Page 32 of Billionaire Dragon King’s Rejected Mate

Her lips still tingled as she ran to her car. Why had she kissed him? She knew better.

She rested her head on the steering wheel and rivulets of water dripped on her console. She definitely needed a new job. If she had wondered before, his recoil and reaction to her kiss put any doubt out of her head.

Interest or not, he had rejected her. Again. Maybe she had misinterpreted what she thought she had seen in his eyes. Either way, she was done. She had to be.

You deserve someone better than me.

The words didn’t make sense no matter how many ways she tried to spin them. Hot and cold. Hot and cold. The pattern repeated so clearly now that she had to question everything she thought she understood about him.

Because which version of him was real?

The man who steadied her on the lift, who laughed like something had finally broken free inside him, who looked at her in that office like the space between them mattered or the one who dismantled her work without hesitation, who refused to meet her eyes, who pulled away like she had crossed a line he had drawn without telling her it existed?

And maybe the most frustrating part, the part that kept circling back, unwelcome and persistent, was the way he looked when he pulled away. Like it cost him something and he was the one being dragged through it.

Which made no sense because she was the one standing there afterward, trying to piece together what had just happened while he walked away.

“Then why,” she muttered to herself as she started the car, “does he look like he’s the one being tortured?”

The question hung there unanswered as she drove the short distance to her apartment. After a hot shower, she sat down with her laptop while her hair was still up in a towel on top of her head.

Her temper was a bit higher as anger replaced the hurt. At some point between shampooing and conditioning, the why Chance acted like he did stopped mattering.

What mattered was the fact that she didn’t deserve it and she was done with that.

By the time she sat down at her desk, the decision had already begun to settle into something solid, something actionable instead of emotional. She pulled up the job listings again with a sharper focus than before and scanned for anything that would give her a clean exit and a fresh start. She needed somewhere that didn’t come with the constant risk of being thrown off balance by a man who couldn’t decide what she was to him.

She deserved better than what he was giving. And if staying at TimeOff meant enduring this constant push and pull, this slow, grinding uncertainty that made even the good moments feel suspect, then she would leave.

She exhaled and rubbed her temple as she scrolled through another job listing that wanted five years of experience for an entry level position.

“Sure,” she muttered to herself. “Let me just hop in my time machine to get a job so I can get the experience that I need to apply for the job in the first place.”

A sharp thunk echoed somewhere deeper in the apartment. Randi froze with her fingers hovering over the keyboard as she tilted her head and listened. The refrigerator hummed and the clock on the wall ticked quietly. Rain tapped lightly against the windows.

“Imagination is gonna get you,” she murmured, though her shoulders remained tightened. “It’s just the wind.”

She forced herself to keep reading. Her eyes scanned words she didn’t absorb. Marketing assistant. Fast-paced environment. Must be a self-starter.

Another sound made her snap the laptop closed.

It was nothing loud or dramatic. It was… something. A faint scrape, like something shifting where it shouldn’t.

Randi’s stomach dropped. Instincts told her that it wasn’t the storm.

Every cautionary story she’d ever heard suddenly lined up in her brain like a parade of bad decisions. Her heart thudded and each beat louder than the last, as she slowly closed her laptop.

“Hello?” she called before she stopped herself. Every movie started with the damsel in distress calling out a greeting.

Silence answered.

She slid out of her chair as quietly as she could. Her bare feet were silent in the thick carpet as she crossed the room. Her gaze darted toward the hallway that led to her bedroom where the shadows suddenly seemed darker.

You’re being ridiculous. It’s just the storm.

But her body wasn’t buying it. She heard another faint sound. Someone was in her apartment.

Adrenaline surged and she hurried back to her desk. She yanked the drawer open and grabbed her pistol, suddenly grateful that she had been forced into self-defense classes. She grabbed her phone just as it lit up and started ringing in her hand.