Page 72 of Bulletproof

“You were with a very beautiful woman.”

“Thank you. I’ll tell her you said so if I get out of here in one piece.”

“She’s gonna be pissed that you were hurt.”

“Oh, you have no idea.”

I nodded, stood up, and then turned back to Cristo Liron.

Every good thought I’d ever had about the man was gone, and because of that, so was his beauty. It was amazing how quickly it could happen. Sometimes, people who were not so blessed in the looks department got stunning the longer you knew them because after a while, you stopped seeing the outside and just saw their hearts. The opposite was also true. Some really hot guy, like Cristo Liron, suddenly lost all his poetry and light because it turned out, after all the sticking up for him I had done, the man really was bad news. I hated it when Dane was right.

“Jory.”

I just stared.

“Something bothered me all night,” he said, leaning forward, his elbows on the table. “It seems that you and Detective Kage have been together for quite some time.”

“Which I told you from the start,” I reminded him.

“And I appreciated that,” he said. “But that was the problem. I know people, and I never make mistakes. People around me sometimes do, but not me, never me.”

“Could you get to the point?”

“Sure.” He nodded, tipping his head at Adan, his bodyguard.

The huge man came around the table and stood behind Sam. He then grabbed Sam’s hair and yanked his head back hard at the same time he put a gun to his temple.

“I own every face you see in here, Jory—make no mistake about that. You yell fire in here, nobody’s gonna move. This is my family. These are people I know. Hell, my brother’s the one who brought you.”

I absorbed that, even as I fought not to throw myself at Adan to get his hands off Sam. I wouldn’t give the bigger man much trouble, but it would be enough to give my husband the upper hand for crucial moments.

Sam must have read me like a book because his eyes flicked to me. “It’s okay. You’re okay. Everything’s fine.”

Sam had a gun pressed against the side of his head, but he was trying to comfort me.

“Hey!” Cristo Liron snapped his fingers at me like I was a dog. “Over here.”

I turned my head slowly.

“Better,” he assured me. “I want your full attention.”

And he had it.

“As I was thinking about you last night, I finally came to the conclusion that there was just no way. A guy like you, Jory … there’s no way you’d fuck some stranger in the back of a club. And there’s no way you wouldn’t give me hell on the phone last night when I called. You should have told me off for insulting your integrity, but you didn’t. You just hung up on me so you could be with whoever was there. But I know you, and you’re a fighter if it matters, if you care enough, so I have to ask myself … who would you let fuck you up against a wall in a club, and who was with you last night?”

I really had to give the man credit. In the short time that we had been acquaintances, he had actually paid attention and figured out the kind of guy I was. Too bad it wasn’t going to do him any good.

“I didn’t fuck anyone in the club,” I told him honestly—because I had let my man put me up against a wall, but he was not just anyone.

“You told me you had sex.”

“I lied.”

“Lied then or now?”

“Then,” I said flatly. “And if you’ve got someone who wants to put me on a polygraph machine, I will pass it.”

He squinted at me. “You smelled like cum at the club.”