Page 28 of Arrogant Bastard

My gut clenches tight every time I’m forced to acknowledge that. “I would change that in a heartbeat if I had the power to. The fact that he had the right to call you his before you were mine drives me insane.”

“Well, you can’t change it! He was my husband, Killian. And we killed him!”

Chapter Nine

Killian

Her words fall like deadly spikes between us. Her eyes are dark green haunted pools. I want to tell her the truth. The whole truth. But at what cost?

I have no problem speaking ill of the dead when they deserve it. But the chance that adding to her guilt will push her out of my reach? Fuck, no.

“You’re wrong. We didn’t kill him. You left him—”

“When he needed me the most.”

I swallow the knot of fury that surges through my gut. “On the campaign trail, maybe. But nowhere else. We both know that. Tell me your marriage wasn’t already over when we met. Tell me you didn’t have divorce papers drawn up and tucked away in your underwear drawer ready to file.”

She gasps. “How the hell do you know about that?”

“I’m a spy, baby. That’s what I do. I went looking, and I found them. I don’t mind admitting that was the fucking highlight of my second visit to your house.”

She shakes her head, the weight of her remorse winning out against the outrage of my admission. Her lashes sweep down, and she swallows. “I may have been on the verge of filing those papers, but I was still his wife when we…”

“You didn’t cheat on him. He was dead when we got together.”

Her laughter is filled with bitterness. “And how quickly after that did we happen? Jesus, I fucked you at his funeral, and we both know I wasn’t using you to lessen my overwhelming grief. How many kinds of bitch does that make me?”

“Who the fuck cares how you used me? I don’t. You’d already said goodbye to him long before we put him in the ground.”

“He wouldn’t have been in the ground in the first place if he hadn’t suspected something was going on between us. He wouldn’t have been at the hotel, in that alley, if it hadn’t been for us.”

The door I keep locked on my guilt attempts to crack open. “We had dinner that evening, baby. That was all.”

“That wasn’t all, and you know it.”

I sigh, take the water bottle from her, and put it next to mine on the desk. I stay silent to avoid corroborating that truth. We spent that evening barely eating and eye-fucking each other a dozen different ways across the table in the hotel restaurant. I have no idea what we talked about, or even if we talked at all.

The torture of not being able to touch her, of sitting opposite her with a hard-on the size of Texas, when all I wanted was to bend her over the table and fuck the shit out of her, had driven me seriously nuts by the time I put her in her car and sent her home to my brother. But my reason for staying at the Arkansas Grand Hotel was because of the connection to the op I was working on. The op that directly involved my brother.

Matt’s call to me that night had been pure coincidence, but as usual, our conversation descended very quickly into taunts and insults and, on my part, a subtle probing into his activities that had raised his suspicion. Did I subconsciously intend for that to happen? For my brother to panic and seek out the man I was tailing in the hotel? Probably. I’m not enough of a saint to rule my soiled hands out of the equation.

“I knew he was tracking my phone. I didn’t think he would follow me there though and get himself killed in a random shooting.” Her voice is racked with pain.

It wasn’t random. I swallow the words and pull her into my arms. There’s no way I’m telling her Matt had been taken out by a well-aimed shot to the head in a merciless execution that may have been indirectly my fault.

I may have gotten used to carrying the guilt but I’ll never be rid of it.

Because how the fuck do I tell her that I was on a covert mission when I visited my childhood home that day? A mission to find out whether Matthew Knight, my brother, was involved in the sex ring that involved several high-level members of the government.

When his name was first flagged by the analysts at Fallhurst, I had a hard time reconciling the above-average asshole of a brother I grew up with and Congressman Matthew Knight of Arkansas suspected of turning a blind eye to the bone-deep corruption going on under his nose. But even before I closed the file of intel on my brother, the seed of conviction was growing. I knew he wasn’t above such heinous acts, although trafficking sex slaves, a disturbing number of them underage girls and boys, was taking things to a whole new level.

But the Knights were notorious for turning a blind eye if it would benefit them. Hell, I did exactly that when I clapped eyes on Faith Carson and decided she would be mine even though she didn’t belong to me.

Randall and Patricia Knight, my much-esteemed parents, were the same. Both from a long line of families that preferred to be the money and power behind politicians, they thrived on manipulating the candidates they endorsed for their own gains. And they were wildly successful at it, right up until they were embroiled in voter-tampering charges. The convenient explosion at our luxury cabin in the mountains of Montana served the dual purpose of ending their lives and killing the rabid speculation as to their guilt before their case could go to trial. I never discounted the fact that they orchestrated their deaths much like they’d orchestrated their lives. Much like they’d tried to orchestrate mine.

Perversely, it was that tiny possibility of their innocence that propelled Matthew up the polls when he decided to run for a congressional seat six months after their deaths. Like the sleazy political animal he was trained to be, he’d changed the narrative of my parents’ lives, spotlighted their hard work, and all but wept on camera for his loss. All the while knowing, like me, that Randall and Patricia never gave an inch unless there was something in it for them.

Matt learned to play their game before he was out of diapers. I blatantly refused. And earned myself a long stay in hell for it. In the middle of my junior high year, I went from private school to inner city public school without so much as a heads-up. My parents held a charity benefit for underprivileged kids, during which they self-effacingly shared their desire to like the common man by sending their second child to a school in a dangerous, gang-ridden neighborhood. To this day, they don’t know I barely escaped being knifed on my second day. Or that I eventually earned my safe passage to and from school by helping the gang leader build and maintain his burgeoning online porn business.

---