Page 33 of The San Marco Heist

Was someone watching the room? Had they seen the play I was putting on?

“I wasn’t—” began Bruce.

His receptionist put up a hand and mouthed,Bob.

Scarlett marched right up to me, her mouth a firm line. “I don’t believe we’ll be dealing with this company, honey.”

I gripped her elbows—this was exactly a scenario which warranted physicality—but she shrugged away from me. “Of course.”

She quirked a brow, waiting for whatever ridiculous pet name I’d pull out that time. Something was wrong though, and taunting didn’t feel right anymore.

If she was insistent on leaving, it meant she’d either gotten the information we needed or someone had caught her. She hadn’t given me the operational safe word, so it must have been the former.

But what happened? Why was the receptionist apologizing to Scarlett? And what was bob?

Chapter 14

Scarlett

Despitedozingoffforfar too long on the plane and theoretically sleeping last night, I was exhausted. And Blue Eyes was tweaking the last nanometer of the last nerve in my entire body. I marched across the street and clicked the unlock button for our little London-sized SUV, so I could tell it from the two others parked nearby.

I slid into the driver’s seat, my foot demanding to hit the gas and leave him behind.

“You got the blueprints?” Malcolm asked as he shut the passenger-side door behind himself.

“You’re off the team.” I gripped the steering wheel gingerly, as though I weren’t about to explode. “You can work comms with Will, but—”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

I put up a hand to stop him.Keep it together, Scar.“Younevershut off your earpiece. Ever.”

“I couldn’t work with all of you nattering in my ear.”

“If you’d been listening and nodding to him, like you were supposed to, it wouldn’t have mattered how many people were on the line.” My speech was quickening, anger and frustration begging for release.

“Sometimes, you need to improvise.”

My hand flew across the small distance between us, and he flinched like I was about to hit him. But I ripped the earpiece out of his ear and shut mine off.

“All you need to do is to listen and follow the plan,” I ground out. “It’s obvious why you and Emmett are buddies—you’re as irresponsible as he is. You’re fucking everything up.”

“Listen here, ice queen, I’m not fucking anything up.”

He was fucking up my feelings. Every time he got close to me, touched me, it wasn’t like working with the other guys. There was a different instinct behind what Malcolm did. Something primal about his hand on my back when no one could see it—when it wasn’t a calculated move to convince someone we were actually married.

Men pawed me all the time, and I let them because it got me what I needed. I knew where my lines were and never crossed them, but so help me… goddamn Malcolm Sharpe was screwing with every line I had.

I swallowed, battling with what felt like a wad of cotton blocking my throat.

‘Tears are a tool, darling,’ my mother had told me at the tender age of twelve. She hadn’t repeated those ridiculous words until after Noah’s death. I had one month to grieve, one month to sell the lie to my girlfriends about the cause and about whose ashes we buried, then it was back to work. ‘If you can control them, you can control anyone around you.’

“Hey now…” Malcolm’s soft voice mirrored his soft touch on my thigh. “Don’t do that.”

And now he was fucking up my self-control. A Reynolds woman didn’t cry. “If we don’t stay in constant contact with the team, people wind up dead.”

“I’m fine.”

“This is not about you! You selfish, arrogant, little prick.” I swiped a palm across my eyes and threw his hand off my leg.Tears are a tool. Tears are a tool. Reynolds women don’t cry. “If you’d kept your earpiece on, you would have heard I needed backup. That’s why we go in together. We’re a team.”

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