Page 25 of Crushed
“I thought you were really into the whole, ‘you need to do this on your own’ thing,” I said.
She leaned across the table and shoved my arm playfully. “Scarlett,” she said, “You’re still doing this on your own. And you’re not the only one who wants to know about your parents.” She took the last bite of the appetizer and gazed out at the video ocean. “You’re not the only one who misses them.”
Lizzy wasn’t trying to downplay the fact that I had lost my parents at ten years old, but she was trying to remind me that she had been close to them too. Close enough for her to take a year off after their deaths, trying to figure out what happened to them. Close enough that she wasn’t willing to answer my phone calls, until I mentioned their names in a voicemail. That was what got me the lunch date with her.
I shook my head. “You’re right though. I do need to do this on my own.”
Lizzy picked at her cuticles. “I’ll talk to him.”
“Lizzy.”
“Yes, yes. I know. You need to do this on your own.” She pushed the appetizer plate away and angled her body toward me. “Now tell me about this assignment. How is it going, doing it on your own?”
“Cormac is—” I paused. What would be the best way to describe Cormac? “He’s volatile. One minute, he’s playing the alpha asshole, and the next, he’s spanking me over a bench.”
She raised an eyebrow. “That’s still being the alpha asshole, isn’t it?”
“You know what I mean.” She nodded. “Anyway, the first night we met, it was hard for him to shake my hand.That’show closed off he was. But then he gave me his phone numberandtexted me later.”
“A game of hot and cold.”
“Tell me about it.”
The waiter brought our entrees, and after eating in silence for a few minutes, I spoke up. “I approached him yesterday. I guess it was rude to talk to him when he was sitting in those seats in front of the stage.”
“Ah, yes. Quite les faux pas.”
“Well, I have no other purpose for being there beside him, and I didn’t want to lose my chance. Then he told me he wasn’t interested, but as soon as I walked away, he grabbed my arm and took me to the Terrariums.”
“So he needed the chase, then?”
“I guess,” I shrugged.
“How were the private rooms?”
Sometimes I wondered what it would have been like if my parents were alive. Would I have gone into the same profession as them, or would they have encouraged me to do something else? It was only when they died that I learned the truth about their profession, that ‘consultant’ really meant assassin, which is when I adamantly decided that I needed to follow their path. It was in my blood, after all.
But if they had never left, if they were still here and I had somehow decided that I wanted to be an assassin like they were, would my mother have wanted to know aboutthispart of my job? Assassins or not, the seduction details would probably make most parents squeamish.
But this was Lizzy. She wasn’t my mother; she was my guardian. The lack of shared blood helped in that regard, even if she was still basically a badass grandmother to me.
“It was hot,” I said. She smirked, eating a large chunk of potato. “He spanked me.”
“Oh! That’s better than the last one.”
“Yeah, but get this, hedidn’ttouch me afterward. He made me touch myself.”
“What did you think of that?”
My cheeks warmed, thinking of his focused gaze. How his eyes washed over my body, drinking me in, and stayed steady on me as I came. The twitch of his hard cock in his pants.
“Scarlett?”
“I—” I started. But how did I begin to describe Cormac?
Lizzy smirked and ate a clam. “He must have left an impression on you.”
“Well,” I paused, trying to think of a good explanation. “He spanked me. His handprint stayed on my ass for an hour.”
