Page 7 of Ruthless Enforcer

“With you? That seems contradictory.”

“You wound me.” I guide her around the corner of the museum toward a side street where I parked my Escalade.

She somehow manages to keep up with my quick pace in her high heels. “You just shot someone, Gabriel.”

“He was trying to stab you.”

“I noticed.”

Taking the fob out of my pocket, I unlock my car when it comes into view. “Then gratitude would be appropriate.”

“I followed you into a service corridor,” she points out dryly. “Look how that turned out.”

“You’re alive,” I point out.

“Covered in someone else’s blood.”

I glance sideways at her, taking in the emeralds, the blood-spattered silk, and the fierce green of her eyes. “Alive and accessorized.”

She stares at me in pure disbelief, but before she can deliver whatever scathing retort is forming, I stop us alongside my car and hold out my hand. “Your phone, Duchess.”

Her brow furrows, and her hand goes to the purse slung across her body. “You think they’ll use it to track me.”

“I know they will.”

I wait for her to argue, for her to say she needs to contact her uncle. I’m shocked when she opens her purse and hands me her cell.

Dropping it on the ground, I crush it with my heel, then I open the passenger door.

She doesn't fight or tell me she’s not getting in. She just studies me with those eyes and calmly gets in.

Somehow, her choosing to get into my car rattles me more than if I’d had to force her.

6

CLARA

My head is swimming.

Part of it is the sheer, blinding speed of the danger—the way an ordinary Saturday evening gala managed to devolve into an ambush before I could even have a glass of lukewarm champagne. But most of it is the man in the driver’s seat next to me, eyeing me like I’m a prize he hasn't decided whether to ransom or keep.

Behind us, two bodies lie motionless on the concrete floor. One is unconscious, drugged by his own syringe. The other isn't moving at all.

I can still feel the hot spray of blood across my throat and collarbone, sticky and cooling against my skin. The black silk of my dress clings to my chest, soaked dark where the spray caught me. My hands are trembling, locked in tight fists at my sides, but I'm not screaming. I'm not fainting.

Delicate heiresses faint. Whitlocks do the math.

When I was thirteen, a private charter plane went down in the Bitterroot range and took both of my parents with it in a blinding snowstorm. Overnight, I went from a little girl with scraped knees to inheriting my dad’s half of the Whitlock empire. Less than six months later, a prominent ranching magnate—a man my father had considered a brother—cornered me in our library during an estate dinner. He backed me against the mahogany shelves, his bourbon breath hot and moist against my face, his hands sliding where hands should never slide on a child.

Uncle James walked in before it went any further, ruined the man physically and financially by morning, and made a vow that defined the rest of my life. James never sheltered me after that. He didn't lock me away in some fragile ivory tower; he educated me about the world's monsters. He taught me how to read body language, how to defend myself, how to manage boardrooms, and how to handle a firearm.

"You're not helpless, Clara," James had told me when I was sixteen, watching me reload a magazine on our private range. "And you will never let a man make you a victim."

I love my uncle James and his two sons, my cousins, but I have no delusions about who they are.

Which brings me right back to the dangerous man currently steering me toward the loading exit with one hand locked around my waist and the other resting on the grip of his holstered gun.

Gabriel Reyes is everything my uncle warned me about, yet in the brief time we've interacted, he hasn't forced a single move until force became the only option. He'd stood in the gallery with his palm open, giving me a choice right up until the crosshairs closed in. And when the violence came, it was brutal, efficient, and entirely on my behalf.