Dark Sins (Dark Intentions #3) - Charlotte Byrd Page 0,4

living room.

I think that it might be about keeping my mouth shut about what happened between him and Allison, but he has something else on his mind entirely.

"Have you given any more thought to what we discussed earlier?" he asks, grabbing a lemonade from the fridge and opening it.

He's dressed in his swimming trunks with a loose-fitting island shirt. His laptop and phone and all of his work stuff are tucked neatly away in his satchel laying on the counter.

"I'm thinking about it," I say, walking over to the fridge and getting another bottle of lemonade, wanting to point out to him that he should have offered to grab me one, but his mind is elsewhere.

"I have a job coming up. You're perfect for it."

"Look, I told you that I'm out of the business."

"Yes, you said that," he says in his smirky kind of way.

A few days out here in the sun have made him a few shades darker, but luckily he didn't burn his delicate skin, which I remember he always suffered with when we were kids. Easy to burn, easy to tan used to be his motto.

"You think you're going to come up with $350,000 some other way in a month?"

I clench my jaw.

I was hoping that Mom would give me some leeway on the loan, I say silently to myself. That way I could pay off the other guys first and maybe pay her later.

"She'll never let it go," Lincoln says, reading my mind. "She gave you a month. That means she expects it in three weeks, and you know it. She's going to go to the cops otherwise."

I swallow hard.

"That would be the worst thing that could happen. Look, I know you're worried about getting caught. Don't be. This is a simple job. I have all the details planned out. No research necessary on your part. You'd be getting this money for doing practically nothing."

"Except for the thing itself," I point out.

"You’ve done a lot worse for a lot less."

"I know. And that's why I'm no longer in this line of work."

We're dancing around a subject that I don't need or want to entertain, but I don't think I have a choice.

The thing is that Lincoln does work hard at his hedge fund and he does put in a lot of hours, but he also has a gambling addiction that very few people know about, including Marguerite.

She thinks that all the money comes in from work. What she doesn't know is that in the last year alone, he lost close to a million dollars in the casino over a few hands of cards.

He's had this addiction for a long time, and many people in finance and our line of work suffer from very similar maladies.

Whether it's gambling, or women, or drugs, or all three, there's always something out there to think about. Inevitably, the debts catch up to you.

You owe a few grand here and there.

You owe twenty to someone else, and then when you start making the big bucks at work, you start thinking, maybe I can double that money by putting it all on red at the roulette table.

That kind of thinking affects people who have ten bucks, those who have ten grand, and those with ten million. It doesn't matter; if you think like that, you think like that.

And that's why for many years, we had another more stable job. That's why we did other things to pay the bills, things that aren't entirely legal. Actually, completely illegal, but they always paid a lot more than even our work could.

A year ago, I got out of it. I went cold turkey.

I stopped gambling, and I started traveling.

If I flew to enough places, if I found enough clients, if I stayed busy all the time, then I wouldn't have time to think about that other world.

Then I wouldn't think about gambling, and then I wouldn't need to do that other job in order to pay all of those debts.

"I told you I was out of the business."

"And I told you that I have this job," Lincoln says, taking a step closer to me.

He's so close that I can smell the early morning vodka orange juice on his breath.

"This is a one-time offer. You have a week. I can send you all the details if you say yes, but afterward, I won't be able to help you."

I inhale slowly and then exhale just as slowly. Our eyes are focused on each other.

"You don't have any