Read Her Man in Manhattan for Free Online Page B

giving her a name was what it took to give him a few hours he could put to better use than standing twiddling his thumbs or sleeping...
    ‘Tyler.’
    ‘Tyler,’ she repeated in a lower voice as if savouring how it felt on her tongue.
    Hearing her say it had a mesmerizing effect he’d never experienced before. Time stretched inexorably while she stared at him, her chin angled in contemplation. As he tried to figure out why his blood had thickened to the same consistency as magma when she hadn’t done anything overtly seductive, she blinked and turned away.
    ‘I’ll see you in the morning, Tyler.’
    ‘You leave this house, I’ll know inside five seconds.’
    She raised an arm and waggled her fingers in the air. ‘Nighty-night.’
    Tyler stood in the same spot after she left, trying to decide whether he trusted her any further than he could throw her. His word meant something—or at least it used to; he wasn’t convinced hers did. Then his cell phone vibrated.
    ‘Brannigan.’
    ‘So what’s it like with the city’s version of the Secret Service?’
    The sound of his partner’s voice got him moving again. ‘Don’t ask,’ he said as he left the kitchen and headed for the control room. ‘Got anything new for me?’
    ‘There weren’t any DNA hits in the database.’
    ‘It took them a month to tell us that?’
    ‘Backed up in the lab...’
    ‘What about the known associates we’ve been chasing?’
    ‘There I might have better news.’
    Tyler nodded brusquely. ‘Save it for when I see you. I’ll be at O’Malley’s by nine.’
    ‘If I end up divorced I’m blaming you.’
    ‘Because all your kids look like me?’
    The response made the corner of Tyler’s mouth lift. It was the closest he got to a smile any more. Pretending nothing was wrong when he was around the people who knew him was wearing him down. From that point of view his day with the mayor’s daughter had been a welcome respite.
    He just had to get a handle on his reaction to her while he was still volatile.
    There’d been a time when not getting involved had never been a problem for him the way it had for other members of his family. He’d kept his distance and remained detached, gaining a rep for being emotionally unavailable to women along the way. Once he’d made the mistake of thinking he could handle a little attachment he’d fallen flat on his face. To top it off he’d overcompensated and it had cost someone their life.
    Sometimes he thought he saw her face in a crowd: dull, lifeless eyes staring at him in silent accusation. She was a ghost who followed him everywhere.
    He shouldn’t have left her alone.
    The thought gave him a moment’s pause outside the room that housed the security monitors. From inside he could hear the voices of the men whose presence meant he wasn’t leaving the mayor’s daughter unprotected even if there was an immediate threat.
    There was no reason for him to feel torn.
    A small army of people surrounded Miranda Kravitz and, though they might not have kept her out of trouble, they had plenty of practice cushioning her from the world beyond the walls of the mansion. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have a voice, either. Half her problem with him was he didn’t let her get her own way when she was plainly accustomed to getting whatever she wanted.
    Tyler stood up for the people who didn’t have a voice, who didn’t have the opportunities she’d been given or the ability to escape their lives when they felt like it. If she broke her word, she would pay for it. He’d see to that.
    She might think he’d been tough on her the first day, but she had no idea how ruthless he could be.

SIX
    The small victories gained when she got him to start a conversation and give her the name she so badly wanted to know were enough to allow Miranda to cut him some slack. She wouldn’t break her word. What helped him more was that he’d given her somewhere else to focus her ire. After a night of enforced captivity