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  "Coming up?" Roman asked, gesturing toward the stairs.

  "You go ahead. I think I am going to have a cup of tea before I tuck in."

  "Goodnight, Else," he said, running a hand down my arm before moving up the stairs.

  I waited ten minutes, standing right in my doorway like a weirdo, listening to him move around and settle down in bed before I dashed up the stairs as silently as I could and made my way into my room, going straight through to the bathroom and slipping off the shoes.

  Adrenaline and fear gone, the pain was settling in. The backs of my heels were cut open and, as Paine said, there was a fair amount of blood smeared onto the once-expensive ballet flats. I reached into the shower and turned on the heads as I stripped out of my clothes.

  Even though he wasn't exactly a scary guy, I was glad to have Rome in the house that night. It was silly to feel unsafe locked into a gated community with a full time staff of guards and a state of the art security system, but after the events of the night, I did. It was nice to have a man around. If for nothing other than my peace of mind.

  Rome's house, if you could believe it, was a step up from mine. He had a much better relationship with his father than I did with mine. This was evidenced by the fact that he worked at his father's tech company, one of many businesses he owned and the only one that wasn't medical or pharmaceutical. Rome and his father, Rhett, were in no way nerdy or even all that up-to-date on technological advances, but they were shrewd businessmen who knew that technology was where the money was. So after college, Roman came back to Navesink Bank and got a job making high six-figures and had something I called a mini-mansion one street over from where I grew up. In an actual mansion, like he had grown up in as well.

  That being said, his house was big and lonely and, when given the option, he always chose to stay with me.

  I dressed, slathered on some triple antibiotic and big band-aids on my heels, then climbed into bed. It was well on its way to two in the morning and I knew sleep wasn't going to come easy, despite having to get up for work at seven.

  My job was another thing my father hated.

  See, my dad worked in energy. As in, the not-so-green kinds: coal, oil, gas.

  I also worked in energy, but in the green kind: wind and solar.

  My father made tens of millions a year. I made the mid-low six figures.

  His gripe was not necessarily in the kind of energy I worked in. Even he knew that green was going to be the way of the future. His issue was with the fact that I worked for his competitor. In public, he would just throw an arm around me and claim I had inherited his enterprising spirit. In private, I got lectures.

  Yeah, twenty-eight years old and being lectured by my father.

  It made it really hard to feel like the adult I was at times.

  But, aside from the townhouse, I made my own way in life. My trust fund sat and didn't get touched and I worked to pay for my utilities, my car, my hair, my nights out on occasion, my wardrobe. I took care of myself. Before my mother passed away when I was twelve, she told me that that was what she wanted more than anything for me- independence. She begged me to never let myself be dependent on a man. Being her dying wish, and perhaps an insight into the kind of life my mother lived being dependent on my father, I threw myself into that mission with every bit of determination I possessed. I got good grades at school, never settling for a B when I could get an A. It was the same attitude that got me through college, then got me a good job at a Fortune 250 company despite being one of the youngest and most inexperienced candidates.

  I never settled. I got what I set my mind to. I never gave up.

  So, even given the minor setback that was being chased by two gang members through the streets of Navesink Bank, I was not done. I was not settling for non-answers. I was not giving up.

  I just had to come up with a new strategy.

  The problem there being, I was obviously no kind of detective. And, good stamina aside, I had no real skills to help me in this particular mission. I couldn't involve Rome. I didn't want to involve my father. But I obviously needed some kind of help.

  Top of the next day's agenda was to go online and find out what kind of PI or whatever I could hire or bend the ear of in the area. Even if all they could do was point me in the right direction, it would be well worth whatever fee I would need to pay. I couldn't keep snooping around and putting my life in jeopardy to find answers.

  I needed to find someone who could just... give some to me.

  Three

  Elsie

  I had two calls out to two different PIs I had come across when I searched around on my lunch break. One, to a man named Sawyer who boasted a resume that made me slightly uncomfortable to even think about, full of information on his time in the military and the extensive training he had done afterward. The second was to someone who, if his website was anything to go by, seemed younger, a bit more in touch with millennial generations and their penchant for broadcasting their lives online. His name was Barrett and he claimed he could find answers to any questions you might have.

  Call me crazy, but I was leaning toward the latter of the two. Maybe it was for the sole reason that the Sawyer guy sounded intimidating and I had a tendency to feel nervous around men who reminded me of my father. So the Barrett guy seemed more approachable and, therefore, the more likely candidate for the job.

  I drove home feeling productive and hopeful. I needed to get some answers. I needed to know what was really going on. I couldn't just go on with my life and pretend that things weren't seriously messed up and my father and everyone around me was largely ignoring it.

  I pulled into my garage and parked, grabbing my purse, closing the garage door, and going up toward my front steps. It was a habit Roman picked on me about, telling me it was safer for me to enter my house from the door through the garage. I tended to call him a worrywart and blow it off. It was stupid to go through the garage when I needed to pick up my mail in the box by my front door.

  But when a shadow stepped out from beside my steps, sending my pulse into a frantic stammering and my heart up into my throat, I maybe finally understood his point.

  My mouth immediately opened to scream as I gripped my keys hard, trying to slip them between my fingers like I had heard some guy on the news tell women to do when they were walking home or something.

  "Don't scream," a somewhat familiar voice, a smooth and sexy voice, said as he stepped out of the shadows.

  "Jesus, Paine!" I hissed, my hand moving over my pounding heart. "Do you always hide in the shadows at women's houses?" I asked, then looked down the road where a black Challenger was parked. "How did you even get in here? This neighborhood is gated."

  "Yeah, it is," he agreed, tucking his hands into his pockets.

  "Care to explain?"

  "I know the night guard, babygirl. Just a bit of luck that when I showed up, planning to wait for you at the gate, he was on. Let me in."

  Well, that was seriously messed up. Friend or not, the guard had no idea if Paine's intentions were to rape and murder me in my own home.

  "How did you even know who I am, let alone where I lived?"

  "Babygirl," he said, giving me a charming smile.

  "That's not an answer."

  "Money like you, name like yours, name like your not-boyfriend's, all I had to do was ask around and I got a name. Elsie Bay, daughter of Edward Bay, the biggest schmuck this side of the city."

  I felt myself laugh, caught off guard. It was something me and my close friends might have said about my father in secret, in whispers, but no one else ever had the balls to say something like that in a loud, confident voice. "It's still really creepy, Paine. Why are you here?"

  "Invite me in for coffee," he suggested, his breath hanging in the cold air for a second.

  "No."

  "No?" he asked, head tilting, brows drawing together, like maybe he didn't understand the word.

  "No. It's a co
mplete sentence," I clarified and his lips tipped up.

  "Smart."

  "Yes, I am. Now tell me why you're here before I call the owner of this complex and have you escorted off the premises and your friend fired."

  His smile spread, showing me his perfect white teeth again. He really was ridiculously good looking. I wasn't unaffected either. I was a bit of a workaholic since I started at my company, wanting to prove myself. And when I wasn't working, I was hanging with Rome or girlfriends and having my weekly Sunday dinners at my father's. I wasn't even sure the last time I had made time for a man. So, to put it perfectly frankly, I was horny. I was horny and Paine was attractive and charming and he had this tiny little hint of danger that made my lady bits clench in what I was convinced was a prehistoric, biological impulse to mate with an alpha male to pass on good genes to a new generation.

  Yeah, well. That wouldn't be happening. First, because I had an IUD. Second, because I had absolutely no intentions on giving into some primal drive and having sex with Paine. No matter how much my belly fluttered when he called me babygirl or how nice of arms he had. So my body needed to chill the eff out.

  "Elsie, we need to talk about why you were being chased by drug dealing pimps last night."

  Well, that was blunt.

  I cringed inwardly at the words 'drug dealers' and 'pimps' even though I knew that was what they were. A part of me flinched away from those... professions on principle. But, more than that, there was more of a personal reason I didn't like to be reminded of that. A personal reason I was praying to all hell that the Barrett guy could help me with.

  "I don't see how it is any of your concern. You did a nice thing. If you do things solely because you want something out of it, even something as simple as explanations, then maybe you shouldn't be doing nice things in the first place."

  "You'd rather I didn't help you?"

  "I'd rather you didn't ask around about me, find out where I lived, then hide in the dark waiting for me to get home so you could badger me. That is what I would rather."

  "Badger you?" he asked, taking slow steps toward me. "Is that what I'm doing?" he asked, his voice soft. It was soft in a way that was meant to be sexy. And, well, it was. It was sexy and I felt myself retreating, knowing it was only going to lead to somewhere not good (but, oh, so good) if he got too close to me. My back hit the railing to my staircase, stopping me. Paine closed the last step between us. "Babygirl, if I was badgering you, you would know it," he said, his hand raising and tucking my hair behind my ear. His fingers brushed down my bare neck in a way that made me do a small, involuntary shiver before they trailed over my shoulder and down my arm. His fingers brushed over the back of my hand as my eyes held his, my mouth parting slightly and even I knew it was an invitation. But a second later, it fell open wider when I felt his hand tug my keys out of my palm.

  "Hey!" I yelped as he jingled them and moved from me, jogging up my stairs and stopping in front of my door before I even fully realized what just happened. He stole my keys! He stole my keys and was using them to get into my house. "That's it, I'm calling the cops," I said, reaching for my phone as I looked up at him.

  "Jesus, you finance that Porsche working as a fucking janitor, baby?" he asked, smiling over at me as he sifted through my keys, apparently completely unconcerned about me calling the police. "Ah, here it is," he said and, sure enough, slipped the right key into the lock.

  What, was he some kind of burglar when he was younger? How did he know what key would work?

  "Better get up here and punch in this code, Elsie, or the cops will be here in under five minutes."

  "That was the plan," I said, waving my phone around where I had dialed in the nine and one, but hadn't added the last one or hit send.

  "We both know you're not calling the cops so get your pretty ass up here and punch the code."

  I looked down at my feet for a second, stuck inside clogs that made my lip curl anytime I looked at them, but were the only shoes I could wear that didn't have backs to rub on my cut heels.

  He was right; I wasn't going to call the cops.

  Why? I had no idea. But I wasn't.

  I hauled it up the staircase and gave him a pointed brow lift until he turned away as I punched in the code and the warning beeping finally stopped. When I looked back at Paine, he was casually looking around my house. I couldn't tell from his impassive expression if he was impressed or disgusted or simply unaffected.

  "How're your feet?" he asked, nodding down at my clogs that I was in the process of kicking out of.

  "Fine," I said, lifting my chin slightly. "Now, say what you want to say and get gone. I need to get dinner and make a few calls."

  "You cook?" he asked, craning his head into the doorway to the dining room.

  "No," I said and, for the first time, felt a little embarrassed by that fact. In my normal friend group, everyone grew up privileged like me and Rome, with maids and cooks on the payroll, so it wasn't weird that none of us knew a whisk from a monkey wrench.

  "So let's order in," he said, moving into my dining room, making his way toward my kitchen, leaving me to follow behind like a little lost puppy, not the actual owner of the house.

  "Um, excuse me but I didn't invite you in, let alone invite you for dinner."

  "I know. Who taught you your manners? They should be ashamed of themselves."

  A strange snorting sound burst out of me, making my hand slap down over my mouth in embarrassment. I didn't... snort. That wasn't like me at all. Paine hauled himself up onto my island, giving me a warm smile as I struggled to get my composure back. "You do understand why I don't want a strange man in my house when I live alone, right?"

  "I do," he nodded.

  "And yet you're barging in here and inviting yourself to dinner."

  "Baby, we aren't strangers."

  "Ah, yeah we are."

  "Really? We are? How weird that I know your name, your best friend/ not-boyfriend's name, that you like your coffee sweet but without actual sugar because, I'm assuming, you like to keep that tight body tight. I know you have good, but understated taste. And I know that you're into something. As in, way in. As in, over your head. In turn, you know where I live, what I do, that I have two sisters and that I have better manners than you. I'd say strangers don't know that much about each other."

  On a sigh, I dropped my purse down on the counter. "You're impossible."

  "And you're headstrong as fuck."

  "I'm not headstrong, I'm cautious."

  "Cautious about me, who saved you. And headstrong about not sharing why you're involved with a street gang."

  "Because it's none of your business! You're not my boyfriend. You're not my father. You're not even my friend. So why the hell do you care what I am involved in?"

  "Because," he said, his voice still as calm and soothing and, yes, sexy (damn it) as ever while mine kept getting increasingly frustrated, "babygirl, I don't think you have the slightest clue how dangerous those guys are."

  "Really? It wasn't me that they were chasing last night? Weird. It totally felt like me. And it felt pretty scary and dangerous. Huh. Guess that was all my imagination."

  "Cute," he said, hopping off the island and moving toward where I was leaned against the counter, planting his hands on either side of my body, his thumbs pressing into my hips, forcing me to crane my neck up to keep eye contact as my body urged me to wiggle my hips against his. Christ, I needed to have a serious session with my vibrator when he left. "Baby, they kill people. They kill people without thinking, without blinking."

  I swallowed hard, believing him. It certainly seemed like they were capable of that. I nodded tightly. "Okay. I got it. Thank you for your concern. You can go."

  The side of his lips tipped up as his head ducked down slightly, our foreheads almost touching as his hands left the counter and rested on my hips. "Is that what you really want?"

  At this point, my nether regions were seriou
sly threatening to get up and detach themselves from my body if I didn't inform him that, no, that wasn't what I wanted. That, in fact, what I wanted was for him to grab me and give it to me hot and hard right there in my kitchen.

  I wet my lips and fought to clear my mind. "No."

  "No?" he asked, ducking his head lower and I could feel his warm breath on my neck, making my head tilt the other way slightly to invite more of the sensation.

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. "No."

  "What do you want then, babygirl?" he asked, his lips close to my ear, his words making my sex clench hard.

  God, I needed to pull it together.

  "I want you to order dinner while I go get out of my work clothes. Then I want you to tell me everything you know about the Third Street gang."

  Whoa. Where the hell did that come from? That was not, was absolutely not what I wanted. That was like the last thing I wanted. First, I wanted some good, hot sex. Then I wanted him to get the hell out of my business.

  Paine moved backward, brows furrowed slightly, like he was just as surprised as I was. God, was I that obvious about my sexual frustration? I felt like a dog in heat for chrissakes. "Chinese or Italian?"

  "What?" I asked, my brain somehow taking that dog in heat thought and turning it into a doggy style against the kitchen island thought.

  "For dinner," he clarified, smiling in a way that made me think that maybe, just maybe, he knew exactly what my dirty brain was thinking.

  "Oh, um... Italian," I decided, finding my common sense enough to plant my hands on his very solid, very nice chest and push him back a foot. Space, I needed it. A few feet, yards, miles. "There's, ah, a menu for Famiglia on top of the microwave. Order whatever you want. Everything is good. I'll, ah, be right back," I said, not chancing a look at him as I all but ran from the room and stormed up the stairs.