“Hey.” I place her ginger ale on the nightstand. “I brought soup, but I left that on the kitchen table. You should eat in a little while.”
“Sounds perfect. Thank you so much.” She sits up enough to sip from the straw. “I want to want coffee…yours smells so good…but this is perfect.” She smiles sweetly.
A knife to my gut.
After a few more sips, she sets the drink down, closes her eyes, and flops back on the pillow.
She’s silent for so long, I begin to wonder if she’s already?—
“I made a list while you were gone.” She feels for her phone on the nightstand. Once she finds it, she pops one eye open and shoots off a text. My own cell pings. “That’s a Lenora-approved checklist.”
She snuggles back under the covers with a sigh.
I scroll through the message. Simple enough. “I can do this.”
“I know you can, because you’re my?—”
I cut her off by touching my finger to her lips. “Go back to sleep. I’ll come and check on you later.”
If she calls me a hero again, I’ll break.
Back in my room, I blindly pull a shirt off a hanger while attempting to get the image of Maeve’s sweet little smile out from behind my eyes.
My phone buzzes with an incoming call. When I answer, Rory foregoes any greeting. “Progress report.”
He’s all business. Understandable given what he does for a living, and also because we’ve rarely spoken in the last severalyears. But I guess I thought after last night, he’d have loosened up.
We did basically kill a man together. That generally creates some camaraderie.
“Her books are so clean, they almost squeak. I only found one discrepancy. Payroll doesn’t cover the number of security guards milling around this place. Which leads me to Doyle.” I put him on speaker to hop into my pants. “He’s here. I’m about ninety-five percent sure he’s holed up in the penthouse suite with Declan and his sons. I tried to sneak up to that floor, but I can’t even access the penthouse hallway without a code or a key card, and Maeve didn’t have one on her last night. Peeking through the stairwell window, though, I spotted several guards.”
Rory’s fingers click across his keypad. “Anything else?”
I sit on the edge of my bed to slip on my shoes. “I assume Connor’s up there, but I haven’t seen him. Brody’s like a jackrabbit, bouncing off the walls. Probably running all of Daddy’s errands. My guess is Declan doesn’t trust anybody’s eyes on Doyle but his own. And I don’t blame him.”
“Keep at it. We’ll figure out a way to break in. The important thing is, you’re having fun.”
His sarcasm interrupts me halfway through tying a knot on my Tom Fords. “Excuse me?”
“I’m just saying, we’re thrilled that you’re enjoying yourself on the West Coast, Kellin. Your happiness is of the highest concern for the Irish Kings.”
Tension bleeds into my shoulders.
Fuck. As long as I obtain results, why would Rory care what I’m doing?
And how does he evenknow? There are no cameras in Maeve’s room. None that I placed. If Rory has access to her private quarters…
“I can hear you thinking, Kellin. Did you forget about the camera from the hallway, just outside her door? The one you set up last night with a request for twenty-four seven monitoring that shows you entering last night and not coming out until this morning?”
I inhale. Exhale. “Finn is well aware of the lengths to which I will go for intel.”
“Sure, yeah, of course. Does Finn also know you’re fucking the target?”
I trap the growl in my throat and curl my free hand into a fist. “He knows I’m doing whatever’s necessary. If you’re asking whether I call him every ten minutes and give him a play-by-play, I do not. I’m pretty sure he has better things to do.”
“As long as Nolan Doyle remains in Declan’s clutches, none of us have anything better to do.”
“And, per instructions, I’m handling that. I was up half the night.”
