Prey in Disguise: The Predator's Trap

I got home from work to find the girl I live with holding up a pair of my briefs, frowning like they'd personally wronged her. "Why do you wear white ones?" I followed her wrist up.

Good lord. She was standing in our living room in a slip that barely cleared her thighs. She didn't care. She never cared.

She just smiled and pushed a stack of clean clothes into my arms. "Go shower." To Genevieve, I was the safest man alive. Her platonic guy friend. Total access, zero suspicion.

She'd wash my underwear and not think twice about it. Here's what she didn't know.

Every single day, watching her drift around in front of me like that, it took everything I had not to close the distance. I was a grown man. She had no idea.

Chapter 1 My eyes traced the line of her down to that hem at her thigh, and I swear she straightened her back on purpose, just to make the whole thing worse.

My breath snagged. "Genevieve?" So. She was really going to stand there in a slip. In our living room. Cool.

She smiled, not bothered in the slightest that I'd seen everything. "Shower first?

I laid your clothes out." "I've got it." I grabbed the clothes, caught a glimpse I had no business catching, and my face went hot. This living situation was going to kill me.

One day at a time. Genevieve and me, it goes like this. We grew up next door. Childhood friends.

So close for so long that somewhere along the way she stopped keeping any walls up with me at all. Which is the polite way of saying she did not see me as a man.

She'd grab my hand on the street. Eat off my plate. Split a bubble tea with one straw.

Wash my clothes, fold them, do every single thing couples do, every bit of it, and mean none of it. Because to her, we were just best friends. Her and her safe guy. And look.

Genevieve is gorgeous. Kind, warm, reads a room before you finish the sentence, the kind of body that turns a whole crowd.

Any way you cut it, she's the woman a man builds a life around. Frontrow seat to all of it, for years. And I never once made a move.

Because the universe doesn't hand you something that good without a catch. Hers came early. When she was small, she watched her father with a woman who wasn't her mother.

Watched it land. Then she watched her mother come apart over the months after, a piece at a time, until there wasn't much mother left. So something in her got wired wrong.

Wanting someone, being wanted like that, it stopped being love and turned into the first domino. The thing that ends families.

Every guy who ever told Genevieve he wanted her got the same treatment. Blocked. Deleted. Gone, like he'd never existed. I was the exception.

The one man who lasted, for the exact reason that she'd marked me down as a friend and never looked again.

Which is why saying yes to moving in together was the dumbest thing I have ever done. You can't sit across the same table every night and keep your whole hand hidden forever.

And I was hiding a hand. Because I'm in love with Genevieve. Have been for years. Some nights I'd lie there and let myself run the version where I actually get to keep her.

The hot water ran the day off my back. I let out a long breath and the old days came up on their own. Freshman year.

She decided I was too soft, too easy to push around, that somebody would take advantage of me. So on her free afternoons she started showing up to walk me to class.

I started walking her back to her dorm every night. Give that a few weeks and people talk. One dinner, her roommate finally just asked it. "Are you two together?

It's been this long. Have you, you know, actually done it?" I hadn't even opened my mouth before Genevieve's whole face shut down.

Flat disgust. "Don't put us in something gross like that. Wes is my best friend." Every head at the table swung to me. I took another bite and let them stare. What.

Never seen a guy and a girl just be friends? Okay. Maybe they hadn't.

Chapter 2 By the time she reached for my hand for the hundredth time in that mall, I cracked. "You don't think this is a little much? Holding hands in public?" I went for stern.

She blinked up at me, pure innocence, in the matching outfit she'd put us in, same cut, different colors. "What's wrong with it? It's packed in here.

You want to lose me in this crowd?" Damn it. She had a point. I had nothing. It was summer. She was wearing almost nothing. She was standing this close. I was a man.

She patted my head like I was a golden retriever. "Wait here. I'll grab popcorn and sodas. You'll only come back with the wrong kind anyway." I watched her go.

And God help me, some small, stupid part of me liked it. If we could just keep this up. Stay exactly here. Never tip it over— "Wesley?" A low voice cut into the thought.

Preston Whitlock. Our old campus golden boy. White shirt tucked sharp into pale jeans, tall, cleancut, the kind of guy the hallways used to part for.

I'd met him a few times in college, through Genevieve. Didn't expect him here. "Small world," I said, easy. "Didn't think I'd run into you." His mouth curled. "Not small.

I came here on purpose." He turned his phone around to face me. Genevieve: [Movie night. Finally.] A photo under it. Our hands, fingers laced. Tagged at the mall.

His voice came out with something sour under the polish. "You know, I really didn't think you had it in you, Wes. Squatting in the friend seat.

Cashing the boyfriend perks." "Okay," I said. "And you came here because?" He lifted his chin. "A woman like Genevieve. Who wouldn't want her?

You probably don't know this, but she and I have kept in touch since graduation. She tells me what men like.

I rank high with her, up here." He tapped his temple. "The day I decide to go after her, she's mine." I looked at him and, honestly, felt a little sorry for the guy.

Everyone wants a woman like Genevieve. She just doesn't bow for anyone. "Good luck with that," I said.

His handsome face twisted for half a second. "You want to know what people actually say about you? They say you're pathetic.

Playing the sweet, sexless little nothing, trailing around after her, when the truth is you're too gutless to say one honest word." He stepped in close.

The malice was open on his face now. "Tell me something.

If Genevieve found out her best 'friend' had that kind of feeling for her too, how do you think she'd take that?" "That's the most intimate betrayal there is." I didn't say anything.

Because he wasn't wrong. That was the whole reason I'd never let her find out. I was scared of being thrown away. Maybe my silence made his night.

He leaned toward my ear, smug. "Shame you'll never get the chance—" "Wes?" Genevieve's voice cut him clean in half. I looked up.

Fivefootsix, every line of her catching the light, a face that turned the whole crowd soft and blurry behind her.

White fitted tee, skirt to the knee, a tub of popcorn the size of a small child in her arms, and not one bit of it made her any less.

If her face weren't doing that cold, shutdown thing, half the men in here would already be drifting over.

She looked at Preston like he was a small surprise. "What are the odds?" Preston gave her a gentleman's smile. "Right? Maybe it's just fate." Funny.

That's not how he put it thirty seconds ago. Chapter 3 Genevieve's brow pulled tight.

She reached out, closed her hand around my wrist, and pressed the whole length of herself against my side. She gave Preston a flat little nod. "Movie's about to start.

Wes and I should head in." Preston's face locked up. Then, half a beat later, he caught the hem of her sleeve, smiling like a man asking a favor. "Wait.

I— there's something I wanted to say to you." He cut a look at me. "Could you give us a minute?" I started to step away. Her fingers pinched my side. Light. Just enough to stop me.

I glanced at her, lost. She already had her phone out. Thumb moving, easy and unhurried, down her contacts. She reached Preston's name. Deleted it. Blocked it. Never slowed down.

Like she was closing a file.

Across from us, the color dropped straight out of his face. "You—" She looked up, her eyes gone cool and flat. "I figured everyone already knew how this ends." "Thanks, by the way.

For telling me what guys like." So that was it. Every gift she'd ever handed me, she'd run past Preston first. Explained a lot, honestly. They never quite landed.

Preston's mouth had gone bloodless. He stood there looking wrecked and small, and I dropped my eyes and thought, yeah. Everybody knows how it ends.

They just all believe they'll be the one exception. Nobody ever is.

I looked up to take the tray off her hands, and that's when his head snapped up, his face going mean. "What about Wes, then?

Wes likes you more than any of us." He looked thrilled with himself. Like a man settling in for the best part of the movie. He dragged the words out long.

He hauled my whole secret into the daylight and laid it flat at her feet to look at. See? This man. The one closest to you. He wants you too. He thinks about you that way too.

I lowered my eyes and gave up on saying anything at all. Preston looked even happier about it. Genevieve took one step toward me.

Her face came in close, close enough to count her lashes, and my pulse broke into a run. Her arm slid around my waist.

The cold fell off her like it had never been there, and she grinned. "It's not just him. I like Wes the most, too." I had no idea what my face was doing.

Preston looked like the floor had shifted under him. The air went strange. I snuck a look at her. She was enjoying this. Openly. Every bit of it. He came apart worse than I did.

His hand shook as he pointed at her. "But you said you didn't—" She looked like explaining was beneath her. "What Wes and I have isn't something you'd understand." A pause.

Her voice came down a notch, gone flat and final, a door clicking shut. "It's not some shallow, physical thing." The plain certainty of it stunned him. He gaped at the two of us.

This wasn't the first time someone tried to light a fire in front of her, and it went out the same way every time. That was the only reason I could stand there and not come apart.

Preston read all of it off those few words. I watched it move through him. Stunned. Then furious. Then nothing at all, every threat he'd walked in with dead in his mouth.

Because under the grin, here's what she'd actually handed him: we like each other. Just never the way that ends in love. Never the way that ends in a bed. I wasn't his rival.

He was never going to be her only one. Neither was I.

The golden boy of the whole campus, reduced to the punchline, every scrap of his pride spent on a woman he was never going to get.

And I'd spent mine years ago, for a seat at her side that came with the very same fine print. Genevieve's patience ran out.

One arm still hooked around my waist, she pouted and pushed me toward the ticket scanner. As we passed him, shoulder to shoulder, I heard it, low. "Wesley.

You're pathetic." Chapter 4 And there it was. To them, all I had ever been was pathetic. There was a time they envied me. The way she treated me, the access nobody else got.

People moved through her life in a constant churn and I was the one who never moved. The fixed point. The one she kept.

Then they worked out that she felt nothing past friendship for me, and the envy went soft and turned to pity. To that little curl of contempt.

A guy said it to me once. "At least I took my shot, Wesley. I didn't stand there my whole life, too scared of losing to ever move." Love's like a sponge.

The longer it sits, the more it soaks up. While it's thin, while it still runs like water, you can hide it. Cup it careful in your hands.

But let it get heavy enough and one poke is all it takes. Then it's everywhere. All over the floor. For anyone to see. Preston needed one look tonight to find it on me.

And I'd watched what Genevieve did to every man who let her see it. I knew where it came from, too. Her father. The wiring under all of it that never set right.

The day she caught it on my face, I stopped being the exception. I became one more name under her thumb, scrolled past and gone. So how long, really, before she looked?

My nails bit into my palm. The lyingtomyself part, I told it, is over now. Done, Wesley. I sat through the entire movie a thousand miles gone.

She leaned in a few times to tease me under her breath and I caught none of it. On the walk home, I put a toe in the water. "Earlier, with him.

Why don't you ever set people straight about us?" She just looked at me. I started building the case. "You tell everyone you don't date. Fine. You want them to give up.

But you say that, and then you..." I picked the next part carefully. "You're all over me. You tell people we like each other. Of course they think I'm your boyfriend.

Whatever you said about not dating, it's wasted.

Anyone who likes you keeps a little bit of hope." "I don't care what they think," she said. "And besides." She said it like the most obvious thing in the world. "They already know you're my boyfriend, and they hope anyway.

Anyone who'd do that just proves I was right to cut them." My heart kicked before I could stop it. You're my boyfriend. So plain. So certain. Like it was long since settled.

Like we were a thing somebody had actually decided. I pulled in a slow breath and kept my face flat. "Sure.

Except this is going to get in the way of me finding a girlfriend." Genevieve stopped walking. "You want to find a girlfriend?" Chapter 5 After that, she didn't leave my side for a second.

She trailed me around the apartment, asking in this small, wounded voice whether I'd picked up some other stray out there. Whether I was about to put her down and walk off.

Then came the briefings on how terrible other women are. Unreliable. Out to sweettalk a man into spending money on them. The prettier they are, the better they lie.

And she got more attentive, not less. I'd wake up and the toothpaste was already squeezed onto my brush.

I'd come in at night and the bag was off my shoulder before I'd cleared the door. She'd always taken care of me. But she used to leave a little space, a little line.

Now there was no line at all. It was like living with a brandnew, dangerously happy wife. When she bent down to untie my shoelaces again, something in me gave.

I slid my hand into her hair and closed it, just enough to hold her head still. "Enough." She stopped. Stayed there, halfcrouched, and let my grip tilt her face up to mine.

First time I'd ever had her at that angle. The neck of the slip had slid loose, and it showed more than she knew. Collarbone. The soft dip below it, pale, there and gone.

I pulled in a breath and put myself back together. "What are you actually doing?" "Taking care of you." Dead serious. "Clearly I wasn't doing enough before.

That's why you want some other girl." Listen to yourself, I thought. Really listen. She kept going, earnest as anything. "Isn't this good, though? My company runs itself now.

You never have to work again. I can keep us both. Or we do this. You come home, the laundry's done, dinner's waiting. You get sick, I take care of you.

The day the job bores you, quit. We travel. "I've got a little place on the water. When we're tired of traveling we settle there. Watch the ocean.

Get a dog, if you want one. "So why go find a girlfriend?

Anything she'd do, I can do." Her voice was clear and warm, and she was sketching, line by line, the exact life I used to lie awake building in my head. Which was the problem.

Every soft piece of it stood on one thing: that she still hadn't noticed what I'd started to feel for her. The wanting. "No," I said, and cut her off cold.

I don't think my face had ever been that serious. I looked down at how lost she suddenly was and said it. "I'm a man with wants too. That kind of want." Her face went blank.

I made myself let go of her hair and stepped to the side. "So stop doing this." Her hand snapped out and clamped around my wrist.

Soft fingers, warm, the faintest rose to them, hot as an open stove.

I looked at her, startled, and for one second something burned behind her eyes, there and gone, and then she was the Genevieve I knew again, smiling up at me. "You should've said so sooner, Wes." Said what sooner.

I didn't get to ask. She stood, and her shadow came up over me, and I backed a step without meaning to, right up until the locked door hit my spine. Nowhere left to go.

She closed the gap anyway, that rose scent all around me now. She tipped her face up until her mouth hovered an inch off mine, close enough that the warmth of it reached me.

My pulse was slamming. My hands had gone dead still at my sides. It was taking everything I had left not to close that last inch.

She smiled, slow, like she knew exactly what it was costing me. "I can do that too." Chapter 6 She had me wrapped in warmth and rose and the particular gravity of her, my head swimming, and I genuinely did not catch what she meant by that.

She reached out and rubbed a slow circle at the small of my back. Pins and needles ran down to my knees and took the strength out of them.

I bit down, glared at her, and pinched her back out of pure spite.

She sucked in a sharp breath against my ear. "Knock it off," I said. "Keep this up and you'll start something you can't finish." She melted into me instead, all soft heat, eyes gone heavy and dark in a way that set off every alarm I had.

I went to pull my hand back. Too late. Her small warm hand had already pressed it flat against her. Then her mouth was on mine, hard. Sweet.

Soft. "I'll make you feel good." I was terrified. One step over that line and we shattered, no way back, ever. The second my head cleared I shoved her off.

She was, it turned out, unfairly good at that. My face was burning, my legs were useless, and the moment I remembered why I'd let any of it happen, my whole head went to static.

I needed distance. I needed to find the line again and stand back behind it. Work saved me, for a while.

Deadlines, allnighters, a schedule flipped upside down, fewer chances to be in the same room as her. So I put in for a work trip. Packed while she was out. And landed in A City.

Funny thing. The client lead happened to share Genevieve's last name. Sutton. I noticed it the way you notice a coincidence.

Clocked it, slid it into my back pocket, didn't chase it. Director Sutton was young. Twentysix, twentyseven at most.

Rosetinted glasses, a power suit pressed to a razor's edge, every inch of her saying money and competence and don'twastemytime.

And looking at her face, I kept circling back to the same thing. I'd seen her somewhere. I tucked that in the back pocket too.

She was easy to work with, no bigboss act, and the whole project ran clean. Two busy weeks blurred past.

As we came up on the finish, Director Sutton floated the idea of taking everyone out to a karaoke lounge to celebrate. Lights going, room loud.

I sang a couple to be a sport, handed off the mic, and dropped into a corner. Half an hour in, I caved and pulled up my texts with Genevieve.

Her profile picture was a wideeyed ragdoll cat, all clean innocence, the kind of face that looks like it'd lose a fight on purpose. Nothing like the actual woman. I scrolled, slow.

Genevieve: when are you back? Me: soon. Genevieve: are you slammed? why's it take you forever to answer me [poutycat sticker] Me: yeah. kind of busy.

Genevieve: made your favorite mac and cheese today. wish I could bring you some [photo of the dish] Me: looks good. at work, gotta go.

Genevieve: who goes on a work trip and doesn't tell me?? I could've set up my own trip to A City. taken care of you [puppy with a rose, sly little grin] Me: behave. go work.

The further up I scrolled, the clearer it got. Our threads thinning out. The replies going cold. The distance was doing its job. The notification bar sat empty.

The last thing between us was a day old, signed off by me. Celebration tonight, turning in early. Twentysix hours. Nothing back from her. My chest went tight.

Maybe this was the version that worked. At least we'd still have friends. The odd dinner. A text on the holidays.

Better than punching through that thin pane of glass and never speaking again. Chapter 7 The couch dipped beside me. A cold, woody scent came with it. Cedar, something like that.

I turned my head. Director Sutton had settled in halfleaning against the armrest, tugging her collar an inch lower, baring a clean line of collarbone.

Her eyes dropped to my screen. "Girlfriend?" I put the phone away. "No.

Onesided thing." I don't bother hiding much in front of strangers. "Mm." A knowing little smile tugged at her. She held my eyes. "Funny.

I figured you and Genevieve had made it official by now." Genevieve? She knew Genevieve? The name landed out of nowhere and my brain went to white noise. I stared at her.

She didn't seem to mind. She reached up and took off her glasses. "You really don't remember me? Sophomore year, the debate tournament.

I was on the other side of the table." A small smile. "I was about to graduate. Third speaker. Mostly there to coast." Glasses off, her whole presence shifted.

Younger, sharper, awake. I ran her words back, and the face finally clicked. She was Beatrix. Beatrix Sutton.

The senior a year ahead of me. "Women know women," she said. "The way that girl looked at me back then? That was a lot of things.

Onesided wasn't one of them." She kept her voice low, but every word landed.

For half a second, hearing it, that Genevieve wanted me, wanted me enough to get territorial about it, something stupid and warm lit up in my chest.

Then the last of it caught up to me and the warmth went cold. Genevieve doesn't want a boyfriend. And I was in the middle of walking the two of us back to safe. Back to friends.

And still. Some quiet part of me had already started turning it over. If she wanted me. If it really wasn't onesided. What a man might do with that. I looked up. "Beatrix.

It's a little complicated." Telling it wasn't hard.

She was a good listener, never cut in, dropped a sound or a question in exactly the right place, held me with those warm dark eyes. No man alive turns that down.

I left out the part about Genevieve's family and gave her the rough shape of it. When I finished my throat was dry. I picked up the water on the table and drank. Sour.

Not water at all. Some kind of spiked cider, sweet enough to hide itself. She'd been watching me the whole time.

When I frowned and set the glass down, she said, slow, "If that's true, then doesn't it mean..." She leaned in.

Her shoulder pressed into mine, and she said the rest of it against my ear, too low for the room. I pulled back, thrown. Her face was dead serious.

Not a joke. "I—" "You don't have to answer right now," she said, cutting me off for the first time. "We've got time." I looked down at the glass, somewhere else entirely.

A small tug came at the hair on the right side of my head. Her hand was draped along the back of the booth, toying with it. I frowned. The sudden closeness sat wrong on me.

Before I could move, a shadow came across the table, fast. The pull on my hair let go. I looked up at the person standing over me. Genevieve.

Who was supposed to be a thousand miles from this room. Chapter 8 She took Beatrix's wrist in her hand, face like a storm front.

I was on my feet before I'd thought about it. "Genevieve? How did you—" The music in the room cut out, perfectly timed, and every head turned our way.

One of the coworkers I knew best fumbled out, "Oh— that's Wes's girlfriend!" And there it was. The whole room lit up at once with that pure, ancient hunger for gossip.

Genevieve let go of Beatrix's wrist and gave the room an apologetic little smile. "I just came to take Wes home to rest." She's stunning.

Even stonefaced she pulls eyes across a room, and warm like this she had the whole place won.

They went quiet, then broke into easy, knowing cheers, telling her to keep an eye on me, that I'd had a few and might get loud.

Whether it was the smile or the crowd, my face would not stop heating up. I couldn't be in that room another second.

I grabbed Genevieve by the wrist and walked her out fast, and on the way I caught it in the corner of my eye. A sharp little smile she flicked back at Beatrix. Smug.

Pleased it was her hand I'd taken. Real mature. Her dropping out of the sky like that had wrecked every plan I had.

And right there I finally got it: all that talk about keeping my distance was a fairy tale. There are two things a person can't hide. A cough.

And the way they look at someone they love. So I'd do the other thing. Go all in. Either I win her, or we're done for good.

Genevieve touched her own pink cheek, eyes skating off mine. "You've been off lately. I was worried.

So I went and asked your coworker about it." Before I could say a word she'd laid the whole thing out herself. Right.

The "informant" was the same guy who'd just announced her as my girlfriend to the room. Good lord.

Genevieve plays the icequeen to everyone alive, and somehow, behind my back, she'd gotten close enough to a coworker of mine that a couple of soft questions cracked him wide open.

I didn't say anything. She kept right on confessing. "I'm sorry. I didn't come to make a scene.

But you said you had this work dinner." "And at work dinners, people with bad intentions get you drinking, and you're so goodlooking those awful women will absolutely try something.

It's all over the books I read.

I got scared one of them would charm the wallet right out of you." This polished, successful woman reads that kind of romance and writes herself into the plot. Unbelievable.

I kept my face flat. "That's fiction. It doesn't happen in real life. And I'm careful about what I drink." Cool fingertips settled against my cheek.

Her face filled my whole field of view, close enough to read the long curl of her lashes, the straight line of her nose. Her perfume was good.

My face, the traitor, went hotter. "You're warm," she said. "Are you drunk?" I patted my own cheek, and there it was. Burning.

Had to be that last cider I'd thrown back to wet my throat. Stronger than it let on. I shot Beatrix a quick message to apologize. She fired back instantly.

I sat with it a second, then sent a few fast lines, and slid the phone into my bag with something close to guilt. Genevieve was watching me, eyes bright and fixed.

I cleared my throat. "Let's get you back. There's something I need to say to you." Chapter 9 The hotel bed was huge.

Genevieve had insisted on waiting in my room while I showered, in case I went down drunk in the bathroom. When I came out she set her phone down and looked at me.

I tugged at the collar of the robe, not quite comfortable, and went for it. "What do you think of Beatrix?" Genevieve didn't miss a beat. "Cakes on her makeup.

Foundation thicker than the wall paint. Fake, twofaced, moneygrubbing, and easy." I just looked at her. You met the woman one time. One. And you've already got a full rap sheet.

I gave up arguing with a woman in that mood, grabbed the towel off the chair, sat down across from her, and dried my hair while I said it straight. "She told me she likes me.

Wants to date me. I'm thinking I'll give it a shot." Genevieve's voice stopped dead. I glanced up, surprised. She looks a little fierce when she isn't smiling, lips pressed flat.

Like she caught me studying her, she tried to pull the corner of her mouth into a smile and missed. "Wes. You've known her two weeks. Isn't that fast?

At least get to know her before you..." Her brows pulled in. "And she's obviously bad news. Handing you a drink that strong, dress cut down to there, blatantly working you over.

Shameless, honestly." I almost laughed in her face. The lounge had been pitch dark, and somehow she'd clocked the woman's neckline.

My eyes went to Genevieve's own collar, the one she keeps a permanent two inches too low. Pot. Kettle. "Just a shot," I said. "If it's a bad fit, we end it." She went still.

The room sat in a long silence, and right as I was about to tell her to head out, she said it. "Why can't it be me?

If you just want a girlfriend, why can't it be me?" My pulse jumped. Two weeks ago I'd have said yes before she finished the sentence. So fast it would have scared us both.

But Preston had shaken something loose, and now I knew exactly what I wanted. And this wasn't it.

Not Genevieve in a corner, handing herself over because she'd run out of other moves. That's not love. That's the thing that comes apart the first time you put any weight on it.

She was right there on the edge of it with me. She reached for the real thing, the true one under all the rest, her mouth already open around it.

For one second I was sure she'd say it. Then it flinched through her and dragged it back down, and what surfaced instead was the safe version. The flat one. Be your girlfriend.

Like she was reading me a job posting. So I kept mine down too.

It cost more than I'll ever let her know. "Vivi." It came out low, the small name, the one I keep behind my teeth. "Why do you have to be my girlfriend?" I lay on the bed and opened the thread with Beatrix.

Typed back: Okay. Let's try it your way. The reply came fast. I sent it before I let myself feel anything about it, and told myself that was the cider.

Then the alcohol pulled me under.

In the dream Genevieve was in a long white dress, sitting astride me, glaring down like she wanted to kill me and on the edge of crying like I'd already broken her heart, both at once.

Good dream. I slept like the dead. Woke up to no message from Genevieve. No Genevieve, either. It threw the whole day. My right eyelid would not stop twitching.

They say a twitch on the left means money's coming. The right means— I closed my eyes, pressed it lightly, and decided the right just meant I'd slept badly.

The last stand of a superstitious man. You only believe the omens that work in your favor, and every bad sign has a perfectly good scientific explanation.

End of the day, Beatrix and I rode down together. The girl at the front desk came hurrying over, red to the ears. "M—Mr. Hayes?

Your girlfriend's here to take you to dinner." My girlfriend? Who? I came to A City to close a project. When exactly did I pick up a girlfriend?

I followed where she was pointing, out through the glass. Genevieve. Black dress, fitted to her. A huge armful of red roses. Waiting. Chapter 10