My pocket buzzed as I entered the structure, swipingaccepton the call.
“Rick,” I answered. “Nice to hear from you.” I tried to keep the frustration out of my voice, but a touch leaked in.
I had been patiently waiting for the file on Raven for a week, and my stomach vibrated with anticipation before Rick dashed my excitement, sending it down the drain.
“I have much bigger things to deal with than this, kid. Be glad I got it done within a week,” he snapped, his gruff voice cracking like a whip through the phone. I could only assume people did whatever this dude said.
I pulled the door of my car open, Rick’s tone adding to my sour mood. “Can you send the file directly to my email?”
He shuffled the phone, and the speaker scraped against something unseen, causing a harsh swiping to hound my ear. “I can, but you aren’t going to be happy with the results. Your lady there is hiding something. I only found the same information that you said you did. She didn't really exist before college.”
I stopped cold, my hand frozen in midair above the shifter. “What do you mean she didn’t exist?”
“I mean exactly what I said,” Rick huffed. “There are no records of Raven Lovelace prior to her acceptance into college. No birth records, elementary, or high school records, nothing. The only thing I found was the city and state she came from on her college application. I looked everywhere in that city and found nothing.”
I scrubbed my hand over my face. “She had to exist somewhere. Could she be from a different country?” I questioned.Something wasn’t right. I could feel it in my gut that there was more to this than just the simple explanation that she wasn’t born in the U.S.
“Maybe, but it will cost you to find out. Poking around in foreign records isn’t easy.”
“What city?” I asked.
Rick said the name and kept speaking, “There's a myriad of potential reasons why I didn’t find everything with the normal search, but digging deeper won’t be cheap.”
“Do whatever you need to. I don’t care how much it costs,” I said, running my free hand through my hair. “I want the full file, but send me what you have.”
“Don’t expect it anytime soon. I have other shit to do,” Rick grunted, and the line went dead.
I dropped the phone in the cup holder and leaned my head against the seat. What the fuck was going on? Rick was one of the best PIs in the country. He had ways, probably illegal ways, of getting information. I knew from the price tag that his “normal” search was much more thorough than any typical investigator’s methods, so if he couldn’t find information it had to mean something was off. He would’ve looked in the right places so that only led to one conclusion. Raven’s past was buried.
I thought about the city he mentioned, and I remembered Dad’s company had a location there. He and Uncle Jeff visited often even though it wasn’t the office they worked out of. I had always wanted to go with them when I was kid, hoping to finally be enough for Dad—but of course, I was always dismissed. Shaking out of my thoughts, I started the car.
“What are you hiding, Raven?” I sighed into the silence and the empty garage around me.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Raven
“Thank you,Mr. Lopez. I appreciate the opportunity to work with you. We’ll get started first thing next week. You have a good evening.”
I hung up the phone and blew out a sigh of relief that my being late for the call hadn’t fucked up my shot with a huge client. At first, it had been hard to focus on finance with my thighs still soaked and my nipples aching to be touched, but Lopez had been easy to impress. He was a sweet older gentleman who reminded me of Dad. Needless to say after drawing the comparison to my father, my feral body calmed the hell down.
I went to the restroom and smirked at my disheveled appearance staring back at me in the mirror. I looked like I had fought a bear with my wild hair and smeared makeup. After righting myself, I braced my hands on either side of the sink. What the hell was I doing? Having sex on my conference room table with my fucking client hours after a call from the board? It was something out of one of my romance novels. It didn’t happen in real life without consequences, right?
Plus, he was probably nearly a decade younger than me. He had to be twenty-three or four. Maybe he was in his late twenties and just looked younger. That was a possibility, but I needed to ask him. A part of me felt it was wrong to look in his file so that’s why I hadn’t before. I brought my hands up to my face and pushed my palms into my forehead, where a headache was beginning to stir.
Even if he was older, he was still my client. I really needed him to sign the conflict waiver. Maybe if I disclosed the relationship or whatever the hell this was to the board they would overlook it. I could outline all the steps I was taking to keep things ethical.
I groaned at the possibility they might not see it that way and went back to my office to grab my purse and phone. The whole way home I thought about Ryan and the mind-shattering orgasm he’d given me. Sure, the sexting and phone sex had been great, and even the one I had given myself while he watched was more intense than I’d ever had. But Ryan between my legs, looking up at me like he would do anything I asked? Earth-shattering. Everything about him was impeccable. His voice, his purposefully messy hair, those fucking hands and that mouth.
I needed to stop this foray before I was too far gone…too addicted to stop, but I was already lost to him. I had thrown caution to the wind time after time when he could easily ruin me, and I didn’t ever lose control like that. I didn’t take risks. I couldn’t, for the sake of my career, my own livelihood, and my parents. If I lost everything, they would, too.
My apartment was cold and uninviting when I walked in the door. Nothing about it made it into a home and I was hit with the realization that aside from work and my tiny family, I didn’t have much. There were minimal personal touches in the space except stylistic furniture choices, and a tinge of regretand longing for someone else’s things in the rooms pricked my chest as I ate dinner and eventually went to bed.
Nightmares plagued my sleep, and I woke up multiple times in a cold sweat, gasping for breath. I was back in the alley, the darkness closing in around me as footsteps sounded in the distance. There was no way out. Every direction I turned ended in a brick wall. My breaths became haggard, and I felt for a weapon, coming up with nothing.
The footsteps came closer, and it became clear there was more than one set. As the sounds grew louder, I jammed my arms over my head, a scream tearing from my lungs. Harsh laughs joined the hurried steps, and I dropped to my knees, tears streaming down my face.
The dreamscape shifted, and I was held against a wall of a body, my wrists pinned at my sides. He held me to him while a distorted man stepped in front of me and dragged a thumb across my cheek.
