She’d gone a few feet when she heard him calling after her.

“It doesn’t count as a walk home if you’re half a block ahead of me,” he said, teasingly echoing her earlier words.

“I’m releasing you of all your obligations,” she shouted without looking back. She could hear his laughter, warm and rich, following behind her.

When she reached her building, she cut through the courtyard and walked straight to the weather-faded wooden stairwell that would take her to the second-floor apartment she shared with Rae.

“Rylann.”

She turned around and saw Kyle standing at the bottom of the stairs.

“I was wondering if you’re sticking around this cornfield for the summer?” he said.

“Not that it matters, but yes.” She sniffed. “I’ve got an internship with the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”

Kyle climbed up the steps to meet her midway on the staircase. “In that case, have dinner with me tomorrow.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

He tugged the collar of the shirt she was wearing. “You’re just going to take my shirt and run?”

She’d completely forgotten about that. She began to slide the shirt off. “Sorry. I—”

Kyle put his hand over hers. “Keep it. I like the way it looks on you.”

Darn sparks shot right down to her toes. She gave him her best no-nonsense stare. “This was supposed to be just a walk.”

“It’s only one date, counselor. We’ll get chicken wings and beer and bitch about how bored we’re going to be living here this summer.”

Actually, that didn’t sound half-bad. “And what if I’d said that I wasn’t sticking around for the summer?” Rylann asked. “What if you’d been right, and tomorrow I was leaving for Chicago to move into my quaint and overpriced two-bedroom apartment in Wrigleyville?”

He grinned, a smile that could melt the polar ice cap. “Then I guess I’d be driving two hours to pick you up for those chicken wings. See you tomorrow, counselor. Eight o’clock.” With that, he turned and strode back down the staircase.

A few minutes later, safely ensconced inside her apartment, Rylann leaned her head against the front door, musing over the evening’s turn of events. She closed her eyes, a smile curling at the edges of her lips despite all her attempts to fight it off.

Wow.

AS FATE WOULD have it, however, the good feeling didn’t last.

Rylann waited until ten o’clock, two hours after the time Kyle had said he’d be at her apartment. Then she finally gave up and slid out of her jeans and heels.

He’d stood her up.

This was okay, she assured herself. Her internship, which she’d been looking forward to for months, started in a week, and she didn’t need to be distracted by first dates with a sometimes-charming sexy billionaire computer geek and the whole will-he-call rigmarole.

Poor Rae would be crushed, she thought. Before leaving for the summer, she’d left Rylann her black Manolos specifically for the occasion.

“I can’t have you running around in flip-flops for your date with a billionaire,” Rae had lectured, playing it cool and trying not to appear too sentimental as she’d handed over the shoe box to Rylann before getting into her car.

Rylann had hugged her friend. “You and the rest of your shoes need to get back here soon.”

“Call me tomorrow and let me know how the date goes,” Rae had said. “Maybe he’ll fly you to Italy for pizza or rent out a restaurant for your first date.”

Or maybe he’ll just forget the whole thing.

Resolved to ignore the disappointment she felt, Rylann changed into a camisole and drawstring pajama pants. No sense in being dressed up if she had no place to go.

She got comfortable on the couch and absentmindedly flipped through the television channels. It struck her how quiet her apartment was, and in the next moment, she realized how dangerously close she was to wallowing in self-pity.

No way, she told herself, refusing to go down that road. It wasn’t as though Kyle Rhodes was that great. For starters, he was cocky and too confident, and he dressed as if he’d just fallen off a tractor. And the whole computer thing? That was a snooze-fest of a conversation topic if she’d ever heard one.

Honestly, she hadn’t even liked the guy much.

Really.

THE NEXT MORNING, Rylann came out of her bedroom dressed and ready to go for a run. With all the studying she’d done over the last few months, she’d barely worked out and felt the need to rectify that situation. She suspected this enthusiasm would last for about fifteen minutes, until she collapsed in a gasping heap somewhere in the middle of mile two.

She was in high spirits for a woman who’d been stood up the night before. Most of this stemmed from the fact that she intended to toss Kyle Rhodes’s flannel shirt in the Dumpster on her way out, and also from the fact that she had this great one-liner planned in the event she ever did run into him again, about how she hadn’t gotten the chance to put his shirt where she’d really wanted to, so she’d stuck it in the other place the sun didn’t shine.

When she stepped outside her apartment—MP3 player in one hand and the soon-to-be-forgotten flannel shirt in the other—she saw the newspaper lying in front of her door. As she picked it up, the early morning sun made her blink, and somewhere in the back of her mind she was thinking about how it was going to be a warm, gorgeous May day. A perfect day for the pool, she thought. Maybe I’ll—

It took a moment for the newspaper’s headline to register. At first it seemed like any another tragic headline, the kind that makes a person pause at the brief sadness one feels when hearing such things. Then it dawned on her.

WIFE OF BILLIONAIRE ALUMNUS


KILLED IN CAR ACCIDENT

Marilyn Rhodes.

Kyle’s mother.

Without looking up from the newspaper, Rylann shut her front door, sat down at her kitchen table, and began to read.

Three

Nine years later

THE CHILLY MARCH wind cut across Lake Michigan, an icy sting that could easily bring tears to one’s eyes. But Kyle barely noticed. When he was running, he was in the zone.

It was dark outside, after seven p.m., and the temperature hovered right around forty degrees. Every day for the past two weeks, he’d hit the jogging trail that ran along the lake and run a twelve-mile circuit from his apartment and back. His doorman, Miles, had commented yesterday on the routine, and for simplicity’s sake, Kyle had said he was training for a marathon.

In truth, he just liked the quiet solitude of running. Not to mention, he reveled in the freedom he’d come to appreciate while running. Ah…such glorious freedom. The knowledge that he could keep going, with nothing but physical exhaustion to stop him.

And, of course, a team of armed U.S. marshals if he went more than ten miles from home.

A minor technicality.

Kyle had quickly realized there was one drawback to his running routine, something he’d figured out around mile three the first morning: the electronic monitoring device strapped to his ankle chafed like a bitch while jogging. He’d tried sprinkling some talcum powder on it, but all that had gotten him was a white mess that left him smelling like a baby. And if there was anything a committed bachelor in his thirties did not need to smell like, it was babies. A woman got one whiff of that and suddenly all sorts of biological clocks came out of snooze mode and started ringing with a vengeance.

But, as Kyle knew full well, a man could have worse problems than chafing and baby powder. A man could get arrested, say, and be indicted on multiple federal charges and end up in prison. Or a man could find out that his stubborn, pain-in-the-ass twin sister had nearly gotten herself killed while working with the FBI as part of an agreement to secure his early release from said prison.

He still wanted to throttle Jordan for that one.

Kyle checked his watch and picked up the pace for the last half mile of his run. According to the terms of his home detention, he was allowed ninety minutes per day for “personal errands,” as long as he stayed within a ten-mile radius of his home. Technically, he was supposed to use those ninety minutes for food shopping and laundry, but he’d figured out how to game the system: he ordered his groceries online and had them delivered to his front door, and he utilized the dry cleaner located in the lobby of the high-rise building in which he lived. That gave him ninety minutes a day outside his penthouse, ninety minutes when life seemed almost normal.

On this evening, he made it back to his building with eight minutes to spare. He may have been gaming the system, but he wasn’t about to test it. God forbid he got delayed with a leg cramp and an alarm was triggered from his ankle monitor. All he needed was a SWAT team storming the beach and slapping him in handcuffs just because he hadn’t stretched properly.

The rush of warm air that hit Kyle as he entered the building felt stifling. Or perhaps it was just the knowledge that his return through those doors meant he would be trapped in his apartment for the next twenty-two hours and thirty-two minutes.

Only three more days to go, he reminded himself.

In little more than seventy-two hours—he’d started thinking in terms of hours ever since his prison days—he would officially be a free man. Assuming, that is, that the U.S. Attorney’s Office upheld their end of the bargain, which was a big assumption. It was safe to say that he and the U.S. Attorney’s Office were not on the best of terms these days, despite whatever deals they’d made with his sister regarding his early release from Metropolitan Correctional Center, the federal prison where he’d served four months of an eighteen months’ sentence. They had, after all, called him a “terrorist” both in open court and directly to the media, and in Kyle’s book, that got people a one-way ticket onto his shit list. Because a “terrorist,” as any moron with a dictionary knew, was a person who engaged in violence, terror, and intimidation to achieve a result.