His mouth had twitched and he didn’t reply, merely held out his hand for the keys I was holding.
I stared at him.
He stared back.
I might have met my match in Heath. I knew he would likely, out of pure male stubbornness, stay silently outside the offices for as long as it took. Keltan probably ordered him to do that exact thing in order to hamper my investigative skills. I wouldn’t put it past the infuriating kiwi.
I thrust the keys into his upturned palm with more force than necessary, glaring at him.
“You get what you want. But since my heels won’t be used for driving, they’ll be itching to be used for another purpose,” I threatened.
Another mouth twitch.
“You want to give me empty threats, or you want to get in the car so we can go about our day, babe?” he asked dryly.
I sucked in a breath, hating infuriating, attractive kiwi men.
But I got in the car.
And then Heath drove me around L.A., first to Lucinda’s old rehab facility, where they told me about something annoying called “client confidentiality,” so I’d scrapped that idea and gotten Heath to drive me back to the office, where I could do some Googling.
Yes, I was resorting to Google. But I thought the search engine was widely underrated.
Heath had deduced that sitting with me inside the newsroom was not going to work for him, so instead he parked himself at the coffee shop on the ground floor of the building.
It was well situated for someone like me to do the walking, talking, writing thing throughout the workday, and, as it turned out, for a bodyguard to sit and… guard. Against what, I wasn’t exactly sure, considering no one had shot at me so far.
I highly doubted they would.
But the look in Keltan’s eyes gave me pause. I’d already tried to grill Heath for what he knew about the Lucinda case.
“Client confidentiality,” he’d clipped.
I rolled my eyes. “Why does everyone keep saying that?”
Silence.
“The client is dead. She doesn’t need you to be confidential,” I informed him, hoping it would probe him into divulging some information.
More silence.
I glared at his profile as he pulled into the parking lot underneath my building.
“Fine,” I muttered. “I’ll do it without the help of any of you.”
He gave me a look, all the while executing a perfect parallel park. “You need to seriously reconsider that.”
“What? Giving up on questioning a mute man from the bottom of the world, where it’s obviously mandatory to learn how to piss women off?” I replied.
He parked. Rather impressively. It pissed me off. These men were too good at everything. It would have taken me at least two tries.
“No,” he clipped. “This whole fuckin’ thing. You’re gonna get yourself in trouble.”
I smiled at him. “Of course, I am. But I’d do that whether or not I investigate the story. At least this trouble might get me a promotion.”
I went to undo my seat belt, but a hand at my wrist stopped me. I glanced up at the previously impassive face, half obscured by a beard.
It was no longer impassive, dancing with something else.
“No, this will get you dead,” he said, voice hard. “Keltan is like a brother to me. One of my best mates. Know him. Know what you mean to him. Likely knew that before you even fuckin’ knew it. So you might seem to be unworried about the prospect of wading into shit that gets women murdered, but I’m not keen on seeing one of the best men I know have to fuckin’ bury you,” he told me harshly. “Because I’d have to bury him too. Maybe not put him in the ground, but I’d wind up saying goodbye to a mate of mine nonetheless.” Ice-blue eyes burned into me. “You best think long and fuckin’ hard about that before you make any more decisions about just how much that promotion means to you.”
I blinked at him. At the most words I’d heard him string together… well, ever. And he may not say much but when he did say something, he knew how to make the words hit their mark.
“I know what I’m doing.”
He eyed me. “Do you?”
“Yes,” I replied confidently, and untruthfully.
But a girl’s gotta fake it till she makes it.
Then I’d gotten out of the car, and he’d followed me, glowering in silence before parking himself at a table by the window of the coffee shop, informing me that if I “even thought of trying to give him the slip he’d make it look like an accident.”
“Make what look like an accident?”
Another meaningful glower.
“I’m pretty sure that goes directly against the bodyguard portion of your job. Which is the entirety of your job, just for clarification.”
He did not dignify that with a response.
If Keltan was the New Zealand version of Lucky, then Heath was the New Zealand version of Bull. Even he rivaled Bull’s silence. Then again, Bull’s silence wasn’t quite as quiet since Mia entered the equation. Nor was it so full of demons. Heath’s might have been. He hid them well, but something worked behind those eyes