Page 71 of Ruthless Enforcer

This woman who waited naked in my bed because she was done pretending that she didn't want me.

This woman who just told me she loves me without asking for anything in return.

I should tell her she's insane. I should tell her she doesn't know me well enough to love me. I should tell her that love is a liability in my world, and she's safer if she keeps her distance.

Instead, I kiss her. Slow. Thorough.

Claiming.

I roll to the side, keeping her with me, against my chest.

"I'll take that as a 'maybe later,'" she murmurs, sleepily. A few minutes later, her breathing evens out, her body going soft and pliant against mine.

I stay awake, lying here in the dark, holding my wife, and realizing that somewhere between the museum gala and this moment, I stopped thinking of her as a problem to solve.

She's not a hostage. She's not a strategic asset. She's not even just my wife.

She's Clara, and I'm completely, irrevocably fucked, because she's right—I do love her. I'm just not ready to say it out loud yet.

57

COLE

The second-floor lounge of the Helena Union Club is where powerful men come to pretend they aren't conducting business.

Governors have been made in these leather chairs. Fortunes dismantled over bourbon. Land, legislation, and other people's futures traded between men who never raise their voices because they’ve never needed to.

The silence costs four thousand dollars a month in dues.

Today, it’s worth every cent.

I walk across the room, unhurried, headed for an empty table on the far side. My ribs ache when I inhale, a sharp reminder of Gabriel Reyes’s hospitality in that concrete basement.

At least my suit looks good. My linen is crisp. My cuff links are antique silver.

A man who looks battered invites pity, and pity is the fastest route to irrelevance.

I’m halfway across the lounge when I see James Whitlock sitting alone beside the leaded-glass bay window overlooking the state capitol dome. A crystal tumbler of neat bourbon rests untouched beside his right hand. He looks sixty going on seventy-five. The gray at his temples has spread into his beard, and the lines around his mouth seem carved deeper than I remember.

Apparently, his niece marrying a Reyes hasn't agreed with him.

I alter my course without breaking stride.

“James, you look well.”

Whitlock’s pale eyes harden when he looks up and finds me standing beside the empty wingback opposite him. “Turner.”

Not good to see you. Well, that gives me a barometer of where I stand.

“Mind if I join you?” I don't wait for an answer.

He watches me pull out the chair, his gaze catching the slight stiffness in my movement before traveling over the immaculate knot of my silk tie and settling on my face.

Whitlock has always been an observant bastard. He’s known for saying he can always tell when someone’s lying to him.

Fortunately, I have no intention of lying.

"I’m surprised to see you here," Whitlock says, his voice like gravel grinding under a boot heel. "You’ve been off the grid for six weeks. No press conferences. No appearances at the state committee. Then a three-line press release withdrawing your name from the gubernatorial primary due to 'unforeseen personal considerations.' The state party was left holding an empty bag."