Lights Out: A Dark Stalker Rom-Com, page 14
Right on cue, her fingers tightened around mine on the first pump upward, and by the time we came back down again, she was squeezing me much harder than necessary.
My hand burned like a sonofabitch, pain racing up my arm. A whimper built in the back of my throat, but there was no way I was letting it out because she would either realize she’d hurt me or recognize the pitiful sound from earlier.
I grinned through the pain. “Quite the grip you got there. Trying to intimidate me into keeping my mouth shut about all this?”
Her eyes flashed wide with the realization that if I wasn’t her masked stalker, she was choking off the blood flow of an innocent man. She let me go and took a harried step back. “Sorry, no, I just…”
I raised a brow, waiting for her to finish the sentence.
She opened her mouth. Closed it again. Was Aly flustered? Oh, this was too good. My dark, devious heart sang at the sight of her searching for a way to excuse her behavior. I was going to torment the fuck out of this woman, and it was going to be so much fun.
“Just…sorry,” she finished lamely, looking away.
I briefly took pity on her and stepped aside, holding the door wide. “Come on in.”
“Thank you,” she said, skirting past me.
“Sorry if it’s chilly. The heat kicked off a while ago and won’t come back on. I called the building’s super, and he said he’s on it.”
Her gaze dropped to my gloves. “Oh, so that’s why you’re wearing those.”
“Yup. If you get cold, we have more pairs lying around.”
She smiled, still looking embarrassed about her imitation of a boa constrictor. “I’ll let you know. Thanks.”
I closed the door behind her and strode toward the kitchen. “Coffee?”
“Sure,” she said.
“Just half-and-half, right?”
She was quiet, likely wondering how I knew how she took her caffeinated beverage of choice. From watching her, duh, but I’d known it for even longer, and that little nugget of truth would probably throw her off just as much.
I turned and grinned at her, wide enough to make my dimples pop. Her gaze dropped to them and lost focus for a second, and I was grateful my oversized shirt and sweatshirt hid the way my dick responded. I knew what I looked like, knew the effect I had on people. Up until now, I’d always resented how handsome I was because it reminded me of how easy it must have been for Dad to lure his victims.
For the first time in a long time, I was grateful for my looks because the girl of my dreams seemed rattled by them, caught off guard because she hadn’t gotten a good look at me the first time we met and didn’t know what to do about the fact that Tyler’s roommate looked like he could get cast in the next Superman movie.
“I remember how you liked it from when you stayed over,” I said, adding a wink to see if I could get her to blush again.
Sure enough, the pink fading from her cheeks came rushing back. “How I liked it?” she asked, having picked up on the innuendo in my words. Her eyes flashed wide as they glanced toward Tyler’s room, and I saw the wheels turning in her mind, wondering how much I might have heard that night.
“Yeah, your coffee,” I said, tone innocent, expression anything but as I looked her over.
She sucked in a deep breath and turned away. “Yup!” she squeaked. “Half-and-half is fine, thank you. I’ll just go over here and sit down.”
Her ex-hookup’s roommate was flirting with her, and she did not know what to do about it. Inside, I was cackling. Maybe I could keep her so off balance that she forgot why she was here.
But I should have known better than that.
By the time the coffee finished brewing and I ambled over to her carrying our cups, she’d gotten control of herself, back to the no-nonsense, competent woman I watched almost every night. It must have only been her surprise that threw her off at first.
“Thank you again,” she said as I passed her coffee to her. “I know this is a strange request, asking you to hunt someone down for me, and I appreciate your help. Are you sure I can’t pay you?”
“I’m sure,” I said. “The challenge of it will be payment enough.”
It was my turn to get flustered as I stared into her wide brown eyes. Up close, there were lighter hints of amber and topaz hiding amongst the deeper tones. Her eyebrows were thick, a shade or two darker than her hair, arching in the middle like one of the beauties out of a Renaissance painting.
Whatever you do, do not look at her mouth, I told myself.
I used the excuse of sipping my coffee to tear my gaze away before I gave in to that temptation. Looking at Aly’s mouth was dangerous because it would remind me of what that mouth had so recently done to me, and my dick was already hard enough as it was.
I set my coffee on a coaster and opened my laptop. The screen came to life, displaying the emblem of the company I worked for. I’d scrubbed this machine down earlier, removing any trace of Aly from it just in case I had to get up and pee, and she got curious and started clicking around.
“Why do you need to find this person?” I asked. “Tyler was kind of vague.”
“That’s my fault. I didn’t want to go into details with him,” she said.
I glanced over to see her watching my screen intently. I waited a beat, but she didn’t elaborate. Really, Aly? You won’t even tell the guy helping you find what you’re after? Fine. If she refused to be upfront about it, I’d have to wheedle it out of her some other way.
“Okay then,” I said. “Do you at least have a starting point? A name or an address?”
She took a deep breath and pulled out her phone. “Please don’t judge me for what I am about to show you.”
I watched her unlock the screen, noting her passcode – because of course I did – and waited as she pulled up her social media app, found my profile, and then showed it to me.
I looked from it to her and back again. “You want me to find this guy for you?”
She nodded.
“You’re not some rabid fangirl trying to find out where he lives, right? Because stalking is a crime, Aly.” My tone was dead-ass serious, and it took every ounce of willpower to keep the rabid glee from my expression.
Her cheeks heated again, but it looked like it was from temper instead of lust. “I know it’s a crime. It’s someone else who has the boundary issues,” she muttered.
Don’t laugh, don’t laugh, don’t laugh.
“Oh?” I said.
“It’s a long and insane-sounding story, and I don’t want to get into it with a near-stranger.”
Ouch.
She lifted her gaze to mine and had the good manners to appear apologetic. “No offense.”
“None taken,” I told her. “I’m just a little worried this ends with me getting charged as an unwitting accomplice in someone’s murder.”
She snorted. “It’s my murder you should be more concerned about.”
Was she serious? She still thought I might hurt her? Fuck, I hadn’t done enough to reassure her after all. Maybe I needed to change tonight’s plan around and give her the power again. She seemed to like having it last night.
“Are you joking?” I asked because that’s what a non-involved, concerned person would do. “You think this guy is going to kill you?”
She blew out a breath. “No. I mean, I hope not.” She dropped her head into her hands. “Fuck, I’m making this sound so much worse than it is.” She lifted back up and looked at me imploringly, and I decided I would give her anything she asked for at that moment. My help. My undying loyalty. The password to my investment account and all the money inside it.
“If I thought I was truly in danger, I would have gone to the cops,” she said. “This guy has just been messing with me a little, in a mostly harmless way, and I’d like to get back at him.”
I continued to play the role of a concerned bystander. “I don’t know. This seems like something the authorities should handle.”
She shook her head. “No. I want to do this my way. Will you help me or not?” She placed her hand over mine, my right one, I noted, and squeezed again. “I totally understand if you’re too freaked out, though.”
Ow, ow, ow.
I kept my face stoic as I answered her. “I’ll help. But please go to the police if things escalate or you feel unsafe.”
She grinned up at me, squeezed once more, even harder this time, clearly watching me for any sign of pain, and then let go. “I will. Thank you.”
She seemed almost disappointed that I didn’t flinch as I nodded and turned back to my laptop. Did she want it to be me?
Did she think I’d make it so easy for her?
I made a show of pulling up my social media profile on a browser and locked it to the left side of my screen. Next, I opened a coding program, locked it to the right, copied and pasted my user name into a line of code, and hit enter. Numbers and letters started flying over the right side of the screen while the program got to work.
It looked impressive as hell, like something out of a spy movie, but in reality, it did fuck-all. I wasn’t really going to sit there and track myself down, nor had I replaced my fall guy with someone closer. If Aly was serious about looking for payback, that might mean breaking into someone’s house, and I would never send her to a stranger's address if that were the case.
I’d have to find some way to run down the clock, tell her that her hacker was very good – I mean, he was, not to blow my skirt up or anything – and he’d done too much work covering his tracks for me to find him without risking getting caught and hacked myself.
“That’s it?” Aly asked. “You just put it in there, and the program does it all for you?”
“I wish it were that easy, but no,” I said. “This is just to figure out what IP address he used to create his account.”
From there, I went into detail about how much work it would realistically take to track someone down. Her face fell as I talked. Good. Hopefully, she was second-guessing her harebrained idea.
“So you’re not going to have an answer for me by the time I have to leave,” she checked her watch, “in twenty minutes?”
“Nope. Sorry,” I said. “What’s it like being a trauma nurse?” I tacked on. Because I couldn’t help myself. This was the first time I’d spoken to Aly, and despite how often I watched her, I was still ravenous for information. There was only so much knowledge you could gain through a camera. I had memorized her expressions and learned how to read her moods, but I didn’t know what made her tick, didn’t know how she truly felt about all the things I’d seen her go through.
“Oh,” she said, looking slightly taken aback by the sudden topic shift. “It’s…I don’t exactly know how to describe it. Good isn’t the right word. Rewarding might be better.”
I glanced down at her lips, unable to help myself. Less than a day ago, they had parted around my cock. Less than a day ago, I had come inside that sweet mouth.
I jerked my gaze up and refocused on her words before I did something stupid.
“It’s incredibly challenging at times,” she said. “The lows are really low, but the highs are equally high. Nothing compares to the thrill of saving someone’s life.”
I nodded. “I bet. What made you want to get into it?”
She met my eyes before shifting to watch the letters flashing over my screen. “My mom, but I don’t want to talk about it. Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” I said. Shit, I’d touched a nerve. I needed to get us back on safer ground. “More coffee?” She drank at least a pot a night, and her cup looked like it needed to be topped off.
She held it out to me. “Yes, please.”
I went to the kitchen and poured us more. Aly was typing on her phone when I turned back around, and I watched as she hit a final button and then looked toward my phone, which sat next to my laptop, as if waiting for something. Did she just text me? The masked me?
If so, she would get a vague, slightly teasing response in three, two, one…
Her phone chimed, and she looked disappointed for half a second until she read the text and grinned, shaking her head like she was amused and didn’t want to be. I knew the expression well. She’d worn it almost constantly last night.
She fired off another text as I returned to the living room with our cups, grinning even wider when the next reply came through.
The auto-response program I’d loaded onto my burner was pretty sophisticated. It could carry on an entire smartass/flirtatious conversation with her in my absence, though I hoped she didn’t keep this up for long. The program was good, but it wasn’t perfect, and she looked like she had finally stopped suspecting me. Josh me. After all, I couldn’t be her masked admirer if he was texting her back, could I?
“Thank you,” she said, setting her phone down to take her coffee. She looked more relaxed than a moment ago, like her back was no longer up now that she didn’t suspect me.
Mwah ha ha ha ha.
My evil plan was working. Step one: get Aly to drop her guard. Step two: fuck her on this couch.
Oh, wait, no. I’d skipped a few steps somewhere.
But, god, the temptation was strong. Relaxed Aly was almost as hot as feisty Aly, and I had to stop myself from staring at her instead of pretending I was watching my fake hacking program work its magic.
Unfortunately, she didn’t seem to suffer such compunction, and I could feel her gaze like a physical touch as she watched me watch the screen. I’d been worried earlier that my need for her might be tied to our shared kink, and without a mask between us, the excitement would dull. I should have known better. I wanted her just as much now as last night, and from the way she stared at me so intently, I was beginning to think it went both ways.
Keep it up, baby, I thought, and see if I don’t out myself right now just so I can give into this driving need to yank your scrub pants down and –
“What’s it like being a computer programmer?” she asked.
I cleared my throat and shifted my hips, trying to ease my erection sideways so it wasn’t digging straight into my fly. Was she making small talk, or did she really want to know?
I took a sip of coffee and sat back, risking a glance at her. She looked genuinely interested.
“It’s a little like how you described nursing. Challenging but rewarding, if in different ways.”
“What made you want to get into it?”
I reluctantly pulled my gaze from her – I’d been staring at her mouth again and almost missed the question. The second it registered, my stomach plummeted. I was already playing enough games with her, and I didn’t want to start piling lies on top of them, so I settled for a half-truth instead.
“My dad wasn’t a good man. He tried to find us when Mom and I left him. Learning how to hide us from him online was the reason I first started coding.”
“Oh, wow,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
I shook my head. “Don’t be. It’s in the past. We’re free from him now.” The whole world was, thanks to his state-sanctioned execution. “Lighter topic,” I said. “If you were locked in a room full of spiders, would you rather have the lights on or off?”
Aly leaned toward me until I had no choice but to look at her again. “That’s lighter?” she asked, brows lifted in concern.
Her eyes were so pretty this close. “Than my dad? Yeah.”
She sat back. “Lights on, I guess. So I could see the spiders coming. You?”
I nodded. “Same.”
“Would you rather be trapped alone in outer space or at the bottom of the ocean?” she asked.
“Those are both terrible. Outer space.”
“Same. But why?”
I grinned. “I’m banking on the chance of an alien rescue.”
She smiled back, her gaze dipping toward my dimples again and going slightly unfocused.
My heart started beating so hard that it rattled my ribcage. When was the last time I’d done this? Sat and talked with a woman? I couldn’t remember ever being so at ease around one, at least not as an adult. Part of me was always wound up, waiting for them to find out who I was and for that knowledge to ruin everything. Maybe I should have felt that with Aly, but Tyler wasn’t a liar, and if he said she avoided true crime like the plague, he meant it.
“Would you rather change sexes every time you sneeze or not know the difference between a baby and a muffin?” I asked.
She laughed, throwing her head back and almost spilling her drink. “That second part is twisted. I’ll take changing sexes. Sounds fun.”
I nodded. “Same.”
A mischievous look crept into her expression, and her gaze dropped to my lap.
I glanced down, but the hem of my sweatshirt still hid what was happening beneath it.
She lifted her eyes to mine, her gaze searing. “Would you rather ejaculate one tadpole-sized sperm every time you come or a hundred regular-sized ones that can all talk?”
I sucked in a breath full of coffee and immediately started choking. Aly patted me on the back while I leaned forward, hacking as my lungs tried to expel the liquid invasion.
“Sorry,” she said. “Should have waited until you swallowed. I’ve caught a lot of people off guard with that one.”
“That is a truly impossible question,” I wheezed.
She quit patting me and rubbed her hand over my back instead, and I decided to stay right where I was until she felt like stopping. “I know. Because on the one hand, ow. On the other, you could never get rid of them.” She raised her voice to a much higher register, sounding like a munchkin. “Nooo. Don’t flush us, Josh. We’re aliiive.”
Aly had left my house almost eight hours ago, and I was desperate to see her in person again. I’d declared her the winner of our impromptu game of Would You Rather after she made me nearly choke to death again with a question about crying tiny rocks or sweating pickle juice.
My computer screen showed me that she was busy at work, still dealing with the fallout of the mass shooting. Another one of the victims had succumbed to their wounds during the day, and the news organizations and local politicians were both working overtime to either bring attention to or away from the event, depending on their affiliations.
