Total pages in book: 110
Estimated words: 106090 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 530(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 354(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106090 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 530(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 354(@300wpm)
Liam saves me from having to finish the sentence. “The security guy who’s been following you around?”
I blink. “You’ve been watching him too?”
“Hard to miss a six-foot-three stalker when you’re already doing surveillance on the same target.” His smile is wry, almost amused. “You always did like the dangerous ones.”
“Says the professional thief.”
“Former professional thief.” He tilts his glass toward me in a mock toast. “I went straight too, believe it or not. Got a legitimate job, paid my taxes, tried to pretend the last decade of my life didn’t happen. But someone’s dragging us back in whether we want it or not.” He sets the glass down. “Come with me to Canada. Help me end this. Then we can both actually move on.”
“And what’s your legitimate job?” I ask, because I can’t help myself. “Accountant? Insurance adjuster? Beekeeping?”
“Private security consulting.” He has the grace to look slightly sheepish. “Helping companies find vulnerabilities in their systems.”
“So you get paid to case buildings now.”
“Legally. With a contract and everything. I even have business cards.”
Despite everything, I feel my mouth twitch. This is the problem with Liam. He’s too easy to talk to, too easy to fall back into rhythm with. Five years of silence and within twenty minutes we’re bantering like nothing ever happened, like I didn’t walk out on him in the middle of the night with nothing but a note on the pillow and twenty million dollars buried in frozen ground.
I look at him across the table, this man I used to love, used to run with, used to trust with my life when we were doing things that could have gotten us killed. We were good together once. A team. The kind of partners who could communicate in glances and finish each other’s sentences during a job. Somewhere along the way, we became more than partners, and then somehow, we became nothing at all.
He still doesn’t know why I left. I’m not sure I could explain it even now—just that one morning I woke up next to him and knew that if I didn’t go, I never would. That the life we were living would become the only life I’d ever have. So I wrote three lines on hotel stationery, took nothing but my go bag, and disappeared. And he didn’t come looking. I don’t know if that made it better or worse. I took the heartbreak I’d caused myself and I used it to build a new life, one that didn’t involve Liam or diamonds or looking over my shoulder every time I walked down the street.
Except now the past is sitting across from me in a dive bar in Red Hook, asking me to dig up twenty million dollars from frozen ground.
“He doesn’t know,” I hear myself say. “About any of it. Who I was, what I did. He thinks I’m just Sloane’s assistant.”
“And you want to keep it that way.”
It’s not really a question either.
“I don’t know what I want.” The admission feels like pulling a tooth. “I want to be the person he thinks I am. I want to deserve the way he looks at me. I want to pretend for just a little longer that I can have a normal life with a normal future.”
“But you can’t.” Liam’s voice is gentler than I expect. “Not with this hanging over you. Not with someone hunting for a diamond that can bring your whole new life crashing down. That could get you killed.”
He’s right. I hate that he’s right.
I finish my whiskey in one long swallow and set the glass down harder than I mean to. The sound makes the bartender glance over, then look away.
“When do we leave?”
Something morphs across Liam’s face. Relief, maybe. Or gratitude. Or something more complicated that I don’t have the energy to unpack right now.
“In a couple of days,” he says. “I’ll send the details to the burner. Pack for cold—we’re talking negative thirty, maybe worse.”
“And Knox?”
“Tell him you’re going somewhere for Christmas. Family emergency, old college friend, whatever story works.”
“And if he wants to come with me?”
“Then don’t let him.” Liam’s eyes are steady on mine. “This has to stay between us. The fewer people who know, the safer everyone is. Including him.”
I nod, already calculating the lies I’m going to have to tell. The excuses. The misdirection. Knox will want to come. Knox will want to protect me, because that’s who he is, and I’m going to have to push him away to keep him safe from a past he doesn’t even know exists.
Merry fucking Christmas indeed.
“I should go.” I slide out of the booth. “He’s expecting me for dinner.”
Liam stands too, and for a moment we’re close enough that I can smell his cologne. Different than it used to be, something warmer and less sharp, but still somehow essentially him. My body remembers things my brain is trying to forget.