For the past week, I’d been working as Bridget’s assistant. She’d also assigned me a new security case for a local company that had been hit with ransomware. Bridget had set up interviews for my replacement at the end of the week. I would miss the days of doing nothing, but I knew helping Bridget would mean she could take on more cases.

Not sure what role I would take, I knew I would start working at Black Hat sometime in the near future. Neal and I would work it out in the next few months. Neal was doing an excellent job, and the company ran itself. Maybe one day, Bridget would consider merging the two, and I could let her run her own division at Black Hat.

I was looking forward to my first date with Sam that day. I didn’t want to work. I wanted to go home and get ready. I was leaving early to meet my hairdresser at the house. I was thinking of changing my hair color to ruby red.

“Hello, Patty,” Bridget said while tossing some work files on my desk. She sat down in one of the two pink-and-white desk chairs in front of my desk. Sophie came over and took the other.

“Are you ready for your date?” Sophie asked.

“I’m leaving early to dye my hair and find a new outfit.”

“Do you need us to come help you?” Bridget asked.

I contemplated them coming over to help me and maybe help with my nerves. The problem was I had so much to get done. I needed to review the code Neal sent before he had a heart attack. Even though I knew there wouldn’t be an issue, I still liked to see if I could find something wrong with his codes.

“I think I will be okay. I need to look at a few things for Neal before I go out.”

“If you need us, don’t hesitate to call. Why don’t you head out and go get ready? I want a full report tomorrow of what you guys do.” Bridget struggled to get out of the chair. She was due to have Alonzo at the end of the month.

Not waiting for Bridget to change her mind, I shut everything down and headed home. On the way, I texted Megan. She’d been my hairdresser for the last few years. Like me, she loved the colors of the rainbow for her hair. Last time I saw her, she had the complete rainbow.

A few hours later, I had a subtle shade of ruby red in my hair, a cup of hot cocoa in one hand, and some Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in the other. Before I sat down, I gave Lemon a new dog bone, hoping she would go chew on it in her bed. I sat down to review what Neal sent me.

Time was flying while I was testing the code in a virtual environment. I put the security software on a virtual PC and hit it with all the hacking tools I had to break through the program. When my email pinged, I looked to see if it was a new message from Neal—and my heart dropped. For the last few weeks, someone had been sending me strange emails. I’d tried to find out who was sending them, but the culprit was amazing at hiding his tracks.

If the person weren’t so creepy, I would have asked Neal to hire him. That brought up the next thing Neal would be furious about: I hadn’t reported these emails. They’d been a little creepy, but nothing to get too worked up over. I grabbed a Reese’s for comfort before opening the email.

From: B. Waterville

Sent: Friday, February 17, 2017

To: Patty Beckett

Subject: My long-lost love

Patty my love,

You could have been with me, but you choose another over me. I saw you last week going to a sex club. My perfect Patty shouldn’t have been going to places like that. You are too special to be having sex of that nature with strange men. You are very special to me, and what you did has brought misery into my life. I’ve been waiting and waiting for you, and you never come or answer my emails. I love you and want you to be a part of my life. If you don’t change your behavior, I’m going to have to step in and not wait for you to come to me, my love.

Yours forever,

Waterville

I don’t know how long I sat there rereading the message. In the previous emails, he’d talked about his life. Nothing more. He’d never said he was watching me. That sent a shiver down my back.

Lemon must have noticed I was upset because she came over and lay across my feet. I was reading over the email again when someone knocked on the door and scared the crap out of me. I pulled up the security feed and saw it was Sam. I’d completely lost track of time.

When I’d arrived home, I’d told the bellman to let Sam up when he came. I hadn’t expected him so soon, and I wasn’t even ready.

Lemon took off toward the door, barking like she would take on the world. The girl was only two feet tall but acted like a Labrador. When I opened the door, Sam was wearing a white button-down shirt with black slacks. For a split second, all my troubles went away.

“I thought we agreed to seven?” Sam asked.

“We did. I had something happen, and I lost track of time.” I shrugged and waved for him to come in, uncertain I wanted to bring all the drama on our first date. That last email had me on edge, though, and I should probably have called the cops.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Sam asked, pulling me into a hug. “You look a little upset.”

Working on untangling myself from Sam’s arms, I pointed toward my office. “Let’s head to my office, and I will show you.” I filled Sam in about the email I received. I went on to talk about how the first email had started with him talking about his life, but now they were escalating.

* * *

The second Patty started talking about her emails, my anger rose. I knew who she was talking about. We’d been trying to find him for the past month, and we thought we had. If she was still receiving the emails, that meant the man the police had in custody might not be the Waterville Stalker. For the past few months, Team Blackwood had been working with the local police to bring the Waterville Stalker into custody.

He’d been stalking women, and when they did something he felt they shouldn’t have, he killed them. The local police had asked us to help because their caseload was so high that they could not put enough time into the case.

“How many have you gotten?” Why have we not seen anything from the police about this? They should send us updates when new people get emails.

“I think this is the sixth,” Patty answered over her shoulder.

“What did the police say when you gave them the emails?” I was trying to keep the anger out of my voice.

Patty stopped and looked at me with large brown eyes. She was biting her lip and fidgeting with her hands. That second I knew why the police hadn’t sent me a copy of the emails. She hadn’t reported them. “They weren’t that bad until today. I was going to contact the cops now.”

I took a few seconds to put my anger back. Patty had been getting stalker emails and done nothing about it. “Show me the emails.”

I went around Patty’s desk and sat down in her chair before she had a chance. I pulled her onto my lap. I wished we weren’t there looking at a possible stalker sending her email.

She reached over and brought up her email. My world dropped when I saw it was signed the same way the emails always were. Nobody but the police and my staff knew how the emails were signed or the contents of what was written. It also seemed he was to the point of being mad at her—and that put her at risk.

“I need to make a call.” I dialed the local police chief. “Hey, Chief.”

“Hello, Sam,” Chief Haley answered. It sounded like he was moving papers around on his desk.

“I’m at a friend’s house, and she showed me emails she has been getting. The emails are close to the other women’s.”

Chief Haley grumbled on the other end. This confirmed the wrong person was in custody.

“I don’t want to open that case back up. You better tell me it’s someone else.”

“It seems we have the wrong person, or he has an accomplice.”

“Fuck, send me the emails, and we will meet tomorrow,” Chief Haley ordered before ending the call.

“I think you might be overreacting a little. I think we should’ve looked through things a little more before involving the chief of police. How can you be positive this is the same person? I think this person is trying to prove their hacking skills.”

He had more than computer hacking techniques. The Waterville Stalker also hacked the bodies of his victims. The women were almost unrecognizable.

I had to come up with a plan to keep Patty safe and figure out who this guy was. “Patty, have you not been watching the news at all in the past month? There has been a stalker on the loose, sending emails to women, and when he gets upset with them, he kills them.”

A gasp escaped Patty’s lips. She looked shocked. That was when I realized Patty had not looked at a newspaper or watched the news in the last month. She had a seventy-inch TV hanging on her wall to the right of her computer station. Why isn’t she watching the news while she works?

“I get all my news from my Facebook feed. If there’s something important, it generally pops up in the newsfeed. Let me Google this to see what’s going on.”

Who the hell uses Facebook for their news? When she went to grab her keyboard, I pulled her back into my chest. She didn’t need to see the pictures.

“You don’t want to see the photos. This changes our plans for the night. I will call Brock and have him bring me a change of clothes and takeout. Go relax in your living room and go over the research you were supposed to have done.”

“That’s a little presumptuous, thinking I will sleep with you.”

“Patty, where in that conversation did I say anything about having sex with you tonight?”

“Well, you told me you would have Brock bring you clothes. So I assumed you were planning on staying. What guy stays over and doesn’t expect sex?”

I wanted nothing more than to throw Patty over my shoulder and head toward the bedroom. She was drop-dead gorgeous. But I wanted to take things slow with her. “No, we are taking our relationship slow. My main priority right now is to make sure you are safe.”

I kept Patty in my arms while I called Brock. I needed him to bring me some clothes and tell him his assumption about the stalker was right on. He said he would grab us some food and be on his way.

“Why don’t you show me around your house while we wait for Brock to get here.”

Patty got up from my lap and led me around her penthouse. The place fit Patty correctly. The house was comfy and cozy for being so large. The living room had big, fluffy black couches that faced another seventy-inch TV on the wall. The kitchen was modern, with sleek black countertops and crisp white cabinets. The house looked like it was taken straight out of Better Homes and Gardens. I would say it leaned more toward the modern side.

While we were looking at pictures from Shialia, the doorbell played the Mario Brothers theme song, and Lemon took off toward the door. I went on high alert, because someone opened the front door without being let in. There was no reason Brock would walk in. I pushed Patty behind me and went for my gun.

“What are…”

I silenced her so nobody could hear us.

The footsteps in the front room were headed toward our location. They sounded heavy, so it had to be a large male, maybe even two men. I was sure it wasn’t Brock. When I walked around the corner, I was half relieved and half pissed. It was Neal and Brock.

“What the hell is with the gun?” Neal asked. He walked over to Patty and engulfed her in a big hug. I knew I had nothing to be jealous about. They had more of a brother-sister relationship. Still, jealousy twitched in my gut.

I walked over to them and pulled her back into my arms. Neal knew what I was doing, and he shook his head and laughed. “I heard somebody open the door, and nobody should open the door and walk in uninvited.”

“Hey, man, Neal was the one who opened the door and walked in. I grabbed him from downstairs on my way up so he would know what was going on. I knew he’d want to be informed of the case,” Brock explained.

Neal looked confused. “What case? All the cases I’m working on with your team are closed.”

“It seems the case wasn’t closed. Patty has been getting emails from the same stalker,” I replied to Neal.

Neal paced back and forth, cussing under his breath. His hands were closing into fists and opening. “Patty, please tell me what Brock said on the way up about you receiving emails from a stalker is false?” Neal fumed at Patty.

“Well, you see…”

“You have got to be fucking kidding me. The stalker is targeting Patty. I told you last month to stop frequenting Club Heavenly Flame. I didn’t say it for my health. The stalker has been targeting people going to that club.”

Patty turned a lovely shade of red and settled deeper into my hug. There was no point in standing around the kitchen, yelling and pointing fingers. We needed to sit down, eat, and figure out what to do.

“Let’s sit down, come up with a plan, and stop trying to fix the past.” At least I was levelheaded about the situation, even though I was still angry Patty was a target.

Everyone sat down around the table. The view in the dining room overlooked the ocean. The sun was just setting, and it was picturesque and quiet. It looked peaceful—nothing like our conversation was about to be. I had to go into mission-planning mode to figure out how I would protect Patty from this cruel man.

“She needs a bodyguard on her,” Neal demanded.

“Brock can be her bodyguard during the day. We will make it look like he is a client. I’m going to stay here at night.”

Brock was already nodding. I could see from the look on Patty’s face that she was not pleased with the situation.

* * *

Who do these guys think they are? They can’t just come in and take over my life. They had already decided who would go to work with me and who would stay at my house.

I might have had a crush on him for longer than a week, but I’d really only known Sam for a week. We’d talked, like, twice—and he was staying in my house! I should’ve listened to Neal. But I had gone to Club Heavenly Flame one more time, and I guess my awesomeness attracted a dumb stalker. Heavenly Flame was a nightclub that catered to music from the nineties. The last time I went to the club, they were doing a best boy band of the nineties night.

It’s time to put this bodyguard shit to rest. The emails had been coming in for over a month, and nothing had happened. I didn’t need somebody watching me all the time.

“Um, hell no, I don’t want a bodyguard. You guys can all go fuck yourselves.” I might have been a little over dramatic. Damn, I don’t want a guard.

Sam leveled me the death stare, or maybe it was that Dom stare. Neal has a similar one. All I’d wanted was a beautiful night with Sam. They continued to argue among themselves, not even blinking an eye to my demand. Since they weren’t giving me an option or even taking my opinion into account, I grabbed my plate and headed back toward my computer room, a.k.a. Lair.

At least Lemon was on my side. She got up and left with me. “Come on, girl. These guys are ignoring us.”

As I was leaving, Sam told me he would catch me up with everything they figured out. When I was almost to my office, he yelled for me not to do a Google search. That was like putting a red button in front of me and saying, “Do not press.” Anyone would push it and see what happened.

I went into my office and started Google searching. When the first images came up, I knew I should’ve listened to Sam. A woman in her early thirties had been brutally murdered. The cops had a hard time identifying the woman because the killer had cut the body into parts. It seemed the killer had also used acid on the body, along with other torture devices.

I needed to start working with people I trusted instead of coming up with my own plan. I would listen to Sam and Neal this time to help keep myself out of danger. Sam showed up in my office about an hour later. He let me know Brock would go with me to work tomorrow, and after seeing the photos and everything I saw online, I didn’t want to argue.

We spent the remaining part of the night on the couch, watching a Big Bang Theory marathon because my almighty Dom and savior had never seen it. There was no way I could date a guy who didn’t like the show, so we had to do a marathon to make sure he liked it.

Sam walked me to the door of my bedroom. Before walking in, he wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled me in for a kiss. The kiss was demanding. Immediately, I wrapped my arms around his neck. His hands ran down my back and rested on my ass. By the time Sam pulled back, I was breathless and wanting more.

He leaned down one more time and kissed me on the nose. “Good night, pixie.” Sam proceeded to turn around and walk toward the spare bedroom. I spent a few more minutes standing in my doorway, dumbfounded. How could he leave me wanting more and not give it to me?