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I sucked in a breath. My eyes flew to Vaughn’s, and his thin lips pulled into a smirk. “Gemma, hi, it’s Vaughn. I know it’s been a while.”

Silence permeated the room for a beat, and then Gemma snapped, “Where is she?”

“Who? Ruth?” Vaughn asked, patronizing her even as he confirmed her suspicions.

“I swear to God asshole, if you didanythingto hurt her, I will find you and stuff an entire medievaltomeup your Victorian-tight sphincter. And if you think I won’t find you—”

“Gemma.” Vaughn cut her off with a condescending chuckle. “Relax. I offered her a job. That’s all. How’syourjob, by the way? I hear you’ve found significant success with it.”

The sound of Vaughn’s voice mingling with Gemma’s,wrapping around hers with an insidious slither, made me physically ill. “Stop,” I hissed.

“What kind of job?” Gemma asked sharply. “She’s not going to work with you, tofu brain.”

“Oh, I made her an offer she can’t refuse,” Vaughn said with a nasty glint in his eyes. “Ruth?”

Pain, stabbing and wrenching, filled my chest even as my shoulders deflated in defeat. He really was going to destroy everything Gemma had built for herself here. I hadn’t called his bluff at all. He’d called mine. “Hey, Gem,” I said loudly enough for her to hear.

“Dude,” Gemma’s voice responded in outrage. “Are you fucking for real right now? You don’t show up to work today, and it’s because you’re with that short glass of prune juice? I thought you were with Cal.”

Vaughn hung up. No goodbye, no explanation. Just piercing, supercilious eyes behind thick glasses. “Are we clear, now? Sign the contract, Ruth.”

My heart thundered in my ears, but I held his gaze. Gemma wouldn’t want me to go through with this. Actually, she’d probably murder me before she let me waltz off with “prune juice,” as she’d called him. But Gemma also bought food for her Doberman with the last of her paycheck before buying herself food, so I knew better. It would ruin her life, and she would do it for me. I couldn’t let her.

Still, I couldn’t sign my life away without putting up a fight, either. I’d been stepped on my whole life—used and discarded,abandoned, and taken for granted. Vaughn himself had done much of that, and perhaps a month ago, I might have accepted this as my fate and resigned myself to the life I’d mourned before. I might have even seen the positives in it.

But that had been before Cal, and it had been before I’d invested inmyselffor once. Before I’d taken this crazy matchmaking job and discovered that my intelligence didn’t stop at a certain degree or type of research. It could expand and evolve.

My heart could, too.

“I’m an open door, and you can walk right in and get comfy, Shortstop.”

If Vaughn was an ironclad prison door determined to shut me up and trap me in my own insecurities, then Cal was the opposite. Cal was a glass door, thrown wide open and inviting me into a world of light and air. And I’d shut it right back in his face.

I sat back on the couch and pushed the tablet back toward Vaughn with my toe, adjusting my glasses. “I’ll sign that when you take me back to my apartment. I want details on where we’re going, how long we’ll be there, and what I’ll need to pack.”

Vaughn wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t going to let me go far, even on an invisible leash. He considered me with a quiet kind of venom that leeched through my pores and straight to my aching heart. Finally, he said, “Alright. We have a few days. I’ll take you back to pack. You can have an hour in the apartment to pack. We’ll be in Denver for three months while I secure our fundingand make arrangements for our research team in Florence. From there, it will depend on how our research at the University of Pisa goes.” He held out his hands, bowing slightly in mockery. “Appeased?”

I wanted to kick him in the nuts. “Fine. I’ll sign that,” I said with a flick of my eyes to the tablet, “when I see proof of funding.”

“Fair enough,” he glared.

I had to get to Janice and tell her the truth about my forged resume before Vaughn did. That was the only way I could see my way out of this suffocating conundrum I’d found myself in. If I made my way to Janice and took the fall—the entirety of it—before Vaughn could hint that Gemma had been involved, then at the very least, I could take the power out of his threats.

But the more I stole glances at my door as I puttered around my apartment, the closer Vaughn loomed over me like a threatening shadow. I tried to ignore him, gathering clothing blindly and stuffing it into a blue duffel bag without really caring what I’d chosen. He watched every movement, his eyes tracking my hands and his arms folded. I felt every slide of his eyes over my body like an oil-slick caress, and I suppressed a shiver severaltimes. The longer this went on, the more insidious it felt.

Fight back, that braver voice inside of me whispered urgently.This is wrong. This is bad. Fight back.

As he followed me to the bathroom where I intended to grab toiletries, I whirled suddenly to face him in my narrow hallway. Although it was noon, and the sun should have permeated the space, the hallway always managed to be indefinitely dark and quiet with no access to windows. Shadows swathed Vaughn’s gaze, and he pulled up short.

I dropped my bag onto the floor. “Why are you doing this? You can’t bethisdesperate for a research assistant.”

“I’m not,” he said quietly. His voice lowered, and its edge nicked my intuition like a paring knife.

I’d suspected as much, but hearing it injected my veins with ice water. “Then, why?”

Vaughn unfolded his arms, dropping them with a shrug. “What’s that they say about absence? Makes the heart grow fonder, right?”

“You were neverfondof me,” I shot back, my voice just above a whisper. “You enjoyed owning me.”