“Nothing.” Darren gulped. “She’s got no one.”

I squinted at the paper I held in my hand. At how little I had to work with. It’s like the girl didn’t want to exist outside the realms of her house. There was one more thing I needed from Darren. He’d already signed the contract, and everything was set and in motion. There were two clauses he insisted on, that were highlighted in bold letters. One—Jesse Carter should never, ever, ever in her life know about this deal. And two—I would never, ever, ever have a sexual relationship with her. “Break one or both, and the deal is off.”

Truth was, I skimmed the motherfucker, because Darren struck me as such an impotent man, I didn’t really think he was capable of hurting a fly.

“Email me a recent picture of her. I need to know what she looks like, you know, so I don’t hit on a rando.”

“You’re not hitting on her,” he enunciated. “You’re helping her.”

Semantics, the western society’s favorite mistress. It didn’t matter how I did it—all that mattered was that Jesse Carter would leave her fucking house. I didn’t bother to search for her online. If I read this chick correct, and I thought I did, she wouldn’t have a Facebook, Snapchat, or an Instagram. She wanted to disappear from earth, so she had.

I was about to drag her back to society.

She could come alone, or with her demons.

I really didn’t fucking care.

The photo Darren sent me was grainier than Tobago Beach and I couldn’t make much of Jesse. It looked like he’d taken a picture of her when she wasn’t looking, which made my Creep-O-Meter ding a few times. She was sitting on a tapestry bench, a copy of The Captain’s Daughter by Alexander Pushkin clasped between her hands. Her face was buried inside. All I could make out was her raven hair, snowy skin, and long lashes. I had a weird feeling that I’d already seen her, but I shoved it to the back of my mind. Even if I had, she was business now.

Strictly business.

The kind of business I didn’t want to lose.

Especially after using five hundred thousand dollars of the three million Darren had transferred to my account for importing Italian furniture to my new boutique hotel. Oops.

I decided the best course of action was to corner Jesse when she visited her therapist. I waited across from the glitzy building where the clinic was located. I sat in a coffee shop at Liberty Park and gawked through the glass wall. She parked her Range Rover in front of the building and stepped out. Her slumped shoulders looked like broken wings; her overcast eyes were where your soul went to fucking die.

My first thought seeing her was that she was nowhere near Quasimodo-ugly. She was beautiful, and that was the understatement of the fucking century.

The second thought was that I’d already seen her. I didn’t need her to gather those inky strands of hair up to see the Pushkin tattoo. A girl like that, you don’t forget. It was years ago, on the beach, but I remember how carnal the need to conquer her had been. How pissed I’d been when I’d seen her pasty-ass teenage boyfriend fondling her as soon as she’d collapsed on the sand in her little red bikini next to him. Luckily, I’d held myself back from stealing her out from under his nose.

Now that she was collateral, there was no way I’d ever touch her with a ten-foot pole.

Jesse was wearing a pair of shapeless jeans in an attempt to hide her banging long legs, a tangerine shirt—long, baggy, and depressingly modest—and an open black hoodie over top. She had a ball cap on—Raiders, my kind of chick—and the shades she clutched in her fist were the size of her entire face. She clearly wanted to fly off the radar as much as possible. Unfortunately for her, for six mill, I was not only going to notice her existence, but celebrate and build a shrine to it. You know, so to speak.

She disappeared inside the building, her head ducked down, the no-eye-contact policy in full effect. She had an hour at the therapist’s. That was plenty of time for me to saunter over, unscrew the core from the valve stem of her back tire, and watch as it slowly hissed out air. After I did that, I walked two blocks down to get my vehicle— a billion-year-old red Ford truck I’d rarely used—and parked it directly behind her Range Rover.

As expected, Jesse reemerged from the building an hour later, powerwalking to her Range Rover. A perceptive little thing, she noticed the flat tire before she climbed into the car. She squatted, sighed, and then shook her head. I pushed my driver’s door open, hopping to the ground a few good feet from her. Darren mentioned she wasn’t hot on men getting near her. No problemo.