Page 115 of Corrupted Seduction

My father’s jaw was tight, his lips pressed together, but he nodded after a moment. This alliance shit was going to take him a while to get used to.

“Grazie, Greta,” he said with another curt nod.

She got up, grabbed her phone out of her pocket, and punched in a number as she left the room.

I turned to Aurelio, then my father.

“Useful?” I asked, honing in on what Sinclair had said. “How the hell have we been ‘useful’ to Sinclair?”

My father’s expression said he could make no more sense of it than I could. “We located the fortune William Dawson had hidden at the Regalton Arms, but that put it out of his reach. I don’t see how that was useful.”

It took me a minute—maybe I was off my game—but when it hit me, it hit hard.

“Unless it kept someone else from getting their hands on it.”

“You think there may be another player,Signor?” Aurelio asked.

“If that asshole, Sterling, was correct and there’s four times what we found hidden somewhere, there could be a lot of players looking for it.” I said, tamping down the urge to wring a dead man’s neck. Heidi’s father had to have known that people would come looking for that money. He hadn’t just been careless with his own life; he’d been careless with his daughter’s life.

My father and Aurelio both nodded.

“Are you any closer to locating the rest of this fortune?” my father asked.

“Hell, no,” I said, frustrated. “She was nine years old when her parents died. She doesn’t remember much from before that.” And after four days of Heidi trying to remember anything that could be useful, I kind of just felt like an asshole for making her dredge it all up.

Aurelio nodded. “The Regalton Arms helped to jog her memory, but without knowing what else might do that…”

The obvious hung in the air between the three of us: It was quite possible Heidi would never remember, and that was assuming there was anything to remember, that her father had left her clues in the first place.

“All right,” I said, getting to my feet. “I’ll keep at it.” I didn’t relish the thought of grilling Heidi any more on the topic.

Returning to Heidi, though, I was just fine with that. I’d left her in my bed two hours ago—lightly tied, so she could get free if she really wanted to.

Now, she was either waiting for me, tied up, naked, and ready for more. Or she’d gotten herself free, and it was time to drag her back and tie her up all over again. Seemed like a win-win situation to me.

My cock was already stirring when I reached the office door. It was not impressed, though, when the door swung open and Cielo strode in, blocking my path and just about colliding with me.

“I’ve heard back from my contact in London,” he said without preamble, his jaw tight as his gaze moved back and forth between our father and I. “You’re going to want to hear this.”

I sighed as visions of my naked, willing captive went up in smoke.

My cock was not impressed at all.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Heidi

The hospital looked different today.

It wasn’t the five days I’d been away from it. It wasn’t that the building itself had changed. Or that the hustling and bustling people moving in out of the front entrance appeared in any way different.

It was me. It was the nervous knot in the pit of my stomach and the cold dampness of the palms of my hands.

Keeping my head straight as I approached the building, I glanced surreptitiously to the right, then to the left.

Did they know?

Could they see what I’d done, written plain as day across my face?

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