“I’ll send specific instructions so that can be taken care of. Do I need to know anything else right now?”
“No, it’s not time-sensitive. My friend wants this done as soon as possible, but not like her life is in danger. I appreciate it, Liam.”
“May not be thanking me in three months if the trail is cold.”
“But you’ll do the work, right?”
Honestly?
Even with the easiest agreement ever for fifty thousand dollars, no, I still wasn’t feeling it. It was one thing to be rescuing people who were genuinely in danger from someone like Snake. It was one thing to be doing it for a group that I believed in.
It was another to be playing Maury for wealthy people while your boss was shagging clients.
I would always be a dom, but I didn’t know if I would always be a DOM.
But in the short term, you know what? Even for a guy like me, fifty grand was a fuckton of money that you didn’t turn your nose up at.
“I never take a job I won’t do the work for,” I said, “so mail me whatever you want me to know, including the client’s contact info, and as soon as I get it, I’ll call her.”
“Great. This will mean a lot to her. I appreciate it, Liam.”
“Sure,” I said, more of a grunt than a full word.
Nothing was going to change the fact that I was ambivalent about this project. But if nothing else, Emily’s willingness to hand me a huge sum of money made me at least feel somewhat compelled to do my job to the fullest.
Ten Days Later
It was unseasonably warm in Breckenridge, and I barely had to trek across any snow as I headed to my mailbox. Of course, melted snow and ice presented its own tricky problems, but that was a much easier issue than frozen ice and slick snow.
When I got to my mailbox, I found a single envelope that had no return address and looked like it had gone through the ringer a bit. I knew what this was before I even opened it.
I took it back inside, sat by the fireplace, and opened the letter.
“Liam,” it started. “This is everything that Kelly sent.”
The name meant nothing to me…for all I knew, Kelly was either a childhood friend I’d long forgotten or someone I’d never even been within fifty feet of in my life.
I read through the letter. It provided a phone number, as well as details from the night. Emily hadn’t been lying about her friend being local—the night she met this guy had happened at a ski lodge that I happened to visit from time to time. Maybe I had run across this woman before.
But I read the letter as if I didn’t know the woman, and there wasn’t anything particularly descriptive that concerned me. Details like “skinny” and “sharp jaw” eliminated all the overweight people, but in a town like Breckenridge, that took out maybe ten percent of the male population—maybe.
There was nothing like an identifying scar, a tattoo, a distinct haircut, anything that would have cut through the hordes of fit white men in a town like this. So, unfortunately, like usual, it would require more work than expected. Fifty grand doesn’t get made that easily, you know.
I found her number, grabbed a burner phone I hadn’t used before, and called the number. I made sure to activate the voice modulator before the number dialed.
“Hello?”
“Is this Kelly Bennett?” I said, reading off the name from the sheet.
“Yes, and you are?”
“My name is Liam, and I am the help that Emily hired.”
“Oh, thank you, Liam. This means a lot; I really appreciate it.”
There was something oddly familiar about her voice, but I’d learned long ago that while gut feelings needed attention, they weren’t enough to assume anything. This was something to take notice of—but it wasn’t anything to definitively conclude that I knew this person. There were only so many types of voices for women before they started to repeat themselves.
“I’m a hired man who will do his job to the fullest of his abilities,” I said. “Now, I understand that you live here in Breckenridge?”
“Yes, I do,” she said. “I—Charlotte, please hush.”
Her daughter. I was never much of a kid person—really, I was never much of a close, intimate person in just about anything, period—but I did have a soft spot for kids. They had a certain innocence that I’d lost long, long ago. An innocence that made them willing to connect.
An innocence that, in certain moments, I wondered if I still had.
“I met the man after a really rough day and he just kind of…took over the moment, I guess you could say. He had a certain…what would you say—”
“Dominance,” I said.
I’d meant to say it as a question, like I was asking if that was the word that would fill in the blank for her. Instead, it came out a lot more assertive than that.
“Yeah, kind of like that.”
There was a lightness to Kelly’s voice that made me a tad nervous. This conversation was supposed to be strictly factual and logistical, not nostalgic.
“You sound like him a little bit, to be honest.”
“A lot of people sound like each other, Kelly,” I said, “and in any case, as a precautionary measure, my voice is being modulated by an app I use.”
“Oh. It sounds natural.”
I am using that app, right? It was too late to change now.
“Well, assume it is not,” I said. “As next steps,
