I want to take his gun and shoot him. I want to tackle him to the ground and fuck him senseless and then leave him wanting.
And I want to not feel a thing but the anger about yet another bodyguard.
I thought I’d burned through them all. Every last one of them. And now, the only person worse than a bodyguard, someone who’s an actual real-life criminal, is off with my mom planning tobemy bodyguard.
I can guard my own body.
Fuck.
He’s up to something. He’s into playing games, toying with me, and while I don’t know why, it’s more than clear I’m some sort of cross between a challenge and a source of amusement.
Feeling me up in the car earlier, kissing me on the street after I left the club.
All of that wasn’t real, it was just for Declan’s amusement.
Can I despise him anymore?
I turn, then hurry off to the study. “Mother, I don’t want?—“
“The grown-ups are talking here,” Declan says, sounding so Irish it’s ridiculous. Like he’s a leprechaun about to hold up a pot of gold or something. “Mind yer manners and yer mam, here, or you’ll be wanting a spanking.”
And then he winks at me.
My temperature shoots up. I laser him with a glare. But it rolls off him as he turns back to my mom, holding a bunch of notes in a folder.
“It might be a twenty-four-hour job, Mr. Murphy,” Mom says, tidying up some papers on her desk. I look longingly at the letter opener.
He looks at it, too, and then he picks it up, examining it, but not letting it go.
Asshole.
“Of course,” he says.
She frowns. “Not inside with her—outside.”
The meaning’s clear. With the rest of the riff raff.
“Oh, of course,” he says, “And you should know that every job I take becomes my life. This threat...?”
Mom nods. “She has a stalker.”
I roll my eyes. She is so dramatic. I have fans as a ballerina with the Manhattan Ballet, and this one inparticular likes to send flowers, chocolates, and tiny presents to me. That’s all. He’s never threatened me at all.
Jesus. If he’s a stalker, then I’m the Queen of England.
I’m just a pawn to my mother. She has a need to control every bit of my life from the dance career I don’t want, to a marriage she knows I would never agree to. She’ll do anything to strengthen Briggs Energy into a mega conglomerate with her in control of absolutely everything she can sink her claws into.
Now that Daddy is gone, she can take the reins.
“Then that’s who was following her. She said she was meeting this boyfriend of hers,” Declan says cheerfully.
“No boyfriends allowed,” Mom says sharply.
She folds a piece of paper and hands it to Declan.
He pockets it without looking and snaps the folder shut.
“Be here tomorrow. Seven a.m. We’ll talk terms and the pay at the end of the day. If you can keep track of her.”
