Page 72 of Wicked Intentions (Wicked Games 3)
Nineteen
Mariana
“Reynard,” purrs a cultured British voice on the other end of the line.
Flooded with the same relief I always feel when I hear his voice, I close my eyes and rest my forehead in my hand. I’m sitting at Ryan’s glass kitchen table, my nose filled with the delicious scent of frying bacon. My heart feels like a grenade with the pin pulled inside my chest.
How do people live like this? How can anyone survive this feeling, this agony of tenderness and hope? It’s madness, I know it is, and yet…
“Hello, Reynard,” I say quietly. “It’s Dragonfly.”
A brief pause follows before he asks, “Are you all right?”
“Yes and no. Mostly yes, nothing to worry about.”
Another pause. “It certainly sounds like something to worry about.”
I chew my lip, thinking. “The job was…difficult.”
This time, his pause is deafening. “Have you completed it?”
I clear my throat. “Yes. And no.”
“How esoteric,” he says drily. “Care to elaborate?”
“I’m just calling to find out if you’re safe. Are you safe? Are you well?”
“Of course. Whatever are you going on about, my darling?”
When I don’t respond, his voice turns dark. “Oh, bollocks. The American.”
I let my heavy sigh serve as my answer.
Reynard turns businesslike, his tone clipped. “If I’m not mistaken—and I never am—your deadline is in forty-eight hours. Do you need an extension?”
“I want you to promise me something, Reynard.”
I can almost hear him pull himself up short. “Good God. That sounds bad. Let me sit down. All right, go ahead, I’m sitting. No, wait, let me get my flask.” Through the phone comes the sounds of a gulp and some lip smacking. “There. Sorted. Tell me.”
I open my eyes and look at Ryan, frying bacon in a pan at his ridiculously enormous stove, and listen to what my heart is emphatically telling me.
“If Ryan McLean contacts you for any reason, I want you to promise to do exactly as he says. No questions asked.”
At the stove, Ryan freezes.
A bristling silence, then Reynard speaks flatly. “He’s taken you hostage. That bloody grinning idiot is holding you hostage, isn’t he?” His voice rises. “He has a gun to your head right now, doesn’t he? Put him on the phone! That colossal wanker! I’ll give that smiling arsebadger something to stew on—”
“Reynard—”
“Does he have any idea who he’s meddling with?” Reynard shouts. “That smarmy, second-rate John Wayne impersonator! That swaggering, insufferable, cock-swinging, pathetic excuse for a man—”
Wincing, I hold the phone away from my ear. Reynard is still going. I wait until I hear a pause, then I put the phone against my ear again and loudly interrupt the tirade.
“No one has taken me hostage, Reynard. No one is forcing me to say anything. I’m asking.”
Ryan stands perfectly still at the stove. It doesn’t look like he’s even breathing.
“Why are you asking?” Renard says, cool and controlled again.
