He grinned and shrugged. “No plan.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Relax, wife. We don’t need a plan.”
“Stop calling me that, and yes we do. We can’t just break her door down and start yelling.”
“I wasn’t going to break her door,” he muttered.
“Come on, we need some sort of game plan here.”
“Fine. What do you have in mind?”
I sighed. Was he really going to just wing the whole thing? Probably, yeah. That seemed exactly like something he would do.
“Well, first thing is, she’s going to recognize us.”
“Did you bring masks?”
“No. So I think our biggest problem is going to be getting her to open the door.”
“If it’s an apartment building, we can just wait for someone to come out before we go in.”
“True. Good point. But if it’s not?”
“I’ll buzz her and say I have a package she might want.”
“You’re not making a penis joke right now, are you?”
He gave me a little sideways grin. “Yes. Penis joke.”
I rolled my eyes. “Okay, whatever. What if that doesn’t work?”
“Then we stake her out. We’ll wait until she comes outside. She’ll have to leave her apartment sooner or later.”
“That could be hours.”
“Could be days, princess. Think you can handle it?”
I gave him an annoyed look. If he could handle it, then so could I.
“Of course,” I said.
“Good. So that’s the plan.”
“What about when we get in there?”
“We ask her where the pictures are. And if she won’t talk, we make her.”
“You are not going to torture this girl.”
“What kind of guy do you think I am?”
“Crazy.”
“Maybe,” he said, laughing, “but I don’t hurt women, even ones that are blackmailing me.”
“Fine. How will you get her to talk?”
“I’ll threaten her, try and scare her. If that doesn’t work, we’ll offer to pay her.”
“And if none of that works?”
“Then we’ll figure something else out.” He paused, watching the road. “Relax, Alex. We’ll make this work.”
“Fine, but when this goes horribly wrong, you can’t blame me.”
He smirked at me. “What could possibly go wrong?”
I shook my head at him. “I wish you hadn’t just said that.”
* * *
Fifteen minutes, we parked a few blocks away from the address and walked over. It turned out that she lived in a pretty large apartment building.
“What now?” I asked him.
“Now we wait for someone to come out or to go in, and we follow them.”
I nodded. “Okay then.” I leaned up against the wall and he leaned up next to me.
Things had been tense between us ever since we had gotten back from the banquet hall. I couldn’t believe how incredibly soaked I had been, and how badly I had wanted him. Still, part of me had known it would have been a bad idea to give in to him, and so I had ended up closing the door and locking him out.
But I couldn’t stop myself. I had to get off, had to do something about all the difficult feelings swirling around inside me. I couldn’t believe that I was so wound up that I actually moaned his name out loud. Afterward, I was so embarrassed, almost positive he had heard me; I thought I had even heard him outside my door. But no, that couldn’t have been right.
Still, it was so much harder than I had thought it would to keep my hands off him. I wanted to grab his thick biceps and pull him against me, but that would only complicated things needlessly.
“Got another fight coming,” he grunted suddenly.
“What?”
“I got another fight coming up soon.”
“Oh, that’s awesome.”
“It’s against Trent.”
That name rang a bell. “He was the guy Ronnie talked about?”
“Yeah. The one and only.”
“Your nemesis or whatever.”
“Fuck nemesis,” he said, shaking his head. “That guy is just a dick.”
I watched as a few people came walking down the sidewalk, but nobody was going in or coming out of the building.
“Why do you hate him anyway?”
“Long story.”
“We’re not doing much.”
“Okay then.” He launched into the whole story, beginning with his early days training with Trent and ending with the fight.
“Wow,” I said once he was finished. “He almost killed you.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Almost ended my career at least.”
“Why?”
“Because the guy is a hothead.”