All He Wants For Christmas...: Flirting With Intent / Blame it on the Bikini / Restless. Kelly HunterЧитать онлайн книгу.
nations. How is that wrong?’
Ruby’s steps had quickened, her chest rising and falling rapidly. Damon walked too, silence clearly the best option for now. How the hell had he got into this mess?
Headbands were the devil’s work, he decided grimly. The next time he saw one he’d know to run.
‘I knew you had secrets,’ she said and fumbled through her satchel for her car keys. ‘I chose to spend time with you anyway. But this … I’ve got to hand it to you, Damon. Even for me this is a whole new level of secrets and lies. I knew I should have stayed away from you,’ she muttered. ‘Why the hell didn’t I?’
He had no answer for her there. ‘You can’t tell anyone, Ruby.’
‘Yes, I gathered that,’ she said, and raised a shaking hand to her head. ‘Who else knows?’
‘My immediate family. My handler. Now you. Six people in ten years.’ It wasn’t a bad effort. He didn’t think it too bad a record.
‘God.’ She looked worried and so she should be. ‘I won’t tell anyone, Damon. You have my word.’
‘And in an ideal world, your word would be enough,’ he said quietly, but this wasn’t an ideal world. He needed to secure her silence and her loyalty. Bind her to him now, with whatever he had in hand.
‘What if I said I could help you find your father?’
‘What?’
‘That’s what you want, isn’t it?’ ‘Yes, but …’ “
She didn’t, or couldn’t, finish her sentence. Typical lawyer. Always a But.
‘I’m offering to contract out to you,’ he continued. ‘In return for your silence. You get news of your father. I acquire a hold on you I currently don’t have. Everyone wins.’
‘That’s blackmail.’
‘It’s necessary,’ he cut back hard. ‘And at the end of the day you get to walk away, I get the peace of mind I need to let you walk away and the people I work for get to remain none the wiser as to what you know. That’s worth something, Ruby. More than you know.’
‘Well, aren’t you chivalrous,’ she murmured, and favoured him with a tight-lipped smile.
‘I try.’
This discussion wasn’t exactly going according to plan, decided Damon grimly. But then, nothing involving Ruby ever did.
‘I’m trying to protect you,’ he said curtly, and maybe Ruby heard the frustration in him for she eyed him uncertainly before looking to the car-park walls for answers, only there were none to be had there. He’d already looked.
‘Or I could let my superiors know I’ve broken cover with you and let them deal with the fallout. They won’t harm you, they’ll recruit you. Like it or not, you won’t have a choice. That’s the value they place on the work I do for them, Ruby. The cost of maintaining my cover. And the reason I never wanted you to know any of this in the first place.’
‘I knew you were trouble,’ she said again. ‘I knew.’
Again, Damon said nothing. It wasn’t as if she were telling him anything new.
‘How would you do it?’ she said after a time. ‘My father could be anywhere. How would you set about finding him? Where would you even start?’
‘I’d access files various authorities have on him and get you to read them. See if what they have to say fits with what you remember. See if it throws up any ideas. And then we’ll continue from there.’
‘Couldn’t you just … send me a report?’
‘Sorry, Ruby. You don’t get to stay clean while I get dirty for you. I want you with me.’
‘And equally culpable.’ Damon shrugged. The short answer being yes.
She looked ready to weep but she tilted her chin and squared her shoulders. ‘When do you need my answer on this?’
‘Now.’
‘And when would we do it?’
He gentled his tone and hoped for her sake she could handle this. ‘Just as soon as we get you back to your apartment and get into different clothes.’
‘What kind of clothes?’ Ruby was willing to be distracted by the little things. It was a start.
‘The kind that don’t stand out.’
IF RUBY could press a rewind button she would.
This day would disappear for starters.
Russell’s society luncheon would go.
She wouldn’t go so far as to wipe Damon from memory completely but there were definitely things she would have done differently when it came to dealing with him.
Such as not push him for personal information he so clearly hadn’t wanted to give.
And not allow herself to become so enamoured of the physical side of their relationship that she lost all sense of self-preservation.
Fooling around with Damon in his bedroom, with a party in full swing not six yards away. What kind of idiot behaviour was that?
She’d thought she could play with Damon without consequence. Use him, as it were.
She really had thought she could be intimate with him and come away unscathed. Wrong.
‘First a father who may or may not be guilty of the biggest heist in banking history, and now a computer hacker for a lover,’ she murmured, and a small cat peeked out from beneath her bed and regarded her solemnly. ‘I’m really not having a good run. And what the hell kind of clothes does a person wear when committing a hacking offence?’
Damon had clothes in his backpack, or so he said. He’d retired to Ruby’s bathroom to get changed.
Ruby tossed her jacket on the bed and began to rifle through her wardrobe. Jeans, they’d do. A black T-shirt she usually wore when cleaning things. Flat shoes … apart from the ones she wore around the apartment, and they were little more than slippers, flat shoes really weren’t in her vocabulary. Almost-flat shoes, by way of a pair of black patent leather pumps with black and white spotted bows across the front of them, would have to do.
She put her hair up in a ponytail, left it ornament-free and returned to the lounge room in search of Damon, the man with the vagabond lifestyle, the secrets she didn’t want to know, and a moral fluidity she couldn’t even begin to comprehend. Don’t judge.
Why did she always have to judge?
Damon had his Christmas jeans on and a grey T-shirt and the battered black backpack slung across his shoulder now looked half-empty. She’d never seen him looking quite so downmarket before. Or so dangerous.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked tentatively.
‘Out for some fast food.’ He looked her over, frowned when he got to her shoes. ‘Lose the shoes, Ruby. Or at least lose the bows.’
Fortunately for him, the bows came off without a great deal of persuasion and would go on again under the influence of superglue. ‘Do I have to eat the fast food?’ she said.
‘It’s tastier than it looks.’
‘Only if you have the palate of a two-year-old.’
He smiled at that and some of the tension between them dissipated. ‘It’s my show, Ruby,’ he said softly. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Wait!’ she said hastily. ‘You don’t want to talk about it first?