Her cheeks warmed. “I thought I saw him,” she corrected. “But he wasn’t there when I got out into the hallway. When did you speak to Benny? Why did you?” She couldn’t think of a single circumstance under which the two men would even have met, let alone had a conversation.
“A short time ago.” Leon grimaced. “And it seemed like a good idea under the circumstances.”
“What circumstances?”
He gave a shrug. “I believe at the time, Jericho was in the process of blacking Calabro’s other eye in an effort to persuade him into revealing who his employer is.”
“As far as I know, Benny works for Graham Reed, the owner of the sports bar… Jericho was blacking Benny’s other eye?” She gasped as she realized what he’d said.
Leon nodded tersely. “Kieran had already had the pleasure of blacking the first one earlier.”
Carla stared at him in disbelief as realization of the situation hit her squarely between the eyes with the force of a blow.
Leon had left the hotel earlier because his team of bodyguards had caught the man who had tried to shoot him.
Was he now saying that man was Benny?
Her hands became icy, and her cheeks felt as if they were carved in stone. Her tongue also felt as if it had swollen too large for her mouth and would surely prevent her from speaking. “You can’t seriously be telling me that Benny was the man who tried to shoot you last night?” She shook her head in denial of that even being possible.
Benny might not have been the best boyfriend in the world, but he’d never hit her or shown even the slightest violent tendencies.
Leon snorted. “Are you seriously trying to tell me you didn’t know exactly who he was last night?” He rose gracefully to his feet, able to look down at her now she was wearing flats and not the four-inch-heeled sandals from yesterday. “That you weren’t assisting him in trying to kill me?”
Carla’s eyes grew even wider at the accusation. She would never… She had never… How could Leon even think she would be a part of something so…
She stilled as images of last night’s shooting suddenly flashed through her head like a broken reel on a movie spool. Images of the shooting she’d thought might be lost to her forever.
Of a man stepping out in front of her and Leon after they’d exited the elevator.
Of the man’s arm rising, and finding herself looking down the barrel of the silencer on the gun he held in his slightly shaking hand.
Of her shock at seeing, and recognizing, the man’s face as he pulled the trigger.
Benny’s face.
Then her head had been engulfed in pain and blood spurting from her right temple and into her eyes, blinding her before dark unconsciousness engulfed her and she felt herself falling to the marble floor.
All of them memories Carla had blanked out until this moment.
Because she simply couldn’t believe Benny, the man she’d once been engaged to marry, was also the man trying to kill Leon.
Benny would never… He wasn’t capable of…
But Benny had, because Carla had seen him with her own eyes, holding the gun pointed at Leon before his finger pulled the trigger and he shot her instead of Leon.
All Benny.
The same man she’d thought she’d seen earlier that evening outside in the hallway where the wedding reception was being held. He’d been talking to another man, she’d thought, but he’d disappeared by the time Carla had hurried out into the hallway. Leading her to think she must have imagined it because the wedding had brought back unhappy memories.
But if what Leon now said was true, then she hadn’t imagined anything, and Benny was the person who had tried to shoot Leon later than evening.
Football-watching, beer-drinking Benny.
Too-lazy-to-get-off-his-arse-most-of-the-time Benny.
Unfaithful Benny.
“Is it all coming back to you now?” Leon taunted in a hard voice.
She frowned her irritation. “As a matter of fact, it is. I couldn’t remember what happened last night before now. The part where Benny fired a gun at you, at least.”
“Is he your lover?”
“That’s none of your business!” she snapped, outraged at what was starting to feel like an interrogation.
Leon’s mouth twisted. “If it’s any comfort, Mr. Calabro expressed his regret about shooting you instead of me and hopes you will make a full recovery.”
Carla swallowed at the complete lack of a similar regret in Leon’s tone. “Where’s Benny now?”
Leon’s nostrils flared. “You know where he is.”
The same warehouse down by the docks where she’d first met Leon. Which also told her exactly where Kieran was too. “Is he still alive?”
“He was when I left.”
She flinched. “Is he going to stay that way?”
Leon had no intention of lying to her. “That all depends on you.”
She eyed him warily. “Me?”
Leon hardened his heart against the vulnerability he could see in Carla’s expression. If she was a part of the attempt to kill him, he would have no choice but to mete out the same treatment to her as he had Calabro. “If you tell me the name of the man who employed you both, then I won’t have to beat it out of you, and I might even be persuaded into sparing your own and Mr. Calabro’s life.”
“You, personally, would beat it out of me, or would you have one of your men do it?” she scorned.
He’d spoken the words, but in reality, the thought of doing anything to hurt Carla, or ordering anyone else to do it, was anathema to him.
Nor was there any reason why he should have Carla’s or Calabro’s blood on his hands. Once their employer caught up with them, he would order one of his men to put a bullet in the other man’s head for having failed to kill Leon, as Leon had already surmised when the shooting failed to kill him.
Even Leon knowing Carla had betrayed him, the thought of her with a similar bullet hole in the middle of her forehead,
