Page 22 of Abduction
“Yeah, let’s get something to eat,” I agreed. I glanced over to make sure Josh was out of my line of sight, and, once he was, I pointed myself in the opposite direction. I didn’t want to run into him again. As much as I had enjoyed seeing him today, I needed to put some space between us, or I was liable to get a little too addicted to his attention.
Chapter Twelve
Josh
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“OKAY, SO, NAVY PIER, 3 p.m.,” Tommy told me, giving me a hard look to make sure I understood how serious this was. I rolled my eyes.
“I know, Tommy, you’ve told me a hundred times already,” I reminded him. “I know where we’re meeting. I know when. Just me do this, okay?”
“Okay,” he replied, eyeing me. I could tell he was having his doubts about this, but I could handle it. I knew he had reason to, given the way I had flubbed things the last time he and my dad had given me a big job like this to take care of.
We were meeting an arm’s dealer down at the docks, and moving his product to the south of the I-80 to get it as far from the city as we could. It was going to be tense and tough, but it wasn’t as though we hadn’t done shit like this a hundred times before. Even if the cops stopped us, they knew better than to make it a problem. Most of them were in my father’s pocket anyway.
We could do this, I knew we could, but Tommy always got into his head when it came to big deals like this, and he would repeat to me a million times over everything he felt like I needed to do. As though I wasn’t taking care of it all as it was. I knew what I was doing, I knew how to do it, and I knew Dad wouldn’t have risked the two of us on this job if he didn’t think we could take it on. We just needed to see it through, and we would be out of there. We would be in the money.
“Good,” Tommy muttered to himself, rubbing a hand over his face. “I’ll see you down there. I have some stuff to take care of till then.”
I almost asked him what it was, but I knew there was no point in trying to get it out of him. It might have been something to do with our family business, our dad giving him more responsibility than he had gifted me, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear about it if that was the case. Let them deal with that shit together. I wasn’t going to put myself in the middle of it, try to demand my own piece of the pie. When the time came, I would take it, and until then, I could keep my mouth shut and let them do what they needed to do.
Besides, I had plans of my own for that afternoon. It was a good few hours before I had to meet with Tommy at the docks, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do.
I had run into Amber the day before again—I still wasn’t sure what she had been doing in my part of the city, but I wasn’t going to complain. The look on her face as soon as I had spotted her told me she needed some kind of distraction, and I was sure she was getting closer and closer to leaving that piece of shit who seemed so insistent on screwing her around. Good. I hoped she dumped his ass. And not just so I might have a shot at things with her.
She would be at the university now, and I had to pass by it to get to the pier—why not take a leisurely walk and see if I could run into her again? I wasn’t sure how many times I could do it without her getting suspicious, but she sure didn’t seem pissed about seeing me the day before. Maybe just because she was having a hard time with her man and wanted any distraction she could get to keep her head out of where he was and what he was doing and who he was with.
She was enjoying my company, and I wondered if I had been stuck in her head the way she had been stuck in mine. Her eyes, her hair, her skin, the way she smiled, the little laughs she let out when I cracked a bad joke—all of it. I wanted her. I wanted more than just these random little run-ins around town. I wanted...I wanted her in my bed. In my apartment. Waking up next to me. At least for one night.
My cab dropped me off at the far end of the campus, and I slowly made my way around until I reached the law department. I glanced up to the building, wondering, if I thought hard enough, if I would be able to manifest her right then and there in front of me. Could she tell I was so close to her right now? Tell how much I wished I could just reach out and touch her? I wished I could lift some of the stress of what she was going through from her mind, but she had struggled so much already as it was, and I didn’t like the thought of giving her even more to deal with. Despite my desire, my selfish want for her, I knew if something happened between us, it was going to make her life a whole lot more complicated.
I could have just walked away then, left it without seeing her, but I knew I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself. I wanted to see her, to touch her, to show her how much I had been thinking about her. I knew I was putting way too much into this woman I had barely just met, but it didn’t bother me. It was a good distraction from everything else going on in my life right now. I needed something, someone to focus on that had nothing to do with my family or my father or how much I felt like I was letting them down. And Amber? Amber was as far removed from all of it as possible. She was training to be a damn lawyer, after all; she was anything but part of the criminal empire my father had made for himself...
And as I leaned on the heavy stone steps outside the law department, I spotted her. I couldn’t help but grin as I saw her coming down the steps. She seemed distracted, trying to zip her bag shut and make sure she had managed to keep everything inside of it, but when she looked up and saw me standing there, she stopped dead in her tracks, as though she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
“Josh?” she called to me. The familiarity of my name in her voice made me smile. I lifted a hand and waved to her.
