She wriggled her ruby-tipped toes. “Don’t rat me out. I have a black color only rep to maintain.”
“Your secret’s safe with me.” He glided his hands up and down her foot, rubbing her arch with his thumbs. “What is your secret?” He lowered her foot and reached for her other one. She didn’t argue this time when he unsnapped the thin ankle strap and slid the sandal off her foot.
“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a secret.”
He held her foot aloft. “Patient confidentiality.”
She gave him an assessing look, her jaw rigid, then shrugged. “Have you ever heard of a catfish scam?”
“It sounds vaguely familiar.” He glided his fingers up her calf to massage the suddenly tense muscle.
“It’s when someone pretends to be someone else online in order to lure in people who think they’re developing an actual relationship, when in reality, it’s just a scam to get money.”
To him, that sounded like almost everything on the Internet. “Who would fall for that?”
“Me.” She crossed her arms and yanked her foot out of his grasp.
But Devin swiped it and pulled it close again. He refused to relinquish the bodily contact, wanting the touch as much as she needed the massage. And, despite her tough-chick exterior, she did. He traced his thumbs across her instep and sixty percent of the aggression seeped out of her shoulders.
“My mom, in a typical case of Italian over-involvement after I’d broken up with the latest in a long string of loser boyfriends, signed me up for a dating website without me knowing about it.”
“What made them losers?”
“My type runs…” She paused. “I mean ran to guys who thought straight jobs were poison, or that cheating was totally acceptable, or that my checking account should be their checking account. You get the idea. They were beautiful on the outside and empty on the inside.”
“So your mom took things into her own hands.”
“By the time I found out, she’d already added five potential boyfriends to a list. One was Heath.”
Devin returned his thumbs to the ball of her foot and increased the pressure, slowing down his speed to combat the increased tension.
Ryder sighed. It was quickly becoming one of his favorite sounds. Damn, he liked touching her. It relaxed him…and got him harder than an oak tree at the same time.
“I wasn’t about to go on a date with a complete stranger. Not without finding out more about them. Which is exactly what I told the guys on my mom’s list. Some got mad. Others acted all offended. A few didn’t even respond. Heath was the only one who came back with a plausible history and enough real life facts to bypass my natural skepticism.”
“Like what?” Unease staked a path up Devin’s spine.
“The name of a local dry cleaner he used. A picture of a Golden Retriever at a Waterberg dog park. Stuff like that. Everything seemed legit. He traveled a lot for work, so we chatted online, then we met in person and started dating for real and after about six months, I thought he was the real deal. Then he invited me to come with him on a business trip.”
Devin’s stomach twisted with dread. He didn’t like where this was going. “What happened?”
She chewed on her bottom lip, which was already starting to swell from the abuse. “He worked for a tour company and said he could get me a great deal on the flight and hotel, but I had to give him my credit card number so he could book everything for me through the company system.”
Clearly agitated, she went back to twirling a long strand of hair around a finger as she stared out the plane’s small window. “I told him I’d think about it. That’s when he started turning the screws. The more I hedged, the more insistent he became. I’m not an idiot. I did a little more research, using Maltese’s security software. Heath had a Social Security Number, a significant online presence with photos, a blog, there was even a driver’s license.” She paused. “He also had a death certificate. The guy—whoever he is—had scraped the personal records of a guy from Waterburg who’d had a heart attack five years ago, to create a false identity.” Her voice took on a clipped, just-the-facts tone that failed to cover the pain threading through her words. “I confronted him. He lost it, became violent. I fought back. He ran off, but not before inflicting damage. I ended up in the hospital with a broken wrist and a black eye.”
Devin had smashed a lot of faces when he’d been training to be an MMA fighter. The broken noses, bloody gashes, and general destruction would be nothing next to what he’d do to the man who’d harm a woman. That the prick had hurt Ryder made Devin’s vision blacken around the edges.
“Did you tell the police?”
“Hell, yes. But he disappeared like a ghost. I contacted the dating website and reported him. They flagged his file and connected him with complaints from other women. Turns out he’d been making a pretty penny fleecing women—and some men—who thought they were getting a hell of a bargain on a vacation with a too-good-to-be-true boyfriend. I’m the only one to have confronted him face-to-face.”
Devin paid special attention to the pressure points in her foot. “What did your mom say?”
“I never told her or anyone else in the family.”
He almost dropped her foot. “Why not? I thought you were close.”
“My mom had picked him out. She’d feel responsible. I couldn’t do that to her. Add to that the fact that my history of dating Grade A assholes, and that I work as an investigator at Maltese Security, so I shoul