Short of an emergency, not many people would forgo washing off after four hours of sex-unless they knew they could shower very soon somewhere else, like maybe somewhere else in this very building. She might not have come to that conclusion, but he hadn’t wanted to take the chance. Anyone sharp enough to pull the wool over Salinas ’s eyes wasn’t a person he could take lightly.

The afternoon had been…satisfying. Very satisfying. Not only had he learned a lot about Salinas, but he’d pushed the boundaries of his own self-control and had a great deal of pleasure from it. He’d wanted to know how much Salinas needed him, and the answer was obvious: very much-enough that Salinas had agreed to share his woman, which ran contrary to the basic foundation of his heritage, his position, and his ego. The only time someone in Salinas ’s position would give away his woman was when he was tired of her, and the assassin was damn certain that wasn’t the case.

The identity of his latest target, a major drug trafficker in Mexico, had made the assassin curious. Salinas was a major distributor, but his operation was on the delivery end of the drug chain. Drug dealers were constantly knocking each other off, but for a distributor to have a supplier eliminated was…odd. Something else was going on, something that could prove to be very lucrative to a man who was the best at what he did.

The assassin had carefully considered all the angles and possibilities, and devised a way to find out what he wanted to know. If the answer was “yes,” then Salinas would soon desperately need the assassin’s services, which in turn meant the assassin could name his price for the job. If the answer was “no,” no real harm was done, because while he’d have to stick by his implied threat to never work for Salinas again, there was never any shortage of jobs. There was, in fact, a surplus of people who wanted him to kill other people. Economically, there was no downside for him, and a “yes” answer also gave him a nice physical bonus: Drea.



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