Another month, and we hadn’t had sex. How long is a girl dating a sex god lookalike supposed to wait? Men were supposed to want sex. I’d thought sex was part of the BDSM lifestyle. Nope, I’d found the only Dom in the world who wouldn’t have sex with me.

For a month, Sam had been flying back and forth between Fort Lauderdale and Austin. When he wasn’t able to make it home, we texted and FaceTimed. The stalker killed the victim in Texas, and the murder was the worst so far. Sam was supposed to be heading home tomorrow after he filled out the last of the paperwork. And that night, I wasn’t going to give him an option of having sex. If I needed to, I was going to tie him to a bed or something in his club. I was ready to ask Neal and Brock to help me. I bet I could buy them off.

During the last month of him babysitting me, Brock and I had become great hacker friends. We teamed up together and played pranks on everyone. We installed a Blue Screen of Death screensaver on all the computers at Alex’s company. But Bridget figured it out and made me fix it in person, instead of just sending out the remote fix. She also forced me to apologize to Alex. I could tell he was trying to hold his smile back while yelling at me.

I’d also added John’s telephone number to wakerupper.com so he would get phone calls at all hours of the night. John had grown on me, and his vocabulary had increased from grunts to four-word sentences. Most of the sentences were, “Patty, knock it off.”

All the tricks were harmless, but they kept my mind off Sam being gone. Every night, I slept in one of his T-shirts. I’d put another one of his shirts in Lemon’s bed, and she laid her head on it every night. Tomorrow night Sam and I would have sex.

My phone ringing brought me out of my sex dream. It was eight at night, which only meant it was my Sam calling. It was like clockwork. I curled up on my bed with one of his shirts on and answered the phone.

“Hey, pixie.”

“Hey, sexy man.”

“Sorry, not tonight, guys. I’m going to talk to my girlfriend and then go to bed,” Sam said to someone else.

But he called me his girlfriend. We hadn’t had the “girlfriend” conversation yet. I was hoping we were headed that way, but didn’t want to assume.

“Sorry about that. The local police staff are going out tonight and wanted to know if I wanted to come with.”

“You called me your girlfriend,” I whispered. Then I mouthed to Lemon, “Oh my God, he said I was his girlfriend,” then jumped up and started doing a little dance.

Sam laughed. “I spend every waking hour thinking about you. I spend my nights and mornings talking to you. I hope tomorrow when I get home, we can have dirty, nasty sex. Should I have sent you a note that says, ‘Will you be my girlfriend? Yes or no?’”

I was screaming into my pillow with joy. My boyfriend was drop-dead gorgeous. Although I wasn’t sure I could classify him as a sex god because we hadn’t done the sex part yet, he sure as hell looked like a sex god. “The note thing would’ve been kind of cool. Nobody’s ever asked me to be their girlfriend.”

The next thing I knew, my phone pinged. It was a text message from Sam: Do you want to be my girlfriend yes or no?

I replied: Hell yes.

Sam’s deep voice chuckled on the other end of the phone. “That response wasn’t an option. I think you voided the text message, and we aren’t able to see each other anymore.”

“Not funny. You already sent it, and you can’t back out now.” It was one of the best text messages I’d ever received. I couldn’t wait to tell Bridget and Sophie that Sam had asked me to be his girlfriend. It almost made me feel like I was in high school again.

“What time are you getting to the airport tomorrow?” I wanted to pick Sam up from the airport. Maybe I could jump him in the car. He’s made me wait so long, I’m a fiend for him.

There was a long pause on the other end, and my heart dropped. He’d promised he was coming home. If he changed his mind, I was ready to jump on my jet and fly out there.

“Sorry, I was trying to pull up the email Mia sent. Looks like I’ll be getting in around three o’clock. Brock’s gonna pick me up from the airport. I’m going to run into the office for a quick debriefing with the team. I’ll be at your work around five o’clock to pick you up.”

“You don’t want me to pick you up from the airport?”

“I would love to see you first thing tomorrow, but I know if you pick me up, I would want to go straight back to my place. I need to debrief the team and find out how our other cases are going. Also, since tomorrow is Friday, why don’t you pack and stay with me all weekend?”

“I would love to stay with you all weekend, but I have Lemon. I don’t like putting her in daycare, and Jessica has so much going on that I don’t want to bother her.” I loved my Lemon, but sometimes, she made things kind of hard.

“I have already bought a dog bed and the same food you buy for Lemon at the house. She’s all set. We can pick her up, or I can send Brock over to the house to grab her. I can send Brock now, so she’s there when we get home.”

Sam thinking about Lemon in advance made my heart melt. It was too early to say for sure, but I thought I was falling in love. I take that back—I know I’m in love with him. I hope over time, he feels the same way.

“You don’t mind having Lemon come over for the weekend? It would mean the world to me.”

“Nope. She’s coming over, and I’ve also stocked Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and hot cocoa. You will have no excuse to leave my house this weekend.”

We’d been talking for a couple of hours when I started to get tired. Sam asked me to send him a couple risqué pics before I went to bed, so he could relieve his stress. We said our goodbyes, and I couldn’t wait to see him.

I was working on stripping down to my bra and boy shorts when someone came barreling into my bedroom.

“Holy shit! Why are you almost naked?” my sister and Bridget screamed at the same time.

Lemon took off barking. She could have barked to let me know someone was in the house. As I was trying to find my shirt, my phone buzzed. What the hell?

“What do you mean, why am I almost naked? It’s my bedroom in my house. You guys don’t believe in knocking on a door or calling to let someone know you’re coming?”

“Are you taking naked pics? You of all people know people can hack iCloud accounts and phone accounts and that stuff gets leaked.”

I’d already been working on an app that removed the photos I sent to Sam. We had an encrypted tunnel between us so people couldn’t steal the data. He would get the pictures for two hours, then they were automatically deleted from the drives.

I explained to Bridget and Jessica that Sam had been helping me test the app. They both thought an app that allowed them to send encrypted messages was fascinating and wanted to try it out. Bridget said she always wanted to send Alex pics while they were both at work. But I didn’t want to hear about my boss getting naked in her office to send her husband pictures.

“Well, since you guys are here, you want to help me take a few pictures?”

Jessica shrugged. “I guess since we’re twins, it’s not like I haven’t seen you before.”

It took us about fifteen minutes to get the right picture. I had around ten texts from Sam, complaining that he hadn’t gotten anything through the app and that he thought it was broken.

“Since I’ve seen my employee naked, let me go wash out my eyes. Let’s meet in the living room to have ice cream and talk about your date tomorrow,” Bridget said over her shoulder while heading out of my bedroom.

I was excited that Bridget and Jessica had come over and was happy to see CJ and Sophie were sitting on the couch. A couple pizza boxes were sitting on the coffee table. Sophie was typing away on my laptop. She was more than likely messing with my settings. I needed to grab my laptop before she caused me a week’s worth of work on my system.

“So do you need any tips for the club tomorrow night?” CJ asked.

“Sam doesn’t want to spend our first night in the club. He wanted it to be special and spend it up at his place.” I suspected my face had turned as red as a tomato.

“Are you going to change your hair color before he gets in tomorrow?” Bridget asked.

Since Sam hadn’t come back as much during the last month, I’d dyed my hair black and told him it was because I was mourning because he kept leaving me.

I showed everybody a picture of a hairstyle I was looking to change to—the top layer was black, and there was purple underneath—and everybody agreed it was stylish. I was thinking about getting it done tomorrow, during my extended lunch break that Bridget didn’t know she was giving me. But hey, I’m one of her best employees. She can’t complain.

“Have they found anything else about the stalker? Does Sam have to head back to Texas?” Sophie asked while typing away on my laptop. I knew I should grab it from her hands, but what the hell—it would give me something to do.

“Sam thinks the local police have it under control. I still can’t believe the stalker killed the cops on duty and kidnapped the victim. The torture he put her through was worse than the previous women.” I still had goose bumps down my spine from the story Sam told me. I’d been good and not ditched my bodyguards in the last few weeks.

In the past month, I hadn’t received any new emails, but I still felt like someone was watching me. It could be the crew that Sam had planted on me. The lady in Austin could have been my twin. I took a look at the previous victims, and they all looked like me. It was creepy.

Bridget, CJ, Sophie, and I spent the remainder of the night joking and talking about computer code. When Jessica had the opportunity, she chimed in with facts about technology. For example, Google uses enough energy to continuously power two hundred thousand homes, even though it has solar panels that produce over three million kilowatts of clean energy every year just at its Mountain View campus.