Read Locked In (Locked in Love) (Volume One): An Alpha Billionaire Romance for Free Online

hadn’t stepped in before.
     
    So no showering and a call to maintenance.
     
    Awesome.
     
    Throwing on some jeans and a t-shirt, I go to put my desk back together. It had been super hot when Locke had brushed all my things to the ground. Just like in the movies. Now it was an inconvenience.
     
    Just like him .
     
    As I place things back on the top, I pick up a picture and glance at it.
     
    My debutante ball.
     
    Ugh, I know, right? Sixteen year old me is standing at the bottom of the stairs of some ridiculous old plantation-style home in North Carolina. Fluffy white dress, perfect hair, and the subtle, snarky smile that only a teenager can perfect.
     
    That had been a different time.
    Maybe that’s why Locke’s observations of my current living situation stung so much. Because I had come from much, much better.
     
    My dad had own a successful art gallery in Raleigh. My mother was an artist, a local and international favorite. Some of her contemporary pieces were installed in the NC Museum of Art. I preferred visiting those to remember her by instead of her gravestone.
     
    I’d grown up wealthy. Not billionaire wealthy, like Mr. Jameson Locke, but I knew a little about comfort.
     
    Then my dad got locked up in the Federal prison, my brother disappeared, my mother died, and the money disappeared.
     
    And I became a police officer-turned-detective.
     
    Turned Private Investigator.
     
    Which meant, at the moment, broke.
     
    The job I’d been on when my esteemed former colleagues picked me up was my least favorite P.I. job: Cheating Spouse.
     
    Only, unfortunately my employer decided she had enough proof without the evidence she’d sent me to collect. I’d been minding my own business, or at least, I’d been minding her spouse’s business with my camera at the ready when she’d come in and fired off some words at him.
     
    Then she’d fired her gun, too.
     
    By the time I’d figured out what was happening, it was too late for me to stop her. When I’d hit the front door, trying to reach her, it was too late to stop her from turning the gun on herself.
     
    I’d hung around, prepared to offer my statement as a witness, when my friends from the precinct decided to slap me in cuffs instead. Because obviously I had something to do with a murder-suicide.
     
    They didn’t really think I did it, they were just pissed at the whole event. I get that, I do. Murder-suicides are a lot of paperwork and not a lot of good press.
     
    I’m just pissed because dead people don’t pay invoices, and I was counting on that money for my rent.
     
    Sighing, I leaned back in my chair. My ass still stung from Locke’s invasion, but it wasn’t unpleasant. The sting and the sex, that is. My nose wrinkled when I thought of him.
     
    He was everything I hated. Arrogant, smarmy, with enough money that he’d only get a slap on the wrist no matter what he did.
     
    He was also sexy as hell and the best sex of my life. I shifted in my chair and caught a lingering whiff of his sandalwood cologne, now dusting my hair and skin, and immediately I felt a low throb in my pussy.
     
    Damn it. Grabbing his card, I stared hard at the expensive embossed paper and highly professional header.
     
    Jameson Locke, CEO
    Locked Securities
     
    His phone number beckoned.
     
    One call. One job. Enough money to keep me afloat until another job came in. Enough money for milk and fresh fruit to pad my ramen diet.
     
    Jesus, I hate this. This last case, though, was supposed to be a big one. Something to have under my belt to help reassure people looking to hire me. I’m pretty sure that explaining that my last client is dead isn’t going to win me a lot of work.
     
    Someone like Jameson Locke would, though. The money and the name. He was playing with me, and with the force. I might not work for the RPD anymore, and I said nasty things about them. But I had been one of them. It was allowed. This pompous asshole wasn’t.
     
    I could let him