Stockholm Syndromance: A Bad Boy Romance (Still a Bad Boy Book 4)

by Ada Scott

  I reached into my pocket and slid the folded piece of paper across his desk. He picked it up and started unfolding it.

  “For fuck sake. We’ll have to send some guys to give them a message. It’s going to cost us, and it’s coming out of your pay. What the fuck do you need all this extra shit for?”

  “Research and development.”

  “Fuck that, we’re not buying all this. Phosphorus? What the fuck is cyclo… cyclohex-”

  “Cyclohexane. Pay me my money and buy what the fuck I have listed there, or tell Alberico that you decided it wasn’t worth my time working on what might be the next F-Pro.”

  I could see Giovanni mulling over how that conversation would go, given how my new product aimed at the sports market had given them an income boost in direct sales, as well as affecting their sports fixing income. A brain like mine was too good an opportunity for them to waste.

  “Fuck it. Fine. Here.”

  Giovanni pulled a briefcase out from behind his desk and spun it so the latches faced me before sliding it across. I stood and opened it and made a little “Mmmm” of appreciation. This was a sight that would never get old.

  Out of all the crime families in the country, the Acardis were the newest. They were still old as shit, but because they’d started their existence as the most modern of them all, they had a kind of acceptance of new technology and methodology that that the other families were slower to adopt.

  The Acardis focused on a different set of schemes than the others. They were involved with cyber-fraud, and I even heard they had a team devoted to online dating scams, where they not only extorted cash from lonely men and women, but if they hooked a person in any kind of position of power, they blackmailed them too. Politicians, business men and women, you name it.

  This technological slant they had was why I always transferred the cash into my own backpack, and took the money to the lab before I took it anywhere else. I had the equipment there to check it for anything they might do to trace it. So far they hadn’t, but the last thing I wanted was for them to know where my stash was.

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Don’t forget your fuckin’ place again. You’re gettin’ paid more than some of the fuckin’ Italian guys and you’re on thin ice.”

  “Right. Have a fuckin’ nice day, and take care of the Cannibals.”

  I shouldered my backpack and headed to the door, noticing Johnny watching Giovanni for any signal that I should be reprimanded for my less than respectful exit. Apparently no signal came, as I didn’t have a gun shoved in my face again.

  Daydreams of dropping Giovanni in a vat of acid comforted me as I took the elevator down. By the time I reached the ground floor, I was over it. He’d get exactly what he deserved in the end.

  In the meantime, life was rolling along pretty well. Especially last night.

  That girl. Sarina. Her virginity was mine, and she’d been the best lay of my life. Incredible.

  Ordinarily, I would have been over the moon if I woke up and found the girl gone instead of hanging around asking me for some free F or wanting a gift or some shit. I actually wanted to taste her again, listen to her screaming as she came. So good.

  And not only sexy as fuck, but feisty… and so innocent-looking too. From what little I’d spoken to her… she seemed smart and even nice.

  Mom said she wanted to see you with a nice girl before she-

  I cut the thought off before it could finish. None of that was going to happen. I didn’t see myself with a nice girl, and Mom wasn’t going to die. Not on my watch.

  I didn’t have Sarina’s number… but she did say she was staying at Cumberland. It wouldn’t be that hard to track her down. Maybe I’d drop by in a few days, once she’d had a chance to recover and could handle another session.

  Sarina

  I’d woken up that morning after only a couple hours of sleep when my common sense burst through the front door of my mind like, “Honey I’m hooome… aaaahhhhhhh!” and found me in bed with a drug dealer. This was what it felt like to be the worst undercover cop in the history of the job.

  The cherry on the cake was how I couldn’t find my panties while trying to get dressed like a ninja. They were still there somewhere, and I had to return home with no underwear on. After the physical exertion of the previous night, my thighs almost cramped up in the taxi, I was clamping them together that tightly.

  Since then, I’d been drifting through a couple days like a zombie. The little group I’d taken out to use as my cover couldn’t stop talking about what I’d done to the gang member, but I had no way to match their enthusiasm, and didn’t accept their invites to hit the town again.

  “Cumberland toga party tomorrow, Badass,” Millie said as we returned to the dorm after our Intro to Human Resources lecture, using the nickname the girls had bestowed upon me. “It’s in the dorm and you’ve definitely had long enough to recover.”

  “Hmmm. I don’t know, I’m not feeling too great.”

  “What did that guy do to you? I’m gonna get the details eventually, you should just tell me now. Hi!”

  Millie waved and smiled at one of the guys from our dorm as he passed us, heading in the other direction. Her fresh looks and bubbly personality in a petite package were pretty popular with the opposite sex, but it was like water off a duck’s back with her.

  Not so much for me. On top of the obvious self-chastising I was doing, because what happened between Ryan and I never should have happened, I was worrying about what he thought about me, my body, my… performance. Why hadn’t he called? I hadn’t given him my phone number, but why hadn’t he called? Did he like me? Was I somebody that deserved to be liked?

  “Nothing. We just talked.”

  Millie laughed. “Yeah, I heard you the first time and I believe you just as much now as I did then. Was he really that good? Or that bad?”

  “At talking?”

  “Yes, talking.” Millie held up her fingers in exaggerated quote marks.

  I stumbled over my words for a second and just ended up blushing, much to Millie’s amusement. In the end, I supposed it didn’t really matter anyway, because I had a meeting scheduled with my CO tomorrow and I was going to formally resign.

  There was a badge sitting in my locker at the police station, ready and waiting for me to put it back on after this assignment, but I didn’t deserve it. The all-encompassing failure of my first undercover assignment was tough to deal with.

  None of the steps I’d taken in advancing my career had been missteps until now, and it was impossible to reconcile the one thing I’d always cared about with the confusion that the very sight of Ryan had instilled in me. What could you even call this turmoil churning away inside of me?

  The two of us walked past the dining hall where the menu advised that dinner that night would be Black Bean Beef. I sighed.

  Mercifully, Millie changed the subject to the lecture we’d just been through for the duration of the elevator ride up to the fourth floor we both lived on. The mercy was short-lived; when we came around the corner, we were confronted by a face I’d last seen fast asleep in the bed where I’d lost my virginity.

  Millie bounced in glee and I froze. Ryan looked so out of place in the dorm, on the campus in general, amongst all the singlets and flip flops with his suit sans tie and polished black shoes.

  He was leaning against the wall next to my door, reading something on his phone, when Millie’s antics caught his attention. He looked up and Millie gestured at me like a beautiful assistant on a game show, displaying what our contestant could win today.

  Ryan smiled and put his phone away, turning towards us. I could see he had a single rose in his other hand and he was getting closer. Correction, I was getting closer, with Millie’s help via a hand on the small of my back.

  “Found you,” he said when I arrived at my door.

  “How… oh, I told you I was in Cumberland?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Is that
for me?” I pointed at the rose.

  “No, I was going to eat it.” He smiled. “Of course it’s for you. Here, I hope you like it, there are two other Sarinas staying in Cumberland this year and I had to fight hard to keep one of them away from it after I showed up at her door.”

  I accepted the flower and held it up to my nose without thinking. It smelled heavenly, and when I looked up into his eyes I could feel myself melting all over again.

  Get yourself together, Sarina.

  “Sarina Bell, now I know.” He pointed to the name written on a card on my door.

  “Well… thank you.”

  “So… uh… I was wondering, I had a really good time… uh… talking to you the other…”

  Ryan seemed to be slowly coming to the realization that there was a girl almost attached to my elbow with a smile on her face so wide you could have seen it from the surface of the moon. He glanced in her direction.

  “Sorry, if you don’t mind…?”

  “I’m Millie,” she said.

  “Well, hi. I’m Ryan. Hey, Millie, if you don’t mind, I’d like to just… you know.”

  “I don’t mi-”

  “Millie?” I urged her in the direction of her own room with my eyes as forcefully as I could.

  “Oh! Well, nice to meet you. Be nice to Badass, OK? You saw what she can do.”

  Ryan raised his eyebrow as Millie double-timed it to her door and slipped inside. “Badass?”

  “Apparently that’s my nickname now, after that night in the club.”

  “Makes sense. So, Sarina, I was wondering if I could take you out sometime? Sometime soon? Maybe dinner so we can talk a bit? I see you’ve got “Black Bean Beef” tonight. Just sayin’.”

  Sarina was my real first name, and standing in front of such a powerfully sexy man, holding a rose and hearing him use my name and ask me out on a date literally made my heart flutter. A smile started to play at the corners of my mouth.

  “Does that mean yes?”

  “Yes… but…”

  “But what?”

  But I needed to report in to my CO. My meeting was tomorrow. I could salvage this operation. Colossal fuck up or not, I did at least have some relevant information already, didn’t I? Some cops were in character for months before anything happened, so I was kind of ahead. In a way.

  “But not tonight. How about Monday?”

  “Oh, a school night, eh?”

  “I am a badass…”

  “Alright. Monday. I’ll pick you up at seven. Until then, though…”

  Ryan reached up and laid his hands along my jawline, fingers buried in my hair, and he tilted my head up to meet him. I crushed the rose against my chest as he kissed me, first tenderly and then with more force.

  He turned us so my back was to my door and I hit it with a little “oof.” Ryan’s breath was hot and perilously close to the crazy-button he’d found on my neck as he whispered in my ear.

  “So, if we’re not going out tonight, maybe we should stay in.”

  The desire to say “OK,” find my keys and not leave my room for the whole weekend was potent, but I somehow found the willpower to let go of my rose with one hand and push against his chest until he backed off by half a step. I licked my lips and gulped.

  “Wait… this is going to sound crazy after the other night, but… I want to take things slower. Is that OK by you?”

  Ryan gave me that cat-and-mouse smile again. “Fine by me. I’ll go, but can I give you one thing just so you don’t forget me?”

  “What’s that?”

  Ryan bent down again and gave me a kiss that left me breathless. I sucked in as much air as I could through my nose, my world filling with his mind-bendingly sexy scent, and I sighed like a lovesick schoolgirl when he finally left my lips to their own devices.

  I gave him my number, he gave me his, and then he left with that smile never leaving his face. Round one definitely went to him, but I could do this. All I needed to do was string him along until we hit the friendzone and then it was business as usual.

  I can do this.

  Sarina

  Highston was a major hub for the Palladium Lines bus company. Their services and central bus terminal provided a cost-effective way to get from campus, through a crowded space that would be a hassle to follow me in, to a bus stop a short walk away from a parking lot, where Sergeant Josiah Shelton was waiting for me.

  The pouring rain gave me every reason to move hastily, as I didn’t have an umbrella. I leapt into his car within a fraction of a second after opening the door, wiping my face. Shelton, always prepared, handed me a towel.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I was surprised to hear from you so soon, Beckett. That usually means you need to get the hell out, or things have gone uncommonly well. Which is it with you?”

  “I’ve made contact with the suspect, sir.”

  I gave my hairline one last wipe, hoping to preempt the next several drips that would fall across my face, folded the towel up, and handed it back to him. He threw it in the back seat.

  “Already? Where? The club?”

  “Yes, sir. He showed up the first night I went there.”

  “Anything interesting happen?”

  Something about the way he looked at me almost made me break out in a cold sweat. He had this all-knowing quality about him that all my most efficient superior officers had over the last several years.

  I licked my lips and gave my face another wipe with the back of my hand. “A lot of things, actually.”

  “Go on.”

  “The suspect arrived at about eleven thirty on Wednesday, and I saw him exchange something for money with multiple individuals.”

  “OK, so, if that was F, he’s still got a source.”

  “Yes, sir. After a short time, he joined us on the dancefloor.”

  “Us?”

  “Some of the girls from the dorm. I managed to get his attention and ended up talking with him in a booth in private. He… um… expressed an interest in becoming romantically involved with me.”

  “Understood. Go on,” the deep all-knowing voice came, as he looked out through the blurry windshield at people rushing to and from their cars.

  “So, my plan at this stage is to string him along for a while. Get to the friendzone, so to speak.”

  “Watch yourself, Officer Beckett. You’re not the first undercover cop to opt for that path. It’s got more blind corners with freight trains coming the other way than you might think. Especially for our female officers. These people…” He shook his head.

  “I’ll… I’ll be careful, sir,” I said, weaker than I would have liked.

  “Did he talk about F at all?”

  “Not yet, sir. He avoided the topics of drugs and money altogether and I don’t think I could have pushed it any further than I did.”

  “Agreed. You’re already ahead of the game, no need to get too cocky and blow it all. Anything else?”

  “Oh yes indeed. Ryan Crewe has some kind of link with The Cannibals.”

  Sergeant Shelton looked at me sideways. “The Cannibals? What kind of link?”

  “I’m not sure, sir. All I know is that they showed up and Ryan immediately excused himself to talk with them. I couldn’t hear a word they said, but things got very violent very quickly. I was forced to intervene because the suspect was outnumbered, and one of the Cannibals produced a knife.”

  “Intervene, you say?”

  “With a bottle of champagne over the head.”

  My CO closed his eyes, raised his eyebrows and sighed. “Go on.”

  “Between us, we subdued the other gang member, then we made a getaway like a regular Bonnie and Clyde. We went to his apartment, on Fifty-Seventh, for a short time, and I was still unable to steer the conversation to drugs or money. Then I returned to my dorm.”

  My heart was hammering in my chest as I watched him for signs of arresting me for my blatant omission of a few choice details. I could see him running his tongue over his
teeth inside his closed mouth for a few moments as he mulled my story over.

  “Something’s not right here,” he said.

  My heart exploded, and all of a sudden there was nothing booming in my ears at all, just the background noise of rain hitting the roof of his car. I’d just screwed myself bigtime.

  I could feel my mouth creaking open as if on rusty hinges, with a torrent of begging about to pour out, when Sergeant Shelton continued his musings.

  “This isn’t exactly in The Cannibals’ wheelhouse. F isn’t crack, it’s not like any junkie looking to make a quick buck can make it in a dirty old bottle. We haven’t even been able to find a lab that can reproduce it accurately.”

  “Th-that’s what I thought too, sir,” I said, scrambling to recover. “But it’s still possible, isn’t it? All the rumors say the F King is one guy, so if he chose to work with The Cannibals… who knows, right?”

  “You’re not wrong there, but don’t take it as a given. Keep looking for other possibilities.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you know when you’re seeing Crewe again?” he asked.

  “Monday night, sir.”

  “Alright. Anything else?”

  “No sir, that’s everything so far.”

  “OK, get back to it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I pulled at the door handle, but before I’d opened the door more than a crack, Sergeant Shelton grabbed me by the elbow. With the rain streaming in through even that tiny gap, I turned back to my commanding officer.

  “Sarina?”

  “Sir?”

  “Do what you need to do, but even with such a fast start, this isn’t going to be easy. You’ve had a short and impressive career so far, and I have every faith in you, but you’re the youngest undercover cop I’ve ever supervised. And I’ve seen more seasoned officers than you lose it after being completely submerged in this shitty world for too long. Look after yourself.”

  “I will… thank you, sir.”

  “Don’t miss your bus.”

  I dashed out into the rain again, practically sprinting for the bus stop. That was a harrowing experience that my heart, career and life might not be able to endure again.