional sketch in high school and figured it was worth a shot.
Peter had insisted on making his first payment face to face. Odd, but not entirely unusual. Sometimes people liked to look you in the eyes and make sure you weren’t going to disappear and stiff them. Or intimidate you.
They’d agreed to meet at a café for a quick funds transfer. In and out in less than fifteen minutes. He’d made her uneasy. That was the first thing she thought when she saw him step out of the taxi from her vantage point across the street. She never arrived first when meeting a client.
She should have walked away then. Something told her to get up from the table where she watched, grab her bag, and leave Rome without a second thought. She’d been due to move on from her home base anyway, so disappearing would have been easy.
She was blinded by the payday, the price tag too good to turn down. It was what many in her field liked to call retirement money. Her cut would have set her up for life. In the end, she decided the rewards outweighed the risks. So instead of leaving, she crossed the street, sat down at the table, and shook his hand.
He held her hand a little too long, caressing the back of it with his long fingers. Even now, the memory made her shiver. It wasn’t unusual for male clients to get handsy when they saw her. Most of them tried to get her into bed. All of them ended up disappointed.
He didn’t talk much while he quickly transferred payment through a secure server, just watched her out of eyes so dark they were almost black. He continued to watch her when she got up from the table. She could feel his eyes boring into her back as she walked away, had to force herself not to glance behind her.
