“You’re not the boss of—!”
“Yes, I am, princess,” he hissed, throwing me down on the sofa near the fireplace. He loomed over me as I kicked away from him, his eyes blazing fire as he looked right into mine.
“From now on, yes, I am.”
4
Cormac
Two days ago:
This was a big, big problem.
My hands tightened on the file between my fingers, crinkling the edges of the papers as my eyes burned fucking holes right through them. And everything else around me and on my mind just faded the fuck away as my gaze landed on her.
On Nina Case
My chest tightened. Hell, so did my jeans as my cock quickly thickened and hardened. And all this just from looking at a damn picture of her, like I was some horny teenager. But damned if I could look away. Damned if I could tear my eyes or my filthy, forbidden thoughts away from her once I’d opened that file and laid eyes on her.
The folder had been dropped off at my condo by one of Urlech’s couriers. That would be Deputy Chief Urlech, my contact with the Bureau. Aside from him, all anyone at the FBI knew about me was that I was a ghost—a hired gun. A contractor from outside the agency who could get shit done when it needed to get done.
For a second, my thoughts flickered away from the girl in the photos in my hand and lingered on the fact that Urlech was my only real contact with the bureau. Normally, it wouldn’t be a problem. But with the shit I’d just uncovered?
I shook my head.
This was bad. Real, real bad. The kind of shit that’s so bad you don’t even know where to begin because if someone that high up the food chain is as dirty as Urlech, who the fuck do you trust?
I growled in disgust. Corrupt shit like this was exactly why I’d stopped wearing a badge. This is why I was an independent contractor, beholden to no one but me. I turned, plucking the other file from my big, hard-wood desk, and I turned to gaze out of the big floor to ceiling windows overlooking the city. I glance down at the other file, and my jaw hardened.
This was a connection I never wanted to see.
Sylvan Bucks. The man was the living breathing definition of human garbage. He was the kind of guy you wanted to make exceptions for when it came to the “justice” system, because guys like him existed on another level of evil entirely. Sex crimes, human trafficking, pushing drugs on young girls to pimp them out. This was tip-of-the-iceberg shit with Sylvan. And when you started making the connection between him and a few different Balkan-state organized crime groups he was involved with, it just got worse.
And Urlech was in bed with him. What a fucking disgrace.
I’d been sitting there trying to figure out what the fuck to do about the evidence I’d just discovered when Urlech’s package had arrived. I’d grumbled, taken the envelope marked “sensitive witness information” to my desk and sat back down, knocking back the rest of my whiskey before I’d torn it open.
…That’s when my whole world had tilted on its axis.
Forget Sylvan. Forget Urlech. Forget literally anything else on Earth. Because once I pulled the file out, and once I laid eyes on her, I knew my whole world was forever changed.
Nina Case.
One look, and I was hooked. One fucking glance, and I was obsessed—obsessed to a degree that shook me, actually. I felt myself growl, muscles tightening and cock just fucking aching for her, until I had to remind myself to breath.
Dirty blonde hair, bright blue eyes, and the body of fucking goddess. She was all soft curves and slender lines in all the right places. Skin like a peach, lips I wanted to fucking devour, and hips that begged for my hands.
I wanted her instantly.
I craved her in a millisecond.
And it wasn’t even just physical, as stupid as that sounds. Just looking at her, I felt my heart ache, like it’d never ached before. I was thirty-nine years old. I’d been with women before. I’d had relationships—however brief, fleeting, and unfulfilling they’d been. But not a single one of them had ever made me feel what a series of photographs made me feel for Nina Case.
They were surveillance shots—taken with a long lens. Shots of her sitting on a bench on the quad of the local college. Shots of her drinking coffee while pouring over a notebook studying. More shots of her studying or reading. And shit, even more. I grinned.
Sexy little bookworm, she was.
I felt my jaw clenching, my body tightening and my cock thickening as I took in the images of her. I growled, reaching for the sheet of information on her, my eyes skimming over it.