CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE    No more women stormed Brick’s office for the rest of the day. From his behavior, a person never would’ve guessed he’d been slapped, threatened, and broken up with, all within five minutes. I had to wonder if somewhere inside him, it truly bugged him.Outwardly, he nodded, grinning as he took a step back from the work table in his office to inspect our finished portfolio in all its glory. A dozen posters were spread across the tabletop and ready to be displayed.“Holy shit,” he murmured in awe, scanning his gaze across our hard work. “I think we’re done. I think we’re really done.”“And just in time, too,” I said, standing beside him, my hands against my heart as I breathed out a relieved and proud breath that it was finally finished.But my stepbrother rounded on me with an incredulous blink. “Are you kidding me? I’m usually up until midnight the night before the presentation, scrambling to get it together. I’ve never b

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE    Have you ever had one of those mornings where you woke up and everything just felt right? The best amount of cushion possible was molded around you, the perfect covers on top, pillow fitted just so under your head, the temperature of the room excellent, and you’d slept a good, solid deep sleep? Then your alarm ruins it all, and you groan because you want to keep lying there, just like that, without moving a muscle, for the rest of eternity?Yeah, it was one of those mornings, for sure.My eyes flickered open. I stared at the wall of my room for a moment, feeling rested and relaxed. A slow smile started and then, boom, the alarm shrieked out this totally unnecessary and increasingly annoying racket, making something grumble in complaint right into my ear before a warm weight draped across my stomach shifted.I squeaked. Totally didn’t scream, because I’m not a screamer, but there was a definite noise of alarm that escap

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE    “And they weren’t here when you came in this morning?” Brick repeated the very question he’d asked me about a dozen time since he’d walked in the door. “None of them?”I shook my head and bit my lip. “At first, I just thought you’d put them somewhere.”“Where the fuck would I put them?” he exploded, losing his cool. “This was the best place to leave them. Christ.” He gripped his hair with both hands. “That was the best fucking portfolio my people had ever put together.”Wringing my hands, I looked around the office as if hoping at least one of the prints we’d assembled yesterday would suddenly appear from thin air.“You know who’s behind this, don’t you?” he raged, pacing the floor like a captured wolf, ready to tear out the throat of the first person who opened the door to his cage. “My vindictive bitch of a mother, that’s who. Well, this is crossing the line. Chasing away all my women was one thing, but this shit ain

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN    It would probably be completely unnecessary for me to say my weekend at Ezra’s was amazing, but it was. It totally was.We spent most of it inside, trying to christen as many rooms as we could—double-christening a few. And when we weren’t sexing it up, we’d sit out on the back terrace, wrapped in a blanket together, enjoying the sunset. Or we watched movies, argued politics, heck, we even played a couple games of chess together. And I took a spin in his mammoth kitchen once or twice, whipping up a batch of chocolate chip cookies.Nothing else in the world existed but us.By the time Monday came around, we were both loath to return to reality, where we had to hide our relationship at work and pretend we barely knew each other.When we returned to his light-blue Bentley in the garage—my purse and overnight bag with me—we were both unusually quiet and subdued. Ezra held my hand while he walked around to the passenger sid

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE    At home, the first thing I saw when I stepped into my apartment was the big box window that looked so much like the one in Ezra’s bedroom, and I burst into tears.To escape painful reminders, I fled to my room, only to remember everything we’d done on my bed together. I already knew I’d only summon a memory of him cooking grilled cheese sandwiches in my kitchen if I went there, and basically, there was nowhere else in my apartment to go after that, so I shut myself in my bathroom and curled into a ball on the closed lid of the toilet seat.It felt as if my dad had just died, all over again. But this time, he’d been murdered.By Lana.How had she done it to make it look like a heart attack? I’d read this true crime book once about some doctor lady who’d fed her husband some kind of exotic beans or something that wouldn’t reveal anything unusual in a toxicology report as she’d made him sicker and sicker over time. Was th