She gave a self-derisive snort at the thought of the jeans and top she’d taken off and put in a bag ready to take to the dry cleaners tomorrow so she could return them to Natalia. A glance at the designer label had told her that a single one of those items of clothing would pay the rent on this apartment for a month, and there would still be some money left over.
To hell with it. She’d had enough of the four walls of her apartment already. She sometimes went for a swim on a Sunday, and while she might have to be careful and keep the gauze bandage on her temple dry, there was no reason why she shouldn’t have a leisurely swim up and down the pool for a few laps.
Alternately, she could do some food shopping.
Either way, she had to get out of her apartment for a few hours.
Leon stared coldly at the unconscious young man strapped to the chair in front of him. His face was bruised, and he was bleeding from his nose and mouth.
Leon’s expression remained cold as he nodded to Kieran to throw the rousing bucket of water over their guest’s head and shoulders.
It worked, one swollen eye opening wide enough for the beaten man to look up. “Oh fuck,” he muttered as he obviously recognized Leon was now the man standing in front of him.
“Indeed,” Leon drawled in a hard voice. “Who are you and who are you working for?” So far as he knew, Kieran and Jericho hadn’t received an answer to either of those questions, despite the “incentives” given.
“Is she still alive?” was all the slurred answer he received.
“I’m asking the fucking questions!” Fuck, there he went with the word fucking again. And then again in his thoughts. What the hell…
“Just tell me I didn’t kill her,” the younger man pleaded.
“If you’d killed her, you would already be dead,” Leon grated.
“Grazie a Dio.” The shooter’s shoulders deflated with the same relief as could be heard in his voice. His words also confirmed Leon’s initial impression that, from his swarthy complexion and dark hair and eyes, this young man was of Italian extraction.
“Your Dio won’t be of any help to you now,” Leon promised him.
Defiance gleamed in the one dark eye still visible after his beating. “Fuck you.” Blood and spittle left the young man’s mouth with the vitriol. “I failed to kill you, so I’m a dead man anyway, whether I answer your questions or not.” He grimaced after glancing down at his bound feet, his hands also secured behind his back.
Leon felt a grudging respect for the man’s defiance. It didn’t mean he wasn’t going to die, and slowly, but for what it was worth, he’d have Leon’s respect when it happened—
“As long as I didn’t kill Carla by mistake, I don’t give a damn,” their prisoner stated scornfully.
Leon stilled, and a coldness entered his chest where his heart should be.
Because this man had just called Carla by her name.
Implying he knew her.
How?
Why?
“How do you know Carla?” he demanded, nodding in Kieran’s direction when Calabro glared at him but didn’t answer.
The younger man’s head snapped back from the force of Kieran’s blow. “You can all go to hell.” Blood and spittle once again frothed from his mouth.
The coincidence was too much. The man had been at the hotel, intent on killing Leon when Carla was attending a wedding reception at which she knew Leon would also be present.
Leon didn’t believe in coincidences.
Did that mean Carla was part of the plan to kill him?
Yes, she’d moved in front of Leon and taken the bullet meant for him, but there could be several reasons for her doing that.
She could, belatedly, have changed her mind about being involved in the plan to kill him.
Or, having supposedly saved Leon’s life, she could just bide her time and kill him when she felt like it.
Either way, Calabro knew Carla, and Leon wanted an explanation as to how he did.
In the meantime, that coldness in Leon’s chest turned to ice. An ice that was becoming deeper and harder by the second.
He scowled as his cell phone vibrated in the inside breast pocket of his jacket. His expression darkened once he’d taken it out and read the text on the screen from Killian.
Miss Andretti left the hotel. Padraic followed her, and he is now standing guard outside her apartment.
Adding to the possibility of her guilt?
Chapter Eight
Carla felt so much more like herself, and in control of her own life, after swimming off some of her excess energy. Frustrated sexual energy, she acknowledged self-derisively.
Because her body—the traitor!—had remained aroused long after she left the hotel.
As Leon had remained front and center in her thoughts.
If the take-charge way he’d kissed her was an example of his prowess, then his lovemaking would have taken her to her knees. Again, she added with self-mockery. Being allowed to touch him intimately, sucking his cock until he came in her mouth, was the single most erotic experience of her life so far.
Single most being the correct description.
Because she had no doubt Leon would forget she even existed while questioning the man who tried to kill him. That he would return to New York without seeing her again. For all she knew, there could be a woman in his life there. Obviously not someone he’d wanted to bring to the wedding as his plus-one, but a woman he nevertheless had regular sex with.
Carla knew from experience that she didn’t share.
No doubt Leon, if he thought of her
