FALLING FOR MY BIKER BOSS

Chapter 1 "You're late." He was scrolling his phone. Didn't look up. Didn't stop. "Sit." I sat. The chair was too low. The desk was too clean — no mug, no photo, no pen out of place. Just a laptop, a folder, and a phone he liked better than me. Four minutes. I counted every one. Then he picked my résumé up off the pile like it was something stuck to the bottom of his shoe. "'Detail-oriented.'" Flat. Like a bad joke he'd heard a hundred times. "You spelled the company name wrong." My stomach dropped. I'd checked it twice. Three times. "Everybody writes this one." He turned the page. "'Works well under pressure.' Means nobody's ever tested you." He got to the bottom. Read the last line out loud, slow, so I'd hear how stupid it sounded. "'Available immediately.'" He finally looked up. "Yeah. I bet you are." Gray eyes. No warmth in them. Not cold, either. Cold would mean he was trying. I kept my voice flat. "If my résumé's that bad, why'd you call me in?" He went back to his phone. "I didn't." The floor was glass. Thirty stories of city under my shoes. I could see a bike down on the street, tiny, black, parked where nobody parked. "You think I care about a typo?" He didn't look up. "I don't. I care that you wrote three paragraphs about your 'eye for detail' and then put the wrong name on my company." "It's one letter." "It's my name." He set the folder down. Not hard. Careful. Somehow that was worse. "People get my name wrong my whole life. I notice." I didn't say anything. He went back to the phone. Typed something. Waited. Typed again. "So. Chicago." My hands were flat on my knees under the desk. He couldn't see them. That was the only thing I had. "Why'd you leave." It wasn't a question with a question mark on it. It was a test he already had the answer key to. "Change of scene." "Mm." He scrolled. "You got family there?" "No." "Lie number two." He said it to the phone. "You're at three by lunch." I counted to four in my head. "You want the job or not?" "I want to know why you're offering it." He laughed. Not at me. At the phone. "You think this is about you." The office was too warm. The whole floor was empty behind me — I'd walked past eight desks and nobody looked up, and I'd wondered then if they were scared of him or scared of being seen. Now I knew. He pressed a button on the intercom. Didn't look away from the screen while he did it. "Mia. Clear your desk." A voice came out of the speaker, small and fast. "Mr. Kane, I—" "Today." He released the button. I sat very still. Silence from the speaker. Then a chair, then a door. He picked up my résumé again. Read it a third time, like he was looking for something specific, like there was a word hidden in it. "Rebecca." The room moved. Not the floor. Not the glass. Something behind my eyes. I hadn't heard that name out loud in two years. Not once. Not from my father, not from a hotel clerk, not from a bank. On paper I was somebody else. Somebody with a different last name and a rent history and a driver's license with a bad photo, and I had built that person brick by brick in a rented room with a lock on the door. He'd said it like it was on a shipping label. "That's not my name," I said. He didn't blink. "It's the name on the passport in your bag." The door was open behind me. I knew it was open. I'd walked through it four minutes ago and something in me had already clocked it — ajar, hallway light spilling across the carpet — because that's what I did. That's what I was for. I noticed things before I noticed I'd noticed them. So I knew the hallway was not empty. I knew there were people out there. I knew the sound of a phone going quiet. "Say it again," I said. "Louder. So everybody gets it." He leaned back in the chair. Not defensive. Bored. Like I'd finally said something mildly interesting and he was deciding whether it was worth an answer. "Rebecca Hale." He said it to the open door. Loud enough. "Don't worry. Nobody out there's gonna google it." A sound went down the hallway. Not whispering. Something worse. The sound of people deciding not to whisper. I stood up. My legs worked. I noticed that, too. "How do you know that name." "Which one. The one you use, or the one you're running from?" "How do you know it." He picked up his phone again. Scrolled. The conversation was over. I'd been in the room for six minutes and I'd already been filed. "You're gonna want to sit down," he said. "You're gonna do the math for a while and get it wrong, and I'm gonna let you, because it's gonna be funny." "I'm not sitting down." "Then stand." He shrugged. "Doesn't change anything." I put both hands on the edge of the desk. The wood was cold. My fingers went white against it and I watched them do it. "Who told you," I said. "Because whoever it was, they were wrong. That's not me." That got me a look. Not a long one. Just a tilt of his head, an inch, like I'd made a sound he didn't expect from furniture. "I don't get told things," he said. "I find things." Somebody appeared in the doorway. Dark suit, gray at the temples, hands loose at his sides. He didn't knock. He looked at me first, then at the man behind the desk, and something passed between them that I was not invited into. Lucifer didn't look up. "She's not done." The man in the doorway stayed where he was. I picked up my folder. My hands were steady, which felt like a betrayal. I closed it. Pressed it to my chest. "You don't know anything about me," I said. "I know you left Chicago in the middle of the night." He was scrolling. "I know you haven't used that name since. I know that's not a change of scene." "Then tell me why I left." "I don't care why." The way he said it — no heat. No cruelty in it at all. Just flat, like a man reading the weather off a screen. That's the part that got under my skin. He hadn't been trying to hurt me. He just wasn't thinking about me at all. I walked to the door. The man in the suit stepped aside to let me through. Lucifer didn't stop me. Didn't say my name again. Didn't say anything. I got to the elevator and the whole floor was looking at their screens. All eight of them. Every single one at once, at nothing. Then, from down the hall — behind me, through the open door, loud enough to carry all the way to the glass — his voice. "Get her a badge. She starts at six." The man in the suit: "You're sure." "She'll be back. Let her cool off." The doors closed on their own. Then his office door came down the hall, hard enough that the wall shook, and the floor stayed quiet. I pressed a button I didn't need to press. Six a.m. I'd be there. I hated that I already knew it. Chapter One Ends