Page 81 of The San Marco Heist

Scarlett

Rest?HowwasIsupposed to rest after all of that?

Malcolm had braced my leg on his lap the entire drive to the private airfield. He’d ensured that even the few bumps we felt in the Bentley didn’t jar anything. His new tuxedo pants were stained with my blood, and he waved it off like it was nothing.

Our husband-and-wife pilot team, along with their daughter, our flight attendant, had us in the air a half hour after we arrived.

Rav had forced me into the rearmost cabin on the plane, where he’d injected lidocaine into my leg and removed every shard of glass. He muttered the entire time, mostly in French, which told me how pissed off he was about everything. He’d never been good at sitting in the car.

But now my leg was bandaged and propped up on the divan, we were in the air, and Malcolm was standing in front of me. I turned off the tablet I’d been reviewing mission notes on and slid it into a side compartment.

I gestured to the single large seat in the cabin. “What’s up?”

He slid the door closed and latched it. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“I’m okay. That’s hardly a question you need to lock the door for.”

Instead of taking the seat, he knelt next to me, his gaze resting on my leg. “You really gave me a scare.”

“Me? You’re the one who had a gun to his head.”

He swallowed hard and shook his head. “You froze.”

I pulled myself closer to the end of the divan and the wall, sitting up straighter. “I don’t freeze.”

“And you were crying.”

“I don’t cry.”

He eased himself up, only far enough to sit on what little space there was available next to me. “You’re in some serious denial.”

So what if I was? I lived a fake life with fake people. I lied for a living. Wasn’t the next logical step to lie about all of my feelings, including to myself? “You barely know me.”

“True.” His hand flexed over my thigh. “Permission for whatever level it might be to pat your thigh in support?”

My heart rate picked up at his silly request. “Permission granted.”

He rested the hand on my mid-thigh, his touch feather soft. “In the hotel this afternoon—before Rav arrived—you were about to say something to me.”

Thiswas the conversation that required a locked door. “Was I?”

“You were.” He inched closer. “You said, ‘When this is all over...’ and stopped. What were you going to say?”

I was supposed to be reading Brie’s report. Mum would already have gone through the entire thing and picked out fifteen mistakes I’d made. I needed to spot them before she called me on them, so I had a retort.

More importantly, I needed to look at what she’d sent me about the man who pulled the gun on Malcolm. Declan’s photographs had included a shot of his bound hands and a tattoo on the web between his thumb and forefinger. She suspected it was related to some organized crime family or gang but hadn’t figured out which one yet.

But all I could see was the gun at Malcolm’s neck. Other images bled into the periphery of my memory—him carrying me, the mischievous look in his eye when he brought up the idea about the Velatti, and the kiss. The all-consuming kiss in the light well that made me want to throw everything away.

I didn’t know Malcolm Sharpe, not really. My brother trusted him. Some of my team even liked him. Was any of that enough for me? Did it really matter? “I was going to say, when this is all over…”

His hand crept up the outside of my thigh, toward my hip. “Yes?”

A pulse exploded from my core, and the same pathways lit up as when he’d kissed me. “I know you’re going to go back to your old life, that you don’t want to be part of a team, but I want you.”

His hand skimmed up over my hip to my waist as he leaned in. “Reynolds Recoveries wants me? Or Scarlett Reynolds wants me?”

I sat up from the pillow Rav had forced behind me. I talked my way around people and situations for a living. Why was it so hard to tell him how I felt? “We have an opening.”

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