Agatha Lerner likes to walk her own path. By day, she’s a hacker, and by night, she waits for a hot biker-slash-commando to materialise in her bedroom. She’s never given him a key. He doesn’t seem to need one.
So when she’s invited to her younger sister’s wedding on a quiet Maine island, the last thing she wants is a lecture on her poor life choices, but she knows she’s going to get one. After all, she’s her mom’s biggest disappointment. A pretend boyfriend seems like the perfect solution, but the path of fake love never runs smooth, and Agatha’s plan to take a good, honest man to meet her family soon goes horribly wrong…
Phantom is a standalone romance novella in the Blackwood Security series.
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Chapter 1:
Me: BC?
I sent the message and sat back on the couch, sighing. This was a bad, bad habit I’d gotten into. Other women—my sisters, for example—had normal, healthy relationships with men. They went on dates, shared meals, talked about the future, and then got married. Me? I had booty calls with a self-confessed asshole.
Hawk: Yeah.
That was it. One word.
Brendan Hauser, otherwise known as Hawk, was my filthy little secret. Well, maybe not so little. But I hadn’t mentioned our non-relationship to my friends or colleagues—which were the same thing, seeing as I had no life outside the office—and I certainly hadn’t told my family. My mom would shit a brick if she found out I was sleeping with a former commando who hung with his dad’s biker gang in his spare time. Okay, so we didn’t actually sleep much, but you get the point.
Out of their three daughters, I was my parents’ biggest disappointment. Clarice, my older sister by four years, had joined the peace corps after college and spent time overseas promoting environmental awareness in Borneo before she married her high school sweetheart and began having babies. Odette, the baby of the family at three years younger than me, was an elementary school teacher—poor kids—with ambitions of becoming a housewife, a dream she’d achieve sooner rather than later. Because she’d gotten engaged. Last month, she’d video-called giggling and squealing to show me the ring and gush over Stu’s proposal, but I had plenty of time to come up with an excuse to skip the ceremony. How long did weddings take to arrange? Years. It was years, right? At least I didn’t have to be a bridesmaid. Those slots were reserved for her friends.
The thought of spending several days with my family filled me with dread, but that was tomorrow’s problem. Tonight, I had a more pressing issue to deal with. Hawk. I needed to take a shower because if past form was anything to go by, he’d walk through the door in around thirty minutes. I’d never given him a key. He just flitted in and out like a ghost.
Perhaps I should have been more alarmed by the whole lock-picking thing, but Hawk was in special ops—he probably picked his own locks at home just for fun—and he only showed up at my apartment when I’d invited him. Which, if I was honest, was too often for comfort, but I’d become addicted to his touch, and the pheromones he shed like confetti overrode rational thought. When he was with me, I felt sexy, desirable, a different woman from the flat-chested blonde waif who stared back at me from the mirror each morning.
Fool that I was, I’d bought new underwear for this evening’s encounter, and as I headed to the bathroom, I wondered how much longer the arrangement would carry on. Last month, I’d turned twenty-eight. I was a grown-up with a semi-respectable job. And my biological clock was ticking, as Mom never stopped reminding me.
In the shower, I clipped my hair on top of my head and stood under the hot spray as the water washed away some of the day’s tensions. My small team at Blackwood Security—there were three of us—supported the Special Projects and Investigations teams by providing information as and when required, and both departments were busier than ever. I’d started the morning on run-of-the-mill infidelity cases and ended the evening hunting for a missing teenager. She’d gone to meet an online friend in Maryland, a fellow Indigo Rain fan who had a spare ticket to their concert, a pretty sixteen-year-old brunette who, in reality, turned out to be a middle-aged guy. Two hours ago, the field team had found the missing girl crying in a motel room, and now she was on her way home. The groomer? Our target was only fifteen, so his catfishing ass was in jail.
I scrubbed harder. Maybe I was trying to wash off a little of the second-hand misery that clung to me as well. I loved my job, both the technical aspects and the fact that I got to help people, but some of the things I saw along the way, they gave me nightmares. Hawk took me out of the darkness, if only for a few hours.
Although he wasn’t exactly sweetness and light. No, he was a grouchy, secretive, pushy asshole. An asshole who made my blood run hot and reliably provided multiple orgasms before he left me in a boneless pile on the bed and disappeared into the night. But he was also safe. With Hawk, I knew exactly what to expect. He never made any false promises, and in the brief moments we spent together, he took care of me.
Not like the men who’d come before him.
He’d saved me from making at least one big mistake, and probably more.
It had all started on a cloudless night in The Brotherhood of Thieves, or should I say, outside it. The Brotherhood had started out as a biker bar, a real spit and sawdust place that Hawk would have felt quite at home in, but like so many establishments, it had fallen on hard times. In its second incarnation, it had become the kind of place city boys drank when they wanted to feel badass. Rebels without the risk. Bandidos who wouldn’t dream of violating any city ordinances. The new clientele rode motorcycles on the weekends, bragged about their bonuses, and didn’t care how much the drinks cost.
It was also Blackwood’s unofficial watering hole, seeing as Logan, another reprobate from Emmy Black’s Special Projects team, part-owned the place. We had a favourite table near the back, and I sometimes swung by for dinner when I was too tired to cook. Edgy but safe, that was The Brotherhood. There was a Harley in the bar, plus a pool table and a wall covered in dollar bills. Tradition dictated that the customers pinned their change there for charity, and now folks came from two states over to take Instagram selfies in front of the famous “dollar wall.”
I’d been there one Friday night with a few colleagues—Dan, Mack, and Hallie—and as the drinks flowed and the talk got dirtier, I’d begun craving an orgasm that wasn’t battery-powered. Just a few hours with a man. Fingers, dick, a fleeting connection. I hadn’t dated since my FBI days, and for good reason. The relationship had ended badly. In hindsight, I’d jumped in too fast, and after my ex cheated and blamed his infidelity on my long work hours, I’d been left to untangle the mess of a joint mortgage, of shared furniture and a cat he’d adopted but no longer wanted.
That night in The Brotherhood, I’d gotten talking to a guy at the bar. He’d bought me a drink, which turned into two drinks, which turned into an invite to his place soon after nine o’clock. A reasonable hour for a one-night stand, don’t you think? Late enough to be pleasantly tipsy, early enough that I’d have time to do the deed, get home, and grab some sleep before I headed back to Blackwood in the morning. Yes, I often worked weekends. The office was my second home, okay? There was a gym, a kitchen full of snacks, and a shooting range. What more could a girl want?
“We can take my car,” my new friend said. “I’ve only had one drink.”
“Do you live nearby?”
“I have an apartment in Tuckahoe.”
While he hunted through his pockets for the car key, I snapped a picture of both him and his vehicle and sent them to Dan, just in case he was secretly a psycho, and activated my phone tracker. I’d had more than two drinks, but my judgment wasn’t impaired enough that I forgot basic safety procedures.
Dan sent a message back: Enjoy! Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do 😉
That didn’t leave much out. I could ride him like a prize rodeo bull or taser him in the balls, and Dan would be just fine with it.
But I never got the chance to do either.
I’d climbed halfway into the car when a steel band tightened around my waist, and I found myself being lifted right back out again. Fear surged through me, and I opened my mouth to scream, but then Hawk spoke.
“She’s not going with you, asshole.”
The guy jumped out of the car. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I heard you and your buddies talking, and if I ever see you in this bar again, you’re gonna lose teeth. You don’t treat women that way.”
What way? Any criticism was a bit rich coming from the man currently holding me in a vise-like grip. If it had been anyone other than Hawk, I’d have been rooting through my purse for my stun gun, but…but… It was Hawk. Back then, he’d just joined Blackwood’s Investigations team in the aftermath of a hellish case, and every time I saw him in the office, I had to press my thighs together. Hawk was hot. Incendiary. Six feet of brooding muscle topped by dirty blond hair and dimples that didn’t match his usual scowl.
I was about to tell him it was fine, that I was up for a one-night stand and I’d gotten into the car voluntarily, when the guy stammered out an apology, climbed into the driver’s seat, and took off without another word. Only then did Hawk’s grip loosen.
“What the hell?” I demanded.
“You’re welcome, babe.”
I twisted in his arms and shoved at his chest. “You’re such a jackass. All I wanted was a non-self-induced orgasm, and you just ruined that.”
“That motherfucker was never gonna make you come. He was only in it for himself.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Based on what? His BMW? His button-down shirt? The fact that he bought me drinks? I know you just attended a behavioural analysis course, but you’re taking the judgmentalness way too far.”
Judgmentalness? Was that even a word? Well, it was now.
“Based on the fact that he and his buddies were having an in-depth discussion on stealthing and the best way to go about it.”
Stealthing? I froze. “And you think…”
“Yeah, I do.”
Stealthing—a man surreptitiously removing the condom during sex—had been on the rise recently. Blackwood had even been hired to hunt down one perpetrator after his victim found herself pregnant after a ten-minute mistake in a nightclub bathroom. And that could have been me. Not the bathroom part, but the rest. I sagged in Hawk’s arms and murmured an apology.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I called you a jackass, but why are men such assholes?”
“Practice.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
“Dating is a minefield, and even the path to a one-night stand is littered with IEDs. Is one tiny orgasm really too much to ask?”
One corner of his lips twitched. “I don’t date, but I can help out with the orgasm.”
It took a long moment for his words to filter in. “W-w-what?”
“Five minutes, and I’ll have you gasping my name.”
Pick up your copy of Phantom to find out what happens next…
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