Page 48 of Problematic

Then, a quiet sigh.

“. . . Understood.”

The doors closed. I watched the coffee shop feed on my phone as the elevator descended.

Liv was laughing again.

The sound didn’t reach me through the silent video, but I could see it in the way her shoulders lifted, in the way her head tipped back slightly, in the way the room around her softened when she smiled like that.

Something inside my chest tightened in a way that was inconvenient and deeply concerning. I did not like inconvenient feelings. Fortunately, I had several productive outlets available tonight: B&E and assault.

The first camera went in above her door.

Not outside the apartment building. Not down the hall where a polite stalker might stop if he still believed boundaries were real, not just decorative lies people told themselves to sleep better.

Inside.

Right above the narrow strip of molding where cheap plaster met ceiling, tucked into shadow, so small it would pass for dust to anyone who didn’t know what they were hunting.

I stepped back and studied the angle. Front door covered, living room covered, kitchen corner partially covered, but the micro on the bookshelf would fix that. The hallway was easy, exterior done. If anything tried to come through a window, I’d know before it got one claw over the sill.

Efficient and entirely illegal.

I adjusted the lens half a millimeter to the left. Perfect. The apartment stayed quiet around me. Liv’s place smelled faintly like coffee, old paper, cheap citrus cleaner, and some soft soap that had no business making my cock hard.

I stood in the center of her living room with a case full of surveillance equipment and peered around. Books covered every available surface. Stacked on the coffee table. Lined along the windowsill. Three uneven towers beside the couch.

I stepped over one stack on my way to the kitchen, then stopped halfway there. Curiosity had always been one of my less attractive traits. Murder, intimidation, emotional avoidance, curiosity. A full personality of mildly alarming traits.

I crouched beside the nearest pile and picked up the top book.

A paperback with worn edges and a cracked spine. The cover had been bent back more than once, abused with affection. A faint corner crease marked a page near the middle. She dog-eared in lieu of using tabs. I hated that I liked knowing that.

I flipped it open. My eyes found the marked paragraph. Then stopped. Slowly, I read the line again. My jaw slowly dropped.

The male character had the heroine against a wall, wrists pinned above her head, his mouth at her ear while he described, with impressive dedication, exactly how thoroughly he planned to ruin her in the most violent and obscene ways.

I blinked.

“Well,” I said to the empty apartment.

The next paragraph got worse. Better . . . worse. There were teeth involved. A death threat. A knife handle inserted somewhere a knife did not medically need to be. EVER.

I sat back on the sofa and ran a hand through my hair. The shy coffee girl with the nervous smile and the soft little flinch when strangers got cruel apparently spent her private hours reading about dominant psychopaths with possessiveness issues.

Interesting. Deeply inconvenient. Potentially hopeful. I turned the page. The man in the book dragged the heroine onto a desk. I lifted my brows.

A quiet laugh slipped out of me, too fond for a man committing a felony in someone’s living room. “Liv,” I murmured, running my thumb along the edge of the page, “you absolute menace.”

A blanket lay over the arm of the couch, bunched and soft, one corner worried thin from fingers rubbing the same spot over and over. I touched it before I thought better of it. The fabric held her scent.

I should have left. Instead, I closed my fingers around that worn corner and imagined her curled there in the dark, knees tucked, book open, mouth parted around some filthy little gasp she’d never admit to making. I imagined her reading this scene and shifting against the cushions, annoyed with herself, cheeks hot, pretending she wasn’t affected while her body told the truth.

My hand tightened. The image hit low and hard enough to make me go still.

“Absolutely not,” I told myself.

I ignored my body with the discipline of a man who had killed entire rooms and apparently found a blanket more challenging.