Wrong Bed, Right Girl Read online

  He pushed open the front door to her building and took the stairs two at a time. He didn’t want to buzz to announce his presence. Not if one of Jonnie’s guys was there. Not if something was wrong.

  And if Aaron was right, and everything was fine? It was better to be safe than sorry. He’d check on her, and then he’d go home, pour himself a whiskey, and finally crash.

  When he reached her door, he pressed his ear to the outside. He didn’t hear anything. He didn’t know if that meant he should knock, enter, or turn away. Someone could be waiting in the darkness for him, knowing he’d come looking if she didn’t check in. Or else he was being an idiot, and Stacey was out doing shots on the Lower East Side with her friends and would stumble home pissed as hell at him for invading her privacy.

  Let her be pissed. He’d rather she be mad than in trouble.

  Quietly, he slipped the key in the lock and pushed open the door.

  It was dark inside and absolutely silent, except for the usual drip from her toilet that he’d never been able to fix. He took a breath. Now what?

  He was about to leave when something caught his eye.

  Or not something, but everything. It was like his subconscious noticed the changes first, before the rest of him caught up. Instinct. Intuition. That feeling in his gut.

  The studio was dark, but he could see the shapes of things piled on the kitchen counter. Stacey was neat and organized, everything in its place.

  But now the kitchen was messy, and there were boxes on the floor. Boxes and…was that a suitcase? He took a step forward, trying to make his way across the floor. Where the fuck was the light switch again?

  Only he’d forgotten how tiny the room was. He jammed the toe of his boot against something in the way, hard enough to hurt through the leather. He jolted forward, his body still in motion as his legs were unexpectedly stopped. He fell forward, realizing a split second too late that he was tumbling onto the bed.

  He expected a comforter, a soft landing, a bruised ego but everything else intact. At least no one was here to see him. No reason Aaron or anyone at the squad had to know about him being taken down by a damn box.

  Except he wasn’t just falling onto a comforter. Something thrashed wildly underneath him, a long, twisty octopus with a whole lot of limbs, making a startled, throaty yelp. He let out a roar of surprise.

  “I’m so sorry, Stacey!” he cried, hoping she wouldn’t be able to see how insanely embarrassed he was right now. Of course she was asleep this whole time, with her ringer off, and now he’d snuck into her apartment and literally fallen into her bed.

  What a fucking disaster.

  But the limbs were still thrashing, tangled in the sheets. And Stacey wasn’t calming down after realizing it was him.

  “Jesus dammit motherfucking hell!” came a shriek, and Reed’s heart seized.

  That voice did not belong to quiet, polite Stacey Moss. He froze, but the voice kept going.

  “Don’t you fucking move or I’ll stab you in the nuts!”

  Reed scrambled off the bed, pulling half the sheet with him. Maybe he didn’t look like much of an agent right then, stumbling over his own two feet. But he liked his nuts as they were, thanks very much. Just as he liked his informants where they were supposed to be—asleep in their own beds and not threatening him with bodily harm.

  He was shouting that he was a special agent and not to do anything stupid when the violent offender in question turned on the lights.

  Reed blinked, eyes adjusting to the sudden brightness. He was definitely not looking at Stacey Moss.

  But that only raised a whole lot more questions. Like where Stacey was. And what this stranger was doing in her bed.

  And how come he couldn’t stop staring?

  He might be a skilled agent, but he was still a man. For better or worse. And, sometimes, it was definitely for worse. Like right now, when he should have been coolly and competently taking control of the situation instead of dropping his jaw to the floor.

  Because the woman before him was gorgeous. She had an eye mask yanked up on her forehead, brown hair splayed everywhere, and one earplug sticking out of her ear while the other was cupped in her hand. But somehow none of that mattered. All he could think was that she was fucking gorgeous.

  And possibly a psychopath.

  She didn’t have a knife—thank God. Or a gun, which would have been worse. But she’d reached for a book by the nightstand and was wielding it like she was ready to knock him out with its spine.

  Fortunately, it was a paperback. But by the look in her eyes, he didn’t doubt she could do some serious damage before he got his handcuffs out.

  The thought of her plus handcuffs made him shift uncomfortably at the foot of the bed. In ways that were not befitting a professional city employee and sworn officer of the law.

  Because there was also another thing affecting his ability to focus on the matter at hand.

  She was panting hard, practically snarling at him, so distracted by the chaos that she must not have realized the strap of her silky tank top had slid off her shoulder, exposing the swell of her left breast and the dark, pert nipple peeking at him just above the lace.

  He tried not to stare. And stare. And stare.

  At her flush, her heaving chest, her parted lips. At her long legs bare and tangled in the sheets. At that perfectly cuppable breast, and the other one outlined by the clinging fabric, hard nipple standing at attention.

  He swallowed hard. He wasn’t that kind of guy. He didn’t sneak into women’s apartments, he didn’t fall into bed with strange, beautiful girls, and he didn’t stand there salivating like a caveman at what he knew she’d be utterly mortified by in three seconds, two, one—

  In an instant, she dropped the book and scrambled to fix her top. Her cheeks flushed a deep, impossible red.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quickly, turning away at the same time that she said, “Who the fuck are you?” and yanked the blankets up.

  “I’m Special Agent Reed Bishop. With the DEA,” he added, trying to be careful, non-threatening, slowly drawing out his badge so she could see he wasn’t dangerous. He threw the ID on the bed. She snatched it up, never taking her eyes off him.

  Good. He liked that she was cautious. He liked that hungry, wary look about her, like she wasn’t going to take any shit, no matter how much bigger he was or the fact that he had handcuffs in his pocket and a gun pressed against his back, tucked beneath his shirt.

  He gave her a minute to check out the badge and size him up. He felt oddly exposed under her gaze, even though he was in jeans and a black T-shirt and she was the one literally half naked, lying in bed.

  “You’re not Stacey,” he finally said.

  “I can see why they made you a special agent.” Her lips pushed up, somewhere between a smile and baring her teeth.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked, ignoring the jab.

  A beat, and then she said, “I live here.”

  He almost choked on his own spit. He’d expected her to say she was a friend, a cousin, someone crashing for a night. He’d apologize, but they’d sort out the confusion and move on. He’d have to find a way to explain why Stacey had agents busting into her apartment in the middle of the night, but that was a minor concern compared to making sure Stacey was safe.

  The word live made his chest tighten. What the fuck was going on?

  “Since when?” he asked, trying to keep his voice from betraying the sudden gallop of his heart.

  “Since today.”

  Oh shit.

  “Where’s Stacey?”

  The girl hesitated, biting her lip—the first flash of uncertainty he’d seen on her face.

  “She’s not in trouble,” Reed said. “I’m just trying to get in touch with her.”

  “She took off. Said she had a family emergency. I’m subletting the place.”

  Reed swore. Loudly. He had enough practice to know the girl was telling the truth. She wasn’t part of Jonnie’s team
or in on some kind of scam. She clearly had no idea why he was there.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, and Reed wished—not for the first time that night—that he’d listened to his brother and gone the hell home.

  But he was in too deep to back out now. He ran a hand over his head and noticed her eyes go straight to the tattoos on his arm as he moved. If he gave his biceps an extra flex, it wasn’t intentional. It had nothing to do with her soft hair or the arch of her foot sticking out from under the bed sheet. Nothing at all to do with having just seen her gorgeous breast.

  It was only because he was really fucking stressed.

  Of all the nightmare scenarios he’d been imagining on his way to Brooklyn, being met with a half-naked, book-wielding, ball-threatening woman in peach lingerie somehow hadn’t made it onto the list. They seriously didn’t prepare him enough in training for real life in New York.

  “You can’t stay here tonight,” he said with a sigh instead of answering her question.

  Her eyes shot open wide, but he held up a hand before she could protest. “Tell me your name,” he said.

  “Talia.” She clutched the blanket tighter.

  “Talia,” he repeated.

  Now wasn’t the right time to go thinking about what a beautiful name that was. Now definitely wasn’t the right time for his dick to start remembering it existed.

  He had to focus. He had a job to do, and it had just gotten a whole lot more complicated.

  “I don’t know where you want to go, Talia,” he said. “But trust me. You can’t stay here tonight.”

  Chapter Two

  He had to be joking. That was all Talia kept thinking.

  She waited for the “Surprise!”, the cameras, the laughs. For the misunderstanding to resolve itself so she could kick him out, lock the door and use the deadbolt, and never think about this insanity again.

  But he was still looking at her like he thought this was real.

  “Now?” she finally asked.

  “Now.” The agent’s eyes went stony and dark. He wasn’t fucking around. Reed, she reminded herself. Reed Bishop. She tossed the badge back to him. Holy shit. Looked like this really was happening.

  “I can’t go anywhere,” she said and let out a laugh, one of those nervous hiccups she wished she could shove back in her mouth as soon as it was out. His face flashed in warning—lightning before the storm.

  Some part of her knew she should be scared. That would be the expected and appropriate reaction upon being woken up by an enormous slab of scruffy, tattooed, testosterone-laden male trying to hide the fact that he clearly had a gun wedged in the back of his jeans that he didn’t want her to notice. Probably because he didn’t want her to lose her shit on him, the way any normal person would in this situation. Even though no normal person would ever find themselves in this situation, because holy shit.

  There was clearly something wrong with Talia. That was the only thing she knew for sure right now.

  Because she wasn’t noticing his biceps tattooed with ocean waves or the hard scruff of his jaw or the outline of the gun against his shirt in order to assess the danger and determine how to get the hell out of it.

  Or if she was…

  She was also noticing his biceps tattooed with ocean waves, his jaw, the outline of the gun because she was checking out his ass in those jeans when he turned and ran a hand over his head. And God. Damn.

  She couldn’t believe she’d flashed him, not even realizing in the frenzy of leaping for the light switch and trying to grab the first thing she could get hold of—a book, could she be any more useless?—that her boobs were halfway hanging out.

  She needed to start sleeping in a three-piece suit with buttons all the way to her neck—none of this soft, lacy peach. Turned out there was no telling who was going to turn up in her bed around here.

  But if he thought she was going to leave her new apartment in the dead of night, right before a big rehearsal in the morning, he had some serious explaining to do.

  “You’re sure you don’t know where Stacey is?” he asked her again.

  “I’m telling you—she came in to rehearsal, said she needed a subletter, and booked it out of there. It’s not like we’re super close. She didn’t get into details.”

  He frowned. “Did she seem worried? Upset?”

  “About her family, yeah.” But her skin felt hot as she said it. She paused. Asked him anyway. “What was she really worried about?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” he said stiffly.

  “So you can only hint that she was an informant for you,” Talia said. “But not say anything outright.”

  He didn’t need to look so surprised. Why else would an agent at a drug enforcement agency know anything about Stacey—let alone her name, her job, where she lived, and who knew what else?

  The rumors that the ballerina had been caught going through cabinets at Columbia Presbyterian must have been true. But Stacey wasn’t in jail. And she’d never talked about needing money or being short on cash like she would’ve been if she’d had to pay a huge fine. Sometimes, she’d hurried off from rehearsal without taking time to change. “Busy,” she’d said.

  Yeah, right. Now Talia could guess it was more like, “Going to treatment.” Or “Going to meet a hot DEA officer to tell him everything I know.”

  “How do you know she’s in trouble?” she asked.

  Reed fixed her with a steely look. She could feel him reading her. Deciding something about her. “She’s got a good job, right?”

  Talia nodded, throat dry. “Lead role in our next production.”

  “Think she’d just up and leave it?”

  “I don’t know. For a family emergency, she might.”

  “Anyone might,” he said. “But have you heard her talk about her family before? How close they are, how she’d do anything for them, how they need her? How she had to take time off in the past to do things for them?”

  Talia didn’t answer. It seemed silly that she’d accepted Stacey’s explanation so easily, when obviously the answers to Reed’s questions were “No, no, and no.” But who would have guessed there was any other reason?

  “So, she takes off all of a sudden,” Reed went on. “Right when I’m waiting for her to make a major move.”

  He paused significantly, waiting for her to get it.

  “Oh,” Talia said. And then: “Shit.”

  To her surprise, something almost resembling a smile tightened across Reed’s face. Smile-adjacent. If she squinted, didn’t look too hard, and accepted that smiles could be that taut.

  “Shit,” he said, “is right.”

  “And you came looking for her to…?” Talia didn’t know how to finish the question.

  “I had a hunch.”

  “Oh,” she said again. This was all surreal. Was this really her life?

  “She didn’t get in contact with me when she was supposed to. There was more chatter than usual among our targets—rumors about the West gang cleaning house. And now I find out she’s disappeared and subletted her apartment for God knows how long.”

  “So you’re screwed,” she said, trying not to act like she was aware of every inch of her skin under the intensity of his gaze. The prickle of her bare arms, her nipples—

  She would not look down to verify that they were safely tucked away under the blanket. She’d never realized her lace top was so flimsy. So clingy. So barely there.

  “No,” he said, and she was about to ask what he was talking about when he said, grimly, “You’re screwed.”

  “Wait—what?” She nearly dropped the blanket in her surprise. This had all seemed crazy—but it wasn’t her crazy.

  “I already told you, Talia. You can’t stay here.”

  “That’s bullshit. I’m sorry Stacey burned you, but I’ve got nothing to do with this.” She didn’t care that he was an agent, he was eighty million pounds of pure muscle, he had a gun, and he was into some seriously deep shit she didn’t want to know about.
>
  He was still an idiot, and she wasn’t afraid to tell him so.

  “Listen to me,” he said. She didn’t want to. But his voice held such cool command, she had no choice. “I don’t know what did or didn’t happen. I don’t know how bad the risk. But obviously Stacey got spooked, and she fled.

  “Maybe it’s nothing,” he continued. “Maybe she has an aunt in Poughkeepsie who needs twenty-four-hour care. Maybe that aunt is in Paraguay. The south of France. I don’t know, and I don’t care. What I do care about is that there’s a chance Stacey was compromised, and she knew it. It could be a small chance. But I’m not willing to take any risks. Not with Stacey. And not with you.”

  Talia’s mouth hung open. She couldn’t believe how much this man, with his clipped sentences and tightening jaw, had just said. Even more so, she couldn’t believe the words he was saying. He was the one talking, but it was her own throat that ached. She’d started off with adrenaline coursing through her. But she was starting to have a very bad feeling about this night.

  “What do you mean,” she said quietly. “With me?”

  “You know a man named Jonnie West?” Reed asked.

  She shook her head. “But that’s good. I don’t know what case Stacey was involved in, so it doesn’t matter. You can leave me alone.”

  Only Reed wasn’t buying it. “Say Jonnie gets suspicious about Stacey. Finds out who she was talking to in her spare time. This guy’s got a business to protect. He gives an order, and there’s muscle lining up to take care of the job. All he has to do is give them the address and a description. Brunette chick, long hair, nice face, legs for days.”

  Talia tucked her errant foot under the blanket. She wished he hadn’t said the word legs like it was something obscene. She wished she didn’t flush so hard at it anyway.

  “A dancer,” Reed went on. “New York City Ballet. Looks it, too. Unmistakable, Jonnie will say. You know, that dancer look.”

  Talia held up a hand for him to stop. She didn’t need him to hammer the point home any harder.

  “They’ll think it’s me.” She almost couldn’t get the words out. “He’ll give them Stacey’s description, but they could easily think it’s me.”