Page 74 of Brutal Obsession

“Do you practice here?”

“Most evenings.” He straightens his shirt and glances at me. “Some girls watch.”

“Why would they do that?” Seems it would get tedious, watching them do drills over and over again. At the very least, mind-dullingly boring.

He lifts a shoulder. When I glance over at him, he’s smirking.

I stop. “They come for you, don’t they?”

Greyson’s smirk widens into a shit-eating grin. “Me, Knox, Steele…”

I narrow my eyes. “Yeah, I know pretty intimately why they’d show up for Steele.”

His gaze turns flinty, the smile sliding right off. He doesn’t respond to that—how could he? He’s the one who forced me to get on my knees.

In the back of my mind, I know I had a choice. I could’ve walked away.

But then I would’ve had to deal with the repercussions—worse ones than these.

He leads me to an elevator and hits the up button. We wait in silence, then step inside. Immediately, it feels like we’re in a vacuum. The silence gets louder.

My skin itches with the need to break it. To say something.

I last two floors before I crack. “What are we telling her?”

His cocky, self-assured smile is back. The same one I’m sure he wore when he strolled out of the police precinct after his father got him out. The same one he probably also wore when he left the scene of the crime. He rolls his shoulders back, then cracks his neck. Everything about him relaxes. Even the little muscles around his eyes that, up until this point, held stress.

I look away. This Greyson has been hiding. Shuffled out of sight, because everyone we interact with already knows and loves him. I’m fascinated by it. By the way he just seems to radiate an easy-going confidence. He’s brought out this persona for the publicist.

She’s going to fall in love with him before our time is up.

Am I going with him to be the scapegoat?

Or his savior?

I eye him again, drawn back to the expression he wears like a mask. Maybe I’ve been getting it wrong. Backwards. The anger, the way he is around me… maybe that’s his true nature, andthisis the mask. It’s easier to believe that than to think he wears his anger as a guard.

No. He’s shown me who he really is deep down. Not everyone gets to see that.

My nerves are eating me alive by the time the elevator doors slide open. And he still hasn’t answered me about what we’re telling her—what he expects me to say, if anything. I mean, I’m assuming that I have to say something. Otherwise, it’s pointless that I be here.

We exit into a brightly lit foyer. There are windows to our left, and a set of glass doors to our right. We go through them and stop in front of the wide desk that a receptionist mans.

Greyson smiles and tells her who we’re here to see. His gaze flicks up and down the woman’s body, and he winks at her.

She blushes.

I silence my disbelief.

She rises and gestures for us to follow her, and Greyson winks atme. This is all an elaborate game to him. When we reach a corner office, the receptionist opens the glass door and steps back to let us pass.

“Thank you,” he says to her. Then his attention switches to the woman striding toward us from behind her desk, and his smile widens. “Ms. Dumont.”

“Mr. Devereux,” she answers.

They shake hands.

She’s probably a few years younger than my mother. Her hair is white-blonde and pulled back in an elaborate braid. Her makeup is flawless, and her eggplant-purple dress is form-fitting. She has the sort of energy that translates into no bullshit. I imagine she’s had to become a shark to survive in a male-dominated sport.

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