Bane (Sinners of Saint #4)(10)
Truth was, I skimmed the motherfucker, because Darren struck me as such an impotent man, I didn’t really think he was capable of hurting a fly.
“Email me a recent picture of her. I need to know what she looks like, you know, so I don’t hit on a rando.”
“You’re not hitting on her,” he enunciated. “You’re helping her.”
Semantics, the western society’s favorite mistress. It didn’t matter how I did it—all that mattered was that Jesse Carter would leave her fucking house. I didn’t bother to search for her online. If I read this chick correct, and I thought I did, she wouldn’t have a Facebook, Snapchat, or an Instagram. She wanted to disappear from earth, so she had.
I was about to drag her back to society.
She could come alone, or with her demons.
I really didn’t fucking care.
The photo Darren sent me was grainier than Tobago Beach and I couldn’t make much of Jesse. It looked like he’d taken a picture of her when she wasn’t looking, which made my Creep-O-Meter ding a few times. She was sitting on a tapestry bench, a copy of The Captain’s Daughter by Alexander Pushkin clasped between her hands. Her face was buried inside. All I could make out was her raven hair, snowy skin, and long lashes. I had a weird feeling that I’d already seen her, but I shoved it to the back of my mind. Even if I had, she was business now.
Strictly business.
The kind of business I didn’t want to lose.
Especially after using five hundred thousand dollars of the three million Darren had transferred to my account for importing Italian furniture to my new boutique hotel. Oops.
I decided the best course of action was to corner Jesse when she visited her therapist. I waited across from the glitzy building where the clinic was located. I sat in a coffee shop at Liberty Park and gawked through the glass wall. She parked her Range Rover in front of the building and stepped out. Her slumped shoulders looked like broken wings; her overcast eyes were where your soul went to fucking die.
My first thought seeing her was that she was nowhere near Quasimodo-ugly. She was beautiful, and that was the understatement of the fucking century.
The second thought was that I’d already seen her. I didn’t need her to gather those inky strands of hair up to see the Pushkin tattoo. A girl like that, you don’t forget. It was years ago, on the beach, but I remember how carnal the need to conquer her had been. How pissed I’d been when I’d seen her pasty-ass teenage boyfriend fondling her as soon as she’d collapsed on the sand in her little red bikini next to him. Luckily, I’d held myself back from stealing her out from under his nose.
Now that she was collateral, there was no way I’d ever touch her with a ten-foot pole.
Jesse was wearing a pair of shapeless jeans in an attempt to hide her banging long legs, a tangerine shirt—long, baggy, and depressingly modest—and an open black hoodie over top. She had a ball cap on—Raiders, my kind of chick—and the shades she clutched in her fist were the size of her entire face. She clearly wanted to fly off the radar as much as possible. Unfortunately for her, for six mill, I was not only going to notice her existence, but celebrate and build a shrine to it. You know, so to speak.
She disappeared inside the building, her head ducked down, the no-eye-contact policy in full effect. She had an hour at the therapist’s. That was plenty of time for me to saunter over, unscrew the core from the valve stem of her back tire, and watch as it slowly hissed out air. After I did that, I walked two blocks down to get my vehicle— a billion-year-old red Ford truck I’d rarely used—and parked it directly behind her Range Rover.
As expected, Jesse reemerged from the building an hour later, powerwalking to her Range Rover. A perceptive little thing, she noticed the flat tire before she climbed into the car. She squatted, sighed, and then shook her head. I pushed my driver’s door open, hopping to the ground a few good feet from her. Darren mentioned she wasn’t hot on men getting near her. No problemo.
“Everything good?” I asked. She snapped her head up and scowled, like my talking to her broke approximately seven hundred social rules. She didn’t answer, bringing her small hand to the tire and feeling for the valve stem frantically. She knew what she was looking for, and that surprised me. Not that it mattered. To change a tire, Jesse needed someone to grab her spare one, and not to be a sexist pig, but that shit weighed a ton. She was tiny. It was simple physics.
Such a lucky coincidence that I was there, right?
“Your tire is flat,” I stated the fucking obvious, taking a tentative step toward her. She nearly jumped out of her skin treading backward. The look in her eyes was of pure horror. It was my educated guess that the beard, tats, and my six-two frame didn’t help matters much.
“Don’t,” she barked, her voice shaking.
“Don’t what?”
“Touch me.”
“Wasn’t planning on it,” I said. And man, was that the truth. She could have paid me 5,999,999 dollars and I still wouldn’t give her a peck on the cheek. I stepped back, raising my palms in surrender.
“Let’s try again. Can I help you change that tire? I have a jack in my truck.” I jerked my thumb behind my shoulder. “You can stand a good five feet from me. I promise not to touch you. Hell, I promise not to look at you, either. I hate orange.” I cocked my head to her shirt. Another truth. The color reminded me of that fucker, Hale, and his auburn hair.