Total pages in book: 767
Estimated words: 732023 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 3660(@200wpm)___ 2928(@250wpm)___ 2440(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 732023 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 3660(@200wpm)___ 2928(@250wpm)___ 2440(@300wpm)
“Then what is it like?” Liam bites off the words.
“He gives them a hug if they lose a game. Or he’ll give a player a massage if he has a tight muscle. Things like that.” I shake my head, struggling to explain. We couldn’t go to the authorities with something like that, couldn’t risk everything on a bad feeling. What if no one believed us? What if Coach Price retaliated against Cody for saying something? The boys already started pairing off when they go to the locker room, but it’s only a matter of time.
“What was the money for?” Liam asks, his voice strangely calm. Gone is the panting, raging man who hovered over me only a few minutes ago. This is the high-paid security operative. “Were you trying to pay him to leave?”
“Kind of. It was for a video.”
“A video of what?”
“I don’t know,” I confess, my cheeks burning in the dark. “Laney did some digging at the school in Austin where he worked last. Apparently there was some scandal that they hushed up. And this guy had some kind of incriminating video file.”
“So you were going to buy the video. And then what?”
I blink. “What do you mean?”
His voice goes subzero. “What were you going to do with the file, Samantha?”
That was the easy part, wasn’t it? Only we never got that far. “We’d blackmail him, make him leave the boys alone, make him resign his position.”
A low growl. “Did it occur to you that he might have bought your silence a different way? By hurting you? Threatening you? Killing you?”
My stomach turns over. “We would have been careful.”
The long pause that follows makes me think of every bad thing that could have happened to Laney or Cody. If anything would happen to me, I know that Liam North would blame himself.
“Careful,” he says, his voice hollow. “There is no amount of careful that would be good enough. How dare you risk your life like that? Do you know what I would do if you—”
Shock makes me breathless. “You risk your life all the time. You send men and women to risk their lives for North Security. But I can’t do the same thing?”
“No, goddamn you.”
I flinch from the venom in his voice. “That’s not fair.”
“Life isn’t fair, Samantha. That’s something Cody and his teammates already learned, and it’s something you’re going to have to learn, too.”
“So you aren’t going to do anything to help?”
“It’s not my business.”
Acid rises in my throat. “What if you had said that about me?”
Something dark moves through the forest of his eyes. “I didn’t.”
“What’s so different between me and Cody? Why would you help me but not him?”
“Don’t ask me that, Samantha.”
“No! I’ve had enough of being quiet, of being the good little girl who does what she’s told. If you won’t help him, I’m going to.”
A harsh laugh. “Don’t push me. I’m about two seconds away from locking you up.”
Indignation and a strange secret desire rise inside me. The indignation wins. “You can’t lock me up. I’m an adult now.”
“Almost an adult. And as I said before, almost doesn’t count.”
He makes me so angry, there may as well be steam rising from my ears. I clutch the pillow tighter, wondering about whether I should throw it at him. But then I would lose my shield.
I don’t know why a twelve-year-old girl he’d never met mattered to him when a boy who lives in the same city doesn’t, but I’m not above using that to my advantage. “What if I ask you to?”
He freezes. “Ask me to what?”
I stand up from the bed and take a step closer to him—and almost, almost touch him. “You can use my violin money. If you buy the video, he won’t be able to hurt you.”
“You want this from me?”
A solemn nod.
The closet light flicks on, blinding me. His body blocks it, and then he’s getting dressed right in front of me. Worn jeans pulled on over his briefs. A T-shirt covering his abs. I’ve never watched him get dressed before, but there’s something studiously casual about his movements.
As if he’s hiding a black hole of emotion.
I’m wearing a tank top and panties, the same as I do every night. The same as I was when I walked in here, but I feel more exposed now that he’s wearing regular clothes.
The closet light casts his face in sharp contrast, the stark handsomeness of his features abutted against pure dark. “I’m not going to give that man a single goddamn cent, but if I did, it sure as hell wouldn’t be your violin money.”
There’s a boulder in my chest, crashing left and right. “You’re going to do it?”
“I’m going to do it,” he says, his tone grim, and I can’t shake the feeling that something powerful is in play, more than a guardian doing a favor for his ward.