Free Staying On Top (Whitman University) by Lyla Payne Page A

made little noise on the old streets. The first car on the street had a blinking red alarm light, the second was too nice to not be missed. The third and fourth had locked doors, but the fifth was the jackpot. 
    The doors on the beat-up, dark blue Volkswagen Jetta were unlocked and the keys fell into my lap when I tugged on the sun visor. The standard transmission didn’t trip me up, though it had been a while since I’d driven one in Europe. Shifting with the left hand never felt natural.
    The passenger door opened and Sam’s face appeared. “Um, what exactly do you think you’re fucking doing?”
    “Borrowing a car, like I said.” The more clandestine and illegal the trip became, the faster Sam would lose interest. I crossed mental fingers that stealing a car would be the place he balked.
    “We’re not stealing a car, Blair. People know who I am. Between the two of us, we have access to millions of dollars.”
    “Look, you don’t know my dad like I do. He has security and IT people on twenty-four-hour payroll, monitoring me and all of his clients. If either of us uses our ID to rent a car, we’re screwed. If you’re not down with doing this my way, then give me the information I need to do it myself and go back to Melbourne. Otherwise, get your ass in the car before we get caught.”
    The truth was, my dad’s con business was a two-man enterprise—me being man number two. He used a few shady individuals, like the PI and the occasional property manager, on a contract basis but, with one exception, they didn’t know shit about his real business. 
    I could find my dad if I really wanted to, at least I thought I could, and he probably wasn’t monitoring Sam’s movements. He’d worked contacts to verify whether or not Sam had reported the theft to Interpol and the FBI, but that was as far as it went.
    He had reported it—or his manager, Leo, had. Law enforcement dutifully added Sam’s name to the list of victims swindled by Neil Saunders, a.k.a. Neil Paddington, a.k.a. a few other names that had been compromised over the years, but they didn’t have a clue where to start. Or finish.
    Indecision skittered across Sam’s classic cheekbones and down his strong jaw. The desire to see this thing through warred with his knee-jerk response to stealing, the entire thought process laid bare in his too-honest eyes. An arrest could damage his career, his only way to make back what my father had taken, and that thought had to weigh heavy on him, too.
    I was counting on it. I wanted him out of my hair, and this new and uncomfortable conflict out of my gut.
    Instead, he folded his six-foot-three frame into the tiny car and buckled his seat belt. “Let’s go.”
    “You sure?”
    “Yes. Can you drive this thing?”
    “I can do lots of things.”
    He didn’t respond to my teasing statement, telling me that I’d been closer to making him fold his cards than I’d suspected. Dammit. Where would he draw the line? Every man had a breaking point, an invisible line in the sand his code of morals wouldn’t let him cross. I needed to find Sam’s so I could get on with my life.
    The car rumbled to life and slid into gear under my guidance, and we rolled down the street and around the corner. I thought about what my dad had said about using all of the tools available to me, feeling sick to my stomach again, and not because I didn’t want to sleep with Sam. Reconnecting with him had made our spark impossible to ignore, and the constant heat under my skin was only going to get harder to dismiss as harmless. 
    But that was my line in the sand. My body had always been mine—the one thing safe from my dad and his life, because no matter how many times he suggested such a thing, he’d never forced me and I’d always figured out another way to make it work. As much as I lusted after the lanky, too-confident, handsome guy in the passenger seat, I would have to do it again.
    “Can you check and see if there’s a map in the