Scoffing, she rolls her eyes and shakes her head. Her fingers dance on top of her knees, and I see her glance at me from the corner of her eye. “Did you like kissing me?”
Turmoil swirls in my stomach, looking for something to glom on to. “It doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t have done it.”
“But that doesn’t answer the question.”
Sucking in a deep breath, I open my mouth to answer when she whirls to face me, pulling her legs up on the bed and propping herself up on her knees. They brush my thigh as she sits back on her heels, blowing a tuft of hair from her face.
My gaze falls to her mouth—that classic ruby red stains her pouty, heart-shaped lips, and I want absolutely nothing more than to reach out and see if it smears.
And therein lies the entire problem. I don’t want just a taste of her, however sudden this attraction may be. I want all of her, everything she could possibly give, and I don’t want to keep it safe.
I want to destroy it.
Because deep down, no matter the expensive suits or the tattoos or the respect I demand inside a goddamn boardroom, I know that everything I ever love is destined for ruin, anyway.
Fiona clicks her tongue, reaching out and cupping my jaw; her hand is cold, sending a chill through my body that I try not to read into, her touch gentle. As though she’s afraid I might shatter.
“I liked kissing you,” she whispers, sliding her hand inward, tracing the dip of my bottom lip with her thumbnail. Goose bumps pop up along my skin, and my dick kicks behind my slacks, desperate for attention. “I wouldn’t mind doing it again... minus all the crap you spewed after.”
Pushing up from her position, she lets her hand fall to her side and gets off the bed, picking her leather purse off a wall hanger and slinging it over her shoulder.
“I’ve got to go grab my mom before she tries to drive herself. But, uh, yeah. Close the door on your way out.”
When she passes the threshold of her room, she pauses, glancing at me over her shoulder. “You should also know, I’m great at keeping secrets.”
* * *
Turning the flash drive in my hand, I scan the monitor, pushing my reading glasses farther up my nose while the time stamp reels forward. The other drive sits beside my mouse pad, overturned from where I slammed it down on the desk after reviewing its data.
Backing up the security footage another forty-eight hours, I stare at the basement mailroom as people file in and out, locking up at the end of the workday. No one suspicious appears to come through, according to the facial-recognition software I’ve paired with the employee roster, which makes the presence of these drives much more unnerving.
When I got back from lunch with Riley, who showed up unannounced to tell me she’s donating her time to cleaning up Lake Koselomal since I wouldn’t take her services, there’d been a manila envelope at the bottom of a stack of mail. Inside were two flash drives with a Post-it taped around them, Kieran’s name written on one in thick black Sharpie.
Mine on the other.
The one with Kieran’s name has some content I recognize—stuff he had me download and send in an encrypted folder back when he was working on getting his brother out of the drug and sex trafficking world he’d fallen into. It didn’t work, and Kieran instead switched to collecting the dirty secrets of every person in town.
Someone evidently got a hold of that information and is now attempting to blackmail him with it, since it also has his family’s deepest secrets.
On the other drive is the stuff I’m more concerned with, though. My birth records, LeeAnn’s address, what might be a sex tape, but I can’t be sure because once the dingy hotel room came into view I clicked out of the window.
Footage of me walking into the courthouse past hours, of me dragging known drug dealers behind dive bars in Stonemore, of me bloodying my knuckles and carving the skin of the seemingly innocuous. I don’t fuck with people who typically don’t deserve it, but this drive doesn’t tell that story.
It paints me as a low-life criminal. As if I’m no better than LeeAnn or the deadbeat who ditched us.
It showcases my violent nature, the beast inside I try so fucking hard to repress.
Makes me look weak. Unstable.
Deranged.
But I’m not. I’ve worked way too fucking hard to prove that, and so as I download the data in the drive to my cloud server, ensuring I’ve got at least two copies, I print off the list of things on both of them, tucking them into a folder behind the audits I was asked to run.
Picking up the folder as tension threads its way across my shoulders, I crush my drive with a stapler, smashing it into pieces, and resolve to figure out who the fuck dropped it off after my meeting.