Damage Control (Dirty Money #2)

“Do I? Because you’re judging me by your family’s actions, while their blood runs through your veins, not mine.”

I press my fists on either side of the door by her head. “Being a bitch does not help you right now.”

“Being an asshole just proves you’re an asshole.”

“Lying only makes you—”

“Honorable in ways you’ll never understand,” she blasts back.

“I’m going to understand,” I assure her. “Sooner rather than later.”

“I’d like to leave, sooner rather than later.”

“We’re going downstairs to the hotel restaurant to eat dinner.”

She blanches. “What? No. I’m not having dinner with you.”

“You will. The lies started with dinner, and so it’s only appropriate they end with dinner.”

“No—”

“And you’ll do it because you owe me that damn much.”

“What is dinner going to do but draw this out, Shane?”

“We’re going to dinner,” I insist, knowing she could try to run, but also knowing she’s being followed, and that ultimately might be the only way I find out the truth of who, and what, she is really all about.

“What keeps me from leaving?”

“Nothing but you,” I assure her.

“I’m going to leave.”

“Then leave, Emily. I’ll find out the answers from someone else, and be colored by their definitions. If that is how you want to end this, then it says a lot about who we are and what we are.”

“Don’t do that to me.”

“I’m just being honest, a trait I value.”

“If you knew what—”

“But I don’t,” I say, pushing off the door, damn ready to get her out of here before I really do strip her naked, and there’d be no coming back from how cold and hard I’d fuck her right now. And apparently I’m still just foolish enough to actually hold on to a hope that she really has an explanation for all of this that makes it possible. As if she wants to douse that idea, she quickly says, “Dinner won’t change what I’m willing to tell you.”

Displeased in about a hundred ways, I turn her to face the door, her back to my front, her lush backside nestled intimately against me. I arch around her, my lips at her ear, my hand flattening on her belly. “Much has already changed, Emily,” I assure her. The floral scent of her perfume teases my nostrils with bittersweet memories of me wrapped in that smell, in this woman, whoever she is. “And so much more is about to.”

“I was weak,” she murmurs. “I should have ended this before you could feel the way you do right now.”

“But you didn’t,” I say, not bothering to ask why. That answer is in the secrets she thinks she isn’t going to tell me tonight.

She leans back into me, a subtle sway before she melts against me. “I tried,” she whispers, her hands sliding to my thighs, and holy fuck, her touch is too damn right for her to be wrong. The idea jolts me and I step back, taking her with me to open the door, before I then set her away from me, and into the hallway. “It’s time for that dinner and conversation.”

She stumbles slightly and damn it, I want to right her footing. I want to save her, when I might be the one I need to be saved after this, after her. I watch her catch her balance and start walking, her pace even, when I have a feeling she wants to run; and even knowing Seth will have her followed, I don’t want her to run. Reaching behind me, I shut the door, and in a few long strides, I catch up with her, but she doesn’t look at me. I think it’s fairly clear that she doesn’t want to see the distrust in my eyes any more than I want to see the lies in hers. Once again, we’re well matched, but for all of the wrong reasons.

We fall into step as we so often do, which is something I have never experienced with any other woman. But when I would normally reach for her, I do not, for the same reason I got us the hell out of the apartment. I don’t need to fog my senses with the feelings this woman obviously delivers, when I didn’t even believe that was possible. She wants to protect me? I’m protecting myself, and I’m not sure what bothers me more: The idea that she doesn’t want my protection because she doesn’t trust me or because she’s my enemy.

In all of sixty seconds, we round the corner and stop at the elevator bank, neither of us looking at each other. I punch the call button while she hugs herself, a defensive stance that means little that I don’t already know. She’s guarded. She’s always been guarded. I knew this. I knew she had some ghosts in her closet, but I thought they were things she wasn’t ready to tell, not things she completely erased. The elevator dings almost instantly and I hold the door for her, not just because it’s the gentlemanly thing to do but because I want to control every moment I’m with her tonight.

She steps inside the car, and while she is often bold and even confrontational, tonight she walks to the opposite side of the car, leaning on the wall, arms folded in front of her chest still. I join her inside, punching the lobby button, I rotate to face her, my hands on the railing of the wall behind me. Her long brown hair is sleek, her navy skirt and blouse simple but professional, though now I find myself wondering if her limitations are choice or circumstance. I wonder a lot of things I should have wondered sooner.

The elevator doors shut, sealing us inside a steel box with her lies and my questions. The car starts to move, and our gazes collide, the connection a punch in my chest I don’t want her to have the power to deliver. But she does. I am vulnerable in ways I swore I never would be with a woman, or anyone for that matter, and I’d actually forgotten the lessons my family taught me years ago. What my mother warned me about with Emily. The people closest to you can hurt you the most. My jaw sets hard, my stare now sharp glass shards of accusation.

Apparently far from oblivious to that fact, Emily lifts her chin and declares, “I am not going to sit through dinner with you looking at me like that.”

“How am I looking at you?”

“Like I’m one of the many people who you can’t trust and who have betrayed you.”

“Change my mind.”

“So I’m right,” she says, her voice cracking. “You do think I’m one of them.”

“There are many things going on in my mind right now.”

“I told you—”

“Don’t tell me anything in this elevator.”

“Right,” she says tightly. “Because everyone in your family is watching everyone else, so it has cameras.”

“You know me and my family well,” I say dryly. “And yet I know far less about you than I want to know.”

“I thought we weren’t talking in the elevator?”

“I want to know more of you,” I say, putting a double entendre to use. “And that’s not something I mind anyone knowing.”