Feathers and Thorne Series Books 1 - 3: The Complete Collection

Chapter Ten

Isabella

I’m sitting in the car with a phantom.

I know nothing of Carter Blackthorne, but we’re in a car together, heading for my apartment. A nice car at that, let alone one with a professional driver in a dark suit. I didn’t even mention where I lived, yet we’re going the right way so far.

I cling tighter to Carter’s coat, sinking into my seat.

“You missed the turn,” I mutter under my breath, looking at my apartment building buried in the middle of the city.

“It’s quicker to go down Main and Fifth than it is to take Turner Boulevard,” the driver says simply. “Traffic is heavy around this hour.”

It was never a problem before, but then again, I was walking. I don’t have a car, nor could I ever afford one, so my license feels uselessly heavy in my purse that I clutch to my chest. Carter watches every movement closely, waving the driver over to the side of the road when we stop in front of my building.

I should ask, but I don’t, uninterested in how exactly he knows where I live. He knows where I grocery shop and where I go for afternoon runs. This shouldn’t surprise me, either.

“I’ll be back soon, Gus. Keep it here,” Carter says, helping me from my seat. Obviously, he intends to walk me up to my apartment.

I look at his car, obnoxiously parked partly on the sidewalk in a spot where traffic does tend to pile up. “You’ll get a ticket for parking there.”

“Something tells me I won’t, dove. Now come on, let’s get you upstairs.”

I lead us upstairs, not interested if he knows what apartment number I am in or not. He probably knows how much I paid in taxes last year just by his perfectly dapper demeanor. I wouldn’t want him to know that information. He has drivers and nice cars and expensive jackets.

I have a ratty apartment where you have to dodge the fruit flies in the kitchen, even when the fridge and cabinets are barren. I stop at my doorway, unlock the door, and hand Carter his jacket, but he only moves past me, welcoming himself to my humble three-hundred-square-foot apartment.

“It’s cute,” Carter mumbles, picking through all two of my rooms. “A little tight. That’s typically a plus, but in this case, not so much.”

He levels his cold eyes in my direction. I feel them crawl down my neck, every blemish made on my appearance today sharpening into focus. I toss his jacket on the couch nearby and point to my bedroom, which is really just a corner of the apartment where a small, raggedy bed sits.

I change quickly behind my room partition, slipping into something loose. Carter is waiting behind the room divider, and I’m convinced he could see over it or probably through it, but it goes with the many other things I don’t feel like questioning today.

Carter Blackthorne doesn’t seem like a man who appreciates questions.

“Thank you for today,” I whisper, hiding the words under my heavy exhale. “For… well, everything.”

“You’re very welcome, dove.”

I scrunch my nose at that name. “Why do you keep calling me that?”

“You look as if I have insulted you.”

“Well, I’m not a bird,” I huff. “So that’s a pretty good start.”

Carter shrugs, meandering back over through the hallway that’s really just a kitchen, leaning on the countertop and pulling the cabinet doors open one by one. His look of disappointment is pretty similar to mine on most nights.

“You eat like a bird,” he mumbles, the sight of such an expensive man in a cheap, pathetic kitchen a bit striking. “Not much of an appetite?”

I just nod, avoiding the real explanation. “You never answered my question.”

“You want to know why I think you’re a dove,” he mumbles, leaning carefully on the countertop. “Catholics believe a dove symbolizes peace and innocents and salvation.”

I tap my fingertips against my aching, bruising cheek where Jacob grabbed me earlier today. “So, you’re a Catholic then?”

“God and I don’t have any qualms that I know about, so I guess so.”

I peer out the window, his car still parked and impeding traffic while cops on their beat walk right by it, unphased by the sight of a parked vehicle halfway on the curb.

“What about you and every cop in New York?”

Carter hardly seems bothered by my pondering. He’s obviously into something major with the mayor, but does that really give him the right to be this damn cocky and this damn rich and so damn… everything? Carter Blackthorne is everything I’m not.

He is rich and proud and fucking successful. He’s strong and bold. He stopped Jacob Lacey from penetrating me against his desk without even touching him when I couldn’t even wiggle my way out of his grasp. I was weak and submissive, and if I had a car parked on that street downstairs, it would have been towed to some impound lot by now.

“So, who are you, really?” I lean against the window, the birds on my stoop gray, ugly, and dirty. Nothing like a peaceful and innocent dove, that’s for sure. “Charismatic businessman or just something else?”

Carter moves across the kitchen—not like there’s anywhere else to go. He’s only got two-hundred and ninety-eight feet to work with, assuming I’m taking up two feet. It’s obvious from my lack of furniture that nothing else is taking up space, and this tall, handsome man roaming through my kitchen is the tallest, most striking use of space in here.

He towers over me, holding an unnecessary hand to my chin where he steadies my eyes on his—as though I could ever look at anything else.

“I am what I am,” he mutters. “I park where I want, I do business with corrupt scumbags, and if I feel like being a rescuer for a pretty little dove in trouble, then I guess I’m that too.”

I watch him carefully, looking for a twinge of reality that could touch a man so aloof, so distant from normality that I’m convinced he isn’t actually real until I press my hand into his firm chest. It’s a surprise when I don’t fall straight through him.

So the phantom does exist.

“Go to work, do your job, and don’t worry about the Lacey family of crooks,” he whispers, leaning in as though to kiss my cheek. I feel a pang of disappointment when he misses the spot entirely, breathing warm exhales against the bony structure of my ear. “You’ll be just fine under my watch.”

I don’t need to be told that he’s watching me. I realized that over the weekend when, for the first time since moving back to this wretched city six months ago, I ran into him twice.

Coincidence doesn’t touch a man like Carter Blackthorne.

He might be a man who parks where he wants, does business with sly snakes in the grass, and can be a very handy knight in shining armor, but if there’s one thing I know about this clever enigma of a man, it’s that he is definitely watching me.

The only real question is why.