Party Girl

But he was.

When she'd finally come to her senses the morning after and found herself in her friend Zenni's apartment, she'd almost convinced herself that she’d dreamed the man who had carried her into Zenni’s guest bedroom. He’d been too perfect to be real. Clearly he had to either be imaginary, or an angel.

But no.

He was real. At Zenni’s wedding where she had been her friend’s maid of honor, she’d come face-to-face with her dream man. At first she'd been so stunned all she could do was stare at him like an idiot, before suffering a crippling wave of mortification. There he was, the most beautiful man she had ever come across, and his first impression of her had been when she was a drugged and drooling mess.

How embarrassing

But it wasn't just her feminine pride that had her wanting to dive into a dark hole and never come out. There was no doubt she had her fair share of self-assurance; becoming a well-known content creator and influencer was proof enough of that. But getting dosed had shaken her confidence in ways she was still grappling with. She’d been as helpless as when her single-parent mother had dropped her off for a day at her coldly unloving grandmother’s, only to never be seen again. Being around Dalton brought back the memory of what it was to be helpless, and that was bad enough. But it also filled her with the irrational shame of being a predatory monster’s victim. She'd barely been able to look Dalton in the eye as they were formally introduced at Zenni’s wedding, and he hadn't helped matters when he'd said, “Oh, Hannah and I go way back, isn't that right, beautiful? We're old friends now.”

That one statement freaked her out like nothing else. Old friends? Had they become friends while she had been drugged? Had she done something embarrassing while under the drug’s influence?

She couldn't remember.

She didn’t want to.

A startled yelp escaped her when her phone's text chime went off, before she automatically glanced around the attic office to see if anyone had noted her reaction. Of course no one had; she was alone in the tiny space she’d converted into a studio. The deeply slanted roof and portal windows at either end of the narrow space screamed WWII-era construction. When she’d been forced to live in this house with her grandmother, the attic had been her much-adored refuge, as the bitter old woman who’d grudgingly taken her in had been too arthritic to climb the attic’s ladder-like steps. When her grandmother died, Hannah’s first thought had been to sell that nasty house of misery just as soon as humanly possible. But then she’d made one last nostalgic trip up into the attic. The cozy warmth of that space filled her with a sense of security so intense she’d had to put a hand to her chest to make sure her heart didn’t explode right out of it. She may not have loved being in her grandmother’s home—no surprise there, since she’d been made to feel like an unwanted guest—but that small attic space belonged to her. Sad and neglected as it was, the attic had been the only home she’d known from the time she’d been a lonely and abandoned ten-year-old.

Finishing out the attic the way she’d wanted it to look for her videos and livestreams hadn’t changed that feeling of home. On the contrary, it had been remarkably freeing to turn it from a dark, cobweb-shrouded space to gleaming white walls and plenty of fresh air thanks to a new ventilation system. The white walls reflected whatever color the LED lights situated around the narrow room were programmed to be, allowing her to set whatever mood she was going for. Today she’d been in a cotton candy sort of mood, so the lighting shifted ceaselessly from pale blue to baby pink and back again.

Usually the light display calmed her. But if she was jumping out of her skin just because of a text chime, she wasn’t anywhere near the zip code of calm. Shaking her head at her idiotic self, Hannah reached for her phone.

Then nearly dropped it after reading the screen.

“It’s Dalton. You didn’t just ban me and run away, did you, beautiful?”

“What the fuck,” she muttered, staring at the phone as if it had just yelled at her. “What the actual fuck.”

Her dream man—who wasn’t really a dream man, but whatever—had her phone number.

How?

Normally having a drop-dead gorgeous man chat her up was a good thing. The best, even. But Dalton-freaking-Derico? He’d seen her at her most vulnerable, and that was a side she never allowed anyone to see. Vulnerability equaled helplessness, and helplessness was something evil preyed upon. Her grandmother had taught her that. Just the thought that this man had seen her helpless made her break out into a cold sweat.

Swallowing hard, she hit the text app’s dictation icon. “How did you get this number? How did you even know I had a YouTube channel?” Somehow she doubted a decorated soldier-turned-doctor would ever be into Raven’s Haven, a pop culture channel dedicated to Chicago’s hottest nightclubs, parties, celebrities, makeup and fashion.

She didn’t have long to wait for his answer.

“Zenni mentioned something about looking after you while she was away.”

“For God’s sake.” Hannah rolled her eyes to the ceiling, struggling for patience as she once again hit the dictation button. “Looking after? I’m twenty-five years old. It’s not like I’m going to be sticking forks into electrical sockets. I’m not a toddler who needs looking after.”

“What you are is a stunning woman on her own, with no obvious family/husband to act as a psychological deterrent to any would-be predators.”

Stunning?

He thought she was stunning?

For a full second that statement stopped her brain in its mental tracks. Then she shook her head to get it going again. “You don’t know that for sure about me.”

“Yeah, I do. Just now while talking to Zenni, you shared how alone you are in the world. Or did I imagine you telling tens of thousands of people that you felt vulnerable without Zenni there to watch your back?”

Damn, she had just done that, hadn’t she? Oops. “Look, just because I was that drug-pushing fuckwit’s victim once doesn’t make me an eternal victim. Thank you for your concern, but I don’t need anyone to look after me.”

“Don’t shoot the messenger. Blame Zenni. Except don’t blame Zenni, because you couldn’t ask for a better friend. She really loves you, you know. She was beside herself with worry the night you and I met.”

“We didn’t meet that night,” she said, mollified, because he was right. In the shallow, party-hopping world of a Gossip reporter, having a deeply rooted friendship was rarer than diamonds. “I was formally introduced to you at Zenni’s wedding.”

“Ah. So you don’t remember me? At all?”

“I...” Her throat closed up like someone had glued it together, and with a frustrated sigh she thumbed the phone’s screen before putting it to her ear. Some things just couldn’t be said with a text. “What I remember,” she said the moment he picked up the line, “is total, whacked-out garbage. None of it makes sense, which isn’t surprising considering I was drugged out of my mind that night.”

“Tell me what you remember, even the whacked-out garbage parts.”

She had to bite her lip to stop from shivering at the sound of Dalton Derico’s voice. But, oh, that voice. It had been her lifeline to sanity, to a feeling of absolute safety and security. That had to be the reason it affected her so deeply now. “At one point I thought you were a dream, and then later on I thought you were an angel. Like I said, whacked-out garbage.”

A low laugh floated to her, and it was the audible equivalent of rich velvet, woodsmoke and candlelight. Pure seduction all the way. “You know, you might be the first person who’s ever mistaken me for an angel. Not even my mother, rest her soul, ever made that mistake. She always said I had too much of the devil in me.”

“Lucifer was supposed to have been the most beautiful of all the angels, so I can see where I might have gotten confused,” she said without thinking, then smacked her forehead when the words echoed in her ears. What the hell was she saying? “Anyway, what I remember that night isn’t important. What’s important is that everyone understands I’m more than capable of taking care of myself.”

“No, what’s important is that you just admitted you think I’m Lucifer-level hot. You did just do that, right?”

She would have facepalmed again if her forehead wasn’t still tingling from the last one. “Is that what you heard? Must be something wrong with your cell signal.”

“Now, now, beautiful, don’t shy away from your own words. Or is that how you like to operate? Tease and retreat? Because if you do, we’re going to have a problem.”

The warning in his tone had her brows inching upward. “A problem?”