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“Apologies,” he said through gritted teeth.
I walked to the fitting room—man, it was nice to have a lock with an actual door instead of a tent inside of a tent—and tried it on.
Of course it didn’t fit.
Sometimes, I could swear he made it too small on purpose.
Usually, all he had to do was cut a few seams and let them out. It took no time at all because he ‘allowed for that to happen’ according to him, but he still had to fix them almost every single time I went and tried something new on.
Gritting my teeth, I walked out of the fitting room and said, “It doesn’t fit.”
The gleam in his eyes told me he knew it wouldn’t.
The ass.
I bet he had to take it in a little more than he usually did, too, because I’d been working out so much and training for this marathon. It would’ve been hilarious had it actually fit.
But alas, that wasn’t how life worked for me.
I never got to stick it to the bad guy.
Stefan St. Croix, the costume designer who was on his last leg with this company, was on his final few strikes with me.
And the next ten minutes would decide whether my bad mood would carry out into his bad day.
Because every time I tried on a costume, it got me angrier than fire.
And my stupid redheaded temper had nothing to do with my dislike for this man.
“Of course it doesn’t fit. It never does,” he huffed.
Fucker.
Goddamn goat fucking fucker.
Dick.
I walked toward him and turned, allowing him to get to the back of my dress where I couldn’t quite get it zipped up.
“If you lose about…” he started to say, but I interrupted him.
“Say anything about my weight, and I’ll be utilizing my new powers,” I said through gritted teeth.
Stefan scoffed. But amazingly, he kept his mouth shut.
The next ten minutes dragged by as he poked, prodded, pinched and pushed.
When I was finally changed and out the door again, I was annoyed as hell.
Which had to be why I didn’t notice the duskiness or the person hiding in the gloom until it was too late.
I made it three feet into the shadows between tents when I felt a strong, muscular arm loop around my belly.
Before I could protest, scream, or make any sort of cry for help, another hand came up and covered my lips.
The first thing to hit me was the fear and the reminder of how it’d felt last night when the same thing had happened.
The second was the smell of cloves and spice.
“It’s me,” he whispered darkly, seductively, into my ear.
I melted.
I knew that voice.
I knew that scent.
I knew the feel of him against my back.
Him.
It was him.
And ‘him’ was all I had to go on, because I hadn’t gotten his name.
He hadn’t given it to me, and I hadn’t asked.
“You,” I breathed.
Him.
He was here.
Miles away from where I saw him last.
I started to tremble.
He let me go only to reposition his hands so that his arms were locked more solidly around me.
“I want to throw him off a building for touching you,” he said.
Him being the costume designer.
Today had been fitting day for our new costumes.
And he’d definitely been touching me all over.
I’d thought it was a bit excessive, but he’d done it to all the women getting fitted that day—I would know, I’d watched them all get done hundreds of times.
“Then do it,” I suggested, surprised by my own words.
Damn, when did I get so bloodthirsty?
It was him.
It had to be.
I wasn’t like this with anybody else.
I was the nice one.
The one who did what was needed of her.
The one who bridged gaps. The one who volunteered at animal shelters in my spare time.
“How badly do y’all need him?” he asked.
I thought about it.
It’d taken us months to get him on board with staying in a permanent spot in Dallas—apparently he liked to move around, which lined up well with his sleazy ways.
Hell, everything about the newly renovated Singh Circus was frustratingly hard.
Everyone who was anyone wanted to work with us. But on their terms, not ours.
Everything was a fight.
New hires wanting more than fair pay. Hell, some of them even wanted to have tips for their performances.
Then there were the security details that Hannibal had provided. They wanted to change everything. Not that I blamed them, to be honest, but shit. All the renovations and suggested security protocols cost money.
And that was something that we just didn’t have in abundance seeing as we’d paid two and a half million dollars for the biggest goddamn building in Dallas, Texas.
But you had to have real estate to be able to do business in a permanent spot, and though we could’ve done the whole tent thing for a while, it was something that we thought might be better to do sooner rather than later seeing as we were trying to rebrand ourselves.
