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)
Without warning or ceremony, he drags me onto his lap, fingers working quickly at my jeans, finding their way inside to the slick center. I jerk at the intrusion. Too much friction, too fast. “Wait,” I whisper.
“Now,” he says, unbending.
I try to clamp my legs shut, but it only makes the pressure more intense. “Tell me we can have more than this. Tell me you’ll see me on the tour. Tell me you’ll wait for me to come back.”
He doesn’t tell me any of those things. His silence is answer enough. My body doesn’t realize it’s lost—the climax builds in pleasure-drenched waves, leaving me panting and sated on the lap of a man who’s just turned me away.
His lips brush my forehead, chaste even as my arousal dries on his fingers. “There is no future for you and me. I’m no longer your guardian. You’re no longer my ward.”
Tears dampen my lashes. “We could make something new.”
He pushes me gently off his lap, and I stagger like a deer on my legs for the first time. “You’re forgetting something, sweetheart. I don’t want that.”
Every molecule in my body shouts at me to push him, to shake him, to make him see that we can work. Whether he’s trying to protect me or protect himself, the result is the same. I can’t make him want this. And I don’t think he’ll ever really see me as an adult while I live under his roof.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
There are two skulls in composer Joseph Haydn’s tomb. His head was stolen by phrenologists and a replacement skull was put in his tomb. In 1954, the real skull was restored, but the substitute was not removed.
LIAM
My hands are steeped in blood and dirt. I’ve been working through the obstacle course we use for training for the past five hours, pretending that my life is at stake—because in some ways it is. I set every barrier to its highest point, every weight to its heaviest. I’m still alive, which means we really need to make it harder. Torn muscles ache everywhere in my body. I wipe the sweat and grit from my eyes.
I started this afternoon, and the sun set a little while ago. Footsteps approach from the house. My senses are dulled by pain, which is the point.
“Go the fuck away,” I tell Josh. He’s come to check on me every hour, offering water and energy bars and once, the use of his pistol. Finish the fucking job, if that’s what you want, he said. He should have given it to Elijah, who probably wouldn’t mind using it.
“I might,” comes a feminine voice. Samantha. “I have some questions first.”
I drag myself into a sitting position, leaning back against a 4x4 staked into the ground. The world tilts wildly until I close my eyes. Something nudges my hand. A bottle of water. I take a swallow, downing half the liquid before I take a breath.
Samantha kneels in front of me, the way I did so often as she played the violin. She holds out something in her hand, her expression solemn. It’s a couple of ibuprofens. I stare at the pills, so innocuous and small, so ordinary when the world is shattering. I swallow them down and finish the rest of the water. “Thanks,” I say gruffly.
“How did you know my father?” she says, her brown eyes as clear as I’ve ever seen them in the deepening night. “The real answer this time.”
“I wasn’t friends with him,” I admit. “We hadn’t ever met.”
She takes a seat a few feet away, her legs crossed. She’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt with her high school crest on it—which makes her look like a child. She isn’t a child anymore, but that doesn’t change what she is to me. Like the bird that fell from the nest before it could fly.
“Go on,” she says.
“He was a spy,” I say, my voice abrupt. Businesslike. Because this had been my business for so long. “He took money under the table from a few different countries, but mostly Russia. It was my job to identify men like that and then eliminate them. But sometimes we would wait. If they could be useful, we’d keep them around, let them lead us to even bigger targets.”
Her eyes are troubled, though she doesn’t look particularly surprised. It’s as if I’m reminding her of something she already knew. Children are smart, even when they don’t know all the facts. They know what’s important. “That’s how you knew him? You were watching him?”
“Those were my orders, except he started getting too erratic.”
She’s quiet a moment. “So your team eliminated him?”
“No, sweetheart. I did that.”
A flinch. “You were just doing your job.”
Even now she wants to make excuses for me. “My orders were to continue to watch him. They wanted to see what happened next. I already knew, and I wasn’t going to wait around. So I slipped a little something into his special dark roast coffee beans, the ones he guarded so fucking religiously that no one else could drink it.”