“What makes you think that?”
“Several weeks ago, Convict asked me to help her. Your grandmother had cut her off, and Mila believed outsiders were trying to influence the business. At the beginning, she was fully Team Marchant. She believed your grandfather could do no wrong. That’s what I mean by single-minded and determined. I’m not sure that’s the case anymore. Hence reasonable.”
A small piece of pity broke away in my chest for what Mila must have felt with all the shit that had come out. They wouldn’t have made the same mistakes with her as they had me.
Tyler tossed vegetables in with the meat. If he’d been working with her on the family business, he probably knew more than I did.
He pointed a spatula at me. “Your turn.”
“I don’t owe you anything.”
“Never said ye did. Remember, I’m on your side.”
Yeah, right. How could he say that? “Does she know I’m here?”
“I told ye, nobody does. Only me.”
Anger came swiftly on the bed of calm. A rush of flood water over dry ground. For hours, I’d been locked up here. Hours of knowing I couldn’t get out, and waiting, just waiting, for him to cause me pain.
“What am I doing here?” My words came out as a shaky little snap. I brandished the knife in front of me again, both hands gripped around the handle. Still, I didn’t enter the kitchen. “What do you want with me? What am I to you?”
Tyler turned off the burner.
He stepped away from the food, raising his hands like I had any hope of besting him. But it was his expression that socked me in the gut. Something twisted and unmasked. He looked haunted.
I drew a shuddering breath. “If it’s money, I have some. I can pay my way out of this.”
Not a flicker. It wasn’t that.
“You going to blackmail someone with me?”
“No. I would never.”
“Start your own crew? Bargain with me to help Mila in some way?”
A headshake in the negative.
“Then the Marchant solicitors? Or my grandmother?”
“I don’t give a flying fuck about that family.”
My temper crested. “Then what, Tyler? If it isn’t to do with my fucked-up history, then what do you want? I’ve got nothing else. At best, I’m a bargaining chip. At worst, a sex doll. Is that it? You have a buyer for me?”
Anger rippled over his features. “We’ll get one thing straight. If ye never want to fuck another person in your entire life, ye don’t have to.”
On the precipice of doing something rash, like rushing him, like screaming at him with the knife aimed at his thick neck, I hovered over that reaction. At that glimpse under the hood. The protectiveness over my body. I took a step from the wooden planks of the living room to the tiled kitchen floor. Into the light. Closer to him.
“Wanna make me your sex doll, Tyler?”
The bastard shivered. “No.”
“Liar.”
He wanted me. This was it. My out.
It hadn’t been one-sided, the stolen glances and building crush. He’d felt the same as I had, or something in that realm. I couldn’t believe it was so simple, and my hands trembled with the realisation.
It showed how out of practice I was that I hadn’t spotted it sooner.
