A Deal with the Bossy Devil by Kyra Parsi

2

You knowyou’re probably in a tiny bit of trouble when one of the wealthiest men in the country has his entire personal security team looking for you.

That’s right. According to Hassan, Adrien Cloutier was utilizing his entire personal security team to try and find me, which, on top of being excessive, was a little weird. Because I wasn’t hiding.

“There she is!” Peter Gladwell yelled the second we stepped out of the meeting. Like I was some sort of fugitive on the run, and he’d finallycaught me. “She was hiding in a meeting room!”

First of all, inaccurate. Second of all, wow. That dude reallydidn’t take rejection well, did he?

“You’re Ria Sanchez?” A bald, beefy man in a black suit trudged up to where we stood, his eyes darting over me like he was trying to determine the exact level of physical threat my five-foot-six frame posed against his seven feet of chunky muscle.

They were bulging out of his too-tight suit. It did not look comfortable.

“Guilty as charged,” I responded cheekily.

Alba pinched my arm so hard I physically jerked back. “Ow!”

She ignored me. “Hey, Frankie. What’s this about?”

Frankie shook his head. “Can’t talk about it. Sorry, Albs. We’ve been instructed to escort her up to Cloutier’s office as soon as possible. That’s all I can say.”

“I could have escorted myself,” I told him, continuing to rub at my arm. “But all right, let’s go.”

Alba and I followed him down the hall and out to the elevators, ignoring the stares and whispers of our colleagues as three more security personnel seamlessly fell into step around us, boxing us in. Just in case I was stupid enough to try and run, I guess.

Also, one of them kept mumbling into his own shoulder, and I’d seen enough action movies in my life (two) to know there was probably a microphone tucked in there somewhere.

The whole thing was really dramatic and excessive. Total overkill. Especially for something that could have been communicated in a single email.

“Come up to my office.” That’s it. That’s all I’d needed. One email, one sentence.

I made a mental note to tell him that.

Alba turned to me when we stepped into the elevator. “Promise me you’ll behave when you go in there. No thinly veiled insults, no smart-mouthing, and absolutely nosarcasm whatsoever.”

“Why? Does he, like, not get sarcasm?” My voice was pitched low and appropriately concerned as I pressed a hand to my chest. “Oh my god, poor thing.”

The blonde guy to my right let out what sounded like a short huff of a laugh, then tried to cover it up with a cough.

“What did I just say?” Alba snapped exasperatedly.

I had to make a conscious effort to stop my eyes from rolling to the very back of my head. “I promise I’ll try to behave.”

She let out a heavy breath as she pinched the bridge of her nose. “He’s going to eat you alive,” she whispered.

Two of the men nodded.

The elevator dinged before I could say anything else, and the six of us stepped out into the hall.

* * *

Talk about an anticlimactic letdown.

All that fuss with the security guys and Alba’s doomsday warnings, and the office was empty when we got there. No fuming Adrien, no HR rep, no threatening lawyers, and no police officers wanting to take statements.

I was instructed to take a seat on the brown leather couch and wait. “He’ll be here soon,” Frankie said before shutting the door behind him.

And then I had to pretend like I didn’t hear him lock it.

That was over an hour ago.

The first forty minutes were fine… but then my phone died, and it was just me and my thoughts, alone in Adrien’s massive, lavishly decorated office.

I lasted three minutes.

“Hey, Frankie?” I called after confirming that the door was, in fact, locked. “Any idea how much longer he’ll be?”

No answer.

“Okay… do you at least have a phone charger I could borrow?”

No answer.

“Alba?” I tried. Her desk was less than ten feet away from the door. If she was there, she should’ve been able to hear me. “You there?”

Still no answer.

It occurred to me that this could technically be considered false imprisonment. Which meant that if Adrien threatened me with a lawsuit, I could potentially counter with this.

Maybe.

I wasn’t a lawyer, but it had to be better than nothing.

“Just so we’re all on the same page, I’m officially being held here against my will,” I shouted at the door.

It occurred to me that having picture and video evidence would probably strengthen my case, and I started to regret wasting the last ten percent of my battery watching cats knock things off shelves while maintaining unwavering eye contact with their exasperated humans.

Sort of. Some of them had been really, really funny.

I bet Adrien keeps a few chargers in here somewhere…

My eyes darted around the space, looking for white wires either snaking out of outlets or coiled neatly on wooden surfaces.

It wasn’t the easiest task. The large office was crowded with a shocking number of plants. There were so many of them that it made the air smell different in here. Less stale than the rest of the office.

I wandered around, checking each outlet individually, but they were all empty. So, I decided to check his desk.

The mahogany surface was kept impressively neat, free of all dust, clutter, and any signs of human life, save for the glaringly out-of-place black box that sat right beside the wireless keyboard.

I ignored it and tried opening the top desk drawer, but it was locked. So was the second and the third and… all of them. They were all locked.

I sighed and dropped into his chair, immediately resentful of how much more comfortable it was than the one I had downstairs. I bet he wasn’t plagued by a stiff lower back if he sat in this thing for too long. It felt ergonomic as fuck.

I whirled around on it a few times, tapped my foot, my fingers, checked the ends of my hair for split ends, and tried holding my breath to see if it would alleviate some of the boredom. (It did not.)

Another ten minutes passed. Then fifteen. Twenty.

I was so bored by this point that I was tempted to start counting the leaves on the nearest fern as I watched them grow. But then my eyes fell back on the black box.

What if there’s a charger in there?

I knew there wasn’t. It didn’t look like the type of box that would house random office accessories. It was too sleek and expensive-looking for that.

What was in it, then? A gift? Cold hard cash? Virgin souls?

Open me, the box whispered seductively. I’m filled with so many phone chargers, you don’t even know. I’m bursting with them. I swear it on Pandora herself.

Two things were for absolute certain. One, the box was a liar. And two, my mind was folding in on itself because of boredom. It was bending and twisting and making up increasingly farfetched theories about the contents of the package, just so it would have something to do.

Like, for example, what if this was one of those psychology experiments? Like when you put a kid in a room with a button and tell them not to press it, so all they want to do is press it. What if there was a camera set up in here and Adrien was watching the whole thing, waiting to see how many hours it would take for me to break?

Because it was weird, right? It was weird that this entire office was American Psycho levels of organized and clean, and then there was this one random, ominously black box sitting right in the middle of Adrien’s desk, completely out of place and begging—pleading—to be opened.

Or maybe it was a genie-in-a-lamp type of situation. Adrien Cloutier was trapped inside the box and that was what was taking him so fucking long. Opening it would release him, and he’d be so grateful that he’d forget about the whole cane-to-the-balls thing and grant me three wishes.

Or maybe—and more reasonably—it was a box full of evidence he’d gathered to prove I was Waldo. Close-up snapshots of my face taken with security cameras and stuff.

But also, it could just be a decorative, diamond-encrusted butt plug. (Rich people were, er, an eccentric lot. You never really knew with them.)

Or, again, it might be a charger. So maybe a small peek wouldn’t hurt, just to be sure…

My hand was moving before I could think better of it, reaching for the smooth corner of the dark lid so I could—

BOOM!

I jumped as everything erupted. The second my finger nudged the lid open, it triggered a loud explosion of gold confetti and red glitter.

So. Much. Fucking. Glitter.

It was everywhere. Floating in the air, dusting the desk, the chair, the floor, the plants, the keyboard. And a shit ton of it had gotten inside my gaping mouth.

I stood there, shocked, holding my trembling hands in the air like I had a gun pointed at me. Because that was exactly what the explosion had sounded like. A gunshot. And it had scared the living shit out of me, holy fuck.

My pulse was thundering, pumping adrenaline through my veins. I could barely breathe as my brain slowly registered the words that had burst out of the box. I was so—

“What the fuck.”

I started, my heart jumping straight into my throat. The explosion had been so loud and distracting that I hadn’t heard the door open.

There was a man standing there, blinking at my glitter-covered self and the three large words that had popped out of the box in bold, golden letters:

FUCK YOU ADRIEN.