Page 77 of The Love Destroyers

Rage floods my body. No. Not again. I can’t let this happen.

But I’m a rat caught in a cage. What am I supposed to do to stop him?

Heart thumping fast, I turn my phone over and find a waiting text message from Nicole.

I’m the one who hangs up on other people. Not the other way around. Is it weird that I respect you for it?

Jeffrey’s in the room, Nicole. He’s going through Ellie’s stuff.

Oh, fuck. Where are you?

I’m hiding under the bed. We need to stop him, but he can’t find me here.

Got it covered.

My heart feels like it’s going to beat right out of my chest as I listen to him continue his search. He finishes with the first suitcase and moves on to the next…

What if Nicole’s intervention comes too late? I need to do something, but I’ll be in big trouble if I’m caught in this room, hiding under the bed like a psychopath pervert. Beyond big. My career will be even more decisively over, and I might face arrest…

I hold my breath, thinking of what Seamus has said to me more than once—that I’m not the kind of woman who takes things lying down. Sure, right now I’m literally lying down, but that doesn’t mean I can’t send a message.

My mind works furiously, and I recall something I spotted on the bureau—a rabbit shaped Bluetooth speaker. I lift my phone in shaking hands and start searching.There. The network’s called CarrotCake. Heart beating hard, I click into the Bluetooth network and then pull up the song on my phone.

Five seconds later, Taylor Swift’s “I Can See You” blares out of the rabbit-shaped Bluetooth speaker.

“Fuck,” Jeffrey says, dropping something.

A manic smile spreads across my face. For one thing, he hates Taylor Swift. For another, he must be scared. Maybe this makes me a bad person, but I revel in the thought, even though it means he knows someone is watching him.

“Is someone in here?” he calls out.

I say nothing. I don’t move a muscle. But the smile slides off my face, because there’s something menacing about his tone.

I listen as he opens the bathroom door, pulls back the shower curtain. A part of me would love nothing better than to sneak up behind him and give him the jump scare of his life—but no jump scare is worth a possible conviction.

Still. He already suspects someone’s in here. There’s no rewinding that, not that I would. So I decide it’s best to opt for a power play—to make him feel like he’s being watched by someone who’s not afraid of him. So I pick a new song—“Vigilante Shit.” My finger is shaking from the nerves prickling all over my body, but I can’t stand down. I won’t.

Jeffrey swears to himself and opens the closet. Then I hear his shoes approaching the bed. There’s a pause, and then they shift direction, leading him over to the dresser. He drops the speaker onto the ground and crunches it under his expensive black loafer. Again and again, the violence making my heart pound harder. The music sputters and then dies.

Jeffrey crouches to pick it up. He throws it away.

Maybe he assumes there was some sort of camera attached to it, and it was Ellie who was messing with him, but he’ll complete his search anyway. I know he will. The man is nothing if not thorough. I suck in a deep, dusty breath, my mind whirring, and decide that I’d rather face him standing up than playing peekaboo through the bed curtains.

He wanted to paint me as a crazy stalker? Might as well act like one.

I’m about to shove myself out—hopefully at least getting the benefit of surprise—when the door to the room whooshes open.

“Sir,” a man says in a stern tone.

“Yes?” Jeffrey replies, calm now. Collected. No one would guess he’d just stomped a speaker into dozens of little pieces. Then again, no one lies like Jeffrey. He used to tell me we could both convince a teetotaler to buy a bottle of hooch—and I had mistakenly taken pride in that. Because to me convincing someone is not the same as lying to them. Convincing took work. It meant being more prepared, more eloquent. It meant wanting it more.

But I’ve realized there’s no lie he won’t tell if he thinks it will help him.

“Uh, you’re going to have to come with me, sir,” the man says.

“Excuse me?” Jeffrey sputters, sounding convincingly pissed.

“There have been allegations of a…sensitive nature about a silver-haired man meeting your description breaking into rooms along this floor and…ahem…exposing himself. Someone saw you enter this room, sir, and here you are.”

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