Big Bad Boys: A Romance Collection

by Wylder, Penny

  You spent years walking right past him, part of me points out. And besides, it’s not like his profile said anything much about his interests or hobbies. Or even his job. Maybe I just assumed we’d have nothing in common. He was pretty but that was about it.

  Zayne, for his part, has sprung into action. He scrolls through his phone, and then hands it to me. I stare at the app page, both unfamiliar and familiar all at once. It’s his other profile, his real one. There are a few dozen messages sitting unread—probably from all those girls he’s been messaging while we’ve been apart for a few hours, I can’t help thinking, because even if he explains this profile, it still doesn’t explain why he’d lie to me about wanting to get off the app when he clearly doesn’t want to stop messaging other women yet. I ignore those and watch as he swipes onto my profile, searching by previous matches.

  There I am. Right on the screen, in the same pixels that damned him yesterday.

  Previously matched, it says, but there’s no contact button, no way to message. He’s right. We matched at some point, and then I unmatched him.

  “But…” I trail off, biting my lip.

  He heaves a sigh. “Clove, I liked you from the start. I tried to talk to you on here, but you shut it down. And you never noticed me at the door. So that night when that asshole tried to follow you home, and you finally seemed to look at me—really look— I had to jump on that chance. The only way to talk to you, I figured, was a match like this. I already knew you were on the app, and we live in the same building, so I figured if I made a new profile, it’d pair us soon enough. And it did, thank god.” His eyes bore into mine, as if he’s willing me to believe him.

  I want to. So badly. I want to just give in, quit asking all these questions, trust him. But that’s so hard to do. Especially after everything that’s happened. Everything I’ve seen.

  I shake my head. “Okay, so you made a whole profile just to stalk me. Great. That’s a real point in your favor.”

  “It wasn’t to stalk you, Clove, it was just to start a conversation. If you hadn’t been interested, I would’ve dropped things right away. But you answered, you struck up a conversation with me. It went both ways.”

  “Right. And how special was it really? More entertaining than the other dozen conversations you have going on right now?” I roll my eyes and hand the phone back to him.

  “What, these?” He laughs, a scoff in the back of his throat. “I haven’t checked this profile in weeks. Especially not since I met you.”

  “Then why do you have so many unread messages?” I point out, rolling my eyes. Now I do lean past him to jab the first floor button.

  He’s faster though, and double-taps it to unselect the floor, leaving us suspended in midair once more. “Clove, look.” He opens his message section and points me at it. “See these last read messages? They’re from weeks ago, some of them months.”

  I stare at the inbox, my brow furrowing. “That can’t be right.”

  Now it’s his turn to scowl. “What, I can’t possibly be telling you the truth?”

  “What happened to all the conversations with the other women?” I counter, crossing my arms.

  “Other… What? Clove, there are no other women. There haven’t been since we met.”

  “That’s not what I saw.”

  “Saw where?” His frown has deepened even further, though I don’t think it’s directed at me. He looks a million miles away now, thinking hard.

  To bring him back to reality, I pull my phone out of my pocket. Now it’s my turn to open my app and pull up the messages that came in yesterday. I flip the screen around, hold it out for him to see. At least today the incoming calls and spamming sext-messages from total strangers have calmed down enough that I can safely use it. Enough to show him this, at any rate.

  He reads. With every line he reads, his eyebrows rise higher, and his jaw clenches. By the time he reaches the end of the messages, he looks furious, angrier than I’ve ever seen him. His fists are clenched at his sides, and his whole body trembles from the force of his fury.

  “How fucking dare she.”

  I swallow again. Against my better judgment, against all of my instincts, I believe that anger. He can’t be this good of an actor, no way. “Your ex?” I ask, a hesitant tremor in my voice.

  He clenches my phone so tight in one fist that I’m almost afraid the screen will shatter. “How did she even…”

  I gently pry my phone from his fingers, mostly to save its life. “Did she make up those conversations? Because some of them…” I pull open the one where he’s talking to another girl. Trouble sleeping? “Seem awfully familiar.” I lift one pointed eyebrow.

  Zayne grimaces. “Some of them are real. Probably most of them, I don’t remember. But the dates are all wrong. Look.” He scrolls through his phone. It takes him a while, but he eventually locates one of the conversations, the one with CandyCane. Sure enough, it took place almost two years ago. Same with another one, shortly afterward, with XtraSaucy. In fact, almost all of the conversations are from that time period. The screenshots are real, identical to his account message history. All except for the dates which had been carefully, meticulously altered.

  “It’s all the people I was messaging right after she and I broke up,” he finally says, his tone heavy. “Right when I first moved in here…” He winces at one particularly sexy conversation. “Some of these are embarrassing.”

  “Not as embarrassed as I am,” I mutter, wincing.

  “No, Clove. You couldn’t have known.” He wraps an arm around me, and finally, after what feels like holding my breath for 24 hours, I sink into his embrace once more. It scares me, how much I crave this. How desperately I wanted him to touch me, even when I thought he’d been betraying me, screwing me around. I still wanted him, even when I knew I’d have to walk away.

  That scares the shit out of me.

  “The screenshots were so realistic…”

  “I’d have thought the same thing as you,” Zayne admits with a clenched jaw. “I’m so sorry that you have to go through this mess. You don’t deserve this kind of drama. If you want to walk away now, to spare yourself, I will completely understand.”

  “Hell no.” I wrap my arms around him too, and lean into his warm embrace. “You don’t deserve this kind of drama either, Zayne. I mean, how did she even get those conversations?”

  He scowls. “She must have access to my account. Nothing else makes sense. She must have gotten in there and been able to see the conversations, and…” His eyes widen, his jaw slackening. “That’s how she found your photo, too. It has to be. She took it from your inbox, where we were messaging.”

  “Since she knows about both of your accounts, it must not have been too hard,” I agree. “If she hacked this old one, she must not have had a hard time hacking the new one too.”

  “Christ, how long has she been doing this?” Zayne shakes his head. “Has she targeted other people I’ve messaged? I never heard anyone talking about being harassed like this, having their photos put up on a website somewhere…”

  “Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. They might have just assumed you did it and sworn off ever speaking to you again.” I sigh.

  “Shit.” Zayne pockets his phone in a single, angry gesture. “I have to stop this. I will. I’ll fix it.”

  “How?” I catch his eye, my own wide with fear.

  “I’m going to confront her. Tell her she needs to stop pulling this kind of shit. I’ll go to the police otherwise. We have proof it was her, and if she hacked my accounts, then she probably still has more screenshots like this saved. None of this is legal, Clove.”

  I can feel myself nodding, my heart rising in my chest once more. But still… “You shouldn’t have to talk to her. Let me.”

  “I couldn’t ask you to do that.”

  “But you have all this history, this baggage. It will hurt you to confront her.”

  He’s shaking his head hard. “It’s my mess, Clove. I’ll clean it
up.” He steps back and presses the ground floor button. The elevator heaves around us, like it’s relieved to finally be in motion. As we whir down toward the first floor, he finally seems to take a look at my outfit, the whole thing, from head to toe. “What about you? You look like you’re off to take care of business, too.”

  I nod, steeling myself once more, shoulders squared. “I’m going to get my job back. No matter what it takes.”

  He smiles and leans in to kiss my lips, just once, feather-soft and light, a kiss that’s there and gone again before I have time to blink. “You will. You’re incredible, Clove. If anyone can talk your boss into having you back in the office, it’s you. And if you need me to come in and testify about it, explain that it was all this psycho…”

  I laugh, shaking my head. “Somehow I don’t think that would help. If you tried to explain that it’s all a big misunderstanding, someone stole my sext to you…” I raise an eyebrow pointedly.

  He grins in response, and leans down to kiss me one last time before the doors open. “Well, I offered.”

  “You did. I’ll keep that in mind when I’ve finished winning my case.”

  “Good luck,” he says, offering me a hand as I step out of the elevator. I take it, and twine my fingers through his, squeezing tightly just once for affirmation.

  “You too,” I tell him, pouring every ounce of feeling into my tone that I can. I hope he can do this. I hope he can talk his ex down. I hope it won’t hurt him too much to be around her, to have all those old memories drug up. I hope she stops coming after him, leaves him alone to live a normal life.

  I hope a lot of things today.

  Time to start acting, at least on the ones I can affect.

  I square my shoulders and cast Zayne one last long smile, then stride out through the glass doors of our apartment building to face the coming storm.

  * * *

  “And you want me to tell the board this?” My boss stares at me across the desk, hands folded on top, leaning forward just far enough that I can see the wrinkles at the edges of her eyes, the corners of her mouth. Normally she’s a cheery person, always smiling and laughing. Even when we do our annual performance reviews, she’s happy, complimenting me on my work and cheerfully explaining any areas that she thinks I should work on in the coming year.

  It feels strange to see her frown, especially this much.

  “If you think it would help,” I say, “sure. But either way, I wanted you to know exactly what’s going on. I want you to know that this isn’t who I am, who I ever would be in my professional life.” I’d just finished explaining the entire saga to her, starting from the point where my doorman saved my ass, all the way up through the awkward part where I shared one risqué but entirely consensual photo with him, and to the part where his psycho ex creepily hacked into all of his accounts and took it upon herself to make an example of me. All for daring to date a guy who dumped this girl years ago.

  My boss sighs and rubs a temple with one finger, massaging it in slow circles. “I don’t know that sharing this level of detail with our higher-ups would help, Clove.”

  “Then don’t.” I bite my lip. “Can we just explain that we found out who made the website, and we’re working on getting it removed? And that I’ve never done anything like this before and never would in the future.” I don’t need to send Zayne naughty photos anymore—he can see what I’ve got to share in person. I’ve learned my lesson about putting myself at risk, even with someone I trust.

  I square my shoulders, rest my new purse on the table between us, and pull out some charts that I made late last night, as I lay in bed with the worst case of insomnia I’ve ever battled.

  “In the meantime, I think this might help convince them that I’m worth keeping around.” I spread the charts on the table. One of them is my projects’ performances for this full year. I had the one disappointing campaign, true, and the fact that it happened right before this whole mess kicked off isn’t helping me, I’m sure. But that was one mediocre campaign in a heap of really successful ones. I point out the growth in all the areas I’ve been marketing, along with the results of my last few experimental campaigns, one of which was entirely my idea and generated a ton of revenue from an untapped stream for the whole company.

  Next, I draw out another series of charts that I made. Ones to explain how much more useful I’d be if I were able to start working on relaunching the failed campaign from last week. I put together a whole new strategy and an estimated schedule of how quickly I’d be able to make up for the lost time and investments in that campaign.

  “Just give me a chance,” I tell her. “And I’ll make it worth your while. The board can keep reviewing the case, decide later what they want to do about me, if they can keep me on or not. But in the meantime, let me help you. Let me keep doing my job. Please.” I lock eyes with Stacy. “I need this. Not the money, just the… The activity, the job itself. I need to have something to do. It’s been just a few days and I’m already going stir-crazy.”

  She sighs. “I know this job means a lot to you, Clove. And you’re right, you’ve always been a highly valuable member of our team…”

  “So let me come back. Please.”

  “It’s not up to me. If it were, you would never have been asked to leave at all.” Stacy purses her mouth, her fingers dancing over the desk phone beside her, as she considers. “But you’re right. This is crazy, to keep you out of the office. Especially if you’re sure there won’t be any more leaks like this. And if you already know who this is, we can file a lawsuit against them—this person hacked into our company servers too, you know. They sent spam messages about that website and your… ah, image. To our clients. We’ll press charges.”

  My heart leaps at the same time my stomach twists. Will Zayne want that? He said he’d warn his ex, not straight up sue her. But then again, if she’s done all this to me, how much has she tortured other girls in his life? All for simply existing?

  I can feel myself nodding. “I agree,” I say. “We’re going to confront her, but either way… She can’t feel free to do this again. She can’t keep ruining people’s lives like this.”

  My boss extends a hand. I lift mine, clasp her fingers in a single tight handshake. “Deal,” she says, and I’m surprised to find that after all this, we’re both smiling.

  So there’s one problem down. Here’s hoping the rest fall into place just as easily.

  12

  Success, I text Zayne on the train home. Just to his real phone number now, having learned my lesson about trusting app accounts. How about you?

  I don’t want to admit how nervous I am to hear back. How much my heart sticks in my throat until my phone finally dings, and I can flip it open to see the reply.

  Went as well as it could have. Which is to say, not great. But I think she took me seriously. I think she’ll really stop this time.

  Good, I reply. Then I bite the inside of my lip. I have to tell him. Because we need to talk about something that came up in my meeting…

  I text Zayne from the train to meet me outside our building. It’s his day off, which is good, since he looks like he slept on a floor all night and then spent the last hour arguing with a psychotic ex.

  “Coffee shop?” he asks before I can even open my mouth to suggest it. I shoot him a grateful sideways smile and we head off toward what’s quickly becoming our spot. Somewhere along the way, he loops his hand through mine, and I squeeze his fingers tightly, enjoying the warmth of his grip, the steadiness of his support.

  “So,” he starts as we step into the warm, reassuringly coffee-scented air of the corner coffee shop where we had our first date. “Tell me what happened.”

  “I need caffeine first,” I protest. Like a mind-reader, he’s already in line. He orders for us both, and I notice with a little secret thrill that he remembered my order from last time. He already knows how I like my coffee. How many guys would notice that, let alone remember it?

  We take a seat at t
he back, the same one where we sat last time, and I blow on my latte while he takes small sips of his tall black coffee.

  “You made it sound like bad news,” he finally says, when the silence has stretched on too long.

  “It’s not. It’s just… Complicated news,” I reply.

  He lifts his eyebrows, expectant. Waiting for me to explain.

  It doesn’t take more than that to get me to spill. I launch into the full story, from the moment I first told my boss everything, up to her proposal. “I don’t know how you’d feel about it; I know you wanted to warn her, give her a chance to back off, but she hacked corporate servers, Zayne…”

  “I know.” He grimaces and blows on his coffee absently, before taking another long gulp. “But you’re right. She’s broken laws at this point. I can’t protect her from herself. It was her choice to hack your company, use that against you. She’d already gone way too far with taking that photo and putting it out in the world, she didn’t have to try and ruin your career along with it.” He scowls and shakes his head so hard that a lock of his blond hair falls across his forehead. I fight the urge to reach out and brush it back. That’s fast becoming a habit already.

  “I’m sorry, Zayne.”

  “Don’t be,” he answers fiercely, almost as soon as the words are out of my mouth. “I keep telling you this, Clove, but I mean it—you did not do anything. You don’t deserve any of this. Whatever we can do to fix this for you, we will.”

  “So if I asked you for your ex’s details to send to my boss…”

  He nods. “I’ll send you everything I have as soon as we get back home. Name, address, the way I think she hacked my account, in case it’s how she hacked your company’s too. All of it.”

  “Thank you.” I bite my lip. “So…” His turn now. “How did your side of it go?”

  He groans and drains the rest of his coffee in one swig. “She’s still living in the same apartment she had when we were dating. I’m not sure she has much of a social life, friends. It was weird.” He winces, closes his eyes. “She seems obsessed, really.”