Page 2 of Princess of Thieves

Like a whore.

“I’m taking you to my place,” he goes on, an unexpected elaboration that startles me to attention, away from the branches flicking past my window. “My home, that is,” he clarifies. “From what I gather, you haven’t had a proper place to live in quite a while.”

I don’t know how to answer that, so I don’t. It’s true—I haven’t really had a home in the sense of a place that truly belongs to me. For, God, I don’t know, years. Since I was thirteen. Since before my dad got loaded on heroin, crashed his car, killed his wife and himself, and left me an orphan in the care of a scumbag who wanted nothing more than to milk me for all my inheritance was worth.

I can’t deny that Rob’s house was luxurious, that it fulfilled every need I had—even those I didn’t know were buried deep inside me.

Again, my skin prickles at the thought of that expansive pool, that garage full of cars, those impossible moments that now I know were total fiction.

No, fiction is too kind a word. They were lies.

But just because I’m coming from that doesn’t mean I want to be stuck with this guy. He could be anything. Anyone. And the mere fact that he knows more about me than I know about him puts me on instant alert.

“You don’t know who I am, do you?” he says, as though he can read my mind.

The car slows. We’ve come to a stop sign. I realize I have no idea how long we’ve been driving. He signals left and turns. I study his face in the rearview, but his eyes are on the road now, cloaked by his Ray-Bans.

“Should I?” I ask.

He chuckles. “I wouldn’t presume anything like that. I’m just a humble public servant. But if you did, you’d know that I was trustworthy.”

“I’d hope.” I’m not following. “What do you mean?” I say.

“Oh, we did get acquainted at the Fox Hunt Club,” he goes on. “Didn’t we? Although you didn’t quite reveal who you were.”

I don’t know how to answer that. I lick my lips and tuck my arms tighter around myself. “I’m not anyone noteworthy,” I say at last.

“You’re Richard de Mornay’s daughter,” he corrects with a small laugh. “You really think that’s not noteworthy?”

Hearing my father’s name from his lips sends a chill over my skin that has nothing to do with the cranked-up air conditioning in this stupid car.

“I don’t know what I think about that,” I say, and it’s the honest truth. It’s one thing to love your daddy, to be proud of the work he did as a federal prosecutor, to think that he was out there fighting the bad guys and taking down criminals.

It’s another to learn that he was basically a junkie, an addict who was a slave to his addiction and made his family suffer for it—to the point of killing himself and his wife and leaving his daughter an orphan. And it’s another thing entirely to know that his daughter ended up fucking the very dealer who sold him the stuff that killed him that night.

But that’s...that’s different.

“Are you going to murder me?” I ask. It’s a stupid and straightforward question, but fuck it. I’ve got nothing to lose.

I tighten my grip around my smartphone, just barely thinking that maybe, just maybe, Rob, Will, LJ, and Tuck are worried about where I am, that they’re coming to find me, that they’re on their way to rescue me.

But I’m not going to hold out hope.

My driver, Guy, chuckles again. He strikes me as the kind of man who never laughs—only chuckles, only ever doles out his reactions in small doses, controlled, careful. And I don’t like that. It reminds me too much of Uncle John, of the Sheriff, of everything about Sherwood County that I was hoping to leave behind.

“Oh, not hardly,” he says. “Maren, don’t you know what I’ve just done?”

Scoop me up from the middle of bumfuck and leave my car behind, I want to say. Taken me away from the police so you could do something much more nefarious than throw me in the county jail like they would have.

“I saved you,” he says.

The sound outside the car goes from the smooth hiss of pavement to the crunch of gravel, and I look out the windowagain. We’ve turned down a road I don’t recognize. We’ve passed the forest and entered farmland, through a neat set of gates with curlicue end posts, down a road flanked with trees dripping with Spanish moss.

“You’d gotten tangled up in something awful, regrettable,” he goes on. “A nice girl like you, from a nice family like yours. Which, I must say, pity what happened to your mommy and daddy, but not your fault at all.” He clucks his tongue a little.

“But maybe you didn’t know any better. You didn’t have a great role model. Didn’t have anyone really to look after you for so long. Didn’t have anyone to teach you how to be a lady and to come up in this world proper.”

A cold sweat hits my skin when I hear him say the word “lady.”

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