Con Man: Complete Series Box Set: A Bad Boy Romance by M. S. Parker Page A

reduced me to a teenager with a crush.
    Perfect.
    What would Uaine say if he saw me now?
    Then again, who cared what that gun-toting bastard thought? He was in the past, tied up with a neat bow right where he belonged. He liked to claim that he'd made me, but I knew he hadn't done shit out of the goodness of his heart.
    It'd been easy to keep him locked away.
    But Karis was refusing to stay neatly tucked into the box I'd shoved my childhood into, and now she was pulling out all sorts of memories I thought were long since buried.
    I had to get a handle on this as soon as possible. Otherwise, my story would end up being more America’s Most Wanted than Robin Hood .
    I may have been confused about Karis, but I definitely knew that I didn't want to spend the rest of my life in jail because I got careless.

Chapter Twelve

Karis
    I woke up slowly , and for the first time since the museum theft, I didn’t feel like I'd been dragged out of a swamp. I looked around and was grateful to see that my unplanned visitor had already shown himself out. I hadn't even stirred, which said a lot about how deep I'd been sleeping. I appreciated the fact that he'd just gone without a word. Some women might've found it humiliating or offensive, but I just took it as him understanding how things were between us.
    That was good. I didn't do the hook-up thing often, but I really didn't like the awkward morning after shit.
    I glanced at my clock and realized I’d woken up about ten minutes before my alarm. Nice. I hated weekend alarms worse than the weekday ones.
    I took my time getting up. It was nice not to have to rush for once, and I felt like that, combined with my fresh eyes from a full night’s sleep, would help get me places.
    Normally, I didn’t go into the office on the weekends, but normally I wasn’t trying to beat my coworkers to the punch on a case that could potentially end up with my childhood crush facing heavy jail time. After all, the standard sentence for someone convicted of this sort of thing was twenty-five years, and I just couldn't do that to him.
    I dressed casually and was out the door in about an hour, warm piece of toast in hand. I nibbled at it lazily, feeling both alive and lucid for the first time in days.
    I should've known things were going to go to shit.
    I was almost to the subway when I felt a prickle at the back of my neck. Turning around, I scanned the area, trying to find what was setting off that primal instinct that most people had. The one that said something was off.
    As far as I could tell, none of the people around me were staring me down or sizing me up for a purse snatching. Shrugging, I continued on my walk, senses now on high alert.
    I was aware that this was usually the point where a woman would shrug and say it all must have been in her head, but I trusted my instincts more than that. They were part of what made me such a good agent.
    The feeling didn’t go away for the rest of my short commute, confirming that I didn't just imagine it. I forced myself to keep my head facing forward and ran through my various options. The worst thing I could do right now was to repeatedly look back. It would either agitate my stalker and incite them to act, or it could chase them off before I could find out why I was being shadowed.
    Instead, I stuck to short glances at reflective objects as I made my way up the stairs to the sidewalk, pretending I was none the wiser. Unfortunately, I couldn’t catch a glimpse of my pursuer during any of the brief opportunities, but I knew he was there.
    Depending on how persistent my pursuer was, they would either make the mistake of trying to follow me into the FBI offices, or sit outside and wait for me to come out – that was, of course, if it was someone looking specifically for me.
    And there was no way in hell I’d sit around the office, just waiting to come out and do this dance again.
    I pulled my cellphone out, took stock of everything around me, and then fake