“Stupid bitch,” he mumbled under his breath, but was smiling like he was delighted by my supposed stupidity as he moved away from the side of the bed where my salvation was located and went to sort-of block my escape route to the door as he reached down and stroked himself once, making me have to fight back the urge to heave as my knee hit the side of my bed and I tried to take a deep breath, still my frantic heart before I did the final thing I needed to.
I threw myself across my bed, landing hard on the ground on the other side, my ass hurting more than I thought I should have been able to experience given the adrenaline shooting through my entire system.
Across from me, he snickered.
I looked up to see him advancing me, a promise of awfulness in his eyes as he kept stroking himself.
My hand went up and closed around the cold metal, dragging it down, sliding off the safety, and raising both my hands.
Thanks to my research, I knew all about guns.
But I had no idea how my aim was.
“That don’t scare me, whore,” he growled, but he had stopped stroking himself.
Then he lunged.
And my finger found the trigger and squeezed.
One.
Missed.
Two.
Hit to his shoulder, making him stagger and curse but keep advancing.
Three.
Miss.
Four.
Stomach.
Five.
Chest.
Six, seven, eight…
TWO
Quin
Ten-hour flight.
Ten. Fucking. Hours.
The guy to my left had a hacking, wet cough all ten hours of that, and the woman to my right had a screaming baby that she apparently was trying to teach to self-soothe because she didn’t even try to quiet the damn kid down.
Needless to say, I was not in a great mood as I walked into the office, holding my hand up to my receptionist, Jules, as I made my way into my office, pulling at my tie and falling down into my seat. What I really wanted was to be in my own fucking house where I could take a shower, and slip into fresh clothes, and maybe get some ever-loving sleep.
But I hadn’t been in the office in four days, and they needed me in to sign off on jobs and approve budgets and all that fun shit that being the boss brought with it.
There was a knock, and I looked up to see Jules stubbornly walking in, her chin raised, her almost see-through blue eyes defiant. That was why I hired her. I had almost kicked her out when she came in for an interview two years before, being all of twenty-years-old, coming in wearing some pantsuit that must have belonged to her mother ’cause it did nothing to show off her good figure, her red hair tied back severely into a bun, with nothing decent on her resume even remotely related to office work. But when I tried to dismiss her, she had lifted that chin, raised a brow, and tore fucking into me.
Were she older, it would have been hot.
But given that she was way too young, really, it was just impressive.
I wasn’t generally the kind of man who other grown ass men would launch into. But there she was, tiny slip of a young thing in hand-me-downs, giving me a fucking ear-lashing.
I hired her on the spot and gave her way too high of a salary, telling her that she’d better the hell not let me or any of the men in the office walk all over her.
She promised she wouldn’t and, thus far, had made good on that.
I admired it, but at that moment, I wanted to send her ass packing.
“You have a four o’clock with Finn, Smith, and Lincoln. You have ten files to sign off on,” she said, dropping said files down. “You have thirteen viable call-backs to possible clients. Immediately. And you have two call-backs to people who Smith decided weren’t our kind of cases, but said he would pass them by you before he gave them loss of all hope,” she said, putting down two notes with names and numbers.
One was to a man named Willy. Yes, fucking Willy. He wanted me to fix some business shit he got himself into. It seemed low level.
The other was to a woman named Aven Armstrong. It had her number and simply ‘stalker’ written beside it.
“Stalker?” I asked, exhaling, waving a hand to tell her I needed more than that.
“Right. She said she’s had a peeping Tom for months. He has gradually escalated.”
“To and from?” I growled, impatient.
“From just peeping and occasionally taking pictures to, ah…” Jules trailed off, her cheeks going a little pink. In our field, there was a lot of crazy shit. Jules had always handled it all with a cool, calm, collected maturity of a person twice her age. Seeing her blush, well, some of my sour mood slipped away, and I had to fight a lip-twitch I felt coming on.