by Tana Stone
A thin woman carrying a beige Birkin bag gave her a sideways glance. Katie sized her up as no one worth photographing and gave her what she hoped was her most innocent smile. The woman wasn’t fooled and moved away, shooting a nasty look over her shoulder.
This was a disaster. She knew her desperation was palpable, which was the kiss of death in her business. Even though she was tall, with striking red hair and more curves than were typically accepted in LA, she’d always had the confidence to blend in anywhere. It probably came from growing up with a father who was a grifter and had taught her everything from three card Monte to how to work a mark. It wasn’t tough to see that he was why she’d ended up as a paparazzo for some of the top Internet gossip sites.
“I just need one shot,” she said, more to bolster her confidence than anything. “Just one great shot to get me through this.”
This meant the disaster that had become her life since she’d taken the last known photo of the socialite Mandy Talbot before she disappeared. Katie closed her eyes briefly, willing herself to go back in time and not take that image of Mandy outside of the restaurant after her best friend and TV starlet London had left their standing lunch date.
At the time, Katie had thought it was gold. Mandy was cleared distraught in the image, and the headline the tabloid rag ran next to it proclaimed the TV producer’s daughter to be an “Instagram diva ditched by best friend and boyfriend.” It had netted Katie a tidy sum, enough to cover rent, since her stand-up-comedian boyfriend hadn’t gotten a gig in weeks. It had also been the last image anyone could find of the woman who had apparently vanished the day the photo was taken.
Katie had been interviewed by the police, and by the private investigators hired by Mandy’s dad. Somehow, those investigators had been able to dig into her financial life and see the debt she was in. That was all they needed to decide she was somehow involved in the disappearance, and it had all been downhill from there. She’d ended up on the pages of the very magazines she usually shot for, headlines proclaiming her as the last person to see the heiress alive and painting a picture of her as someone with nothing to lose.
She adjusted her oversized sunglasses. Part of her was glad her father hadn’t lived to see this. She was supposed to be the one hunting for celebrities trying to blend in or avoid detection, not the one hiding. Not that she’d been shocked when her fellow paparazzi had turned on her. No honor among thieves, and all that.
“Katie!” A voice from across the street made her jump and turn before she could stop herself. She heard a click of a shutter.
She cursed at herself. “Dammit, you know better.”
She started walking briskly in the other direction, dodging people and trying to put distance between herself and the photographer. She thought it might be that weasely guy from the Enquirer, but no way was she going to turn around to check. Figures, she thought. Only the bottom feeders were still hounding her after all these weeks.
“Where’s Mandy?” the voice yelled after her.
At this point, people were staring and beginning to recognize her. She kept her head down and held her bag tight, barely avoiding a run-in with one of the Schwarzenegger kids. Shit, she should have been taking his photo, not trying to avoid flattening him while she made a run for it.
She ducked around the corner and nearly ran the two blocks to where she’d parked her piece-of-shit car. Jumping in, she tossed her bag on the passenger seat and floored it, looking in the rearview mirror once she was moving. No one behind her, that was good. But she hadn’t gotten a single photo. That was bad.
It took her almost an hour to reach her apartment in the Valley, which gave Katie plenty of time to think about just how badly her life was falling apart, since her car’s radio wasn’t working.
“Think,” she told herself, letting the wind from the open window cool her. “What would dad do?”
He’d managed to get himself out of plenty of scrapes over the years, and he’d usually been guilty as hell. How had she managed to get herself in such a big mess without having done anything wrong?
The problem was the TV producer dad and his rabid dog investigators. They seemed hell-bent on blaming the girl’s disappearance on someone, and didn’t seem to be too concerned about the details. Katie had thought the dad was faking it the first time he’d appeared on the news with his collagen-enhanced third wife. She knew a faker when she saw one, and that guy didn’t give a shit about finding his daughter. He wanted people to think he did, though. Hence the private investigators eager to find a fall guy.
Katie pulled up in front of her apartment building and the car shuddered to a stop. She rubbed her fingers on the steering wheel and whispered to the car, “I just need you to hold out a little bit longer. I really can’t take one more thing going wrong right now.”
What she needed was to provide an ironclad alibi to the police and have them call off the investigators. And the best way to do that was to enlist the help of her boyfriend. He may not be great when it came to making money, but she knew he had her back when it mattered. At least she thought he did.
Katie took the stairs to her third-floor, garden apartment two at a time, waving at an elderly neighbor, who clearly didn’t read tabloid news since she smiled brightly. She opened her front door and called out as she walked inside.
“Mark, I need your help—” The words died on her lips as she stood in the near-empty living room, looking at a faded couch and an empty TV stand.
The flat screen was gone, along with the contents of the bookshelf and the framed prints on the wall, leaving metal hooks to dangle at eye level. Her mouth went dry and she dropped her bag and keys on the floor.
No, this wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be happening. How had they been robbed? Mark was supposed to be home all day.
“Mark?” She went into the bedroom, and saw that her laptop was gone from her desk. She opened the closet and her heart tightened. Where her boyfriend’s clothes had been were only a few wire hangers, but her clothes were all still there. They hadn’t been robbed. Mark had left. “And that bastard took my computer.”
She pulled her cell phone from her pocket and dialed his number as she stomped back into the living room. She didn’t mind his leaving, nearly as much as she minded him taking everything of value in the apartment. The asshole hadn’t even paid for any of it.
Her call went straight to voicemail. Typical. She doubted he’d be answering any of her calls from now on. She left him a colorful message telling him exactly what she thought of him, then threw the phone onto the carpeted floor, sinking down next to it and letting her head fall into her hands.
After a moment, she straightened up. Mark had been right, even if she hated him for being the first one to think of it. She had to get out of there. She didn’t have money for rent, and that was due in less than a week. She couldn’t make money with every paparazzi in town angling for a photo of her. She needed to get out of town before it was too late.
She hurried back to the bedroom, reaching under the bed for her suitcase. Nothing. The asshole had even taken her suitcase.
“You have got to be shitting me,” she screamed, then took a deep breath and tried to shake it off. It was fine. She’d just have to pile her clothes onto the back seat of her car.
She grabbed an armful of shirts from the closet and headed for the front door, stopping and nearly dropping the pile when she saw the man standing in the doorway. If she wasn’t already so upset, alarm bells would have been going off in the back of her head. As it was, she was too irritated to be afraid, even though the man had to be almost seven feet tall and built like a linebacker.
“Can I help you?”
He wore sunglasses so she couldn’t see his eyes, but he pivoted his head to take in the shabby surroundings. “I believe it will be the other way around.”
To be continued . . .
To read more of EXPOSED, Zayn and Katie’s story, and Book 3 in the Tribute Brides of the Drexian Warriors series, click the li
nk on the next page.
Also by Tana Stone
TAMED
SEIZED
EXPOSED
RANSOMED
About the Author
Tana Stone is the sci-fi romance author of the Tribute Brides of the Drexian Warriors series. The first book in the series, TAMED, was released in July, 2019. Her favorite superhero is Thor (with Jason Momoa’s take on Aquaman a close second), her favorite dessert is key lime pie, and she loves Star Wars and Star Trek equally.
She has one husband, two teenagers, and two neurotic cats. She sometimes wishes she could teleport to a holographic space station.
She loves hearing from readers! Email her any questions or comments at [email protected].
Acknowledgments
Thank you, thank you, thank you to ALL the readers who read my first book, TAMED! Thank you for the reviews and the emails. You have made a new sci-fi romance author very happy!
Special shout-outs to Tanya Saari for her insightful editing, Croco Designs for the fabulous covers, my family for their unending patience, and to all the other SFR authors who have been so supportive and kind. This is such a great genre, in large part because the authors are so cool and the readers are so awesome.
My biggest thanks, as always, is to you, the reader, for reading my books. Writers would be nowhere without readers, so thank you!
Copyright © 2019 by Broadmoor Books
Cover Design by Croco Designs
Editing by Tanya Saari
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.