“It was a mistake not to change your password after you let me borrow your computer for the Whilcox presentation all those years ago.” Her voice is steady, but her eyes—those beautiful, furious depths—lift to meet mine in challenge. “I currently have my finger poised over the send button of an email highlighting the details of my abduction. This is theRequiem, right? And we just left North Cove Marina, heading out to sea?”
I take another beat. Another breath. Another attempt to calm the volatility before I close the door behind me.
“Don’t take another step,” she warns. “This is addressed to my trusted staff and several press contacts from this morning’s briefing. If you move any closer, I won’t hesitate to hit send.”
“You don’t want to do that,” I growl.
She pastes on a belittling smile. “For your sake as well as mine, right? Can you at least admit you’ve got skin in this game, too?”
I could admit it. But exposing vulnerabilities comes with more complications.
“I want to know everything,” she demands.
I bet she does, and although Cross is a fucking coward, I find myself in the same league, unable to voice the hidden details of her father’s duplicity. “How about I do you one better and show you exactly how much skinyou’vegot exposed?”
She hesitates. Briefly. Just long enough to betray the surprise flashing across her face. “Do it. Show me.”
“You’ll need to move away from the computer.” I edge forward.
She points a finger in warning, the gesture somehow both elegant and lethal. “Not on your life, pretty boy.”
Pretty boy?That’s new.
Although, growing up, there’d always been a mutual attraction between us. We had heat. Years of it. A wildfire that simmered under the surface, waiting for a spark. But hearing that description now, through her venom, taunts feelings I’d much prefer to keep locked tight.
“There’s a safe.” I casually raise my hands in surrender. “It has the original paperwork.”
“Where?” Hope flickers in those innocent eyes.
“Under the rug.” I approach an inch.
“Stay there.” She stands, slowly, her gaze locked on me as if I might strike. “I don’t want you getting any closer.”
“Isla, this situation is well past the idle threat of an email.”
“It isn’t idle,” she fires back, squaring her shoulders. She lifts the laptop with one hand, the other poised over the keyboard. “Talk me through how to find the safe.”
There are a million things I would’ve once killed to talk her through—how to part those pretty thighs, how to take my cock—but her downfall was never on the list.
“Fine.” I lower my hands to my sides. “It’s under the corner to your left.”
She steps around the desk, shuffling sideways before dropping to her knees. She sets the laptop on the floor beside her, then folds back the corner of the rug.
While her attention is preoccupied, I reach into my pocket and press the side button on my cell three times, enacting the signal jammer to shut down all services on the yacht.
That threatening email of hers? No longer an issue.
She doesn’t notice the Wi-Fi blink out. She’s too focused on her task to see how I’ve dismantled her plan.
To her, the floor would appear seamless, but up close, there’s a subtle break in the boards. A collective lie of timber planks masking what’s hidden beneath.
She scrutinizes it for one beat, then two, before leveraging her fingers beneath the edge and lifting the panel free, exposing a digital keypad. “What’s the code?”
My pulse thuds harder. “Life won’t be the same once you open it. If I were you, I’d take me at my word and trust that reestablishing the?—”
“Trust?” she accuses. “After how you’ve treated me? For years? That ship sailed long ago. We might’ve been friends once, but you torched that bridge… Well, I guess given this new reality, it’s clear the friendship wasn’t real to begin with.”
It was real.
