Behind Your Back, стр. 57

“You were good last night. If I’m walking funny today, I know who to blame.” She gets up and winces, but gives me a smile.

After we shower separately, I give the appearance of getting ready for work. She doesn’t have class until nine, so I’m leaving over an hour before her.

She’s lazing around in bed, her hair wet and tangled when I come to tell her goodbye. I take a breath and then lean down, putting my lips to hers. I wish she were wearing her lipstick so some of it would be left on my face.

But her lips are bare and sweet and she blinks up at me and touches my face as I break the kiss and smile brokenly at her.

“See you tonight,” she says.

“See you tonight,” I say and lay a kiss on the tip of her nose. In the doorway, I pause and look back at her.

“I love you,” I say. She rolls on her stomach and I trace her body with my eyes. Memorizing.

“I love you, too.”

With every step, little bits of my heart break off and drop behind me. I’m leaving a lot of pieces of me behind here. I don’t think I’m ever going to get them back.

I drive around for a while in the BMW, just thinking and burning through gas. I sit outside her apartment and wait for her to leave. I watch her as she tosses her hair over her shoulder and hops into her candy red car. After she drives off, I wait for twenty minutes and then break into her place for the second time. I don’t want to be here too long, so I move as fast and as efficiently as I can. Once I’ve scoured every single bit of the apartment, I’m ready to go.

I look back again and make an impulsive decision. I go to the bathroom and find her lipstick. I uncap it and draw a heart on her mirror before slipping the tube in my pocket and locking the door behind me.

I’m getting into my car when I feel something cold against the back of my head.

The barrel of a gun.

Someone is waiting for me in the backseat of my car.

“Drive,” the voice says and I flick my eyes in the rearview, but the person is covered head-to-toe in black, including a ski mask. The eyes are brown and non-descript. I don’t know who it is.

My heart pounds a little, but I do what he says. There’s not really a whole lot of choice when you have a gun pointed to your head.

He directs me just down the street from Saige’s and then has me pull into an open garage next to a housing unit.

I pull in and wait.

Silence.

The gun digs into the back of my skull and the only sound is my breath and that of my… kidnapper?

“Get out,” he says and I slowly do as he says. I’m hoping once I can get the barrel of the gun away from my brain, I can attack him and take control.

But the second I’m out of the car, I’m hit with thousands of volts of electricity. A fucking Taser.

As my body seizes and falls to the concrete floor, I think that I should have crashed the car because then at least I might have gotten away.

The next time I open my eyes, I’m tied to a chair with rope. There’s a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling of what is clearly a small concrete room. It’s so typical that I want to laugh. My head is still a little fuzzy, so they must have drugged me. I have no idea how long I’ve been out.

I test the ropes and they’re tied pretty damn tight. Whoever tied them was probably a Boy Scout or a sailor. Who knows, it’s not important.

Lizzy is waiting for me and I’m stuck in this fucking room and there’s no way to contact the guys and I’m stuck in this fucking room.

There’s a door across from me and it opens. Someone walks through and I nearly bite my tongue in half with shock.

“Hello, Sylas,” Saige says with a smile on her face. “Fancy meeting you here.”

Epilogue

He thought he was so damn smart. So sneaky. I guess he would be, if I didn’t know exactly what he was up to.

But I knew. I knew every step he was going to make. Or at least I thought I did. The dinners, the dancing, saying the right things was all on the agenda. But then he deviated and I had no choice but to follow him.

I was fascinated. Sure, he was good-looking and unbelievable in bed, but there were secrets behind his eyes that I wanted to know. At first he was a job, but then he became an obsession. A mission. I wanted to pull him apart and see what made him tick. Figure out why he did the things he did.

I thought my father was crazy when he proposed the job to me. I’d done plenty of undercover work, but nothing like this. I wasn’t sure if I was up for it, but the first time I saw him in the cafe when I was wearing my disguise (which, of course, was meant to intrigue him), I knew I was on board. Seduce an attractive man? Hell yes.

I just never expected to fall for him. Hard.

But I have a job to do, and that takes precedence over anything my heart might feel. So I’ll do what’s required and live with the fallout. Even if that means my heart gets destroyed in the process.

To be continued in Back To Back, available June 9th…

Acknowledgements

This book has been a long journey. I first had the inkling of an idea when I was on a plane flying to Scotland for a book signing. It continued to tease me until I decided to start it. I was in Edinburgh, so I did the only logical thing. I went to The Elephant House, which also happens to be the cafe where J. K. Rowling wrote much of the first Harry Potter book. I figured it couldn’t hurt and at the end of that first writing session I’d written 5,000 words.

That was nearly a year ago. I’ve worked off and on with this book since then. It’s one of the projects I’m most proud of, mostly because it was so new. I’ve never written romantic suspense, and I’ve never written a book completely in male POV. But here it is and I’m so proud of it. Even if no one else reads it, I’m proud of it.

I have to say a special thank you to my always-patient editor, my publicist, my formatter and especially to Jay Crownover, who read this and told me it didn’t suck when I was convinced that it did. I’d also like to thank (and curse) her for a suggestion that completely changed the course of the second book.

I’d also like to thank the people, who, when I told them what I was writing were excited and told me they wanted to read it. As a writer, you never know if your ideas are good or not, or if they’re worth pursuing. So thank you everyone who said nice things

And thank YOU for taking this ride with me. You’re probably not very happy with me at the moment, but I promise everything will work out. For the most part…

About the Author

Chelsea M. Cameron is a YA/NA and Adult New York Times/USA Today Best Selling author from Maine. Lover of things random and ridiculous, Jane Austen/Charlotte and Emily Bronte Fangirl, red velvet cake enthusiast, obsessive tea drinker, vegetarian, former cheerleader and world's worst video gamer.

When not writing, she enjoys watching infomercials, singing in the car and tweeting. She has a degree in journalism from the University of Maine, Orono that she promptly abandoned to write about the people in her own head. More often than not, these people turn out to be just as weird as she is.

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