“Ah, yes, because he needs money. He’s run out, correct?”
“Poppy,” she said my name as if she was tasting it, testing it, trying it out. “What an interesting name for a viper.”
I couldn’t have kept the smile off of my face even if I’d tried.
“Of all the things I’d heard about you… fierce wasn’t one of them.”
“We can’t all stay innocent playthings forever.”
Chapter Fifty-Five
Ivan
Recovery was a bitch.I hated every second of needing help. I hated every second of my mother playing nursemaid. But most importantly, I hated that when I was discharged from the hospital and came home… It was to Poppy at her engagement party and a text to my mother stating she would be going home with Donovan for the night.
My mother was worried sick, I was fuming, and Jane kept shooting me odd glances. Finally, my mother left us alone, and I jumped at the chance.
“What’s going on?”
Jane chewed on the side of her pinky nervously. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Then why do you keep looking at me that way?”
Jane tucked her hands in her lap. “What do you mean?”
“You keep looking at me like you know something I don’t know.”
That made her eyes shine with mischief as she smiled slightly. “Yes and no.”
“Spill then.”
“I mean,” she leaned towards me and cupped her hands around her mouth. “I think she’s planning something. Something dangerous. You didn’t see her when she left here.”
I’d been avoiding the tabloids for a reason, but I knew now that I didn’t have a choice. I typed her name in the search engine, and there she was. A vixen. A viper. A dangerously enthralling woman stared back at the camera with a smile that screamed she won. To anyone else, they would have thought the smile was because she was on the arm of one of New York’s most eligible bachelors, but I could see the hardness in her eyes and the determined clench of her jaw. She’d won something else, and that scared me.
“What do you think she’s planning?” I couldn’t look away from my phone. Everything about her had me trapped.
“I don’t know.” She pulled her knees up to her chest, hugging them like she needed something solid to hold on to. “But she was… different. Not sad. Not broken. She looked like she was going to war.”
My pulse stuttered. “And she said she’s spending the night over there? Did she know I was coming home today?”
Jane tucked her knees up against her chest. “I don’t think so, or she would have been home. She’s been a caged animal waiting for any news on you.”
I shot up from my chair, everything inside of me screaming with the fast movement. “I have to get to her.”
Jane rolled her eyes as if I was being dramatic. I knew I wasn’t. “You can hardly walk.”
“I’ll crawl if I have to!”
Jane untucked her legs from her body and began to stand. “Don’t make me get your mother.”
I winced. Emeline Cristof was a force to be reckoned with. Jane could move much faster than me, too. She would get to my mother before I had a gun strapped to my chest. Hell, she would get to my mother before I could even make it down the hall.
“Don’t be stupid. Poppy needs you.Ineed you.”
That was enough to split me open. I sagged back into my chair and watched the girl who was wise beyond her years. “What do you think I should do then?”
“I think you should wait because we might have to bail her out of jail tonight.”
