Her voice rose with each word, and it sounded like she was on the edge of hysteria. I couldn’t keep holding back to the urge to get closer to her. Surging to my feet, I lifted her off the chair as if she weighed nothing, sitting in the chair myself and settling her sideways across my lap. Her feet dangled off the side of the chair, and one of her hands rested on my chest. She stiffened at first but relaxed after a moment.
“Listen to me. You are not responsible for anything that’s happened to you. You’re right. You didn’t do anything wrong to deserve this shit. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. You worked for a man who was probably murdered because of me.”
“What?” she gasped. She tried to get out of my lap, but I tightened my arms around her. She wasn’t going anywhere. “You said you didn’t kill him! And those men in the parking lot made it seem liketheydid it.”
“They did. But I think it was his connection to me that caused them to kill him. You know he owed me a considerable debt, and I sent a few men to intimidate him.”
She glared at me, and my cock responded to that fire in her eyes by growing hard. She must have felt it because she narrowed her eyes at me. I couldn’t help smirking.
“Yeah, I know you were there. I read your witness statement, and I’m sorry you were scared by my men, but they weren’t actually going to hurt anyone. I had no intention of causing harm to Henry.”
I could tell she didn’t believe me by the way she pursed her lips.
“I swear,” I said, holding her eyes. “I had other plans for him. I wanted Henry to work for me.”
That surprised her. The aggression bled out of her expression. “In what way?”
“I have a certain… product that I need shipped from Michigan to New York on a weekly basis. But it’s not the kind of thing I can just hire any shipping company to do. I needed someone I would be able to control. So, I sent my guys to scare him, make him desperate.”
“And then you’d come to him with a solution to his problems? Forgive his debt if he used his company to discreetly ship whatever it is you want brought to the city?”
I grinned again. “Like I said, you’re a smart girl.”
Her gaze shifted to the wall behind me, but the far-off look there made me think she was really just lost in thought. I figured she was wondering what I wanted to have shipped, but when she spoke again, she didn’t ask.
“You know, I was Henry’s assistant for almost four years.”
“Yes,” I said, wondering where she was going with this.
But at the same time, I was just glad she wasn’t crying or trying to get away from me anymore. She was in a shitty situation, and it would be easy for her to place blame on me, despite that fact that I didn’t actually kill Henry. I unknowingly put a target on his back. Yet, she was still here in my lap.
“I saw him build the business from the ground up,” she continued, a glint of something like excitement in her eye. “Carving out a place for himself in the market meant getting to know his competitors. And I happen to know he had some dirt on one of them.”
“You mean Henry had information about the head of another shipping company that could be used against him?”
She shrugged. “Potentially.”
There was something almost playful about her in this moment, and I wanted to kiss her, but I needed to hear more about what she had to say.
“Do you know what dirt he had on his competitor?”
“It’s Jeremy Kyle, and he shipped some kind of controlled items to a sanctioned country five years ago. Somehow, Mr. Moss got a copy of the false export documents Jeremy used as well as the real shipment details. He was holding onto it as insurance in case Jeremy ever tried to run him out of business. They were on his computer. So, if you find the documents yourself…”
“I could use them to get the leverage I need over a new shipping company.” I laughed, feeling a weight lift off my shoulders. “Who would have thought you were a criminal mastermind?”
“I don’t know about that.”
“I do, baby. You might have been dragged into my world against your will, but you’ll fit in just fine.”
As I said those words, I realized I wasn’t planning to ever let her go. It didn’t matter that I’d never committed to a woman before or that she wasn’t raised in the mafia like I was. It didn’t even matter that she had a kid.
Sarah was mine.
Thrusting my hand into her silky hair, I turned her face to mine and pressed a kiss to her lips. She probably wasn’t ready to hear that I wanted to keep her, but she was going tofeelmy claim before we left this office.