Page 38 of Maneater
“Well, I gotta head out. My friend is waiting for me,” I say, and my voice is almost inaudible now. A long beat passes as he stares at me before he speaks.
“Then I guess you should go,” he says. Without another word, I start to walk away, moving toward where Rory is waiting for me, but I feel his eyes burning on me with each step. This time, I lose the fight to not look at him at the last moment.
But I’m glad because when I look over my shoulder at him and confirm he was, in fact, staring at my ass the whole time, I give him a wide smile and get the privilege of watching that blush burn on his cheeks one last time.
FIFTEEN
ROWAN
When I return to my office, I don’t check my emails.
I don’t check my missed calls.
No.
Instead, I log into the security system and locate Josie at the pool. And then I watch her. I watch her chat and laugh with her friend in that tiny fucking bathing suit I wanted to rip off her body, and I resist the all-consuming urge to go down there and drag her up to my room.
When she leaves the pool deck for her room, I go into the bathroom and jack off, thinking about her plush pink lips wrapped around my cock.
That’s when I admit to myself that this week just got a whole fuck of a lot worse.
SIXTEEN
JOSIE
When I get back to Rory, we hang out for a bit at the pool before heading to the room to debrief. There, I tell her about what the bartender told me, adding a new suspect and notes to our files, and she confirms that the transmission of the bug she planted is working correctly. I also fill her in on seeing Rowan again and the way he seems to keep showing up every time I’m trying to conduct any kind of investigation, though neither of us knows what it means or if we could work it to our advantage, just that we need to keep an eye on it. We stay in for the rest of the night, Rory continuing to try and hack into the systems and succeeding on some smaller things, like the reservation systems.
I’m rinsing my face after scrubbing it clean that night when there’s a knock at the front door. I give my partner a semi-confused look in the mirror before drying my face and walking to the door, opening it a crack. A young man in a hotel uniform, maybe nineteen or twenty, is standing there with a bored expression, a box in his hand.
“Hi, I have a delivery for Ms. Montgomery?” the employee says, and I tip my head just a hair.
“That’s me.” He shoves the box in my direction without another word. “Uh, thank you,” I say, reaching for the box and accepting it gently. The employee nods and gives a half-hearted smile before walking away down the hall, before I can even think to tip him.
I step back into the room, letting the door close behind me with a loud slam. Rory grabs the card from the top of the box and sits on the couch before I can say anything. I sit beside her as she reads it, the heavy box in my hands.
“Looks like I found you,” Rory reads aloud, her tone filled with confusion.
I grab the card from her hands and skim it over with my eyes before letting the warmth of the words wash over me.
J-
Looks like I found you after all.
-R
It seems Rowan’s not nearly as immune to my charms as I thought.
“What does that mean?” Rory asks, breaking into my thoughts. I stare at the card for a few moments longer before answering.
“At the bar, he asked for my number before he left. I said no. I said he was a powerful man; if he wanted me bad enough, he could find me.”
Rory’s lips twitch with a smile. “That’s such a Josie move.”
I return the grin before shifting my gaze to the box in my lap. I lift the lid from the box and see the bottle of whisky he drank at the bar, and I do my best to ignore the flutter of butterfly wings in my belly at the sight. Once again, Rory spots another small card inside before I do, grabbing it and reading it aloud.
“Since you seemed to like the taste last time.” She looks up at me, confused again, though my body is reacting with need at those few words. “Were you playing him? You hate this stuff.”
I remember the way he tasted when we kissed, and my pussyclenches.
