“Try me.” He didn’t give her time to ask if he even had a set of cuffs, before he ordered, “Get dressed. We have a stop before we go to the pier.”

“What stop?”

“Your place.”

Kara blanched. “My place?”

“That’s right. I’m moving in. That way you are in my sights all the time.”

“No. You can’t.” He couldn’t. This was bad.

“I am.” He rounded the corner to the hallway, disappearing out of her view, and she could hear him doing something with his bag.

Kara’s mind raced for a way out of this, but she was coming up blank. Blake had already seen beneath her story and while she was smart enough to have nothing damaging lying around her place—she was too well trained for that—it didn’t matter. Blake would see the facade of a real life in her fluffy decor and use it to unwrap the truth. He’d confirm what he suspected, that her life as she’d put it on paper was fiction.

“Hop to it,” he said, reappearing and tugging a shirt the rest of the way down his chest, and over his rippling, spectacular abs. “Let’s get out of here.”

“I live in a tiny studio. You won’t like it.”

His eyes danced with mischief and heat. “All the better to get to know you in.”

“What if I don’t want you to stay with me?”

“Sorry, darlin’.” He scooped up his socks. “This time if you drug me and I pass out it’s going to be in your bed.”

***

Blake pulled up to a parking meter behind Kara’s car as she parked, and glanced at her apartment directly to his left, which was more a wooden house broken into small units and framed by two more just like it. Kara killed her lights and he quickly dialed Kyle for the second time since leaving the hotel ten minutes before.

The instant Kyle answered, he said, “You had to park in front and under a streetlight? Thanks for making it impossible for me not to be seen.”

“If your job was easy,” Blake said, unzipping his bag to remove the plastic bag holding a glass Kara had used in the hotel, “you wouldn’t like it.”