Page 30 of Volatile Obsessions

At least ten people pointed up to an office overlooking the main floor. The blinds were drawn but I could just make out a shadowed figure standing beside the window.

My pulse quickened all the more.

Was that him?

“On your right. The stairs,” Vic commented softly in my ear. “Go, I’ll watch these guys down here.”

My gaze followed his directions, then up the zigzag trail of the rusty stairs.

Perfect.

“You guys remember the plan?” I asked them both, taking one last look around the first floor.

“Yup,” they answered.

“On my mark only… Cover me,” I ordered Roscoe, holstering one firearm at the small of my back as I sprung into action and hustled up the steps. The iron floor clanked beneath my heeled boots, growing louder and louder as I zeroed in on the door. Each step pumped in time with my heart.

“As you were!” Vic barked powerfully. “C’mon, nothing to see here!”

I heard, rather than saw them all scramble back to work just as I curled my hand around the cool knob.

This was it.

The moment I’d been waiting for.

And it turned out to be nothing like I expected…

Bursting into the office fit my vision perfectly. Falling dead in my tracks, however, did not.

My breath caught as my feet rooted themselves to the ground. This man, Phantom or not, he was...me. Only in male form.

A handsomely grim mug.

Intense eyes.

Hard lines to his jaw.

Almost every plane of skin tattooed in entirety, or at least it appeared that way beneath the all-black suit that fit him like a second skin. Even his face was tattooed. Two stood out most; a spider crawling down one side and the word compel scripted over his eyebrow, almost in the same spot I carried one of my own. I felt like I was looking into some weird mirror from an alternate universe and was completely taken aback at how strikingly good-looking he was.

“Take a picture, pigeon, it’ll last longer,” he mused, a deviously cocky smirk playing on one corner of his mouth.

That word, pigeon, and the amused fashion in which he’d spoken to me—with an accent like mine nonetheless—both shook me to my core, and yet rekindled my initial purpose for being here.

Fire rushed through my veins as I narrowed my eyes and started for his desk with determined strides. “First and last time you call me pigeon. I’m not a fucking bird.”

The handsome man chuckled, a dark, sexy rumble in his chest, and lazily reclined into his seat, crossing his arms behind his head. “On the contrary, Miss Mercier, you are quite the little bird. Not at all what I was expecting the Queen of Miami to look like.”

It is him.

“And what were you expecting?” I asked sarcastically, trying my hardest to seem as unaffected as possible.

“I don’t know…maybe some class?” His smirk spread further at the offended expression that fell across my face.

Oh hell no.

I could’ve killed him, right then and there, simply for being such a fool. But because I was so intent on finding out who he was, what he wanted, and how the hell he knew who I was, I swallowed his words down, the gun in my grasp burning my palm.

Wasn’t lost on me he had me bouncing from one emotion to the next in nanoseconds.

---