“I’ll do my best.” He comes up, a hand slipping around my waist, and he tilts my chin up.
A girl could lose herself in those eyes forever and not care that she was gone.
So fucking dangerous.
“I need him found. Whatever it takes.”
“I won’t be making false promises to you, Marlowe,” he says. “But I’ll do everything I can. Sometimes, people don’t want to be found.”
“Or?”
“Sometimes they can’t be.”
I swallow. He means if they’re killed and every trace of them is gone. I can feel it. Dark, cold, in the air.
It cools me right down and I shove those thoughts to the far recesses of my mind. Because I refuse to believe he’s gone for good. I have to believe he’s still out there. Alive. So I switch back to our sham arrangement. “We’re not getting married for real?”
“No.”
“And you’ll let me go after you find him?”
He quirks a brow. “What’s the thing you’re not saying?”
I press my lips together. I want to ask him to help me get out of everything, the dancing, the cloying world my mother wants me to be part of. If I could dance just for me, or even make it into something else like a studio of my own where I’m helping kids, or anything other than have it consume my life, I could deal with it. But I don’t want to be part of the whole stuffy world of the rich that surrounds the high-performing arts.
Help me get out of something like a marriage or a life she might have planned for me. I’ve heard her talking about the right man. A good deal. It’s for her, not me.
I want to ask for his help to escape it all. I almost do. But I don’t.
So I pirouette on him verbally. “If we have sex, that’s what it is, because I don’t like you. But…” Shit. “Don’t go thinking it’s more than me using you for your body.”
His mouth twitches. “Hate sex is a maybe, got it. Your sex toy, got it, too.” He brushes his lips over mine. “Goes both ways, Molly. And…I don’t share.”
“Me either.”
“I’ll get that contract.” He moves me then, pressure light on my lower back, and we walk to the door. “But just to be clear, no Leon. No firing me—hence the fake marriage, and neither one of us walks away from the arrangement.”
“And you’ll do all you can to get Dad.”
“On my mam’s life.” He puts his free hand to his heart. “Yes.”
The drive to my home is too short. And I expected…I don’t know… Declan to flirt or try to fuck me. But then again, all those years ago, he didn’t want our first time to be in a car. I remember that, just like I remember his lies, his shattering my stupid heart when he kissed that girl and left with her.
But he’s on his phone. The blue light from it paints his face like modern art, and I melt in places inside me, down deep, over and over. I throb in my pussy, where the ghost of a memory touches and strokes.
I press my knees together. I don’t want to find him so beautiful or his touch so magically good. And I don’t want to go home.
But we’re there, and he puts the phone away.
“Thanks for the ride.” I reach for the handle.
He catches my arm. “We’re both going up because you’re coming back with me. We’re going to move fast on this.”
“Fast?”
“The fake marriage. All we need to do is just slip a ring on and tell people.”
He smiles.
