“Are you?” We had been dancing around his feelings for Saint a while now, but this was something different. “Remember I have never met this man.”
“Do you want to?”
I didn’t have an immediate answer to that question—not in the way he’d asked it. Whether either of them knew it or not yet, Saint was my ally. We shared a common cause. Anything else could wait. And if it transpired that Cam was in love with him?
Hmm. It was a pretty picture I didn’t dislike.
Cam sighed. “You’re so fucking complicated, you know that?”
I straightened from my slouch against the wall and stepped into my current favourite place on earth: the cage of his strong arms around me. “Things are only complicated if you allow them to be. It is easier sometimes to be honest.”
The irony. And Cam felt it too. He closed his eyes, laying his forehead against mine. “I don’t know when I’ll be back, but I’ll call you, okay?”
I said nothing. What was the point? He had to go and he’d call. It was the hand we’d been dealt.
“Lexi?”
“Hmm?”
Cam opened his eyes, fixing me with a dark stare swimming with too many emotions to count. “Be safe, okay? I don’t think anyone tailed me here, but I can’t be certain and it would fucking break me if anything happened to you.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to me.”
Cam gripped my chin with rough fingers. “You don’t know my world as well as you think you do.”
You don’t know mine. “I will be careful if it makes you happy.”
He growled and I could tell he wanted to say more, but he was already running late for the brother meeting him close to his bike.
Cam kissed me, hard and claiming, and then softer, reminding me that there was far more to this man than the alpha wolf he was becoming to step out into the world again. He was good and kind. Gentle. I didn’t know much of his story, but even without the claim he’d staked on my heart, he didn’t deserve to die.
Hewould notdie.
I pulled back. “Goodbye, Cam.”
His answering smile was wistfully sweet. “Bye, Lexi.”
The door closed behind him, and though he’d likely stepped straight into the lift, my brain played the soundtrack of his footsteps fading on an imaginary staircase.
Irritated, I retreated to the work I’d abandoned in the kitchen, but I couldn’t digest the information on the screen. The figures swam and I felt nothing but rage.
I was scared to dissect the painful squeeze in my chest. I did not have time for it if I was going to help Cam.
Resolved, I shut my laptop and moved to the bedroom to change out of the shirt and trousers I’d only put on to tease him. I left them on the floor. Regretted it and scooped them up, folding them away in the walk-in wardrobe Cam claimed was as big as his bathroom.
Dressed all in black, I left the penthouse and retrieved my car, though the energy in my veins screamed out for my bike. The wind in my face, the freezing winter rain making the roads dangerous enough to calm me down. Was that how Cam felt when he rode his stripped-back Harley? Perhaps we had more in common than we’d ever imagined when we’d set eyes on each other that hedonistic first night.
I steered my car out of the underground car park beneath my building and took a deliberate and direct route from Bristol to Devon, circling around Whitness before heading east to the Dog Crows’ compound.
Close to the clubhouse, I plucked the tracking device from my wheel arch and ditched my car, picking my way through the undergrowth on foot until I came to the perimeter fence.
The security was even easier to bypass than the Rebel Kings’ HQ. I let myself into the compound and slid into the shadows, creeping into the room that housed their loft access.
I climbed into the rafters of the old building and found my way to the air vents above the room where the officers held their meetings. It was comically easy to insert a listening device and connect it to the software on my phone. So easy, I didn’t stick around to eavesdrop with my own ears. I crept back to the loft hatch, dropped silently to the floor, and ghosted back to the fence.
It was as I’d left it, open and exposed. I rolled it back into place and ducked into the undergrowth, anticipation building in my veins as I neared my car, the tracking device a beacon in my pocket.
My car came into view.
