Her little dog makes things easier, whining and climbing into my lap, putting her tiny forepaws on my abs, and making a yip-yip noise.
“She’s such a little princess,” Juliana giggles. “That usually means she wants a tickle.”
“Want a tickle, girl?” I laugh, stroking her under the chin with my forefinger.
She’s so small. My finger’s almost the size of her head.
She makes a cooing noise.
“I think you were right,” I say.
Juliana makes a contended sighing noise, snuggling close to me.
“Down here, I can almost forget that there are people trying to kill us.”
“I can’t,” I tell her honestly.
I promised that I’d never lie to her.
And I meant it.
“I can never forget it. And I never will, not until I know you’re safe. But let’s not talk about that right now. I want to talk about you.”
“There isn’t much to say,” she murmurs.
“Why do I find that hard to believe?” I say, risking a kiss to her sweat-dappled forehead, hoping that the heat of her skin doesn’t send me into carnal overdrive.
She smiles sweetly when my lips make contact with her skin, radiant and beautiful, and everything I could’ve dreamed of in my life partner.
I’m stunned by how quickly she can take me from white-knuckling lust to wanting to kiss her, hold her, just be with her.
She’s casting a spell on me and I wouldn’t dispel it for the world.
“Well, I’m an orphan. My parents—”
From the floor, a buzzing noise sounds.
I’m on my feet immediately, scanning the room, listening for any other noises.
A cellphone.
“It’s mine,” Juliana says, gesturing to a ruined half of her trousers.
“You didn’t turn it off?”
“Should I have?”
I shake my head, waving a hand. It’s not her fault. It’s mine. I should’ve warned her to turn it off when we first came back here.
“What should I do?” she asks.
“See who it is,” I tell her, ready to throttle any bastard who’d dare to interrupt this moment.
She reaches down – Rebel harrumphs and flees to the other side of the couch – and then picks up her cellphone.
“It’s Patricia, my boss. Should I answer it?”
A dark feeling creeps through me.
“Does she usually call you this late?”
“No.”
The feeling gets deeper, tinged with violence.
My instincts tell me that this is bad.
And my instincts are never wrong.
“Is she just your boss, or does she mean more to you?” I ask.
“More, way more,” Patricia says. “She’s been my best friend for the last three years, my only real friend ever, really.”
Something drops inside of me.
That means we can’t ignore this.
That means we have to deal with the consequences.
Fuck, I should’ve thought of this.
“Answer it,” I tell her.
“Patricia?” Juliana says, bringing the phone to her ear.
I watch as her face inevitably changes, moving from confusion to terror as her features contract, all but her eyebrows, shooting up with lightning shock.
“Wait, wait, slow down. There are men in your apartment. And they want … me? They’re going to—oh, God. I will. Okay.”
Juliana lowers the phone, staring at me with wide pits for eyes.
“They’ve got Patricia,” she says. “They’re going to kill her unless I go to her apartment—now, alone.”
Fuck.
Chapter Ten
Juliana
I walk down the hallway toward Patricia’s apartment as I have dozens or hundreds of times before, only now there’s a knot in my gut the size of my fist.
No—the size of Jett’s fist, a big nasty knot that twists and burns when I think about all the ways this could go wrong.
It would be so unfair if fate snatched away what we have just when I learned how special it is.
Jett is a virgin, like me.
Jett wants to claim me as badly as I need to be claimed by him.
My wildest dreams are coming true.
It just so happens they’re coming true at the same time as my worst nightmares.
I guess life is a bitch that way.
“You need to trust me,” Jett said back at the underground apartment.
It was as if he’d turned into a different man, his smirk disappearing, his blue eyes becoming flinty and focused.
He became Jett the Hitman, not Jett the Lover, Jett the One-Day Father.
I stop outside the door, drawing in shaky breaths, my shirt sticky from the party, Jett’s pants hanging loosely from my hips, tied with a belt constructed hastily from his T-shirt. At least I still have my shoes and my bra.
Maybe I’d feel ridiculous if the stakes weren’t so high.
My heart hammers in my chest as I think of Rebel, of Jett, of a bullet between my eyes ending everything we’ve built.
I knock and knock and knock, and then somebody grumbles from deep within the apartment, “Fucking hell, it’s open. Just come in.”
“No,” I say, going with sassy like Jett instructed me.
“These men,” he told me, “they despise when a woman talks back to them. You need to make them angry.”
That’s easier said than done when there are a thousand arrows of anxiety being fired at me every single moment.