The F King: A Bad Boy Romance(6)

“Yesterday. It seems nice enough.”

“What did they give you for dinner?”

I raised an eyebrow. “They called it South African beef with rice, why? It wasn’t made from homeless people, was it?”

“I don’t think so, no, but it was probably about as South African as Neptune is, and just you wait. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not the next day, but within the week, you’ll see South African Beef with Rice on your plate again, only it’ll be called something else, and it’ll look like it’s been drying out in the fridge for a few days. Black bean beef, I think, was a common one. Beef stroganoff, where they add gravy, was another.”

“Oh no…”

“Oh yeah. One time, they gave us what they called breaded schnitzel, but it was really just strips of leather in breadcrumb-colored gravel. The knives they give you in the cafeteria are too blunt to get through it. You could make a bear-proof suit out of it, I’m telling you.”

Ryan casually draped his arm over my shoulder and took another sip. I glanced down and saw how perilously close his fingertips were to brushing against my right breast, and was ashamed at how hard it was to fight down my excitement.

If I breathed too deeply, his fingers would touch the bare skin of my chest. My hammering heart demanded deep breaths. I was caught between a rock and a hard place. I wanted him to be interested, but I didn’t want to screw up the whole investigation. So many rocks and so many hard places.

What I needed right now was the ability to control my heartbeat like those people who competed in the duathlons, skiing and then shooting. Ryan showed me no mercy, in fact he seemed to enjoy my predicament, talking at length about the paper-thin walls in the dorm rooms and how you could hear everything your neighbor got up to, and general dormitory hijinks.

With all the care I could muster, I delicately moved his arm off my shoulder and shuffled away just far enough so that our legs weren’t touching.

“Hey, Ryan, you seem really nice and everything but-”

“I’m not,” he grinned devilishly.

“Um… but I’m really just out with the girls tonight, trying to get my bearings in a new city and figure out how I’m going to pay for it all, you know?”

Ryan glanced at the dancefloor and chuckled. “Looks like your friends have a different idea about what tonight was for.”

I looked over and saw Sally engaged in a deep tongue battle with some guy, while Violet, clearly not the shrinking variety, was practically getting fucked out there. You could call it dancing, but… so much for chicks before dicks.

When I looked back at Ryan, I saw his arm was behind me again, but resting on the back of the seat instead of over my shoulder. He was leaning in.

My traitor reflexes made me lick my lips and froze me in place instead of leaning away. I started stammering.

“I’m… I’m not like them, though, I can’t…”

He was still leaning in. I was still not leaning away. What would it feel like to have a man’s lips on mine?

“Stop.”

He paused.

“This is all too quick for me… I need to take things slow. Maybe I could get your number? I really need to get myself settled in and stable with some kind of income first.” I had to redirect the flow of this situation, and fast. “Hey, I- I saw you come in and some guy gave you cash. You selling something?”

Ryan gave me a funny look and then leaned back, his brows knitting together as he scrutinized me. Shit. The line I had to walk was that narrow and I’d just screwed everything up.





Ryan





Fuck. She was a cop. That was, what, the third time she’d brought up needing to make money in the brief time I’d been talking to her? This last one was just so blatant.

That explained a lot. It had been a long time since a woman had played so coy with me. “Not that kind of girl, I need to take things slow.” Yeah right. That kind of girl didn’t exist in my world.

I’d been sloppy. Concentrating so hard on taking down the Acardi family, I’d become too used to the lifestyle that my position afforded me. I’d had too much fun and at some point I’d come up on the police radar, or was it the DEA?

Either way, it didn’t matter. It was a wake-up call for sure. I was going to have to rein myself in, keep a lower profile until I pressed the button on what I was privately referring to as Operation House of Cards.

Son of a fucking bitch. It was all going so smoothly, too. The lab was running like clockwork, the Acardis were paying me eye-watering amounts of money, and unknowingly funding their own destruction. All the chess pieces were almost exactly where I wanted them.

Clearly, I’d been celebrating too early, though. Blinded by all the pussy and respect I was getting. Well, I wasn’t the first man that had happened to, and at least it wasn’t too late for me. They didn’t know I was The F King, otherwise they’d have sent a SWAT team instead of this pretty little thing.