A woman, my mind corrects. A goddess.
I grit my teeth, forcing my mind in the opposite direction. A girl. A piece of skirt. A one-night fucking lay.
‘No, not that girl,’ I reply, my voice icily calm. ‘The other girl.’
Even as I say this, I know in the pit of my gut they’re one and the same.
Mon Dieu. What have I done?
‘The surveillance photographs show her as blonde,’ I grate out. ‘She isn’t.’ Photographs I’d given only a cursory glance, less interested in who she was than why she was set to intrude on my life.
‘You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to work that out,’ he answers. ‘I told the private investigator the images weren’t exactly stellar, but even the ones taken in that dark shit hole of a club, you could tell she was wearing a wig. She was no fucking Heidi,’ he asserts with a wink.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ My response is almost a growl.
‘You don’t find many good girls working in strip clubs.’
I take a deep breath in an attempt to calm myself and tamp back this wave of anger that I don’t quite understand. He’s talking about an anonymous woman who means nothing to him, not the woman with the tender heart who looked after me. Surely that’s the definition of good. Not that she wasn’t good in other ways.
A good girl. A piece of skirt. A one-night glorious lay.
Not now. I cannot think of that.
‘What about the interview? Didn’t you say there was a recording?’ I think this is what he would call clutching at straws.
‘Not one that I looked at.’ His answer is dismissive, the task below his pay grade.
‘In which case, there is a girl, here in this building, who we went to much trouble and expense to employ, who isn’t who she is supposed to be.’
‘They rarely are.’
I take a deep breath before continuing, resisting the urge to blame him for the magnitude of my mistakes. ‘For one minute, could you stop being so fucking obtuse? I’ve just met her. She’s the same woman who took me to the hospital the night I was attacked in San Francisco.’
That girl—non, that woman—the one I’d been looking for, she wasn’t supposed to be brunette. Not that the colour of her hair can be encompassed in that bland word. Rich, like mahogany. Strands of amber and red gold, silky to the touch.
When I woke in the hospital, I thought Rose was a neighbour, or perhaps a roommate of Róisín, the woman I was looking for, investigating, but not hoping to meet. At least, not yet.
If I’d known, I never would’ve—
I cut off the thought. As much as I don’t want to believe it, these women are one and the same. Confirmed by her introduction. Roísin, but no one ever calls me that.
Confusion and frustration morph into a volcano of thoughts; discomfort, disquiet, and fucking dread. But none of these encompass how I feel, none even touching the magnitude of this fuckup.
‘Say that again?’ From across the room, Rhett’s attention appears to be only for his afternoon snack.
‘The woman we had investigated, the woman I have employed; she is the same person who looked after me the night of my accident.’ The memory of her under me that night rises before me like an apparition. The dark, silken waves of hair in my hands, her eyes like melted honey. The taste of her tiny gasp as I’d slid into her.
Was she a taste of the forbidden?
I push away the thought because only madness lies there.
‘The woman you screwed, you mean.’ With a grin, he pops off the lid, throwing a protein ball into his mouth—the mouth I suddenly want to fill with my fist. ‘They’re good, these. Does Amélie make them for you?’
I glower his way without answering his asinine question, a look that would turn a lesser man to dust. But not him. We train together and spar regularly. We both live clean and fight dirty. And while he is the ex-Special Forces head of my security team, this doesn’t keep me from eviscerating him. What does is the fact that he is my friend. A very annoying friend, yes. But he’s probably the only person in the world I truly trust.
The thought is followed in an instant by another. Perhaps less thought and more a memory, two voices almost floating from a grave. My childhood long dead, my father also passed.
Remy, when you grow up, you will be respected, revered, like the son of a king. People will seek to flatter you, but remember, they bring you close for only one reason. And what is that reason?
For the opportunity to stick a knife in my back, Papa.
Two years and the man is still haunting me. As for treating me like a king, he himself treated me as though I was begotten on a kitchen maid. When he said the business would never be mine, I thought he meant it as a punishment. But not so; as the adage goes, all war is based on deception, and he set me up to fail.