Chapter Two

He had to be joking. That was all Talia kept thinking.

She waited for the “Surprise!”, the cameras, the laughs. For the misunderstanding to resolve itself so she could kick him out, lock the door and use the deadbolt, and never think about this insanity again.

But he was still looking at her like he thought this was real.

“Now?” she finally asked.

“Now.” The agent’s eyes went stony and dark. He wasn’t fucking around. Reed, she reminded herself. Reed Bishop. She tossed the badge back to him. Holy shit. Looked like this really was happening.

“I can’t go anywhere,” she said and let out a laugh, one of those nervous hiccups she wished she could shove back in her mouth as soon as it was out. His face flashed in warning—lightning before the storm.

Some part of her knew she should be scared. That would be the expected and appropriate reaction upon being woken up by an enormous slab of scruffy, tattooed, testosterone-laden male trying to hide the fact that he clearly had a gun wedged in the back of his jeans that he didn’t want her to notice. Probably because he didn’t want her to lose her shit on him, the way any normal person would in this situation. Even though no normal person would ever find themselves in this situation, because holy shit.

There was clearly something wrong with Talia. That was the only thing she knew for sure right now.

Because she wasn’t noticing his biceps tattooed with ocean waves or the hard scruff of his jaw or the outline of the gun against his shirt in order to assess the danger and determine how to get the hell out of it.

Or if she was…

She was also noticing his biceps tattooed with ocean waves, his jaw, the outline of the gun because she was checking out his ass in those jeans when he turned and ran a hand over his head. And God. Damn.

She couldn’t believe she’d flashed him, not even realizing in the frenzy of leaping for the light switch and trying to grab the first thing she could get hold of—a book, could she be any more useless?—that her boobs were halfway hanging out.

She needed to start sleeping in a three-piece suit with buttons all the way to her neck—none of this soft, lacy peach. Turned out there was no telling who was going to turn up in her bed around here.

But if he thought she was going to leave her new apartment in the dead of night, right before a big rehearsal in the morning, he had some serious explaining to do.

“You’re sure you don’t know where Stacey is?” he asked her again.

“I’m telling you—she came in to rehearsal, said she needed a subletter, and booked it out of there. It’s not like we’re super close. She didn’t get into details.”

He frowned. “Did she seem worried? Upset?”

“About her family, yeah.” But her skin felt hot as she said it. She paused. Asked him anyway. “What was she really worried about?”

“I can’t tell you that,” he said stiffly.

“So you can only hint that she was an informant for you,” Talia said. “But not say anything outright.”

He didn’t need to look so surprised. Why else would an agent at a drug enforcement agency know anything about Stacey—let alone her name, her job, where she lived, and who knew what else?

The rumors that the ballerina had been caught going through cabinets at Columbia Presbyterian must have been true. But Stacey wasn’t in jail. And she’d never talked about needing money or being short on cash like she would’ve been if she’d had to pay a huge fine. Sometimes, she’d hurried off from rehearsal without taking time to change. “Busy,” she’d said.

Yeah, right. Now Talia could guess it was more like, “Going to treatment.” Or “Going to meet a hot DEA officer to tell him everything I know.”

“How do you know she’s in trouble?” she asked.

Reed fixed her with a steely look. She could feel him reading her. Deciding something about her. “She’s got a good job, right?”

Talia nodded, throat dry. “Lead role in our next production.”

“Think she’d just up and leave it?”

“I don’t know. For a family emergency, she might.”

“Anyone might,” he said. “But have you heard her talk about her family before? How close they are, how she’d do anything for them, how they need her? How she had to take time off in the past to do things for them?”

Talia didn’t answer. It seemed silly that she’d accepted Stacey’s explanation so easily, when obviously the answers to Reed’s questions were “No, no, and no.” But who would have guessed there was any other reason?

“So, she takes off all of a sudden,” Reed went on. “Right when I’m waiting for her to make a major move.”

He paused significantly, waiting for her to get it.

“Oh,” Talia said. And then: “Shit.”

To her surprise, something almost resembling a smile tightened across Reed’s face. Smile-adjacent. If she squinted, didn’t look too hard, and accepted that smiles could be that taut.

“Shit,” he said, “is right.”

“And you came looking for her to…?” Talia didn’t know how to finish the question.

“I had a hunch.”

“Oh,” she said again. This was all surreal. Was this really her life?

“She didn’t get in contact with me when she was supposed to. There was more chatter than usual among our targets—rumors about the West gang cleaning house. And now I find out she’s disappeared and subletted her apartment for God knows how long.”

“So you’re screwed,” she said, trying not to act like she was aware of every inch of her skin under the intensity of his gaze. The prickle of her bare arms, her nipples—

She would not look down to verify that they were safely tucked away under the blanket. She’d never realized her lace top was so flimsy. So clingy. So barely there.

“No,” he said, and she was about to ask what he was talking about when he said, grimly, “You’re screwed.”

“Wait—what?” She nearly dropped the blanket in her surprise. This had all seemed crazy—but it wasn’t her crazy.

“I already told you, Talia. You can’t stay here.”

“That’s bullshit. I’m sorry Stacey burned you, but I’ve got nothing to do with this.” She didn’t care that he was an agent, he was eighty million pounds of pure muscle, he had a gun, and he was into some seriously deep shit she didn’t want to know about.

He was still an idiot, and she wasn’t afraid to tell him so.

“Listen to me,” he said. She didn’t want to. But his voice held such cool command, she had no choice. “I don’t know what did or didn’t happen. I don’t know how bad the risk. But obviously Stacey got spooked, and she fled.

“Maybe it’s nothing,” he continued. “Maybe she has an aunt in Poughkeepsie who needs twenty-four-hour care. Maybe that aunt is in Paraguay. The south of France. I don’t know, and I don’t care. What I do care about is that there’s a chance Stacey was compromised, and she knew it. It could be a small chance. But I’m not willing to take any risks. Not with Stacey. And not with you.”

Talia’s mouth hung open. She couldn’t believe how much this man, with his clipped sentences and tightening jaw, had just said. Even more so, she couldn’t believe the words he was saying. He was the one talking, but it was her own throat that ached. She’d started off with adrenaline coursing through her. But she was starting to have a very bad feeling about this night.

“What do you mean,” she said quietly. “With me?”

“You know a man named Jonnie West?” Reed asked.

She shook her head. “But that’s good. I don’t know what case Stacey was involved in, so it doesn’t matter. You can leave me alone.”

Only Reed wasn’t buying it. “Say Jonnie gets suspicious about Stacey. Finds out who she was talking to in her spare time. This guy’s got a business to protect. He gives an order, and there’s muscle lining up to take care of the job. All he has to do is give them the address and a description. Brunette chick, long hair, nice face, legs for days.”

Talia tucked her errant foot under the blanket. She wished he hadn’t said the word legs like it was something obscene. She wished she didn’t flush so hard at it anyway.

“A dancer,” Reed went on. “New York City Ballet. Looks it, too. Unmistakable, Jonnie will say. You know, that dancer look.”

Talia held up a hand for him to stop. She didn’t need him to hammer the point home any harder.

“They’ll think it’s me.” She almost couldn’t get the words out. “He’ll give them Stacey’s description, but they could easily think it’s me.”

No one who saw her and Stacey side by side would say they looked alike. But when Reed put it like that? The differences between them didn’t matter. Even if the guys had a photograph, it wasn’t like they’d study it with care. In the apartment, in the dark…who could really say?

And they’d be more concerned with being thorough than with potential collateral. Shoot first, shrug later. They’d probably figure that even if Talia wasn’t the informant, she was close enough to Stacey to be living there after Stacey fled, so she might know something. She might need to be silenced anyway.

She started to cry.

It was embarrassing, but she couldn’t stop. It was late, she was tired, and her whole world had just been turned upside down by one man sneaking into her apartment and falling into her bed.

Stacey’s bed, she corrected herself. Not hers. Not even for a night.

She never should have been sleeping here to begin with. It was just like Reed said. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The wrong bed at the wrong time.

And now, on a night when all she needed was to get a solid eight hours of sleep so she didn’t look like an idiot at tomorrow’s rehearsal, she was sitting here blubbering in front of a stranger who she’d already threatened, flashed, and tried to beat up with a book.

Although, he looked more uncomfortable at the tears than he had at any of her other transgressions.

“I have no place to go,” she hiccupped.

“You have a friend you can call? Some place you can stay for the night until we get this sorted?”

Reed looked around the tiny studio like he’d rather be literally anywhere else—a den of lions, Jonnie West’s stronghold, hour seven of the opera with fire ants crawling up his legs and the Queen herself sitting next to him, so there was no way he could tear off his pants and run screaming.

Talia shook her head. The sad truth was that there was no one she could call—and how many people did Reed want to have to explain this mess to, anyway? She’d moved out in order to give Jessie and Shawn their space—and to make amends for how she’d reacted when they first started dating. If she barged in on them at this hour, prattling on about gangs and the DEA, she’d look like she couldn’t leave them alone for even a night.

Her other friend Rose’s fiancé would turn up his nose at Talia appearing all tear-streaked this late, then probably start a fight with Rose about it. Amanda was out of town, and Talia didn’t have a key—or the emotional bandwidth to navigate her roommates.

And it wasn’t like she could take the bus home to her parents in Pennsylvania in the middle of the night. They’d freak. Plus, she’d never make it back to rehearsal in time.

The rehearsal. She began to cry harder, tears hot on her cheeks.

“I have this big day tomorrow.” She tried to explain about the role, Giselle, everything she’d been working for—even though it was hard to talk while the tears were flowing.

God, why did she have to be one of those people who showed every emotion that thumped through their heart? She wished she could be cold like him, just standing there, not feeling. She wished “crying in front of strangers” was one of those things that never, ever happened to her. Instead of, well, just being a part of her life.

Reed looked around the room like he was plotting how far it would be if he jumped through the window to make his escape. Eventually, he went to the bathroom and came back with a square of toilet paper. He passed it to her gingerly. What a gentleman. She wiped her eyes.

“I sound so selfish. Worrying about me instead of Stacey.”

“It’s stressful,” Reed said.

“I spent all day moving in”—she gestured at the empty boxes and suitcases—“only now I have no place to go.”

“I can take you to the DEA office,” he offered. “See what the night officer can do.”

The thought of spending the night on some cold bench in a police station didn’t do anything to stop her tears. Her first night in a new place, only to be kicked out of bed and dragged to the police? She might as well call Hal and beg him to yell at her some more, because no way was a shot of wheatgrass and a few extra stretches going to save her now.

“What about a hotel?” he suggested.

“If I could afford to spend the night in a hotel, do you think I’d jump at the chance to stay in this apartment?”

He made a face. Obviously he knew she had a point. “Fine. You can stay with me tonight.”

“What?” She was sure she’d misheard.

But he said it again. “You can stay with me tonight.”

He ran a hand over his shaved head and pulled on the back of his neck. He looked pained. Like, physically pained. Either at her crying, or at what he’d just said.

She burst out laughing. Not the funny kind, but nervous, exhausted, freaking-out laughter. He had to be kidding.

“No,” she said.

“I’m serious.”

“That has to be against regulations.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“Obviously not. But I can’t just—” A laugh again. “Go home with you.”

“Why not? I can’t let you stay here, and you said you have no place to go.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said, more strongly than she felt.

“Or I can stay here,” he said.

She hadn’t been joking when she’d texted Jessie about how small the place was. There was no room for a man of his size to stay. What would he do—stay up all night sitting in the bathtub? She certainly wasn’t letting him back in her bed.

That would be…wrong. Awkward. Highly unprofessional. Or something.

Stop looking at his biceps. Stop looking at his biceps.

Plus, she did need to sleep, and spending the night curled up to Mister Hulking Stranger and the gun against his back wasn’t a good recipe for that.

“I have a one-bedroom apartment that I used to think was small, until I set foot in this place,” he said. “You can take the bedroom, get a good night’s sleep before your—whatever it is tomorrow. I’ll take the couch.”

“I can’t ask you to do that.”

“It’s fine.”

Talia could talk for hours and hours, weighing all the pros and cons, agonizing over what to do. She could lose the entire night’s sleep just thinking about how she needed to sleep.

But the way Reed said those two little words, it was done. He said it was so, and it was.

It isn’t like I’m taking advantage of him, she reasoned. He was the one who’d busted into her place and fallen on top of her. She wasn’t being selfish for saying yes. She was doing what had to be done.

“So,” he said. “We’re agreed?”

“Yeah.” She sighed. “We’re agreed.”

“Okay then.”

“Okay.”

She stared at him. He stared back.

“Let’s go?” He said it like she was the problem. Was he dense?

“Only if you turn the fuck around,” she said, and tugged at the lace strap of her tank top. Did he really want to find out what she had on her bottom half?

Or, more accurately, what she didn’t?

“I’ll wait outside.” He booked it out of there so fast, she’d have been afraid he was going to change his mind and leave her behind if she couldn’t already tell that would go against every principle of the Reed Bishop Ethics Manual for Women in Tears.

When the door closed behind him, she scrambled out of bed, tore off her pajamas, and put on some actual clothes. Jeans. A shirt. A fucking bra. Maybe some chain mail and a chastity belt for good measure.

She didn’t need to look at him the way she had been. She had rehearsal, dance, things she needed to focus on. Things that didn’t take kindly to boys in her head, messing around in there.

“He’s just doing his job,” she muttered to herself as she stuffed a suitcase with the things she’d need. And it was just for a night, until they could sort this out in the morning.

Then again, what if it was more? What if she couldn’t come back here for a while? She grabbed a second suitcase and started filling it.

Her heart was only beating this hard because she’d been woken up in the middle of the night, informed about a drug ring, and was on the way to a DEA agent’s apartment with two suitcases and no clue what came next.

The fact that his stare burned with such intensity had nothing to do with how frazzled she felt. The fact that she could tell from his description of his apartment that he was single was totally irrelevant to her packing, too.

She was only folding a slinky red dress into the suitcase in case she wanted to go out sometime while she was stuck on the lam. Not in case she wanted to show Reed she could wear something other than pajamas and ballet clothes once in a while.

When she wheeled the two suitcases out to the hallway, he was leaning against the wall, mouth tense in concentration, biceps flexed as he scrolled through his phone like he was going to snap the thing in half. “You’re kidding,” he said when he caught sight of her.

“Take this.” She passed him one of the handles.

“You’re not moving in.”

“Can you tell me how many nights I’ll have to be gone?”

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “We’re going to have to figure this out in the morning.”

But he took the suitcase. Talia had a feeling right then that she wasn’t the only one who wished she hadn’t wound up in Stacey Moss’s bed that night.

They carried her things down the four flights of stairs and he hailed a cab. As they slid into the back seat, he leaned over her to tell the driver the address. She was almost pressed against his hard body, her arm brushed by the hairs on his.

Maybe it’ll just be one night, she thought weakly, trying to make herself concentrate on Giselle, rehearsal, relevé then plié…

Don’t screw this up.

But oh God. She was really doing this. The drumbeat of her heart reverberated all the way down through her toes.