Raiden just laughs, watching me search for my keys to unlock the door. Then, as I’m rushing inside, his voice trails behind me just before I slam the door. “Awww, come on, Firecracker. Don’t be like that. I promise, I won’t bite . . . much.”
I fall back against the closed door, silently screaming, when my body stiffens.
Somebody’s been in my apartment.
My stomach sinks, unease pounding through my veins, seeing the big dragon dildo suctioned to my kitchen counter. I know I left that box out, but I know for a fact that everything was packed away before I left. Yet there it is, staring back at me from the stone counter.
My gaze slices through the apartment, quickly sweeping every inch of my home, and as I slowly stride through the living room, I find five empty plant pots sitting on my small coffee table.
My brow arches, and after determining there’s nobody inside my home, I make my way over to the row of brand-new little homes for Spikezilla, each one of them more ridiculous than the last.
The first is a cock-shaped pot that saysdon’t be a prick. The next is a voluptuous ass that readsthick & thorny. Pot number three is a simple little pot with two little hands at either side flipping me off, the wordsspiky little fuckerscrawled across the front. Lucky pot number four is a mini coffin that saysdead inside. While the fifth, as simple as it is, is by far my favorite. It’s a sassy little face with a speech bubble sayingWhat the fucculent?
Fuck, I hate how much I love them, and I hate knowing that they’ve come from the giant asshole next door, because it makes me hate him just a little bit less. And if I have to be completely honest, I’m not even sure if I hate him at all.
Damn it. Why did he have to make this complicated?
Screwing me in Barcelona is one thing, but caring for Spikezilla . . . shit. That right there is a one-way ticket to my heart. But he can’t have it. It’s not on offer, and I have no intention of ever giving it away. My life is too chaotic to share with someone, especially someone like Raiden Kane.
A stupid smile pulls across my lips, but then it hits me as I’m scanning my apartment for any other surprises. How the fuck did he get in here? The industrial-sized deadbolt I had installed on my door is still fully intact. That leaves very few entry points he’d be willing, or even capable, of utilizing.
There’s the ceiling space I used to get into his apartment, but there’s no way those wide shoulders would have fit, nor do I think a normal person would consider crawling through the ceiling. Then, as I make my way into my bedroom, I find my skimpiest underwear laid out on my bed with a note readingthe things I’d do to see you in this. It had to have been the fire escape.
Fuck. It’s so obvious. How did I not see that coming?
Maybe he’s got me off my game. Shit.Maybe. That’s the understatement of the year. I’m not just offmygame, I’m fully immersed inhis,and there’s not a thing I can do about it, apart from begging for more.
I’m royally fucked, and he knows it.
Milan was right. She always is, and one of these days, I’m going to have to learn to trust her gut instinct the way I trust mine.
Though while she was right that I’m going to get myself in trouble with Raiden, I’m not sure she was right about everything else. She was overly suspicious of him, and I didn’t like that. I looked into him when he first appeared, and there was nothing out of place. But could she have potentially been right about that too?
Hmm.
Unease begins eating at me, and I find myself back in my living room, crashing onto my couch with my laptop, doing the deepest dive of Raiden Kane I’ve ever done. I start with any of his social media accounts and come up blank, and after driving myself insane with it, I finally come to the conclusion that he’s one of those people who don’t like to leave a digital footprint. Apart from on Tinder, of course. He’s all over that one.
Moving on to his professional life, I search IV Global again before looking over every piece of information they offer about their business, and apart from some bullshit about being in the tech industry, it’s not really very clear what their main focus is. Do they sell tech products, oris it something a little more online?
Nothing is clear, and as I move on to Raiden’s employee profile, glancing over the wordsSenior International Sales Rep, I can’t help but wonder what his purpose being in Barcelona was in the first place. I know he said he had meetings with the men who attended Javier’s party, but what was he trying to sell them?
His explanations all make sense until you start digging a little deeper.
My gaze rests on the photo of Raiden, and the more I look at it, the more something seems off. It’s too polished, and there’s something different around the overall shape of his face. It could have easily been a Photoshop incident. Or it could be something different.
His eyes are angled, set a little further apart than what they really are, and the gold specs within them are completely gone. The man in this photo is Raiden, but at the same time, it’s not. If I put this picture through a facial recognition program, my bet would be that there are enough differences to not make a real match.
Interesting.
The second the thought enters my mind, I start researching him like one of my targets, but unlike any of my targets, there’s not a scrap of information I can find on him. Birth certificate. School history. Childhood. It’s as though he doesn’t actually exist, and there’s only one other person I’ve come across who doesn’t exist on paper . . . and that’s me.
My heart starts to race. Maybe Milan was right to be suspicious.
But why? Why wouldn’t he exist? Even people in witness protection aren’t as hard to uncover as the man next door. But it makes no sense. Why go to that effort to conceal who he really is? Unless he’s just like me.
Maybe he wasn’t in Barcelona to meet with Javier Rodríguez to sign a contract after all. Maybe hewasthe contract. That job was posted for a while before I finally accepted it. Another agency could have intercepted it in that time, and if that’s true . . .
Fuck. I really am in trouble.
