Page 30 of How to Get Even

She looked up to find him smiling at her, a tease glinting in his eye. He’d given her a chance to change the conversation. And she took it. But she didn’t like being so easily readable to him. And she didn’t like how it made something in her gut flip when he did that.

She’d had a little of that with Olly, but not like this. With Olly, he’d been obvious to the point of charming. There was a wryness to it that she had become used to. But Chase? Chase was sneaky, hoarding his charm until you least expected it, so when you were hit with it, it was sudden, unexpected, and much harder to defend against.

She looked back across the sidewalk only to find that she’d lost him. She pulled up short, catching the person coming towards her by surprise and Bella had to step nearly into the road to stop them from colliding.

She glanced back over her shoulder to find him standing by a side alley waiting for her with a smirk that made her want to growl. She didn’t have this reaction to people. But there was something about Chase Miller that got her hackles up.

Standing there in his long line coat, the street light picking out the tussles of his hair and the sharpness of his cheekbones, he looked like restrained wildness.

Bella shook her head. She must have caught hypothermia. It was the only possible explanation.

Shaking herself off, she cut her way through the throng of people and met him at the mouth of an alleyway, peering down into the darkness warily.

‘Don’t chicken out on me now, Carmichael.’

She clenched her jaw and shot him a look. No one had ever called her Carmichael. Apart from maybe the boys’ Phys Ed teacher in high school. There was something taunting about it, a challenge that she was helpless to resist.

Half way down the alley, Chase tugged her elbow and led her to a back door with the word EXIT clearly printed on the sign, and knocked.

She quietly shifted out of his grasp without his notice and stamped some feeling back into her feet, until a large man in a security uniform pulled open the door.

Every good-girl instinct screamed in alarm. Were they doing something illegal? Surely if not, they would have just used the front entrance to wherever they were.

‘Chase,’ she whisper-hissed, now pulling at hiselbow.

‘Miller,’ exclaimed the big burly man in the uniform. ‘Been a while.’

Chase huffed out a laugh. ‘Just a bit,’ he replied as the security guard pushed the door open wide enough to let them through into a brightly lit startlingly white corridor.

‘Ma’am,’ the security guard said, dipping his head to her before returning his attention to Chase. ‘Mannon said you’d need these.’

‘Thanks, man,’ Chase replied, taking the keys from the guard’s palm and slapping him on the beefy side of his arm.

‘Lock up when you’re done and drop them off on the way back out.’

‘Sure thing,’ Chase said easily as Bella watched the guard lope off down the corridor all the way to the end.

She looked back to Chase who had that infuriating smirk across his face again. One she wanted to wipe off with a startling amount of violence. Still, she followed him down the corridor until Chase paused in front of one of the many doors. Chase slid a key into the lock and pushed open the heavy door into the darkness beyond.

She was curious despite herself, which was warning enough.

She cleared her throat. ‘I would like to know if I’m about to be involved in a bank heist.’

He peered at her, something bright flickering in his gaze.

‘Would you do that?’

‘No,’ she replied definitively.

‘Just checking,’ he teased, and pushed the door completely open, reaching around to the left to find the light switch that illuminated an absolutely huge space.

Oh.

Bella couldn’t help herself. Her footsteps echoed as she walked past him into a space that was inconceivably near football-stadium large. The space seemed to be partitioned into zones that made her organisational heart near sing with joy. The flooring changed from concrete to white slats, not joined like wooden flooring, but with a line running across them. She followed the line to the deceptively simple wire racks on which hung frames of different sizes and shapes.

This was a gallery storage. And from the glimpse of the paintings she saw, a very well-known gallery.

‘Chase!’ she exclaimed. ‘We shouldn’t be in here,’ she realised, the flush of wrong-doing painting her cheeks in a pink blush.

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