The Rebel King (All the King's Men Duet #2) - Kennedy Ryan Page 0,38

time, who has security of his own. I’ll be safe with him.”

“Are you sure now that we’re together,” he says, leaning over to kiss behind my ear, inciting goosebumps that have nothing to do with the morning chill, “you don’t want to swap with Kimba? Come on the road with me instead?”

Visions of us fucking in the back of a campaign bus fill my head. I pull away, glancing around the empty park to make sure no one is around. “Um, I don’t think going on the trail with you is a great idea. Now, I won’t do this bracelet and security, so which will it be?”

He pulls back and our eyes meet for long seconds. Those green eyes could persuade me to do just about anything he asked.

“Wear the bracelet.”

14

Maxim

“I have news.”

Grim’s words make me pause, my stylus poised over my iPad.

“What’s up?” I stand and walk to the window of the hotel suite. The Champs-Élysées spreads itself like a sultry woman beneath me, flashing alluring glimpses of the Eiffel Tower in the distance. The most beautiful avenue in the world and I feel nothing but indifference for the glittering lights and elegant lines of the buildings. Not just because I’ve seen it a hundred times or more, but because what Grim has to say is the most important thing in the world to me right now.

“Jackson Keene is the one who died,” Grim says.

My remorse for killing the man doesn’t deepen knowing his name.

“It took us a while,” Grim goes on, “because he’d managed to scrub himself from the records we’d typically check. These guys have been off the radar for a while. They may have been running a pretty rudimentary operation, but that seems to have been intentional. They’ve kept their digital footprint almost non-existent the last few years.”

“Jackson,” I murmur, tugging my bottom lip and frowning. “Abe called him Jack.”

“Abe is actually Gregory. Jack’s brother, Gregory Keene. Stanford grad, computer science. Master’s degree from Harvard. Lots of scholarships, but there was also a lot of loan debt. Not one payment’s been made since his mother died.”

“What the hell?” I turn my back on the shimmering city and scowl. “That cretin’s better educated than I am.”

“That’s relative, Doctor Cade,” Grim says dryly. “He’s a genius, though, yeah. In the literal sense, not colloquially. The little I’ve been able to dig up on him all pre-dates his mother’s long bout with cancer. After she died, the trail dries up for the brothers, too.”

“And any luck finding his hopefully decomposing body yet?”

“No, but at least now we know who he is. We have a face and a name, which we probably won’t need because he’s probably dead and the body has been eaten by some wild animal or devoured by a shark.”

“Sharks in a river? Not likely.”

“You know what I mean. We’ve had no activity since. Not even a ping.”

“Considering he managed to not ping for years, that doesn’t ease my mind. If he survived . . .”

The tortured voice screaming his brother’s name haunts me for a moment. I’ve thought more about that than I have about the man I shot. It was the sound of genuine human pain. I hope I’ll never be so callous that it doesn’t affect me, even coming from the man I hate.

“We’ll keep our feelers out there,” Grim says. “I’m not giving up, just telling you there’s nothing yet, and we’re probably in the clear.”

“’Probably’ is not damn good enough with Lennix traipsing all over the fucking country in crowds and at rallies and vulnerable.”

“She wouldn’t be vulnerable if you’d let me put my guys back on her, King.”

“She doesn’t want that.” I clench a hand in my pocket. Each day I’m away from her, it takes everything in me not to order a stealth security detail she’d never even detect.

“Fuck what she wants. Since when did you hand your balls over to a girl?”

“You’ve obviously never had your balls well handled.” My roguish laugh echoes in the empty, palatial suite. “Lennix takes very good care of them for me.”

“Spare me the details.” Rare humor enters his gruff voice. “How the mighty have fallen. You go almost forty years without tying yourself down, and this little woman wraps you around her finger in a matter of months.”

“Months? I met her when I was twenty-four years old, Grim. You know she started winding me around more than her finger years ago.”

“God, yes. You were so whipped even in Antarctica. Staring at her photo