Chapter 96

Cole shuffled, feeling overwhelmed and faintly awful. “Um. Thank you. But surely this isn’t your job.”

“My job is whatever Aiden needs.”

Wow. Because that didn’t have a ring of “pet assassin” or anything. Or maybe all the talk of panic buttons and private security firms had gone to her head. “I’ll try not to bug you.”

“Cole,” he said her name, the first time he’d used it to directly address her, but he said it meanly, like she was someone else’s dog who’d pissed on his carpet and he didn’t feel it was his place to rebuke her. “I’ve been asked to look after you and I will do it to the best of my frankly considerable ability. However, if she made things more difficult than they had to be out of some misplaced bourgeois guilt, I will be quite displeased.”

As Cole opened her mouth to reply, she hoped something appropriate and vaguely sensible would emerge. Except what happened was, “And I won’t like you when you’re displeased?”

Becaus