She looked up slowly. “Which one?”
“Delilah.”
She shook her head. “I know of her. She comes from some deep South crime family. I can’t think of the name right now. Why?”
“She’s missing. Rage is flying solo.”
Jamie nodded, her sharp mind instantly tracking. “And that matters why?”
“I think Rage did something to her,” I said, leaning in.
Her eyebrow rose. “If she did, Delilah’s brother would take her head off. Them country boys are a different breed of violent,” Jamie said, a dark smirk touching her lips. Then she paused, her eyes widening slightly. “Now that I think of it, there was another girl before Rage took over. Some chick from D.C. She came up missing too.”
I sat with that, rolling the pieces around in my head. Rage was cleaning house, eliminating liabilities.
“This might work in our favor,” I muttered. “If I can figure out what happened to Delilah, let her brother know his sister is gone, and link it back to Rage... it gives us room to move. It forces Rage to play defense.”
Jamie nodded, her expression turning calculating. She was already ten steps ahead of me.
“Tell me about your father,” I said, shifting gears. “If you needed him, would he be someone you could call?”
Jamie’s entire face hardened into stone. “My father doesn’t give a fuck about me. He loved my brothers. He saw them as tools, and he saw me as decoration. Just some pretty pussy he could eventually sell off to the highest bidder.” She looked at me dead-on, her gaze lethal. “I knew everything my brothers did. Did half of it better. But he never cared to see past the surface.”
Then she leaned across the table, her voice dropping to a dangerous, purring whisper. “Looking at me right now, would you think I’d press a knife to your throat?”
I looked at her sharp jawline, the fire in her eyes, and shook my head slowly. “No.”
Her beauty was deceptive. Like sugar laced with arsenic. I had known what she was probably capable of the moment she toldme her last name, but up until the point she actually drew blood, I hadn't truly believed it. Because nobody expects a rose to slice them open.
And the worst part? Even knowing exactly what she was—I’d probably still let her get that close to my throat again.
She batted her dark lashes slowly, a sudden, sharp laugh cutting through her cold exterior. “Exactly.”
She wasn’t joking. Not fully.
“I’m going to go down and grab the packages you ordered,” I muttered, pushing away from the table to escape the suffocating pull of her.
She just nodded without looking back at me, acting like she didn’t give a fuck if I ever walked back through that door. She probably didn’t.
An hour later, I walked back into the apartment, bags in hand. I was walking past the guest bathroom just as she was stepping out.
She froze when she saw me, and the air immediately left my lungs.
She was wearing a white tank top she’d just unpacked, and the thin fabric clung to her heavy, damp breasts. No bra. Droplets of water slid down her collarbone, disappearing into the dark valley between her tits like it was doing it on purpose.
I didn’t move. My eyes fell—and stayed locked—right where the hem of the shirt ended against her thick, smooth thighs.
She shifted from one foot to the other, the friction of her thighs rubbing together cutting through the quiet room. She felt it too. That heavy, volatile tension coiled tight in the narrow hallway between us.
“Thanks,” she said, her voice a little too light, reaching out to grab the bags from my grip.
She went to walk past me, but the hallway was too tight, and I didn’t step aside.
She brushed hard against me anyway. I felt it everywhere—in my chest, in my teeth, straight down to my dick. She smelled like rich chocolate and warm vanilla, a heavy, intoxicating scent that had me wanting to trace every single inch of her deep-brown skin with the tip of my tongue just to see if she tasted as sweet as she smelled.
Just the thought of her mouth had my dick throbbing, leaking precum against the fabric of my sweatpants.
She disappeared down the hall into her room without casting another glance back.
