Page 14 of A Smile Full of Lies
A humof anticipation tingled from the top of my head to the tips of my toes as I slid the stack of mail aside and hit the spacebar on her laptop. The anonymous confession forum window was still up. Her cursor blinked steadily at the bottom of the screen.
I minimized it and pulled up her email client, my gaze dissecting the data laid out on her screen. Messy inbox. Unread notifications. Overdue statements. Junk.
And then I saw it:Exclusive Opportunity – Philip Knox.
My heart forgot how to beat. My mouth pressed into a hard, thin line as I clicked it open.
Hey, kid. Quit fucking around with freelance copy gigs and leverage your connection with your mysterious multimillionaire neighbor already.
My stomach churned, bile rising like acid in my throat as I kept reading. Nina’s predatory nature shone through every word like a neon sign.
People have been dying to get the exclusive inside story on his family’s murder ever since it happened four years ago…
I ground my teeth, fighting back the urge to vomit. Rage boiled through my bloodstream.
Of course Nina fucking Frost would try something like this. She’d been circling me for years, like a goddamn vulture. I’d seen her name pop up more than once, sniffing around me and my family’s murder, but this time, she tried using Ros to get to me.
My vision darkened at the edges and my pulse throbbed at my temples as I kept reading.
I have it on good authority that he has a key to your house, for fuck’s sake…
I smirked, savoring the dark thrill that shot through my bloodstream at those particular words.
She’s not wrong. I do have a key. And I’m sitting in my sweet girl’s house right now.
I leaned in, forcing myself to keep reading.
This story is a fucking goldmine, and it could make us both rich as fuck. Just talk to the guy. Get him to open up to you.
My jaw ticked. Nina was trying to make Ros sell me out and turn my grief into a fucking paycheck.
I clicked into the sent folder. My heart stuttered. A single reply to Nina’s email sat at the top of her sent emails. I opened it, dying to see whether Ros had been loyal, or if she’d agreed to sell me out.
Nina,I can see why you’d think this would be a good idea, but I’m really not comfortable using Knox like that.
My breath hitched. An electric hum sparked low in my chest.
He’s a friend, and I respect his privacy. If he wanted me to know about his family’s murder, he’d have discussed it with me already.
My heart swelled. Ros was protecting me.
I don’t want to profit off his trauma and tragedy. It wouldn’t be right, no matter how profitable you think it might be, and I’m not that kind of girl.
My chest burned with the weight of my pride in her.
She didn’t sell me out, even though it would have fixed everything for her: the funeral expenses, the overdue bills, the notices piling up on her table. All it would have taken was a single conversation. But she wouldn’t do it because she’s a good fucking girl… my good girl.
She’s in so deep she can’t fucking see daylight, and she still wouldn’t betray me. That made her surrender inevitable. Because now? She already belonged to me. She just didn’t know it yet.
I sat back on the couch, stretching my legs out beneath the coffee table, the soft blue glow from the screen flickering across my hands. My cock twitched at the thought of her typing out that reply to Nina. I imagined how her breath probably caught, her fingers faltering on the keys, every word a confession she didn’t know I’d read.
I closed the email. The soft sound of her snoring carried down the hall, steady and even.
She’d protected me, chosen me, even over her own survival. That meant something, whether she was ready to admit it yet or not. That kind of quiet devotion wouldn’t go unrewarded.
My mouth curled faintly. Soon, she and I were going to have a little chat about Nina Frost. But first, I needed to come up with a cover story or a plausible way that I could have discovered this information.
Ros couldn’t know I was in her house tonight. She couldn’t know I’d been in her inbox, her bills, her private shit she never meant for anyone to see. If she realized that… if she figured out how deep my habit of invading her life went, she’d go fucking ballistic.
