Page 48 of Conning the Billionaire
“But this isn’t a big job with lots of people. It’s just us doing something about art but not stealing it. If one of us snitches, the other person will know who it was.”
“It’s better this way.”
“But it’s not. It’s you holding all the cards and me being in the dark. It’s being able to walk away without looking back and me not knowing where you’ve gone again because I don’t know the whole plan. If I’m going to do this, I need to know what we’re doing. We need to be in this together. We need to do this the right way, like it’s our thing.”
Micah drained his drink and set the glass on the coffee table. “It’s late. It’s almost two a.m. Let’s sleep, and we’ll continue this conversation in the morning, okay?”
“I don’t know, Micah. I don’t know if I want to do this thing if we’re not in it together.”
“That’s not what I—Look, it’s really late. You can change your mind and walk out in the morning as easily as you can right now. Let’s get some sleep.”
Not that Kylie was going to let him bolt out on her again.
But she traipsed after Micah toward the bedroom of the suite.
She wasn’t going to even shut her eyes when this Micah Shine might abscond and stick her with an exorbitant bill again.
She dug a long jammie shirt out of her backpack. Micah let her shower first while he was busy doing something, but if he thought she was going to go to sleep and let him con her again, he had another dang thing coming.
No one fooled Kylie twice.
Nope.
Nuh-uh.
The hotel bed was so much softer than her decades-old twin mattress in her apartment, and she sank into the cuddly pillows and fluffy comforter in the cool room.
Kylie was not a Southern Jersey hick who grew eggplants on her daddy’s farm and had never met a man before. Kylie had grown up in Atlantic City and was as cynical as an IRS auditor.
If Micah Shine thought that gentle kiss goodnight with his fingers tangled in her hair and holding the back of her head and then a warm smile while he gazed into her eyes—his eyes really were like opals, silvery gray and awash with tides of blue and teal that caught the light—before he turned off the lamp and then sneaked his ankle under hers for a leg hug that felt like affection as his breathing smoothed out to a slow, steady whisper, if he thought all that was going to placate her and allay her well-founded suspicions, well, he was wrong.
Going to sleep would be just asking for this scammer to grift her again.
The bed was really soft.
And warm.
But she definitely wasn’t going to—
15
GONE?
KYLIE
—Dammit.
The hotel bedroom formed a dark shell around Kylie except for a rectangle of faintly glowing lines on one side.
Kylie shot her leg across the crisp sheets toward the other side.
Nothing.
And even worse, no one.
She grabbed her phone where she’d left it on the nightstand. The screen read 4:48 a.m.
Goddamn, that son of a bitch, that scheming asshole had done it to her again.
