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"What? No wise crack about how you've got a tool for every lock?"
"Only the ones worth opening."
She shakes her head, a cascade of curls brushing her shoulders as she continues her search. I hate how so many of her simple movements — the way her hair bounces, the way her eyes smile, the way the corners of her mouth raise when she laughs — have a way of freezing me in place.
We work in parallel, rifling through Brock's possessions, but each drawer opened, each secret compartment found empty of what we need, cranks up the tension. Our movements become more frenzied, our breathing ragged. Time is growing short.
My hand brushes hers as we both reach for a leather-bound book on the desk. It’s just a glancing contact, but it ignites something powerful, sending tiny shocks up my arm. She jerks back as if burned, eyes flashing with that same fire from before.
"Watch it," she hisses.
I snatch up the book. Inside, a chunk of the pages are cut out to form a hollow. Inside that hollow is a small wooden box held shut with a combination lock.
“This might be something.”
“Give me that.” She grabs it from my hands and works on the lock with her lockpicks. “This is one complicated lock. It might be exactly what we’re looking for. It’s going to take me a minute, though.”
“No more fucking around with your little toys, princess. We need to get the job done.” I take the box from her, and with utmost care, I drop the box to the ground and stomp on it, smashing it to pieces.
“Holy shit, you moron,” she says, but I hardly hear her as I kneel and sort through the shattered box and snatch up the flash drive. Then I gather up the pieces and put them back in the hole in the book and put it back where it belongs. The less evidence we leave behind, the better. “What if you had broken the flash drive, too?”
“That was a risk I was willing to take to get out of spending another second with you.”
“You suck,” she mutters. “If you fuck up this mission, I’ll…”
“You’ll what? You’ll do nothing, that’s what. Because we’ll both be dead, so it doesn’t fucking matter.”
The look on her face is priceless. Flash drive in hand, I head toward the door.
The sooner I can get out of here, the better.
“Wait.” Her voice brings me to a stop, and I turn. “We can’t leave looking like this.”
“You want to stop and fix your makeup?”
“We were supposed to have been fucking.”
“Not an option, no matter how much you want it, princess,” I say. It takes effort to make those words sound casual, like there isn’t a part of me, deep down — beneath the absolute hate and disdain I feel for Alexandra — that wants to make her moan my name as I fuck her like I was about to do earlier.
“Appearances matter, Dixon. I know that might be a new concept to you, seeing as how you look like a blind toddler’s Play-Doh construct, but Jeremiah Brock thinks we were back here, in one of his guest suites, fucking like rabbits on ecstasy. We need to at least look the part when we get out there and make a break for the exit, because I don’t want to die.”
I hate her tone. Hate the way she’s looking at me like I’m a fucking idiot. Hate so much that she’s right. So, I reach for my zipper, an overly smug grin on my face, and decide to see just how far she’s willing to go to in lording her rightness over me. As if she’s so fucking smart.
“Fine, if that’s the way you want it, we can make this quick. Bend over and grab your ankles.”
She rolls her eyes and then reaches into her back pocket and takes out a small tube of lipstick.
“I have a better, less-repulsive idea.”
“Which is?”
She applies the lipstick in a thick layer, enough that she bears a more-than-passing resemblance to a clown, as if she didn’t earlier.
“It’s only slightly less repulsive than actually fucking you.”
“Alexandra, you’re doing a shit job of selling me on whatever idea you’ve got cooking in your empty head.”
“Take your shirt off.”
