The Devil Gets His Due (The Devils #4)(15)

I climb in, pulling the blankets up to my neck. “I need clothes. It’s part of my brand. Eventually I’ll save someone’s life and be propelled into reality show fame, and when that happens, there are going to be a lot of premieres and cocktail parties, and I’ll need clothes.”

He glances at me, brow furrowed. “Your 401k must be a disaster.”

“Joke’s on you. I don’t have a 401k.” I make a show of fluffing my pillows, placing them all the way over to the halfway point of the bed. I swear to God if his body crosses the midline of this mattress, I’ll stab him in his sleep. I keep a knife on my nightstand, so I wouldn’t even have to exert myself.

“You have no retirement,” he repeats. Now I know the one thing that can upset him more than impending fatherhood. “Jesus, are you serious? You should be contributing the maximum every year. I bet your company even matches it.”

“Ugh. You sound just like Mark.” I flip off the light and lie down beside this massive almost-stranger I’m stuck with for the night. Movies make this situation look sexy, but in truth it’s just weird. His side of the bed is for outfits I chose not to wear and for the makeup mirror I haven’t found time to hang, not for other humans.

“Who’s Mark?” His voice is icy.

I’m startled out of my reverie. “A friend.”

“What kind of friend?”

Dread slowly crawls into my stomach. This is what I’m in for. For the next eighteen years, it’s going to be my childhood all over again: Your mother left you with a sitter to go out? With whom? She isn’t allowed to introduce you to someone without informing me first. Who the hell is Daniel? Does this quote-unquote neighbor sleep over?

I’m not going down this road with him. I’m just not fucking doing it.

“Let me make something crystal clear,” I hiss. “We might be having a kid together, but that doesn’t mean you have some kind of dominion over me. I don’t owe you explanations about anything unrelated to the pregnancy.”

He tenses beside me—I assume because he wants to argue. “For our kid’s sake,” he finally says, “we should probably at least be civil to each other.”

Yeah, that’s what my dad used to say, too, when he wasn’t getting his way.





My alarm goes off in the morning and I’m assaulted by the sight of skin.

So much male skin.

Graham took his t-shirt off sometime during the night, violating a rule he agreed to six hours earlier, which doesn’t bode well for sharing a child.

And the man sleeps like the dead. I cough and shove him, but he doesn’t budge.

With a sigh, I go into the bathroom, twisting my hair on top of my head before taking the world’s fastest shower. When I walk out, wrapped only in a towel, he wakes, and the first thing he does is look me over, from head to toe—the way he might if we’d just slept together and he was thinking about doing it again.

For the briefest second, there’s a pulse between my legs, a muscle clenching low in my abdomen.

I clutch the towel around me tighter. “You need to get out.”

He raises a brow, pushing himself up and leaning against the headboard. I’d forgotten about his fantastic abs. “You’re a ray of sunshine in the morning, aren’t you?”

“I’m a ray of sunshine the whole goddamn day,” I huff, “but I don’t need a naked stranger lounging in my bed when I get up.”

“Turning over a new leaf then, are we?” A smug smile lifts his mouth. “I was implying you do this a lot, in case that wasn’t clear.”

My eyes narrow. “It’s a shame you hadn’t done it more. Maybe you’d have known how to put on a condom.”

A quiet light flickers in his eyes as if he’s remembering something about that night. Nights. That traitorous muscle in my gut clenches once more.

“Leave,” I demand as I march into my closet.

Inside, I manage to find a skirt that still fits, along with a cardigan just baggy enough to disguise the whole mess. And when I enter the kitchen, he’s sitting at the counter. Apparently, he didn’t understand what I meant by “leave.”

I pop a bagel in the toaster and act like he isn’t there.

“Is that your breakfast?” he asks.

“This is for Mark. I don’t eat breakfast.”

His eyes darken. “Mark, your friend? You make his breakfast?”

I could tell him, once again, that it’s none of his fucking business. I only answer because the truth will bother him more. “He sleeps outside the building. I’ve told him he can come make it himself, but he never takes me up on it.”

Graham grips the counter and breathes slowly, in and out of his nostrils. “So let me get this straight: the guy advising you about your finances is homeless, and you’ve offered him access to your apartment.”

“You shouldn’t judge people based on their occupation.”

“I’m not judging him on his occupation, Keeley,” he replies, mouth ajar. “He doesn’t have one. Do you have any idea what parenting even requires? You need to have money. You need to have some food in your refrigerator. You need to not offer random homeless men the run of your apartment. And I really hope to God you’re not still drinking.”