“She said—” he began.

“Delete it,” Nick ordered.

The man instantly turned to the monitors. One cleared then showed the now empty social chamber.

Within five seconds, it blanked.

Without another word, Nick dragged the girl out of the monitoring room and closed the door.

“You’re done,” he told her. “Pack your shit. Out.”

Her eyes got big.

“You’re firing me?” she asked.

Fuck, he hated stupid bitches.

He’d smelled that on her the minute he met her. It concerned him, not only for the purpose he bought the place—to get access to Olivia Shade—but because he owned the fucking place and no employer wanted a stupid bitch for an employee.

But she was liked by the old owners.

What she pulled, that no longer factored.

“Yes,” he answered, letting her go. “Get your shit and out.”

“But we—” she began.

“There is no we,” he told her.

Her head twitched in shock.

Yeah. He hated stupid bitches.

“But you took me to dinner,” she whispered. “And then we—”

“Fucked. You weren’t very good so I didn’t come back for more. Lesson. Usually, a man takes a woman out, fucks her, wants more, he does something about that and doesn’t let three weeks elapse between the first fuck and the next.”

“But, you’ve been flirting with me for—”

He knew what he’d been doing.

He’d needed something from her.

He got it.

He knew she felt his change when she snapped her mouth shut.

“Out,” he whispered.

She swallowed visibly but that was the extent of her further wasting his time. She hustled her admittedly sweet ass to get her shit and then she got out.

He pulled out his phone, started a string to the managers of the club and tapped in the text.

Find a new Ross.

He hit send and went home.

* * * * *

An hour later, Nick sat on his sofa, foot up, sole of his shoe pressed to the edge of the coffee table, the fingers of one hand wrapped around a glass of Dewar’s and ice, his other hand lifted, his eyes to Olivia Shade’s phone number written on his palm.

Christ, she was a cool customer.

After walking to him in that fucking skirt with that fucking look on her face that made him absolutely sure he could fucking smell the wet drenching her pussy…

Then taking his cock like she did, her eyes locked to his, her hips working his dick…

And finally coming with the demure noises a princess would make while her pussy told a different story and milked him hard.

After all that, walking like she was drifting through her living room in order to grab her panties, put them on, nab her purse and do nothing but nod before she was going to walk away from him.

He had not expected first contact to go that spectacularly well.

He expected eye contact. Maybe a few words exchanged. Enough she’d get he was into her kink so he could lay the groundwork when he ran into her elsewhere.

He didn’t expect to fuck her against the wall.

And certainly he didn’t expect that fuck to be that outstanding.

He also didn’t expect to feel whatever the fuck it was he felt coming off her after her orgasm milked his right out of him.

He had no idea what it was but whatever it was, he stayed buried inside her a lot longer than he’d intended.

And it made him uneasy.

She’d given nothing away after that and it was almost like he’d imagined it.

He stopped looking at her number, leaned forward, tagged his phone off the coffee table and sat back. He used his thumb to program her in.

And there she was. A bold Olivia Shade at the top of her contact.

Her there with him everywhere he went.

A Shade in his life.

He looked across the room to the chest against the wall where the framed picture of Hettie was. A picture that hadn’t moved for four years, except for when he moved house and when his cleaning service dusted it.

Fuck.

He put that thought aside, tossed the phone back to the table, nabbed his drink, threw it back, heaved himself out of the couch and went to bed.

* * * * *

Like he had a sixth sense (and in his business, he had to), Turner called him the next morning five minutes after Nick’s workout.

“You make contact yet?”

Nick looked from his orange juice out the sunny window.

Cold. Warm. February. July. In Denver, the day dawned, odds were it’d be sunny.

“You wanna tell me why you’re asking?” he requested.

“One of her boys got dead last night.”

Nick’s back straightened but his eyes dropped to the stainless steel countertop.

“What?”

“Eli Cook, street name Green. Not sure why. Cops say the crime scene, that bein’ his apartment, looked like he was packin’ to leave town. Not sure why about that either. Don’t got a lot of insight into the Shade family dealings anymore, but no word on the street sayin’ there was an issue. He had a gunshot wound to his thigh that was not mortal, but was fresh, though not as fresh as the ones that were mortal and no one knows jack about that either.”

Even though Nick knew all about Green, including who shot him considering he had surveillance all over the Shade warehouse, he had nothing to say so he didn’t say anything.

“This is not good, Nick,” Turner went on. “The House of Shade has been a house of cards for years now. A cold wind blows, it’ll blow away and everything stacked inside will go with it. And I gotta tell you, with them taking desperate measures years ago to diversify dealings, that going so far south it dropped off the face of the earth, and them constantly scrambling with not much coming of it, now Eli Cook biting it for no apparent reason, I feel a seriously fuckin’ bitter wind kickin’ up.”