Page 25 of Love Her

I stared at the screen and clenched my jaw, as she continued.

He’s texted her twenty times. He started off yelling at her…but now he’s just hoping she hasn’t done “anything foolish”. I put her phone in airplane mode so no one else can track it—but maybe I should text him back for her, let him know she’s alive?

Unless you’ve dicked her to death, that is?

Would I be asking you to help me dress a corpse?

Rhaim, you’re a morbid fucker, we both know that.

I snorted.

Yes, but I’m not a necrophiliac.

Thanks for the heads up.

Gimme 30. I’ll text when I’m outside.

Appreciated.

I lay flat in bed, and pulled Lia beside me, close enough that I could listen to her breathe, my mind already whirling through what needed to be done—then I sent Sable another text.

Also—figure out how you’d plant a bug on a rich twenty-something year-old-asshole…

So you admit you’re out of touch?

she texted back, and I could almost hear her snicker.

But yeah. I have ideas. They’ll take longer than 30 though.

No problem. See you soon.

14

LIA

Ididn’t notice when Rhaim first pulled away, but I did wake up when I heard him talking.

I kept my eyes closed for as long as I could, afraid of being in the dark without him—but then when I opened them, ready to panic, I found the curtains still open, and now that my eyes were adjusted to the dark, the cityscape outside provided more than enough light.

Thank god.

I thought about creeping into the hall to listen in—but in what clothing?

And—what if Rhaim was doing some legit Corvo CFO shit at, oh—I looked around the room, searching for a clock or a phone—I found his and turned it on enough to see the time—five-a-m in the morning?

I set his phone back precisely where I’d found it—it was clear that his nightstand was the more ‘masculine’ side.

Which meant that…my neck craned back, and I quickly wriggled to the other side of the bed.

It wasn’t that I wanted to torture myself by looking at more of Isabelle’s stuff, so much that I wanted to know everything Ipossibly could about Rhaim, and seeing as this might be myonlychance—I opened the drawers on her side, immediately.

I found reading glasses, hand cream, a high end vibrator—and then I realized reading glasses implied the presence of a book—and squinted a little further to find one, kissed by shadows at the far edge of the stand.

I picked it up—and it was a romance novel.

Because of course it was.

I clutched it to my chest and rocked back.