Page 19 of Marked By the Devil

Without a word, he brought it in and sat on it, straddling the back as he faced me.

“If your first day on the task force was that day, why would you assume that you would be a target worthy of being shot at?”

Well, hell.

He had to start with the hard questions.

“I don’t know.”

He pulled out some papers from the inside of his jacket, a suit that looked way too fine on him than it should. He was still a criminal. Dressing up nice only proved that a wolf could try to change his appearance as a sheep.

“Before coming to our fine city of Las Vegas, you worked with fraud.” He glanced up from reading papers. “Small business fraud.”

I frowned.

“Right?” He held up the papers then snapped his fingers. Then he reached in his other pocket and got a pair of glasses out and held them up for me to take.

I accepted them and slowly put them on.

Dammit.

Now I didn’t have to guess at how dangerous and sexy he was. All the details were clear. No more fuzzy outlines. I blinked again, realizing they were my glasses. But they weren’t. I preferred contacts, yet this was… my prescription.

Jesus.

He looked up my glasses prescription?

It wasn’t necessarily an intimate secret, but it was my personal information.

And it told me that he had spent all this time that I was waiting wisely. He’d looked into me. Thoroughly. Once more, I battled with that awkwardness of being exposed. Studied.

“Right?” he repeated, holding up papers that showed my record of employment. He shuffled through them, showing them to me one by one. My résumé. My application to the Las Vegas office. My transcripts from college. And high school too!

“Looks that way.”

“Seems strange to me that a rookie would assume she’s so special that she’d warrant a hit placed on her as soon as she would arrive.” He dragged his dark gaze over me, and I fought the urge to cross my legs and arms to shield myself from his view.

“I told you. I have no idea why someone would shoot at me.”

“Who ordered you to that stakeout?” he asked.

I didn’t answer, too scared to reveal anything now. When he held all the cards and had clearly investigated me, I had to be careful of anything else I’d add to his knowledge.

“Your superior?” He held up a photo of Smithson, a black and white ID image that didn’t do his toupee any favors.

“Is this the kind of entertainment you enjoy? Asking me questions that you already know the answers to?”

He eyed me up and down again, this time with more kick and heat in his dark-brown eyes.

I resisted the urge to cross my legs again, this damnable rush of desire making me aware of what it could be like if a beast like him wanted to eye me in another way.

“Are you interested in entertaining me?” He flapped his hand down, bracing his forearm on the back of the chair.

I cleared my throat.

Assess. Ascert⁠—

“Because I’ve got some ideas of how you might be able to do that.”