Love Op: A Spicy, Cat-And-Mouse, Thriller Rom Com (Love and Other Jobs Book 5)

6. Ghost

Things were going too smoothly. It was making me itchy.

I had tucked Mattie into a large sweatshirt with her arms under it, which hid her bound wrists, and we’d set off after eight to drive through the night. If we traveled mainly at night, it would keep a low profile. The last thing I wanted was someone looking in my back window and seeing a girl in zip ties. It would be just my luck to have someone notice her, rescue her, and then give her the chance to slip away again. Which, the more I thought about it, did sound “exceptionally creepy.” But then again, the longer I was with Mattie, the creepier the entire situation felt. Why did her parents want her home so badly? And more importantly, why would Mattie rather jump in a frozen river than go back to them?

My Ghost-senses were slithering.

Mattie coughed in the back seat, groaning as she slumped over and lay on her side. I glared at her through the rearview mirror. “Did you take your seatbelt off?”

“No, Mom,” she intoned sarcastically. She had pulled up the hood on the sweatshirt, and she curled up like a roly-poly before coughing again. She didn’t sound great—if she gave me COVID mid-assignment, that would probably delight her to no end. “How long are we driving for?”

“Until we stop,” I replied, returning my eyes to the highway.

“Seriously, dude, who hurt you?” she grated out.

“There was this guy in Tora Bora once who used a potato peeler on my di—”

“Agh!” Mattie growled, reaching her hands up through the hoodie neck and pulling the hood around her ears. “I don’t want to know. Don’t tell me. Gross.”

“—distal phalanx,” I finished with a smirk.

Mattie shoved her hood away from her eyes. “Your pinky toe?”

“Yep.”

“Sick,” she grimaced.

I snuffed out a laugh through my nose, glancing at her and then back to the road in amusement. “You asked.”

“One of my few regrets.” She sneezed into her sweatshirt, coughed, and then groaned again. “I have the pox.”

“You know what a distal phalanx is, but you use words like ‘pox?’ Did you get kicked out of med school or drop out? I’m starting to think it’s the latter.” Her records were, actually, strangely vague. They started out detailed, showing a sterling record in high school where she had graduated two years early and started her undergrad at just sixteen. She’d been top of her class through undergrad and med school. But that was where the records got suspiciously sparse. She had dropped out weeks before graduating, but the reason hadn’t been listed, and although she showed in the records as “complete,” as in fully graduated, she hadn’t received a diploma. As far as Tabitha and I could tell, the school hadn’t followed up with her, either.

“Yep, I peeled the dean’s dick with a potato peeler,” she rasped. “Apparently, they frown on that sort of thing.”

I laughed before I could help myself, and then I managed to sober up my expression. “Seriously. Who goes through eight years of higher education to quit at the last minute?”

She made a disgruntled sound, pulling the hood over her eyes again. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.”

Silence wrapped around the rush of tires on asphalt and the gentle hum of the engine. Finally, she sat up and shifted uncomfortably. “My parents made me.”

I frowned. “How can they ‘make’ a twenty-something woman drop out of med school? And why?”

“It’s complicated,” she mumbled. I glanced at her in the mirror again, and I found her wide eyes watching me closely from under the hood.

My intuition pinged like a tuning fork. Something was definitely off, here. “Tell me.”

“You know what my parents do?” she asked.

“They own SynthoCare, which is a pharmaceutical company,” I supplied easily.

“Right. And they manufacture a lot of things. Some of it is medicine, but some of it—the lucrative stuff—is used by labs around the world to simulate certain physical reactions in humans.”

She was probably talking about cathynol. I’d come in contact with it a few times, and it was nasty stuff. It was a nerve activator, and it would light up every nerve in the human body like a sick game of Operation if it was actually injected into their bloodstream. Most of the time it was used in labs for pain management simulation, but it had gotten into the wrong hands a lot lately. I’d seen it used in action—as torture to obtain information. They’d used it on a friend, no less, and it still haunted me that Azura had endured that. My stomach sank. “And?”

“And… I asked the wrong questions.” Mattie sniffled, still surveying my reaction to her story. “I saw a chemical signature on one of their drugs, and then I found the same chemical makeup on a drug they named something different. And they were sending it to labs I didn’t recognize. I didn’t do anything about my suspicions. I just asked why they had one drug with two names.”

“And they… got angry?” I clarified.

She shook her head. “They locked me down.”

That ringing in my intuition sharpened, spearing through my brain and lighting up my suspicions like cathynol to my system. “They’re worried about what you’ll reveal.”

She nodded. “They want to control me.”

“Because your med school training helped you see things they didn’t want you to see,” I added.

“Yeah. At the time, I was just trying to understand what they were doing… or why. But they saw it as an attack. The only thing I could think to do was run.”

So, in point of fact, I was sending this girl back to her criminal parents to be imprisoned for the rest of her life.

Well, fuck.

I scowled at her in the mirror again, my attention divided between the dark highway dotted with headlights and her worried expression. “Why are you just now telling me this?”

“Because you’re an asshole,” she said like that was obvious. “I didn’t figure you’d care… at first.”

“At first?”

Another quick look revealed her discomfort. “You haven’t actually hurt me. Like, you’re rude as fuck, and you threaten me every five minutes, but you haven’t hurt me. I know what cruelty looks like. It’s not you. I guess I figured it was worth trying to appeal to your… human nature.”

A distinctly human emotion melted in my chest like butter on a pancake. “You had it right at asshole.”

She huffed a laugh. “Yeah, but you’re an asshole with a code. Like Geralt from ‘The Witcher.’”

I quirked a brow. “‘The Witcher?’”

“Yeah, you’re all gruff and shit, but you don’t hurt innocent people.”

I thought about that for a second. It wasn’t entirely true—I’d hurt innocent people plenty of times. But when I had, it had never truly been intentional. Most often, it was an innocent who got caught in the crossfire. Anyone I had intentionally maimed, tortured, or killed had deserved it. And I’d go back and do it again—every one of them. “Well, I hate to disappoint you, but your sad story doesn’t change anything,” I replied with soft callousness.

She slumped in her seat. “Yeah. I figured. What’s my commission up to?”

“Two mil,” I said quietly.

Mattie sniffed thickly, like she was trying to smell something. “I can smell their desperation from here.”

“You know what I smell?”

“Two million crisp dollar bills?” she guessed.

“And a yacht, maybe.”

Mattie coughed, nodding in resignation. “Yeah.” After a pause, she added, “I could pay you more.”

I felt my brows lift in surprise. “What?”

“Even if I succeed in doing what I want—in taking down my parents and sending them to jail where they belong—I’m still an heiress. The properties they bought me after my eighteenth birthday, my stock holdings, my assets, they all belong to me. I can pay you double what they’re offering if you help me.”

I chewed on her words, digesting what she was saying. She was offering me four million dollars to switch sides. I scratched my upper lip, thinking. “As interesting as that is,” I replied slowly, cautiously, “I’m not sure I believe you.”

Mattie glared. “Right. Why would you?”

“Right,” I agreed mildly.

It was better to disappoint her now than to give her false hope. I needed to think this through—I needed more information and a clearer look at whatever was going on with the Thornes and Mattie. I wasn’t going to just shove her into her parents’ arms without knowing the facts, but I wasn’t about to pull over and let Mattie go, either. There were other links missing from this chain, and I wanted them all put together before I made a decision.

I took Exit 63 toward Sunnyside and made my way through a dark, sleepy town toward the pharmacy I had pulled up on my phone. She needed medicine and I needed fresh air to think. If what Mattie had just told me was true, then I needed a moment to think and talk to Tabitha about digging into the truth of Mattie’s accusations. Then again, Tabitha was en route with a van to meet us in Salt Lake City, so she was a bit tied up herself.

I spared Mattie a look in the mirror and found her forehead leaning against the passenger side window in the back seat as she stared at the pitch black around us. She looked pale, and her cracked lips were parted as she breathed a little too quickly. Whatever virus she had, it wasn’t going easy on her. “That’s what you get for dragging me through the river,” I muttered to myself.

“I heard that,” she replied sourly.

I fought a smile. She kept doing that—pulling amusement out of me when there should have been only steely resolve with a hint of resentment. I had crafted that mask so perfectly, it felt real most days. But strangely, with Mattie around, it felt more suffocating than protective.

I navigated the mostly dark, small town, passing a few fast-food restaurants with muted lights casting neon halos around the abandoned streets, and finally found the pharmacy. There were only ten minutes until closing, so I pulled into a parking spot as I asked, “Can I trust you enough to come in with me quietly?”

She nodded, rolling her head against the window. “Yeah, whatever.”

“I swear, Mattie, if you try to run—”

“Yeah, yeah,” she droned. “You’ll tie me up and gag me. Always threatening me with a good time, Ghost.”

I smothered another smile. Goddammit, she had to stop doing that. “You already freed yourself from the zip ties, didn’t you?”

She shoved her very unbound hands through the sleeves of the sweatshirt. “Like it’s hard.”

I rolled my eyes. “Stay there. I’ll come get you.” I went around to her side of the car and opened her door. She dragged herself out, eyes bleary, and I put a hand under her arm to steady her. “How long have you been out of the cuffs?”

She shrugged, shuffling beside me as we walked across the nearly empty parking lot, past one faded gold sedan, to the sliding glass doors. “I broke them when you were walking around to get in the car before we left.”

“What?” I angled an incredulous look down at her. The fluorescent glow of the pharmacy lights cast a pallid shadow over her skin. “You’ve been free this whole time? And you’re not rubbing that in my face?”

“You’ve been on the struggle bus, Ghost. I don’t want to totally demoralize you,” she sniffed. Her eyes weren’t even on me. They were on the pharmacy, bouncing around as we walked through the doors, and apparently cataloging everything happening in the open space. A lot like I did, actually. Her light hair had long since come undone from its swishy ponytail, and it cascaded down her shoulders and pooled in the hood of the sweatshirt as she zombie-walked down the aisles with me. She did look half-dead, honestly.

I did a quick scan of the pharmacy, noting the clerk at the front desk of the convenience store portion of the building. The actual pharmacy had closed and looked dark. One older man stood in the antacids section, and beyond that, it was just Mattie and me. I kept a hand on her arm, partially so she didn’t dart off, but also because she seemed like she might topple into a shelf of vitamins any second.

As we reached the cold medicine section, Mattie snatched several boxes of blue “PM” cold medicine. “If I have to endure this bullshit, I’m not doing it lucid.”

I plucked the boxes from her hands and placed them back on the shelf. “Okay med school student, tell me why you can’t have those.”

“I know it might mix with whatever anesthetic you used, but I don’t give a fuck,” she grumbled, reaching for it. “I’d rather keel over from overdose than be conscious for this road trip.”

“It was midazolam, and correct.” I took it from her again and put “daytime,” orange pills in her palm instead.

She made a “pfft,” sound. “No known drug interactions between midazolam and doxylamine.”

“Don’t care.” I steered her away from the sleepy drugs. “I’m not going to be responsible for an accidental death of a very expensive heiress.”

“Can I get snacks?”

“Mattie,” I growled, pushing her toward the counter. “You can pick out a wa—” A crash to our right interrupted me, and we both turned toward the source of the sound.

The older man, dressed in a puffy black jacket, had fallen back against the shelf of the aisle he’d been in. He dropped a bottle of antacids as he slumped down with a groan. Her own illness forgotten, Mattie dashed across the pharmacy to him, and I pointed to the bewildered looking store clerk. “Call nine-one-one,” I told him. Nodding, he took out his phone, and I jogged over to Mattie.

She put her hands on the plump man’s arms, helping him into a prone position on the ground. “Sir? Can you tell me what’s wrong?” But the man had already gone unresponsive, and when I knelt next to her, she had her fingers on his neck as she tried to wake him up. “Sir, can you hear me?”

I took in his pallor, the sweat dotting his face, and the lack of movement from his chest. He wasn’t breathing. But before I could say a word, Mattie positioned herself with her knees on either side of his wide hips and began chest compressions with no hesitation. The man’s sternum cracked, but she didn’t falter. “Ask if they have an AED.”

I’d have to leave Mattie to do that. I hesitated a second, letting my eyes fall over her thin frame as she delivered well-timed compressions. I couldn’t let a man die—not even for two million dollars. If she escaped, then so be it. I stood, and bypassing the confused looking store clerk who stood on the phone with EMS, I did a quick search around the small pharmacy, starting at the front door and sweeping around the walls, looking for red. I found the small, glass case next to the fire alarm behind the clerk’s desk.

When I opened the microwave-sized door, an alarm sounded throughout the pharmacy—likely contacting EMS—and I pulled the red Automated External Defibrillator from the case before sprinting back to Mattie. She glanced up at me, still keeping a rhythm on the man’s chest. We locked eyes, and I saw in her gaze the answer to my silent question from moments before.

I’m not going to leave him to die, asshole.

I unzipped the red case and set it upright. As I turned on the machine, the automated voice chimed, “Remove all clothing from the patient’s chest.”

Mattie stopped, taking the machine from me. She had started coughing, and gestured, wordlessly for me to continue compressions. I positioned myself over the man, knowing full well that his chances of survival from what seemed like a massive coronary failure weren’t great. As I started compressions, Mattie fought against her coughing fit, reaching with shaking hands to unzip the man’s coat. I pushed her hands out of the way, pausing for precious seconds to shove his coat aside and rip his button-down open. The man had wiry, gray hair that matted his broad chest, and Mattie slapped the electrodes in place on his chest and down near his ribs before connecting them to the AED.

I moved away from him, and the AED cautioned us several times not to touch the man while it analyzed his heartbeat. I caught her gaze, and we shared a similar look. It didn’t look good. “It’ll try to detect a rhythm,” she whispered, staring down at the machine and then the still man.

“I know,” I replied softly. “Mattie… we need to go. EMS will be here soon.”

“I’m not just leaving him here,” she scowled.

Another hairline fracture shot straight through that hardened shell around my heart. I had assumed that because of her wealth and upbringing, Mattie was a spoiled, selfish person. But I realized now that I’d been way off the mark. Mattie was putting herself at risk here, and the concern furrowing her brows was genuine. I really might have to drag her away from saving this stranger. I sighed, and the machine beeped loudly before the female voice said, “Shock advised.”

“No shit,” I muttered.

Mattie pressed the big yellow button on the machine and delivered the shock. “This AED is fucking old—it should be doing all this automatically.”

“It’s the middle of rural Washington,” I pointed out.

Mattie started compressions again, and as she did, ambulance lights swirled around outside the double doors. I pulled her away. “Okay, now we have to go.” As EMS ran through the doors, pulling a stretcher with them, I yanked Mattie away from the man. Two emergency technicians—one a woman in her forties, and the other a man well past retiring age—began their protocols, and I hauled Mattie behind a shelf and dragged her to the exit.

“They need information,” Mattie protested.

“They know exactly what the AED will show them, and that’s all you’ll be able to tell them, anyway. We aren’t sticking around for the blue and red light show. Or did you forget why you’re with me?”

“I didn’t forget, but Jesus, do you have to be such a colossal a-hole all the time?” She stumbled along next to me, and the cool autumn air slapped me in the face as we headed out the front doors.

I strode past another EMT just as I saw police in the distance. I opened the passenger side front door and shoved her inside. “Let’s go.”

“Ghost, wait a minute—”

I shut the door in her face, and in five long strides, I reached the driver’s side. I ripped open my door, punched the ignition button, and put it in reverse. “He’s in good hands, Mattie. Chill.”

“You chill. I could have run like a dozen times in there, but I didn’t,” she pointed out. She coughed into her arm before adding, “I just meant you left my cold medicine.”

I paused before putting the car into drive. The blue glow from the dash cast a soft filter over her pale skin, and her long lashes threw spindly shadows over her cheeks. I gave her a double blink. “Sorry, let me clarify. You’re not objecting to my continued kidnapping of your person… but you want the cold medicine?”

“Ghost,” her lips twitched. “It’s the whole reason we came.”

“Right, and saving a man’s life was just a fun interlude.”

She shrugged. “We really aren’t even sure if we saved his life.” Her eyes bounced forward, and then back to me. “You should go before the cops get here.”

Shaking my head, I put the car in drive and revved out of the parking lot. Mattie never did what I expected her to do. Saving the man’s life? Or trying to? It made perfect logical sense. But helping me re-capture her? Absolute lunacy. The only explanation was something that made me both uncomfortable and, at the same time, unaccountably satisfied.

She trusted me. Against all sane judgment, she seemed to think that she was better off with me than away from me. And as much as I wanted to deny the intelligence of that move, maybe she already knew what I hadn’t accepted. I hadn’t even had time to think through my next move, to validate what she’d claimed, or research options.

But Mattie had stayed. She’d saved a man’s life, and then she’d gone with me instead of running away. As with everything when it came to Mattie Thorne, I didn’t have the luxury of planning. I had a moment to react, a moment to feel something in my gut and make a split-second decision. And in this case, there was only one path I knew I could live with.

“Two things,” I said as I got us back on the highway. “One, I’ll stop to get you more medicine, and you should be more comfortable in the camper van once we meet up with Tabitha.”

Mattie’s almond eyes ricocheted all over my profile. “Okay. And two?”

“My name is Kael,” I added, sparing her a quick glance. “If you insist on convincing me to jump ship then… it’s Kael.”