I open my eyes and glare at her. “He’s a criminal! There’s nothing to talk about!”
“Nothing except your deeply conflicted feelings about him and what he does to your libido.”
I close my eyes again, wishing I were a hermit who lived alone on a tropical island and my only friends were a parrot and a tree snail.
A mute parrot and a tree snail.
When the silence grows so pregnant it’s about to give birth, I relent. “Fine. Who’s going first?”
“I am,” says Fin briskly, already in interrogation mode. “Max filled me in on the unicorn pony situation, but I want to backtrack to before any of this started. To the very beginning. How did you pick him for the job in the first place?”
“I saw him on the news a year ago. He was being arrested. Led in handcuffs up the steps of the courthouse by a bunch of federal agents. Except it looked like he was leading them. Ugh. You’ve never seen such confidence. Such conceit. Even his hair looked smug. It really, really pissed me off.” Thinking about it, I’m getting pissed off again.
“I remember that,” muses Fin. “He was let go pretty quickly, right?”
“Literally the same day. No charges filed. The government nabs the guy after months of intense investigation, and not one of the charges they slapped on him stuck for even twenty-four hours.”
Max nods. “You were indignant.”
“Righteously indignant,” adds Fin, her tone soothing.
“Hell, yes, I was! Here was this man—”
“This incredibly gorgeous hunk of man. This extreme example of uber-manliness. This scorching hot, barn burner of a man, who can produce spontaneous orgasms in whole swaths of the female population with merely a smile.”
I direct my glare to Max. “May I continue?”
She has the decency to look bashful. “Sorry. It’s just that he’s freaking beautiful, Jules.”
“No one is denying the man is attractive. Panthers have lovely, strokeable, furry torsos, but nobody is dumb enough to stick their hand close enough to cop a feel.”
“Point taken. Proceed.”
“Thank you. As I was saying…what was I saying?”
Fin says, “You were indignant.”
“Yes! Thank you. I was indignant. Here was this man, this infamous criminal, oozing self-confidence and superiority like sap from a tree. I hated him on sight. It’s like he knew he’d get off scot-free. I could see it on his face. That…that…”
Sounding impressed, Fin says, “Boldness.”
Sounding dreamy, Max says, “Élan.”
“Give me a break here, girls. I’m running out of glares.”
They apologize, and I continue. “Arrogance is the word I was looking for. Arrogance was coming off him like fumes. And not only that—entitlement. He knew he’d get off because he is who he is. Because he thought he deserved to. Because for a man like him, nothing in the world is impossible or out of reach. The heartless bastard.”
I seethe for a moment, until Fin observes, “I’m sensing some Daddy issues.”
My tone drips sarcasm. “You think?”
Max says, “To be fair, if Daddy issues were plutonium, the three of us would have enough nuclear power to run the entire galaxy.”
“True,” says Fin, nodding. “We were all emotionally abandoned as children.”
“We’re emotional driftwood.”
We sit in gloomy silence until I say, “This sure has been a great talk. Very uplifting. I feel so much better now.”
While I’m busy marinating in my discontent, Max is looking at me funny. She says, “Wait. If my math is right, we’ve pulled off four jobs in the last year.”
“Yeah? So?”
“So you said you saw Liam Black on the news one year ago.”
“And?”
She eyeballs me. “And you’ve been stewing about him ever since.”
I issue an automatic denial, to which Max says, “No? Then why wasn’t his job the first job we planned after you saw that news story?”
“I was doing research.”
“Research. Uh-huh. An entire year’s worth of research.”
Her tone makes me feel defensive. “Exactly.”
She’s not buying it. “It takes you a few months to research and plan all the rest of our jobs…why did it take a year with him?”
“Maybe I was being extra careful!”
“Or maybe you knew, deep down, that this one wouldn’t be just another job.”
I sit up, drag my hands through my hair, and huff out a weary breath. “Please don’t start with the fate stuff again.”
“Fate is a real thing, Jules.”
“Sure. So is the Tooth Fairy.”
“No, that’s a BS story parents tell their kids. Fate is as real as…well, as love. Just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. All the most important things in life are invisible.”
Fin and I look at each other, then back at Max. She shrugs.
Fin says, “What other invisible stuff is important? The mental break with reality you’re having?”
Good. She doesn’t believe in fate, either. I knew Max was wrong when she claimed to be the smarter of the two.
But Max is undeterred. She lifts her nose in the air just far enough to look down it at us. “Things like loyalty. Things like faith. Things like friendship, dumbasses.”
“One could only wish friendship were invisible,” says Fin with a sweet smile.
Max scowls at her. “I’m gonna make that condescending smile invisible in a minute. When I slap it off your face.”
I stand and head into my bedroom, calling over my shoulder, “Wake me up if I need to help one of you bury the other one’s body. Otherwise, I’ll see you two nightmares in the morning.”
I head to my room and lock the door, knowing they won’t be the only faces I’ll see in the morning.
Knowing without knowing how that tomorrow, Killian Black will be right where I left him, pacing in agitation outside the window.
My dark, deadly Romeo waiting for his Juliet.
Thank god I don’t have a balcony.
14
Killian
By the time Liam answers the phone, I’m ready to smash something.
“Brother,” he says, his voice thick with sleep. “Tell me this is an emergency. Tell me you’re not calling me at three o’clock in the morning for a family chat.”
I growl, “It’s two here. And aye, it’s a fucking emergency.” I spin on my heel and turn back to pace the other direction, ignoring Declan inside the SUV. He’s watching me, shaking his head like I’m a lost cause.
Hearing my tone, Liam’s sharpens. “What is it? Are you all right?”
“No, I’m not all right. I’m the opposite of all right, whatever that is.”
“What’s going on?”
I glance up at Juliet’s apartment window. It’s dark. The whole street is dark, except for the streetlights and the nuclear glow of my agitation. I demand, “How did you make Tru fall in love with you?”