Page 14 of Tempt Me

I know the rules, but still, she’s taunting me. It’s just the rock on her finger, I tell myself, sprinting now. A red flag to a bull. I always want what I can’t have, and Chloe is just that:

A challenge. A mystery.

But once I’ve figured out her secrets, then she’ll be just like the rest of them. Case closed. Client happy. Check cashed in the bank. I don’t need to fuck her to get her out of my system, I just need to do my job.

Determined, I head back to my place to shower and change, then go straight to the office. It’s Saturday, so there’s a line of yoga babes outside the studio waiting for class and I have to fight my way through a sea of tight pants and green smoothies.

“You take this one,” Molly greets me with a smirk—and a noxious-looking drink. “You look like you need it.”

“What I need is a hair of the dog,” I tell her, but I still take a swig—and spit the whole thing out on the pavement. “What the fuck?”

“It’s kale and chlorophyll.” Molly wrinkles her nose at my rudeness, but fuck, that was the most foul thing I’ve ever tasted. “Helps your skin. You should try it sometime.”

“I’ll stick with Jack and Jim, thanks all the same.”

I head inside and settle at my computer, clicking through to Chloe Archer’s file. It’s still too slim: just basic background, hometown, parents, school. She wasn’t rolling in it, but there aren’t any dark secrets lurking there, either. I called around to some neighbors, pretending I was an old school-friend of Chloe’s looking to track her down, and from what it sounds like, she hasn’t been back home in years. Packed off and shipped out to dance school in the city when she was fifteen, and never looked back.

Those years are easier: photos from performances, write-ups in the arts press. She was one to watch, they all agreed: “a promising talent” tipped for stardom. Sixteen, seventeen, taking on bigger roles. The photos I can find from them show her looking painfully slim, those brown eyes almost too big for her head as she gazes into the distance, lost in her work.

There’s video, too, so I click to watch. Rehearsal training, Chloe dressed in a black leotard, working with some dance instructor on the same steps, over and over again. She looks so different, I can’t believe it: so focused and controlled, it’s like the rest of the world doesn’t exist.

And as far as I can tell, it didn’t. No party pics posted on friends’ social media pages. No trips, or holidays. Nothing at all except ballet, and her slow climb to success. When she was seventeen, she made it to the corps de ballet for the Joffrey Ballet, rising through the ranks, and then—

Nothing.

She disappeared.

Not a trace of her in the system for two whole years, until she shows up in Boston, working as an assistant in a real estate office, like her previous life never existed.

I sit back, tapping a pen as I think. In my experience, there’s only one reason people disappear like that:

Because they don’t want to be found.

So what were you hiding from, Chloe Archer? And is it something that’s going to bring your perfect life as Mrs. Maxwell Mainwaring crashing to the ground?

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