Awaiting her instructions.
It was a chaotic day. Mae had had many chaotic days. She had no concern for chaos or hard work or fatigue. She could handle ado.
It was the unpredictable days, hovering just there on the horizon, that she didn’t like. It was questions without answers that she feared.
Mae didn’t like an enigma.
And Roland Reed was exactly that.
CHAPTER 4
Aday was not nearly enough time.
Tod knew that.
Vix knew that.
Roland sure as hell knew it.
He had spent the entire day deploying his kits to every blasted corner of London while he attempted to hit all the angles they couldn’t reach. He didn’t intend to report to the Vixen that night, and he assumed Tod was well aware of that.
Even so, it hadn’t been enough time.
He’d barely slept, and what sleep he had gotten had been shallow and simmering with half-done tasks in dreamscape, dotted with tangled blankets and agonizing thoughts about the ultimate task that awaited him.
Abouther.
Mae bloody Casper.
More than once in the night, he’d groaned in frustration and thrown his pillow across the room, only to then have to push himself off the mattress and plod after it like an errant little boy. But that was the perfect summation of what that woman did to him, wasn’t it? It was the crux of the damned thing.
He slept what little he could, and when he awoke, the scar on his arm, the white pucker in the shape of a kiss where a man had sunk his teeth in as deep as they’d go, suddenly was itching again.
It hadn’t itched since he’d gotten the stitches taken out two cursed years ago.
But this morning, it was itching persistently. This morning, he could not stop fussing with it.
He rolled his sleeve down over it. He pressed the linen of his coat down on the itch. He grimaced and wondered if it had been bothering him yesterday. He’d been thinking of her then too, hadn’t he? And wasn’t that what this itch was? Mae tickling up under his skin?
He couldn’t articulate what it was about her that vexed him so.
It wasn’t the wanting her. Roland was no stranger to lust. And it certainly had never turned him into a stumbling, tongue-tied idiot in the past.
No, he had always been the one in control with his lovers, no matter how beautiful, no matter how powerful, no matter if they were men or women. Attraction was not the issue here. Though it certainly was a factor.
She had simply taken him off guard from the very first moment he’d seen her in that brothel room, young and beautiful andcompetent instead of old and doddering and pedantic, and he’d never managed to regain his footing.
Maybe he would have if the soon-to-be amputee hadn’t bitten a chunk out of his arm a few moments later. Who was to say?
The damage was done now, anyhow.
For whatever reason, now, any time he was in her presence, he seemed to revert back to that blood-tinged room and forget himself entirely.
It was intolerable. And evidently permanent.
If he had learned anything at all in his life, it was that problems without solutions were best avoided entirely. He had managed to stay alive an unseemly long time, given his origins and circumstances, by adhering to that.
Hadn’t he?
