Micah drove sedately through the afternoon Philadelphia traffic, which was as bad or worse than Boston or New York in his estimation.
Despite how carefully he was driving, not indulging in any of his usual maneuverings to slip through the rolling gridlock, Kylie seemed to vibrate with tension. Her hand was locked around the door’s armrest. Her other hand gathered the fabric of her black dress in her fist. Her throat worked as she swallowed hard.
He asked her, “Do you get carsick?”
“No. I’m fine.”
Micah drove even more gently, finessing the brakes at stop lights to alight as delicately as a butterfly and accelerating like a light breeze. “If you need me to pull over, let me know.”
“I’m fine.”
Once they were out on the NJ-73 South highway leading from Philadelphia back to Atlantic City, Micah put the car on cruise control and held it rock-solid in the center of the lane. “You feeling better?”
“I’m not carsick.”
“It’s two hours back to AC.”
“I know how far it is. Just get me out of Philadelphia.”
Micah accelerated to a comfortable number above the speed limit. “Your wish is my command.”
After a couple entirely silent hours of Kylie staring out the passenger window and her knuckles bleached from squeezing her fists white, Micah pulled into the Ocean Resort’s parking garage and jogged around the car to open her door for her.
She stumbled, her ankles bending as she wobbled in her high-heeled shoes.
“Jesus, Kylie. What the hell happened in there?”
“Nothing.”
He held the door to the elevators for her. “Are you sure?”
“I’m fine.”
They rode up to the lobby in silence, staring at the doors in parallel.
“I say, are you sure there’s not something—”
“Do you have the first installment of the money or not?”
Micah said gently, “Let’s stop at the front desk. It should have been couriered over.”
She scowled. “People just walk around with packets of that kind of money and hand them to hotel desks?”
“I’ll have to sign for it.”
She rolled her lovely dark eyes. “Oh, well, if you have to provide a signature for them to hand it to you, I’m sure it’s safe as houses.”
Micah chuckled, and the elevator doors slid open to the crowd milling around the lobby. “Here we are.”
At the front desk, Micah asked for the package, signed for it, and handed the shoebox-sized parcel to Kylie to hold while they rode up to their suite.
Kylie pressed the package against her chest and folded her arms over it. She ducked her head and looked around wildly, flinching when a couple approached the desk window next to theirs.
As they walked, he whispered, “A little more casual, perhaps.”
“Yeah, sure.” She didn’t budge.
Micah rested his hand on the small of her back as they neared the elevator. She didn’t move away, so he kept it there.
When they were inside their suite and the door closed, Kylie dropped to her knees and ripped the package apart.
She was feral, tearing at the rigid plastic with her teeth and fingernails, desperately clawing it open.
Micah said, “Hey, hey! Are you hungry or somethin’? It’s almost lunchtime. I can order up some room service.”
Kylie ripped open the last plastic layer that shrink-wrapped the bills into a hard block.
Packs of hundred-dollar bills spilled over the royal blue carpeting, the gray-green bricks interrupting the gold scrollwork design. “How do I count this? How do I know if there’s enough?”
She began tearing at the bank wrapper on one of the packs.
“Hang on, Kylie! They’re C-notes. You can see they’re all hundreds by riffling the ends, see?” Micah dragged his thumb over the end of one of the bundles, an unmoving flip animation of “100” and sage tracery. “There are a hundred Benjamins in each pack, so that’s ten grand each. We should have twelve normal-sized packs and an extra half. Let’s lay them out.”
Sweat beaded on her forehead, and tears smudged her eyes.
He dealt the packs out in a three-by-four grid, showing there were twelve, and tossed the half-bundle at the bottom. “And then there’s this empty suit.”
“They’re all—that’s a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars?”
“Yeah.” Micah picked up each stack in turn, flipping the ends to assure her they were all hundreds. “What’s going on with you?”
“And they’re not counterfeit.”
“Fresh from the bank.”
Kylie gathered the stacks of cash and stuffed them back in the end of the ripped-open bag. “Nothing.”
“There’s obviously—hey, wait!”
With a flick of a furtive glance, Kylie snagged the torn parcel, ducked out from under Micah’s hand on her arm where he was trying to comfort her, and bolted for the door.
Micah was far taller and had at least a foot of reach on her, so though Kylie had the door open and was starting to slip around the end, Micah reached over her head and slammed the door shut. “What the hell is going on?”
“Nothing—none of your—let me go!”
“Are you running out on me? Are you trying to go back on our deal?” he demanded.
“I just need to go. I need to get out.”
“We had a deal. I’m paying you half a million to get me in to see Salvatore Grande.”
“No, you’re coercing me. You’re using me like a prostitute. I have to go.”
“If you don’t want to sleep with me, we can renegotiate the money. I’ve never coerced a woman in my life and don’t plan to start now.”
“I just need to get out. I need to leave.”
“You can leave if you want, but you’re not taking the money unless you do what I’m paying you for, which is getting me in to see Salvatore Grande and getting him to do what we need.”
Kylie stopped jerking at the door and fell to her knees, clutching the money to her chest. “I don’t want to try to rip off a Mob boss. He’ll kill me. He’ll do horrible things to me and then kill me.”
“With half a million dollars up front and probably more later, you can move somewhere else and get lost. He’ll never find you.”
“That’s not the only problem,” she said.
Dark thoughts swirled in Micah’s head. “Are they coming for me? Did you rat me out to Salvatore Grande, and you just came back here to get the money and get out before his enforcers show up?”
Kylie shook her head, and her glossy black curls swayed around her face as she sobbed with her head down. “No, I wouldn’t rat you out. I’m not a rat. I’m not.”
“You wouldn’t be trying to renege on our deal unless there was a reason. What’s the reason, Kylie?”
She was still shaking her head and hiccuping. “Why did you even pick me? You shouldn’t have known that I could get you in to see Salvatore Grande in the first place. And why would you offer me so much money for my body for a month? Plenty of girls in Atlantic City are a sure thing for the night. It would’ve been a lot cheaper to get a new girl every night than to make me that offer. I can understand that if someone hated me, if they wanted to degrade me, and that’s why they might try to force me into doing something like that. Did you hate me so soon?”
Micah slapped the security latch over the door’s knob and flipped the double bolt. It wouldn’t keep her from leaving, but it would give him a second to slam the door if she tried to jump ship again. “I don’t hate you at all.”
“Then why? Why would you offer me a stupid amount of money for sex if you didn’t want to be able to tell me what to do, to be able to command me to suck your dick or take it up the ass, if you didn’t want to treat me like a whore?”
“I don’t want to—” God, it sounded crass now. “After that night at the Borgata, I couldn’t get you out of my head. I thought about you all week. I didn’t want to make you a business proposition that would get me into Don Grande’s office. I wanted to seduce you and take you to bed again. I wanted to bring you on board with my business and bend you over my desk in my office in London. I couldn’t get you out of my head.”
“I was conning you. You of all people knew what I was.”
Micah admitted, “Yeah, but like you said, game recognizes game, and I wanted to play games with you.”
Kylie sighed and wiped her face.
“But look, if you don’t want to play games, I’ll pay you another buck-twenty-five just for the introduction to Don Grande and nothing else.” He squatted down so he was closer to eye-level with where she sat on the floor. “So the question is, Kylie, do you want two-fifty for getting me into Don Grande’s office and going along with the story? You can skip town with that just fine.”
She hiccuped and wouldn’t talk.
“What else is going on? What did you do?”
Kylie whispered, “When I was in Salvatore Grande’s office, he said he knew where my sister was. He was taunting me, holding it over my head.”
Micah nodded. “Grande isn’t the only one who has that information.”
Kylie looked up at him through the messy curtain of her hair. “What?”
“I know a guy who might be able to hook us up with that information,” Micah said.
Her eyes were puffy from crying, but she squinted at him. “You ‘know a guy?’ You sure you’re not connected?”
Micah had never said he wasn’t. “More like I’ve got friends in low places.”
She chuckled and snorted, looking away. Her nose was reddened from crying, too.
Micah held a hand out to her. “Come on. Let’s get you some lunch. My mom always said that when you hate everyone in the world, you need to eat. And if everyone in the world hates you, you need some sleep.”
“Your mom sounds smart.”
Yeah, she was, except for her taste in men. “Which is it, little one?”
Kylie nodded, thinking but perhaps still on the verge of tears. “Eat?”
“Okay. I’ll order us some lunch from room service. You go wash your face and take a deep breath.”
Instead, Kylie scrambled for her phone and dialed it. She used her thumbs to dial out a number, not just select a contact.
Micah withdrew his hand.
She said, “I have to call Salvatore.”
“Not yet, right? We were going to wait a few days before you made him the fantastic offer of free scientific authentication.”
Kylie said into her phone, “M.P.? Can I please talk to Mr. Grande? It’s really important. It’s about something we were just discussing. No, I’ll hold. It’s fine.”
Micah grabbed her wrist. “What are you doing?”
Kylie yanked her arm away and covered the phone with her hand. “Quiet! Please! It’s about my sister.” She glanced at the phone, startled. “Hello? Mr. Grande, sir?”
Micah sat back on the floor and watched her.
Her delicate hands gripped the phone, smashing it against her face. Her eyes were squeezed shut, puffy eyelids rolling over her long, dark eyelashes. A teardrop ballooned from the corner of her eye and traced a line toward the phone.
As he watched, his forearms resting on his knees, Kylie’s eyes flared open, and she glared at him. Gathering her legs underneath her, she stood and ran into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
A hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars littered the floor around him.
Micah scooped the packets together, carrying them to the coffee table and dumping them there.
Kylie didn’t seem impressed to have over a hundred grand sitting at her feet.
Instead, she’d called a mafia boss while on the verge of tears.
Well, she’d said it was about her sister.
He walked over to the suite’s kitchenette and tapped on his phone, reordering the same sandwich and soup she’d wanted for lunch the day before and a burger for himself from room service.
She’d been in such a hurry to start the scam rolling.
Like Don Grande was really in her head.
It was as if Kylie owed the Mob a hell of a lot of money or something.
Micah looked toward the bedroom.
How had she gotten out of the eighty-thousand-dollar scam at the Borgata he’d pulled to test her, anyway?
He scrubbed his hands over his face.
Dammit, he’d assumed she’d talked her way out of it because he’d left several big enough cracks for her to slip through. That fake ID he’d booked the room at the Borgata under wasn’t even close to a real New Jersey driver’s license. Jesus, the lettering was wrong on it, and the home address didn’t exist.
If she owed Don Grande eighty thousand dollars for paying off the Borgata for her, he might have pressured her to turn on Micah. She’d had no money before today. Eighty grand is a hell of a lot of pressure.
He walked over and tried the door to the bedroom.
Locked.
He pounded on it. “Kylie!”
The bedroom door clicked open.
She stepped out and slumped against the wall. “We have a meeting with him at one o’clock Wednesday afternoon.”
“What did you say the appointment was for?”
She sighed, and her shoulders fell as she gazed at the carpeting. “I’ll go in for a few moments, and then you’ll come in and tell him about your new art authentication service that you’re offering for free because you respect his collection so much.”
Micah didn’t like this at all. If she’d sold him out for the repayment of her debt or the info on her sister, he would walk into a room draped in plastic tarps. “And I know about his collection, how?”
Kylie flipped her hands in the air. “I don’t know. Because rich people talk about art, I guess. You said you know people in low places.”
Yeah, but he sure didn’t want Salvatore Grande to know that. “I’ll figure out a line.”
“And you’re going to do the thing with the art, sample it or whatever you have to do, and I’m going to convince him that he needs to tell me where my sister is.”
Micah knew precisely where his own sister was, but if he hadn’t, he could see where someone might be desperate for that information.
Desperate enough to do anything.
Desperate enough to sell out anyone else when it came to protecting their family, if they needed their family.
Micah didn’t need anyone.
He said, “Sounds like a plan.”
She dropped her gaze and stared at the carpeting under their feet. “And no matter what happens, I need all the money you owe me by Saturday night. This Saturday night. All five hundred grand because I want that deal.”
“That contract is for a month of you,” he reminded her.
“Yeah, I know. And I agree to it. But I need the money by Saturday.”
So she was bolting on Sunday. Good to know. “If you want to renegotiate the contract for just the introduction, we can. But for the full half-mil, I get it all.”
She glanced up at him and nodded. “I know, and I accept.”
“Deal.”
“This seems like a crazy amount of effort just to get him to hand over a painting,” she said.
“Yes,” Micah agreed, keeping his expression pleasant and neutral.
It seemed like she was starting to calm down, though Micah didn’t trust even one bat of her eyelashes.
She said, “I’m sorry that I, um, got upset.”
This whole routine might have been a con to throw him off the scent if she had already sold him to Salvatore Grande.
On the other hand, if her goal had merely been to pry some money out of him, then she should be moving into the stage of cooling down the mark, where the con artist reframed the interaction in such a way that the mark then viewed the entire thing in a positive light. Sometimes, they see it as an adventure afterward. Sometimes, they think that they got the better end of the deal. That’s what made it a con and not stealing. The mark thinks they’re the winner.
Kylie toyed with his fingertips and then slipped her hand into his. “Did you mean it when you said you couldn’t get me out of your head?”
Micah turned her hand and pressed her knuckles against his beating heart, a move he’d used many times before.
“I am obsessed with you,” he said before he could stop himself.
She stepped toward him so that their bodies were mere inches apart.
Micah’s skin responded to the nearness of her soft flesh, and he ran his knuckles down her other arm.
“I don’t want to change the deal,” she said.
“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.” His voice rumbled from his throat, gravelly and low. “You can have the bedroom. I’ll sleep on the couch.”
She said, “I made a deal to do anything you wanted for a month.”
Even as his flesh burned with the thought of having her again, his body plunging into hers, a hovering piece of his consciousness was aware that this was all part of the con.
She was offering something he wanted to gain his confidence. It was the oldest trick in the book.
Micah pulled her against his chest, her voluptuous curves a decadent temptation for him. “And you’ll do anything I want for that additional three hundred grand.”
She leaned in and whispered, the warmth of her breath fluttering over his ear and trickling inside, “Anything.”
Kylie Miller had definitely betrayed him.
Either Grande had pressured her into snitching on Micah, or she was angling to move up in the world. As far as the Mafia was concerned, the farthest a woman could ascend was to be a mistress of a man of respect, a comare, Italian for godmother.
The fact that Kylie was still in the suite with him meant that Grande’s enforcers would not be breaking through his door and spraying the room with bullets at any minute.
Or at least, she thought they wouldn’t.
So he had time, probably until Sunday.
Maybe only until Wednesday.
Micah bent and picked Kylie up in his arms, carrying her to the bedroom.
She giggled as he swept in and tossed her on the bed, scrambling after her.
He buried his face in her neck and nipped her shoulder, earning a gasp from her as his hand caressed her curves from her waist to cup her tit. Her faint floral perfume swirled around his face as he kissed her shoulder up to her ear and then took her mouth.
This woman was betraying him, and Micah was kissing her like a lover. He should use her ruthlessly, screw her, take his pleasure, and leave her sobbing in the sheets like the rat she was.
Kylie Miller wasn’t even a rat. Rats snitched on people to the cops or Uncle Sugar. Kylie was scheming with Salvatore Grande to kill Micah for her own benefit and deceiving him into thinking they were allies and he was safe with her.
Micah didn’t trust anyone where the Brotherhood was concerned.
The rage and pain of betrayal consumed him.
He shuffled backward until he climbed off the bed, grabbed Kylie’s ankle, and dragged her toward him.
She giggled as she slid over the comforter, her dress riding up her hips.
Micah shucked off his suit jacket behind his back and pulled his shirt and undershirt off over his head with one motion, throwing them on the floor. The cool air of the room brushed over his bare shoulders and chest.
He twisted her legs, turned her over on her stomach, and flipped her skirt over her back as he dragged her hips to the edge of the bed.
Kylie wore sweet lace panties, her luscious ass round and succulent.
Micah grabbed her panties and dragged them down her legs and one foot, leaving the white lace wrapped around the other of her black patent leather high heels, and he slapped her bare ass with a sharp crack of his hand.
“Oh!” she gasped as if they were still playing a goddamn game.
He spanked her ass again, leaving a pink print of his hand on her plump skin.
“Ouch!” She looked over her shoulder at him with a coquettish flutter of her eyelashes. “Oh, no. Are you going to spank me?”
He’d already unbuckled his belt and was unbuttoning his pants. His cock was steel hard and aching with pressure.
Micah cracked his hand across her ass again.
“Ouch!” A little less sex-kittenish that time.
Better.
He kicked her feet apart and dragged his underwear down under his balls to angle himself into her.