The Devil You Know (The Devils #3)(28)

It’s solely for me, so I can exude confidence. And if it happens to make him extra regret the way he behaved, that’s okay too.

I call Keeley on the way to work. “I think I sold my soul to the devil last night.”

“You’re a lawyer. You did that a long time ago.”

She may have a point. “Fine. So, I sold him my soul and then I had sex with him on his desk.”

Her gasp is pure drama. “Ben? You didn’t.”

I pinch the bridge of my nose. “I did.”

“But how?” she demands. “You hate each other!”

“I know!” I cry, letting my head fall back against the seat. “But I threw a shoe at him and…”

She laughs. “Are you seriously going to tell me throwing a shoe at him led to sex?”

Someone behind me honks though the light just changed, so I give him the finger. “Well, no. He told me I had to beg to get it back and then he put it on my foot and…”

“Why was he putting it on your foot, Cinderella? Why didn’t you make him hand it to you like a normal person?”

“I don’t know,” I tell her, because I’m too embarrassed to admit the truth: I wanted to see what would happen. I wanted to see how far he would go, and—apparently—I was hoping he’d take it just as far as he did. And it was so fucking good, until he opened his big mouth.

“How did you leave things?” she asks.

I hiccup a sad laugh made of misery and self-loathing. “He said ‘I told you you’d beg.”

Her inhale tells me all I need to know. I didn’t overreact at all. “What. A. Dick.”

“He tried to say it was a joke, but…”

“Fuck that guy,” she says. “Freeze him out.”

“I know,” I reply. It’s the only thing I can do, under the circumstances.

After arriving at work, I stride into the office with purpose, a polite smile plastered on my face as I greet everyone. Because absolutely nothing is wrong.

There are roses on my desk. For a regrettable half-second I soften, before common sense prevails and I’m enraged by those too. If I hadn’t gotten in so early, half the office might have seen them in here and would have spent the day discussing it.

I put them into the trash, which I hide on my side of the desk, and am shredding the card without reading it just as Terri walks in and shuts the door behind her. “What’s wrong?” she demands.

I smile, folding my hands before me, as if this is the opening summit of the model UN. “Why would anything be wrong?”

She points at my face. “That. That is the weirdest, fakest smile I’ve ever seen. You look like you were possessed by an alien attempting to inhabit human form for the first time. One who’s not sure how the smiling thing works.”

My lips purse. “I’m just trying to be a model employee. Making partner and all that.”

“Oh-kay, boss,” she says. There’s a knock on my door, and when she sees Ben standing there, his ever-present smirk absent, she laughs out loud. “You’re telling me later,” she whispers.

He waits until she’s through the door before he walks in. He’s in a fresh suit, but he’s forgotten to shave, and his hair is even more fucked-up than normal. I hate how good guilt makes him look.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

I drag my eyes to his face. “It’s fine.”

“If it was fine,” he replies, carefully enunciating each word, “you wouldn’t be pissed.”

“I’m not pissed. Pissed would involve caring and I don’t. It’s forgotten.”

He takes a single step toward my desk and leans over it, his face two feet from mine. His eyes have gone black as night. “You are full of shit.”

He pushes away and walks out of the office, leaving me with my mouth ajar. What the hell was that? He’s mad? I’m the one who gets to be pissed, not him.

I didn’t expect anything from yesterday and I certainly didn’t expect him to act like it meant something—so why is he?

And why is my heart thumping, as if I wanted it to mean something too?





I manage to make it through the morning behaving like a reasonable human being and not, as Terri suggested, an alien inhabiting human form. The effort leaves me feeling like I want to sleep for a thousand years, like I’m incapable of faking even one more polite smile for as long as I live. And then the reminder pops up on my computer screen: partner/senior associates meeting, and my stomach drops. God, why today?

Terri’s mouth twitches when I exit my office. “Don’t think just because you buried me in work this morning that I’ve forgotten what I’m going to ask.”

I frown at her. “Why bother asking? You’ve clearly figured it out.”

“Yes,” she says with a wide grin. “But it’s the difference between reading Fifty Shades and having someone tell you ‘they had sex’. I need all the dirty details.”

I grimace. “I assure you, you won’t be getting anything close to Fifty Shades from me. It would be one shade that was thirty seconds long, and no one’s buying that book.”

It was way more than thirty seconds and a whole rainbow of shades, but this is the story I’m trying to tell myself.