Raw Redemption (Crossing the Line #4)(64)

Since she’d anticipated Caine’s amusement at her request, Ailish didn’t even flinch when his laughter filled the dining room. “You’ve gained a sense of humor, too? Will wonders never cease?”

“I’ve always had a sense of humor.” She dipped the spoon into her bowl, nudging the golden-brown flakes into tiny islands. “Maybe we just don’t think the same things are funny.”

Her father inclined his head, as if to agree. “I always found your little attempts to run away funny, so you’re probably right.” He scratched his chin absently. “Henrik says he found you in Michigan, living in a cabin. How long do you really think you could have pulled that off?”

Ailish’s throat felt tight. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, you have no survival skills.” He flattened a palm on the table and leaned forward. “Not like me. You’re nothing like me. You don’t know how to start with nothing and turn it into paper. Money. You would have been returning home in another week. Maybe I should have just waited. It would have been even more satisfying than pulling you out of a trunk.”

“I would have starved first.” Another echoing laugh left Caine, but Ailish spoke through it. “If I have no survival skills, it’s because I wasn’t allowed to learn any. You’re not a father, you’re a prison warden.”

Henrik walked into the dining room with that sentiment still hanging in the air. Just inside the arched entry, he stopped, his expression one of boredom. As if hearing that a man had kept his daughter imprisoned meant exactly nothing. Same shit, different day. It was a convincing act. One that she envied. On the tail of hearing her father claim she had no survival skills, doubt trickled in. She’d gone undercover knowing the score, yet she was doing a horrible job of coping. Keeping up a pretense while being confronted with her past confinement.

Pull it together.

As Henrik moved through the dining room toward the coffeepot, Ailish picked up her glass of orange juice and took a healthy sip. “Am I allowed to leave the house today, or not? There are things I need.” Her pulse tripped over itself. “Or are you even going to keep me around long enough to need anything?”

The energy in the dining room had been tense before her statement. Now? It pulsed with renewed life. Caine wiped his mouth with a napkin and laid it down carefully. “You want to go out?” He tipped his head in Henrik’s direction. “You take Vance, there. You try to run and he feels the need to put you in another trunk? I might take a little longer to open it next time.”

She kept her features schooled, but any remaining connection she’d once felt for her father severed in two, lancing her in the sides as it toppled. “Fine,” she managed, ordering her hands to stop shaking. “I’m used to being escorted around Chicago by your henchmen. It’ll be just like old times.”

“Now that’s where you’re wrong. The old times have come and gone. You’d do well to remember that.” Caine winked at her. “You have a job to complete. Don’t be long. Or we’ll have a problem.”

As ashamed as she was to admit defeat in the battle of words with Caine, Ailish had to leave the dining room. It was one thing to have suspicions that your father found you dispensable, but being presented with a confirmation instilled a new kind of fear, so different from the fear of being confined. Fear for her life.

Ailish took the stairs two at a time to her room. There, she let her robe drop to the floor and changed into a modest light pink sundress. She slid her feet into a pair of white flats and began to pace. She couldn’t appear too overeager to get out of the house with Henrik, but waiting was brutal. Like running out of air with an oxygen tank just within your reach. When half an hour had passed, Ailish opened her desk drawer and peeled her emergency fifty-dollar bill off the inside frame, where she’d taped it months earlier. She tucked it into her bra and went downstairs.

Henrik leaned against the foyer wall, holding the folded Chicago Tribune in one hand, a mug of coffee in the other. When he caught sight of her at the top of the stairs, he sighed and set both objects down on a nearby console table, heading out the front door without another word.

“Where do you need to go?” Henrik asked, once they’d both climbed into the vehicle. And although his tone was long-suffering, he laid a finger briefly to his lips, reminding her of what she’d already suspected. Between the time they’d arrived yesterday and now, her father could have had the car wired.

“The drugstore.”

As they pulled through the gate and out onto the road, Ailish couldn’t help but stare at Henrik’s large hands on the steering wheel, watching the leather glide through his fists and remembering the way they’d treated her backside the night before. Firm, biting, but somehow…affectionate. As if he enjoyed spanking her—a lot—but cared more about satisfying something inside her. Without any conscious thought, Ailish shifted in the seat, loving the twinge of pain wrought by the friction.

Henrik shook his head without looking at Ailish. His eyes were in the rearview mirror constantly. Checking to see if they were being followed? The realization pushed a frisson of alarm leapfrogging through her thickening blood, but it was snuffed out when Henrik reached over and squeezed her thigh. On cue, Ailish’s head fell back on the seat, her hand covering his touch. She silently begged him to move higher, to explore beneath her dress, but he clenched his jaw and focused on the road. By the time the chain drugstore finally came into view, Ailish had become embarrassingly wet between legs, soaking through her panties. Just from that big, rough hand warming her leg. God.