BWWM: SECRET (A Billionaire African American Romance) (BWWM Interracial Romance Book 1)

right way. Someone murders a loved one like that, you should absolutely get even. Like a vendetta. You should ram that murder down his fucking throat and cheer when he chokes.”

  It hits me again, the fact that I didn’t kill Valdez. That in the final moments, I was thwarted, and the hate driving me ever since Roger Stimson’s visit hasn’t been sated... It’s still there, gnawing at my idea of what’s right and what’s wrong.

  “That’s where I come in,” says Carlisle with a sigh, as though I’ve forced him to reassess his part in all this. “They hire me so they don’t have to pull that trigger.”

  “So you are an assassin for hire—a billionaire assassin for hire. That...makes no sense.”

  “Maybe it’s not, but the world makes no sense. This is how I at least try to make sense of it.”

  “You mean killing people?”

  “I mean by getting even for those who can’t.”

  “So you’re a vigilante.”

  “It’s a fine line between the two, I find. A vigilante takes the law into his own hands. A hit man kills for personal gain. Where those two intersect, you’ll find the shadow of Barrett Carlisle.”

  “I think I get it now. Someone offered you a contract to kill Valdez, and before you decided to accept or not, you looked into him, to see if he fit your killing code. And that’s when you found me—the daughter of Andreas Katsaros, Valdez’s business rival, who’d recently been murdered. So you pieced it together from there, using your...shadow world connections. But you really didn’t expect me to show up tonight.”

  He strokes my hair, whispers, “I had no idea.”

  “That I could go through with it...?”

  “That you could surprise me... Not many have.”

  His warm breath tickles the back of my neck, and my stomach flutters. “Surprise you in what way?”

  “In every way... The pictures I saw of you, the impression I had in mind: before tonight, you were just another helpless victim who relied on the law to dole out justice. But the moment I recognized you at the party tonight, I knew I’d underestimated everything about you.”

  I lace his fingers in mine and feel the warm tingle spread. “Barrett?”

  “Hmmm...?”

  “Thank you for saving my life.”