Total pages in book: 55
Estimated words: 51832 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 259(@200wpm)___ 207(@250wpm)___ 173(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 51832 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 259(@200wpm)___ 207(@250wpm)___ 173(@300wpm)
It's a few hours before the party, when a boatload of dresses arrives for me, compliments of Blake. I choose a black lace sleeveless gown, that flares and hits just below the knees. It’s fitted at the bust and kind of a conservative sexy but none of that matters to me. What matters is the flare, which makes a weapon easy to hide. I study myself in the mirror and decide I do really love this dress, which is actually more of the result of Blake’s wife’s shopping, not him. Same goes for the strappy black sandals. And the hair tools that have my hair shiny and sleek, and the makeup that allowed me to gloss up my lips and add a sparkle to them.
Luke appears in the doorway of the bathroom, a vision of hotness in an expensive blue suit, that not only turns his eyes into an ocean of blue, but fits him like it’s custom. “You look beautiful, Ana. Too bad I can’t take you to dinner and show you just how beautiful.”
I step in front of him and run my hand over his lapel. “And you, sir, look like the hottest man I’ve ever known.”
“Careful, baby, or we won’t make it to the party.”
“We can still run away and regroup.” I say, but it’s a joke. Mostly. We aren’t running away, but I do have a bad feeling about tonight.
“I thought you didn’t want to run away?” he challenges.
“Okay, smartass. We both know I never wanted to run away. And we can’t step back anyway. Obviously, Kurt’s not going to. I wonder if we’ll get our weapons in the door?”
“Probably not, but Savage and Adam will be armed. I just talked to Adam. They’re certain they’ll slide right in, weapons and all, and ready to help us, and set our plan in motion.”
The plan, I think, isn’t much of a plan but it’s all we have.
Savage is going to get up close and personal with Phillips’s beautiful wife, Lily, who is twenty years his junior. That way, if we end up with a gun to our heads, she will, too. Savage volunteered for the job because he says, he’s the one who’d really pull the trigger if he had to do it.
I don’t believe he’d kill her just to kill her.
But I don’t have to believe it. He’s a scary-looking dude. He’ll make Phillips and his wife believe it.
Chapter Thirty-One
Ana
We exit the front door to find a fancy, black BMW waiting for us. “What’s this?” I ask. “And please tell me we didn’t steal this one.”
“Rented,” Luke replies, opening the passenger door for me. “We want to blend in with the money there tonight.”
I slide inside the car and run my hand over the leather console, the new smell of the interior telling me this was not a cheap evening prop. Luke climbs in beside me, smelling all masculine and wonderful, compliments of the Airbnb bath soap, but it’s really all about his scent, his presence. They say we react to each other’s scent, that it’s part of our attraction to one another. I’m fairly certain I was turned on by this man in every possible way from that first night we met.
He hands me a phone. “This has an app downloaded on it. It’s marked with an X. It’s going to become the cloud for any phone you get close to. We hope. It’s some new technology one of Blake’s tech buddies created and obviously the reason he was worried about Parker and our phones. The hope is we can take over Phillips’s iCloud and find out what he’s really up to tonight. He obviously plans to have a conversation with us, which means opportunity won’t be an issue.”
“We hope that’s all he plans.”
“If it’s going to get bloody, baby, it will be all over the papers. You know he knows we’ll shoot a million and one photos of us at his place tonight. It’s possible he really just wants the package and he believes we can get it for him.”
“Yes, but how does he know we’re involved at all?” I ask, and it’s a question I should have asked before now.
“Well, we know your boss was involved. We know your boss had you monitored in hopes of finding the package. The links that connect us to Phillips are pretty tight.”
He’s right, again, of course, but everything about this night still feels wrong. And as Kurt always said, never make wrong right. He was talking about a gut feeling, and yet that statement applies to his plan for tonight. He wants to make murder right. But then, his entire life has been about murder, killing for the government, and making wrong right by way of killing. That bothers me when I think too hard about it, which is why I don’t think too hard about it, ever.