Wanted By Him (The Billionaire Black Sheep Book 1) Read online

  I push past him into the apartment and move down the hallway, which opens up into living space.

  Rafe’s right behind me, and I hand him my phone, with Ainsley’s message displayed. “What the fuck is going on here?”

  He looks at it, but doesn’t say anything.

  “What have you done?” I glare at him. “One minute she’s texting me to meet her at her place because you dumped her, and the next I get this.”

  “We’re going to go get her,” he says, as though it’s the simplest thing in the world. He gives me back my phone. “My brother is on his way, and we’ll find her and get her. And then I’ll take care of the person or people responsible.”

  He says that as though it’s the simplest thing in the world, too, which is a little chilling. There’s a wet bar against the wall between the floor-to-ceiling windows, and I move over there and pour myself a couple fingers of bourbon. Orphan Barrel, which means it cost as much as what I’m wearing, and the first swallow goes down smooth as silk.

  “For your sake, “ I tell Rafe, “you better pray that you do.”

  He looks at me for just a moment, then laughs—a short, sharp sound that barely qualifies as a laugh, but still…

  “I don’t know what, exactly, you find funny in this situation.” I swallow more bourbon. “I’m not feeling the humor.”

  “No, it’s just…” He shrugs a little. “You’re just like her. Fearless. That’s rare in a woman. Hell, it’s rare in anyone.”

  I look at my bourbon, swirling the contents around while I decide how I feel about what he said. About him. I can’t get this wrong. It’s too important.

  Can I trust him? Is that panic I saw in his eyes? Is worry for her the reason he looks like he got dressed in a wind tunnel?

  “I’m not fearless,” I say, finally. I have to trust him. “I’m scared to death right now.”

  “Me too,” he says.

  Something in his voice catches at my heart, opens that trickle of pity all the way up. He’s as scared as I am.

  And somehow that’s the scariest thing of all.

  4

  Miles

  I barrel through the lobby of Rafe’s building, waving the doorman away when he moves to intercept me. He knows who I am.

  I take the elevator to the top floor and discover that Rafe’s door, alarmingly, is open a crack. I pause, steel myself for whatever I might see inside. Yesterday, it was a dead guy in Ainsley’s bed. What will it be today?

  But when I open the door, I can see Rafe standing at the end of the hall in his living room, turned mostly away from me and talking to someone else.

  “Me, too,” he says.

  I close the door, and he turns to look at me. I can’t read his expression at all as I walk down the hall. “What the hell, Rafe—”

  I pull up short and just stand there for a moment, blinking. Standing in the living room, backlit by the last gasp of sunlight outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, is a tall woman with a strong chin, softly squared jaw, and wide, upturned eyes that are currently looking at me like I might be something she scraped off her shoe. Black hair tumbles in soft waves to just below her shoulder blades, exposed in a casual gauzy top with thin straps. Under that simple top and a pair of dark blue denim jeans, she’s curvy and voluptuous, with the kind of lush body a man really wants to sink into.

  She’s beautiful.

  Like, outrageously beautiful. Movie-star beautiful.

  A couple of years ago, I was showing off at Surfrider Beach in Malibu, and my board spun out. No big, but I misjudged distance and direction and came up facing away from it; the deck of the board clocked me hard enough that I had a lump for weeks. This feels a lot like that. I just look at her, struck speechless despite the seriousness of the situation.

  “Brigitte, Miles. Miles, Brigitte.” Rafe gestures between us. “Ainsley’s friend. My brother. Now let’s get our shit together and get her back.”

  “So what do we do?” Brigitte asks. “She could be anywhere, right?”

  Rafe reaches his hand out to me. “Give me your phone.”

  “Why?” Not that it really matters. I give it to him.

  “I told her when I talked to her to make sure that she leaves her phone on.” Rafe pokes and swipes at my phone. “That phone, and mine and yours, are all registered to Garrett Enterprises. I’m going to use Find my iPhone—but I don’t want to use mine in case they try to call.” He swipes and pokes some more, then: “She’s in Brooklyn. Park Slope, at the moment.”

  “Who kidnaps someone to Brooklyn?” Brigitte asks.

  Rafe and I both look at her, and her cheeks go pink.

  “That was stupid,” she says. “My brain’s not working right.”

  Rafe picks up his own phone, but I notice he doesn’t let go of mine. “I’ll call my limo,” he says.

  I reach out and pluck his phone out of his hand. “Are you nuts?”

  “I don’t have time for—”

  If looks could kill, I’d be a smear on the carpet, but I hold my ground. “Use your fucking head. How do you know you can trust anyone who’s not in this room?”

  He shuts up, looks between me and Brigitte.

  Brigitte pulls her phone out of her back pocket. “I’ll get an Uber.”

  “I’m sure we can grab a cab outside,” I say. We really don’t have time to wait around for a car service.

  She ignores me and keeps tapping on her phone. “Cabs are dirty.”

  I can’t help it; I roll my eyes. “Cabs are faster, Princess.”

  She slants me a look out of those long, almost exotic eyes. They’re a dark blueish-gray that I don’t think I’ve ever quite seen before. “Welcome to the future, Grampa. It’ll be here before you’ve had time to button up that stupid vest.”

  She moves past me and down the hall. I look down. I love my vest. It’s a black leather motorcycle vest that I bought with my first paycheck in California. Not the money my brother sends. My money.

  “My vest isn’t stupid,” I say—to Rafe, I guess, since Brigitte’s already out the door.

  Rafe looks at me like I’m nuts. “Sure it isn’t. Can we argue about that when Ainsley is safe, maybe?”

  Of course. God, I have to get my head in the game. This is important. I follow Brigitte, with Rafe right on my heels.

  Downstairs, I’ll be damned if she’s not right: there’s a car with an Uber sign already waiting at the curb.

  Rafe hands my phone back to me. “I can’t look at it anymore,” he says, and climbs into the back seat.

  I look down; the battery display for Ainsley’s phone is at 7%. I curse under my breath, and literally before my eyes, it drops to 6%.

  I climb in after Rafe, and Brigitte slides in last. She smells … well, sexy. She smells sexy, no matter how inappropriate it is to notice it right now. Something spicy, musky maybe. Not girlish. It suits her.

  She arches up off the seat; her wispy top slips and exposes a wedge of pale skin as she slides her phone into her back pocket, then settles back onto the seat. “Give me that,” she says, and reaches out to take my phone.

  I don’t let go—I’m still recovering from that flash of skin and watching her writhe around on the seat. The phone ends up between us, each of us holding onto it with one hand. The green dot that represents Ainsley continues to move slowly through Brooklyn, headed roughly southwest to who-knows-where.

  “Billy,” Brigitte says, “I’m not 100% sure where we’re going. I said Park Slope, but the … phone I’m trying to track is on the move.”

  “Okay,” the driver says. He’s freckle-faced and all of maybe twenty years old.

  “Can I just tell you what’s happening on the screen, and we can sort it out when we get wherever?”

  He looks back over his shoulder and smiles at her. I have a feeling that people don’t say no to Brigitte a whole hell of a lot.

  She bends her head over the phone, and the smell of her is in my nose again. I lean in and watch the dot, trying to focus on what ma
tters. There will be time to think about how Brigitte smells once Ainsley is safe.

  Just as we’re crossing into Brooklyn, the dot stops moving. It just sits there, at the end of the 43rd Street wharf.

  “Sunset Park,” Brigitte murmurs. Then, to Billy: “Sunset Park, Billy. They’ve stopped.” She looks up at me, and those fascinating eyes are filled with worry. There’s a faint crease between her brows that I want to smooth away. “Why Sunset Park?” she murmurs.

  I shrug. “Hell if I know.”

  “Oh, balls,” she says. “Her phone’s dying.”

  I lean in again to look at the phone, and catch a whiff of bourbon on her breath. I very carefully don’t think about kissing her.

  The phone is at 4%.

  5

  Miles

  I hear Rafe half-groan beside me, and know that he looked, too.

  “It’s the GPS,” he says.

  We all know this, but no one points that out to him. No one says anything at all for a few minutes, in fact. Rafe’s obviously hanging by a thread right now, so I’m certainly not going to risk setting him off. Ainsley’s phone battery drops to 3%. I don’t mention it, and neither does Brigitte.

  Eventually, as he turns a corner, Billy asks, “Have they moved at all?”

  “No,” Brigitte says. She sounds about as on-edge as Rafe does, honestly. “But her phone’s about to die.”

  “Go faster,” Rafe says. He pulls out his wallet and drops what looks like a hundred-dollar-bill over the divide between the seats. “And there’s another one of those where that came from, if you see this through to the end with us.”

  Billy says something I can’t hear, and Rafe replies, also quiet. Beside me, Brigitte takes in a shaky breath; I check the phone, and the map is empty. No more green dot.

  Oh, fuck.

  “The dot is gone,” I say.

  “What do you mean, gone?” Rafe says. His voice sounds … well, I don’t quite know how it sounds. Certainly like nothing I’ve ever heard from him before.

  “Ainsley was under the impression you’re pretty smart,” Brigitte says. “The dot’s gone. Probably the phone died.”

  Her voice doesn’t sound all that stable either. I wonder if they’re about to go for each other’s throats, and how I should handle it if they do.

  “What the hell is he doing to her?” Rafe says. Plaintive. That’s the word for what his voice is doing. Like he can’t believe the universe is allowing this to happen, and like he’s already given up hoping it will turn out okay.

  “It’s an iPhone, not an oracle,” Brigitte snaps. Rafe opens his mouth, but she cuts him off. “I’m just as worried as you are, so don’t fucking start. She’s a fashion reporter, for Christ’s sake—her life isn’t dangerous, or even all that interesting. Whatever the reason is for this, it comes back to you.”

  I expect Rafe to say something equally cutting in return—he’s not really one to take a tongue-lashing with equanimity—but instead he just sort of … deflates. He sinks back in his seat, and doesn’t say anything at all.

  I’m torn between worry for my brother and admiration for this woman who tells it like it is whether he likes it or not. Lots of people are afraid of my brother—with good reason—but it appears that Brigitte isn’t one of them.

  “They haven’t moved in fifteen minutes,” I say. “There’s no reason to think they’re gonna move now, especially not if we hurry. They were near the end of 43rd, at the wharf. Put the pedal down a little, Billy. Closest intersection is 1st Street.”

  “That’s mostly warehouses and processing,” Billy says, ignoring a yellow light at the corner of Green-Wood Cemetery and turning toward the area of the wharf.

  “I have a warehouse there,” Rafe says. “On 43rd. Maybe two, I’m not sure.”

  “You’re not sure?” Brigitte looks incredulous. “You might maybe have an extra warehouse over there, however the hell much that costs, and you don’t know?”

  “I own a lot of things,” Rafe says tersely. “I can’t be expected to remember all of them. But I’m sure there’s at least one warehouse that belongs to Garrett Enterprises.”

  I don’t even remember the one warehouse, but then I don’t have Rafe’s encyclopedic knowledge of the company’s holdings. If he says we own one—or more—there, then we do.

  “Who would have access to it?” I ask. Up to this point, I’ve purposely not asked him who he thinks is behind this kidnapping, but he needs to think about it now. I think I already know, and if I’m right, he needs to be ready for who—and what—he’ll see when we get to the warehouse.

  “Well,“ he says, “anyone, if they broke in—”

  I’m not letting him off the hook with that. “Who has keys? You know perfectly fucking well this is someone inside the company.”

  “It was always going to be,” he says. “They knew too much and had too much influence over what I saw and heard. The question is, who?”

  “Who do you trust?” Brigitte says.

  “Not many. My Dad. Miles. My second in command, Marco. My PA, Claire.” His eyes are scanning the streets around us, but I can tell he’s getting more and more tense as he answers our questions. “I employ many people. That doesn’t mean I trust them.”

  I push again. “Who has that kind of autonomy?”

  He shrugs.

  Why the fuck is he behaving like this? “Come on,” I say. “This is bullshit. You’re blind as a bat and it’s gonna get Ainsley killed.”

  “Don’t assume you know what I see and what I don’t.” His eyes are flinty. “Even with those I trust, I only trust so far.”

  He returns his eyes to the streets outside, which are transitioning from residential to commercial.

  “I’m going to stop on 1st,” Billy says. “That way they won’t hear a car pull up.”

  We pull up nearly at the corner, behind an idling Chrysler limo. Brigitte’s out of the car in a flash, with me right behind her. Rafe pops out directly behind me and takes off toward the warehouse at a run.

  6

  Brigitte

  The guys are off like a shot, headed around the corner and down the sidewalk practically before I can blink. I take off after them—if you can’t run in kitten heels, what’s even the point of wearing them?—and reach the heavy metal warehouse door only a few moments after they do.

  Rafe pushes the door open and disappears into the darkness beyond. Miles pauses long enough to snag the set of keys Rafe left in the lock—smart, I think—and I move past him, close on Rafe’s heels. There’s a howl of pain from somewhere close by, and my blood runs cold. Without pausing, Rafe turns to the right and throws open another, interior door. He’s through it in an instant, with Miles and me right behind him.

  The scene inside the room is insane. Ainsley stands, eyes blazing, lip bleeding, with a metal baseball bat cocked over one shoulder. Her skirt is rucked up over her hips so that she’s naked from the waist down, and the front of her shirt is torn open.

  Just a couple of feet away from her, a dark-haired, stocky man is doubled over—nose bloodied, wrist hanging at an extremely not-okay angle. His pants are open, and it’s pretty clear what he’s been up to, or at least what he intended.

  But if he’s bloody and Ainsley has a bat in her hands …

  Yeah, that’s actually not all that surprising, knowing Ainsley as I do.

  I move quickly to her, reaching out to pull her skirt down. “Motherfucking piece of shit, what the fuck, Ainsley, here, let me—”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see Miles take up a position between Ainsley and the dark-haired guy. Rafe’s hand reaches out and wraps around the guy’s throat, and he lands a roundhouse punch that literally knocks out some teeth.

  I make a noise I don’t think I’ve ever made before. It’s part horror and part … well, I’m not gonna lie. Whatever happened here, that guy clearly needs his teeth punched out. Good for Rafe. I look away, but there’s no way not to hear; solid punches land over and over again.

  T
he man tries to say something, and I can’t resist looking for a second. I regret it immediately when I see the guy on his knees, obviously begging for mercy. But there is none. Rafe swings a foot back and kicks the guy in the ribs—twice. Hard. The noise they make as they break is going to haunt my nightmares forever, I’m pretty sure.

  Ainsley moves to … go to them? Get between them? Whatever it is, Miles stops her with one hand.

  “Leave it.” His voice is soft. “This is between them.”

  Ainsley protests. “I’m the one he—”

  His voice is still quiet, but firm. “And you did good. But this is between them now.” He looks at me. “Brigitte, get her out to the car.”

  I take Ainsley’s wrist and drag her out the door. There’s a clang of metal and more meaty thuds and groans behind me, but I don’t look. I just keep moving until we’re both out on the sidewalk.

  Ainsley struggles against my hold on her. “I have to—”

  “You have to be smart!” I snap. “What are you going to do in there that Rafe’s not already doing?”

  “I just—” Her chest starts to heave, and the wildness in her eyes shifts from anger to something I know all too well. Her hands flutter up to pull the torn edges of her shirt together. “Brig… he … oh my God. Brig.”

  And then the tears come.

  As well they should, I think. I wrap one arm around her and guide her up the sidewalk toward the corner and, hopefully, the Uber beyond. “Okay,” I say. “I’ve got you. It’s okay. You’re okay.”

  Billy hops out of the Suburban when he sees us, but I wave him back in. There’s nothing he can do.

  “I’ve got this,” I say. “Come on, Ainsley, let’s get in the car.”

  “I’m not leaving him,” she says, stubbornly, even as her eyes are wheeling in every direction at once and her voice is so high-pitched and whistling that I can barely understand her. “I need to—”