I step back, shock and a bizarre sense of betrayal roiling through me. “You’re a what?”
Ellie smiles, her glossy, bubble-gum pink lips curving with convincing sincerity. She never wore that color before. I don’t like it, an instinctive dislike that makes no sense and really has no bearing on anything. It’s her mouth, she can slick it up however she likes.
But I remember those lips stained red, wrapped around my cock. Stained red and parted as I slid my fingers into her mouth to get them slick. To work us both up for what I would do next.
In every fantasy I’ve had in the time she was gone, her mouth was stained red.
Maybe the bubble-gum pink is as much a disguise as the red once was. Maybe the real Ellie doesn’t wear anything on her mouth at all, and fuck me for thinking about anything other than the task at hand.
Answers. I need answers.
“A member of the press,” she says levelly. “And we can keep this off the record, if you’d like.”
“Everything is off the record,” I growl. “Every fucking thing.”
“Sure.” She has the audacity to shrug, and I want to punch the wall.
Instead, I pace into the middle of the library. My mind is racing. If she’s not a hacker, and she wasn’t tagging one of the guests last night, then what was she doing at that party? And more importantly, why is she in my client’s home now? I pivot and point at her. “What story are you working?”
She’s unfazed. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. What are you covering up for Mayfair?”
No. No, no, fucking hell no.
She waits, her eyes bright.
I don’t like the extra-dark hair, either.
I don’t like anything about this new Ellie or her rude return to my life. But instead of answering her, I rake my gaze down her body. She’s still built for sin, and five years is not long enough to erase the memory of her body on top of mine, her thighs straddling my hips. I need to remember that despite our history, she’s investigating my client. Sin can’t play here.
I set my jaw and prowl back toward her, stopping just out of touching range. I want to touch her all over. It’s a dark, unbidden thought, primitive and stupid. I don’t want to touch her, not really. She’s lied to me at every turn. “Tell me what story you’re working, first.”
“That’s not how show and tell works, I’m afraid. I asked, you answer.”
“So you think you have a story on Mayfair.” I lean in. I can’t help it. She smells the same as she always did. “You’re wrong.”
“Then it was great catching up, Jason. I’ll see you around.” She moves, and I grab her wrist. Not hard. Just enough to stop her. Her attention drops to where my fingers manacle her wrist. She sneers. “What happened to you? I thought you’d turned into one of the good guys.”
“There are no good guys.”
Pain slices across her face, just for a second. Fuck me. I drop her arm.
She shrugs it off. “No, I get it. From your perspective, there’s nothing to be done about the state of the world. Not when you come to a thing like this and see people who swear to the world that they are on opposite sides of everything hob-knobbing over a fresh oyster bar, am I right?”
I like the way she says thing like the word is three-week-old rotten garbage. She’s not wrong.
Her voice drops to pure silk. “Spend too much time in this town and it will ruin you.”
That’s my line. I said it to her a few weeks after we hired her—after we hired a sweet, innocent young woman from the Midwest, I correct myself.
That woman, who I knew as Ellie, was too fucking pure for this world.
Now I don’t know who I have in front of me. I doubt she’s too pure for anything. But she might be too fucking smart for this world, and I need her to get wise to the reality of the danger around her. That she’s a journalist doesn’t change that fact. “Let’s start over again. Who are you?”
She waits long enough that I can imagine the responses running through her mind. She wants to refuse to answer again. Ellie always did like a bit of verbal sparring, the push pull.
She was a journalist the whole time.
While I fucked her. While she ducked in and out of confidential client meetings.
It doesn’t matter what she liked, she’s a liar—and, I have no doubt, a thief. “Fine, if you don’t want to answer me, let’s loop back to five years ago—”
“My name is Melinda Gray,” she snaps. “Are you happy?”
My mouth drops open. Ellie is Melinda Fucking Gray?
She smiles sweetly. “So you know who I am.”
“Everyone in this city knows who you are,” I growl. “You’re the reason Gerome Lively went to jail.”
She rolls her eyes. “No, but I helped.”
Melinda Gray.
Nothing ever shocks me, but this… Wilson had tried to figure out who she was, too. Cole had no idea, either, and his sister-in-law was one of the sources for her book—not that they are close. Taylor has worked hard to rebuild her relationship with Hailey, but there’s a lot of complicated history in the mix. And secrets, apparently.
But despite my grudging respect for Ms. Gray the writer, I can’t forget that Ellie—Melinda—used me.
And she doesn’t even try to deny it.
“So there you go. Now you know who I am,” she says, her eyes glittering with challenge.
I shrug. “Sure. You’re a pretty little liar.”
She smirks. “Oh, Jason. You’ll have to try harder than that to get my back up. I did what I had to do to get the story. And then you got lucky, and the story dissolved before I could write it.”
“We turned into good guys, you mean.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
“I would.”
“Of course you would. You see yourself as the savior of the world. But we both know that’s not true.”
Oh, it’s like that, is it? “And let me guess, you actually are? When you lie your way into the beds of—”
She cuts me off. “We never made it to a bed. But that wasn’t a tactic.”
That’s true. I mostly fucked her on my desk. “Should I feel special?”
“If it makes you feel better.”
“The way I see it, if it wasn’t a tactic, that means we have unfinished business.”
Her eyes go wide, and frankly, I know the feeling. What the fuck am I talking about?
As we’ve talked, I’ve closed the gap between us, and now I have her pressed against the wall again. I graze my thumb against her collarbone as I settle my hand on her shoulder. She tenses. “Relax,” I murmur. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
She laughs, a harsh little bark. “I’m not worried about that.”
My thumb strokes back and forth. “I know. Why not?”
“History, maybe.”
“Were you ever scared of me?”
“No.” She follows that with a long, slow blink, and the pulse at the base of her neck flutters.
I lower my voice to a rough whisper. “I miss being inside you.”
Her eyes open, blazing. “Fuck off.”
“Any time, any place.” I tug my tie loose. “Here sounds good.”
“You don’t trust me, but you want to—” She cuts herself off and slices the pink, wet tip of her tongue across her lower lip.
“Maybe I want to fuck you as a distraction, did you ever think of that?”
Her eyes narrow and the pink tongue disappears. “Probably one of the more honest things you’ve said to me.”
“Nah. I told you,” I say huskily. “I miss being inside you. I miss the sweet clutch of your pussy around my cock, I miss the breathy sounds you make when I suck on your tits, and I miss the way you pull my fucking hair when you come.”
“I didn’t.” But the way her eyes widen again tells me she remembers it just as clearly as I do.
“Every single time. It’s like you forget that you’ve got claws. And I love it.”
“Rose-colored glasses,” she murmured. “It wasn’t that good. Besides, you’ve moved on to fancier flavors.”
“I have?”
She bats her eyes and adopts a French accent. “We have such men in France as well, but we don’t make movies about them.”
That gasp I heard. I should have recognized it immediately. “That made an impression on you.”
Ellie flips her hair. “It’s fucking bullshit, that’s all. The French absolutely make movies about their special operators.”
I laugh, I can’t help it. “You’re pretending that you’re mad her line was inaccurate?”
“Of course.”
“And not that she was flirting with me.”
“Why would I care about that?”
I drop my hand to her hip and grab a handful of her skirt in my fist. Her lips part and her eyes dilate, her pupils going inky black. “Because after all this time, you were jealous.”
“Never.” The word slips over her lush lower lip as a breathy whisper. “I couldn’t care less who you try to fuck in your misguided pursuits—”
“I didn’t fuck either of them.”
“No?”
“I raced after you.”
She clicks her tongue against her teeth. “Ooh, I didn’t see you going soft, Jason.”
My fist tightens and her skirt bunches higher on her hip. When I flex my little finger in an effort to cool-the-fuck-down, I graze bare flesh. Her thigh. “Nothing soft about me, Ellie.”
Her gaze flares at the name. A reminder we have an unhealthy amount of baggage to sort out. “You chased after a ghost instead of finishing your mission.”
I bare my teeth in what is undoubtedly a ghoulish grin. “Already had the information I needed.”
“And that is?”
“None of your business.”
“Okay.” She rolls her eyes. “Well, this has been fun.” She firmly sets her palm on my chest and pushes. “For real, though, I’m leaving now.”
“Didn’t get what you were looking for?”
She gives me a dismissive up and down. “I got something better. Now I know who’s running damage control for Jeff Mayfair.”
I growl under my breath as she gives me her back, moving to the door. I want to grab her and haul her to the sofa across the room. Instead, I watch her set that perfect little hand on the doorknob and twist it.
As the door opens, I find my voice. “The next time we see each other, Ellie—I want to finish this conversation.”
She looks back at me. “It’s Melinda. Maybe try using my real name and we’ll see.”