Trust Me: Matty and Kayla, Book 3 of 3 (The McDaniels Brothers 7) Read Free Page B

cling to.
    No comfort in my revenge. No relief at a wrong made right. No peace in the knowledge that my mother’s killer had been put behind bars, never to kill again. I’d be adrift, like a sailboat without a mast, whose crew had abandoned ship.
    Screw that.
    With a renewed sense of purpose, I strode toward my office door and flung it open. I made my way down the hall toward the reception area.
    Ariel, the girl at the front desk, was still pretty new. She was the daughter of one of Mick’s thugs and had needed a summer job before she left for her first year in college. Mick had her doing some filing and answering phones for some of his more legit businesses, but she wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.
    All the better for me.
    I strode in, muttering curses under my breath, but loudly enough for her to hear me.
    “Oh, hey!” Her chair squealed furiously as she rushed to shut down a window on her desktop that looked an awful lot like a game of Candy Crush, only to expose a second window that featured what appeared to be a close-up of a guy masturbating.
    She gasped and shut that one down too before looking up at me with guilty blue eyes. “Um…so…everything okay?”
    Perfect .
    “Yeah, yeah.” I bit back a smile and raked a hand through my hair, trying to look harried. “I’ve just been looking for this one file all morning and I think it got archived. I’ve got something super time-sensitive on my hands that can’t wait, but Mick won’t be back from lunch for a couple of hours.”
    The filing system at the warehouse was archaic by design. Mick loved technology, but he didn’t trust it. Everything he had on a hard drive somewhere, he also had on paper. The only problem was, other than things from his legal ventures, all that paper was behind closed doors in his office, which he locked without fail. I’d never really needed the key before, but the Little Mermaid here had a copy in her desk in case of emergencies. All I had to do was get it from her.
    “Can I use the spare key to his office so I can look through the inactive files real quick?” I offered her a pleading wince. “I’m desperate.”
    She opened her mouth and closed it wordlessly before turning away. “I’m not sure. I’m not supposed to give it out. It’s for Mick if he loses his.” She shifted in her chair and fussed with a paper clip holder. “And emergencies…”
    I cocked one hip and half-sat on the corner of her desk, leaning down until she was compelled to meet my gaze.
    “Well, this definitely qualifies, if you ask me. And,” I shot a pointed glance to the monitor in front of her, “I won’t tell if you don’t.”
    Her cheeks flushed and she cleared her throat, working up a trembling smile. “Yeah, um, sure. You’re his daughter, so I don’t think he’d mind anyways.” She lowered her voice, shooting a quick look at the entranceway over my shoulder. “Can you hurry though? I don’t want him to come back and yell at me, just in case I wasn’t supposed to.”
    A jolt of adrenaline pumped through me in a rush, but I forced myself to stay calm. “No problem, I’ll be back in a jiff.”
    Or, however long it took me to skulk out the back door, run to the Home Depot down the street and make a copy of the key.
    She unlocked a drawer in her desk and fumbled around until she came up with a single, gold-hued key. She hesitated and for a second I thought she was going to back out.
    “That…thing on my screen when you walked in?” She wet her lips nervously. “That wasn’t mine. A friend emailed it to me and I opened it without knowing what it was. You’re not going to tell my dad, right?”
    I didn’t even remember which goon her dad was, so there was no chance of that, but I shook my head and playfully used the key she’d handed me to lock my lips before pretending to toss it aside.
    She let out a long breath and her shoulders seemed to slump. The smile she gave me this time was genuine. “Thanks, Kayla.”
    I