Page 5 of Stealing His Christmas Present

Chapter 2

THE SKY WAS GETTINGdark, which was exactly what I needed. I glanced down at my phone.

She was on her way home.

Claudia.

I clenched my jaw. She was the last person on my list.

The girl who’d started everything.

She’d only been eighteen. So sweet and innocent. Like a rare flower that had just bloomed and that no one was supposed to touch.

I didn’t want to remember the day I’d met her, or the day that I’d made the biggest mistake of my life.

But my mind didn’t care what I wanted. It wanted to play out the memory in my head like a fucking movie.

And I let it.

After my boss had sent me to Spain to try to find Stella Lombardi—there were rumors Stella had divorced her husband and was now a Casadei again, but no one really believed them—I’d followed the leads I had.

A plane that had seemed like a decoy turned out to be the one. I’d figured out Stella and her sister might be at college, but it wasn’t easy to get close without being spotted.

Enrolling at college was too complicated and would raise alarms. Lurking around for no apparent reason would make me suspicious, so my plan was to meet a college student at a nearby club and get her to sneak me into her dorm room.

But as I was looking around for the easiest target in a club packed with hot girls, my gaze found hers.

She was the hottest girl I’d ever seen.

Both wild and innocent in her sparkly black cocktail dress that tightly hugged her curves. My eyes lowered to her long legs, and my cock twitched in my pants.

With her shoulder-length dark brown hair and dark brown eyes, she looked very much like Stella’s sister. But there was no way I’d get so lucky, was there?

Unless Claudia herself was a decoy, and her sister wasn’t even here at all.

I found myself walking over to her as if drawn by some invisible force.

Claudia wasn’t hiding. She had to believe she was safe.

How wrong she was about that.

Her big brown eyes kept staring at me, her full pink lips spreading into a smile.

Mine.

Somehow, I knew she’d be mine.

The memory dissolved, quickly transporting me to another place.

Claudia kept insisting on her fake name, and she hadn’t mentioned she had a sister. Asking her outright about it would be a mistake. She trusted me, and I had to keep it that way.

Not to mention we’d spent the last few nights just dancing and having fun at the club where we’d met.

We’d even kissed, and I wanted more. Prolonging my mission was the perfect way to get what I wanted. I could get both Stella for my boss and what I wanted for myself.

It was a win-win.

Until now.

---