Love Op: A Spicy, Cat-And-Mouse, Thriller Rom Com (Love and Other Jobs Book 5)
Prologue
My captive spread her knees wide, silently daring me to look. It was a bold move for someone dressed in a fluffy, pink crop-top and shorts pajama set, complete with bunny ears on the hood. I gave her a derisive blink. “Comfy?”
Mattie twirled a long bunny ear around her finger, her wrists zip tied together. It forced her to tilt her head to the side to reach the ear on her hoodie. “If I say yes, are you going to zip tie my ankles together?”
“Do you want me to?” I challenged.
She grinned, chewing her gum obnoxiously loud and snapping it between her straight, white teeth. Her almond eyes shimmered with mirth. “Do you want me to want you to?”
My gaze flicked from her mischievous features down to her fluffy crop-top hoodie, over her flat belly, and to her open legs where her bare inner thighs led up to the strip of fabric between her legs. She wanted me to look, so why was I looking?
With a saint-worthy effort, I returned my attention to her eyes. “I want you to sit still and behave.”
We were seated across from one another at the rental house I’d secured after finding her, and even though her wrists were bound and the exits firmly locked, I kept a wary eye on my prisoner. We had an hour left until my operatives transported us in a secure vehicle to a small, personal plane that waited on the tarmac at Denver International.
Mattie manipulated the bubblegum in her mouth and then blew until it formed an impressively large bubble. It popped somewhere around her eyeline, and she sucked it back in noisily. “I am behaving.”
She was up to something. I could feel it. She’d escaped me twice before already, which for me was unheard of. Literally. If I let word of that get out, my reputation would be ruined. If it wasn’t for the hefty paycheck on her head, I would have given up on her after the first time she’d escaped. She’d thrown a bowl of spicy shrimp in my face, kicked my chair out from under me, and then disappeared into a busy mall.
Not this time. I had her now, and I wasn’t taking any chances with my 800K payout. If she wanted to escape me now, it would be her slight build against 190 pounds of determined muscle. And my taser. I had no problem taking her down to the beige carpet with a well-aimed shock to her fluffy bunny body.
Sighing, she slumped on the brown microfiber couch, pushing her knees further apart and bringing her neck to a cinched position. She was practically hanging off the couch cushions. I rolled my eyes.
The house we were staying in couldn’t be more nondescript if I’d tried. Tucked away in the suburbs, the townhouse had been styled in early-aughts beige with a side of IKEA flair. Not that I felt the need to hide Mattie in a safe house, but it was better to choose something discreet, regardless. If she wasn’t such a pain in the ass, this would have been easy money. Her parents wanted her home with them—that was it. Nothing insidious. No crime lords or shady drug deals. Just a runaway twenty-six-year-old heiress with tenacious parents.
Mattie’s bronze eyes flicked back to me. “How long are we going to sit here?”
“Until we leave,” I intoned. I wasn’t wearing any tactical gear to handle Little Bunny Foo Foo, so I folded my arms comfortably over my white T-shirt and sat back in the armchair.
She shoved her long body back up the couch and sat up straight with her zip tied hands resting on her thighs. “You haven’t fed me all day.”
I flicked a piece of lint off my jeans. “Not my problem.”
“How much are they paying you?” she asked with a speculative eye squint. “Pretty sure a… one-hundred-thousand-dollar prize should be fed?” She surveyed my expression. “Three?”
“Eight,” I corrected.
“Damn,” Mattie muttered. “Anyway, pretty sure they wouldn’t be happy if I showed up with a growly tummy.” She patted her flat stomach, emphasizing the bare area.
I scrubbed a hand down my face. Truth be told, once we boarded the aircraft, there wouldn’t be any in-flight meals or complimentary pretzels. It was just her and me for four hours until we reached New York. I didn’t mind missing a few meals, but no matter how much I disliked Matilda Thorne, I figured I should feed her. “Fine, get up.” I motioned for her to stand, reaching out a hand for her arm.
She refused my help and popped up from the couch a little too enthusiastically. “What are you making me?”
“I’m not making you anything,” I countered. I couldn’t cook anyway. Never had been my forte. “I think the team bought us hoagies.”
“Not even coffee?” she asked, outrage pulling her voice up an octave. “I’ve never gone this long without coffee. I might start seizing.” I had abducted her somewhere around four in the morning, so that made two of us.
I led her to the kitchen with a firm grip on her upper arm. “Your file didn’t say anything about epileptic conditions. I’m sure you’ll survive.”
“… like foaming at the mouth, snarling opossum-level seizing…”
“I’m not making you coffee.” I yanked her over to a round, honey oak table set back in a breakfast nook.
“… and I think I had a medical bracelet made for it once. Like, caffeine-dependent rodent…”
“Mattie,” I warned as a headache started between my eyes.
“… who bites when she doesn’t get enough coffee in her blood strea—”
“Fine.” I shot her an irritated scowl, hands on my hips and looming over her as she primly lowered herself to a chair.
She gave me a falsely innocent smile and snapped her gum. “Thanks.”
“Brat,” I muttered, stalking away.
She laughed in an odious way as I went to the fridge. I opened it, keeping one eye on Mattie, and then bent down to find the sandwiches my small operative team had stocked for us. I found them, wrapped in plastic wrap with little packets of mustard and mayonnaise, and I set them on the counter.
“Coffee first?” she queried.
I rotated a half-lidded glare her way. She widened her eyes in question, like she didn’t know why I was being so cranky. Sighing hard, I pointed to her. “Stay. There.”
She held up her bound wrists. “Like I could go anywhere.”
I shuffled around the counters, looking for the coffee maker and grounds, but they weren’t set out on the counter like most house rentals. I spied them in the pantry to my right, across the kitchen and near the back door. It was one of those enormous pantries that looked like it had been a small bedroom at one point, and it had a frosted glass door with “pantry” written over it like it wasn’t already obvious what it was.
I shot Mattie another suspicious look. If I was smart, I’d zip tie her ankles to that chair, but I’d already spent the morning wrestling her into handcuffs, dragging her along to another operation that had been half-finished when I’d found her, and then she’d scraped the rest of my energy clean away with her abominable personality. I gave her a threatening stare. “If you so much as scratch your ass in that chair, I’m tasing you.”
She chuckled, brown eyes bright as she flicked her blond bangs away from them. “Are you this fun in bed, too? ‘Stay there. Don’t move. Orgasm. Or else.’”
I pulled in a bracing breath, willing it to imbue me with a measure of patience. Her laugh chased me as I turned and went into the pantry to grab the coffee maker and pods that went with it. I was in there for maybe five seconds, my hands on the coffeemaker, when the pantry door slammed shut. I dropped the machine and rounded on it, already knowing I’d fucked up.
Thwack.The sound of a chair being jammed against the other side of the pantry door sounded through the enclosed space just as I rammed my body against the glass door. Mattie stood on the other side of the glass door, pink bubblegum pinched between her feral teeth and a pen twirling between her very free hands. Where did she get a pen?
Isla. The “other assignment” I’d dragged Mattie along with. She’d given my uncorked captive a fucking pen.
I tried the handle, but I already knew she’d wedged the back of her chair under it. She shoved the chair tighter with her foot for good measure, grinning. Although my view of her was distorted by the frosted treatment over the glass, I could see enough of her to completely enrage me.
“Open the door,” I ordered, my voice just loud enough for her to hear through the glass.
She gave me a brilliant smile that I knew charmed droves of men and women everywhere she went. “I didn’t hear a ‘please’ in there.”
I leveled a hard glare her way through a decorative line in the frosted glass. “Let me out now, and I’ll go easy on you.”
She laughed, low and soft, and came right up to the glass door so her lush lips were angled up to me. “That’s no fun. Make it rough, baby Ghost.”
I slammed the glass, but she only laughed again, and bringing up the felt-tip pen to the frosted glass, she drew a pair of bunny ears in black ink. Moving fast as I backed away to get a good angle to kick down the door, she scrawled out two words with tallies. And because she was a lot cleverer than she let people see, she wrote backwards so I could read her words. I slammed my foot against the glass, but she finished before I could raise my foot and take another crack at it.
“I will find you, Mattie,” I warned.
She smiled, completely unconcerned. “I escaped an entire fleet of bodyguards in France. I can handle one ghostie.”
I backed up, ready to smash the door and barrel out to full-body tackle her. But then she dropped the pen, winked, and vanished from view. It took me maybe forty seconds to break the door open—which was twenty seconds longer than I expected with a pantry door—and by then, there was no trace of her.
My bunny had escaped.
Again.