Mary didn’t get angry as a general rule. She got frustrated all the damn time, sure. Living in a constant state of frustration was pretty much her job description.

But not angry. Really, truly, rip their limbs off, kick them in the crotch, spit on their grave angry.

She didn’t like the way it made her feel. The way it crawled across her skin like a swarm of tiny biting insects. The way it made her clench up inside, made her wind tighter and tighter until it felt like she was going to explode. The way it bypassed her control and forced things she didn’t want to acknowledge out into the open.

So Mary made it a point not to get angry. To solve the problem before she got that far. But the problem now was that she was as ragingly angry as she could ever remember being. And the only way she could see to solve it was to club Dominic Prince to death with one of her heels, then dismember and flush him down the toilet he was currently hiding in.

The girl who’d just thrown the drink in Dominic’s face was some kind of famous. She walked, held herself, and talked like she was used to having every eye in the room on her at all times. And the way people had been whispering and taking her picture, she probably was somebody.

“Astrid Bellecroix,” someone had whispered as Mary brushed past.

She’d heard the name again and again in various combinations as she’d woven through the crowd.

“… Bellecroix”

“Astrid…”

“Astrid Bellecroix!”

And whoever this Astrid Bellecroix was, she and Dominic were about to go viral. That was the part Mary objected to. Not the drink throwing. Honestly, if Mary’s fatalistic internal shit-has-hit-the-fan radar wasn’t warning her that a minimum of fifteen different videos of the incident were currently gaining traction on the internet, she’d have been cheering.

But unfortunately, there were videos. And the second someone put a name to Astrid’s tall, gorgeous, jerkass co-star, Dominic would have another tabloid scandal to add to his rap sheet.

How had he done it? How had her client managed to find the one person in this club who was both famous and bitchy enough to pull that kind of stunt? And how the hell had he managed to do it in the less than three hours he’d been out of Mary’s sight?

And instead of stopping, instead of trying to help mitigate what was coming down, instead of displaying an ounce of sanity or common sense or decency. Instead of any of that, he smirked at her and backed into the men’s room.

Because he was a man-child who was trying to drive her to murder. Or a heart attack. Or, more likely, quitting.

Well, he wasn’t getting any of it. This sadly wasn’t the first time she’d had flush a rat out of its hole. 

Mary hit the men’s room door like a linebacker and pushed through into enemy territory. It was swanky bathroom standard, which meant pretty, scented heavily to mask the inevitable smell of urinals, and with a floor clean enough that her shoes didn’t stick to it. As she came in, the three men using the room glanced over and did a double-take. None of them were Dominic.

One of the men by the urinals said something in French. He sounded outraged.

Mary didn’t care. She was past outrage, in the zen space where a stranger’s opinion didn’t matter. “Dominic, where are you?”

“Mademoiselle,” the second man at the urinals said. He was hastily zipping up his pants. “This is the men’s room. You are not meant to be here.”

“I’m exactly where I’m meant to be.” She strode toward the stalls. But they were made of opaque glass and designed for privacy. “Dominic?” She pushed one stall door open, then the next. “Dominic? We have to go.”

She congratulated herself on sounding nowhere near as angry as she felt.

The third door was locked. She knocked. “Dominic?”

“Madame, I am not your boyfriend,” said a muffled voice from within the stall.

“Sorry,” Mary said and moved on. “Dominic?”

The man who’d been washing his hands at the sink sauntered over to her. He was big and blond and had a naturally smirky mouth. “I could be Dominic.”

“Oh, how I wish that were true,” she said. “You look like you have a lot more sense. But he’s not my boyfriend. He’s my client.”

The man’s eyebrows rose. He looked her up and down, shrugged, and reached for his wallet. “I could be that too.”

Mary took a long, deep, this-will-not-be-the-thing-that-breaks-me breath and said, “Not that kind of client.”

Someone at the far end of the line of stalls started laughing. It was low, rich, infectious. Mary knew that laugh.

“Dominic.” She turned her back on her would-be john and stomped over to the door. The extra-large stall. That seemed convenient. That extra space would come in handy when she was dismembering his body. She banged on the door. “Open up, Dominic. I know you’re in there.”

“What’s the magic word?” he asked, still laughing.

“Open the damn door, you raving psycho!” She glanced to the side and said, with complete and deadly earnest, “If you don’t put that phone away and leave, I will find out who you are and ruin your life.”

All three men, including the one who’d made the mistake of raising his phone, seemed to recognize her utter willingness to make the threat come true. They left in a hurry. So did the man in the stall. Without washing his hands.

Seriously, men. 

“I’m not the one who sounds psychotic right now,” Dominic said, and she could hear the smirk in his voice. “And what are you going to do? Huff and puff and blow the door down?”

“Oh, I’ll blow you, you—” Mary jerked to a stop. Wait, that hadn’t come out right.

The door clicked open, and Dominic leaned against the frame, wearing the exact infuriating smirk she’d imagined. His hair was wet, and little droplets of water slid along his skin. His black shirt was damp and clung to his shoulders and the lean, defined muscles of his chest. And Mary hated that she was noticing how good he looked right now. Until he opened that smart mouth and said, “Those are definitely magic words, Princess.”

An infuriated snarl bubbled deep in the back of Mary’s throat, and her hands closed on the material of his shirt. She drove him backward into the stall, letting the door swing shut behind her.

She didn’t want any witnesses for what she was going to do to him.

Dominic didn’t fight her. He let her back him into the wall, his long lean body rolling with her, until he was pinned between Mary and the black marble. Rock meet freaking hard place. But his dark eyes laughed at her, and he was anything but frightened. He was still playing a game, and worse, he still thought he was winning.

“So what are you going to do now that you’ve got me?” he taunted.

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” she said. “In the three freaking hours you were out of my sight, you managed to go viral with a French starlet. Do you not understand the concept of low profile? Do you have any idea the kind of category five crap tornado you have just unleashed?”

But, of course, he wasn’t cowed. He lifted one shoulder in a careless shrug that upped her vision of burying him in a shallow grave from standard to high def. “She was the one who threw her drink at me.”

“And maybe if you weren’t a known asshole, that might mean something. But you’re Dominic Prince, professional provoker and slayer of women’s sanity.” She leaned into him harder, but it was like leaning into living stone. He was warm and strong and unmoved.

Dominic’s smirk just got smirkier. “Are you blaming the victim?”

“You are not the victim here,” she snarled. Her pulse thumped in her ears like her blood had reached its literal boiling point. This had to be what the lead up to a heart attack felt like. “The only way you will be the victim here is if I set you on fire and put you out of my misery.”

“Do it.” He leaned forward to whisper in her ear. “Go ahead and do your worst. Let all of that tension and frustration out. Show me what you’re made of, Princess. So far, it’s all talk and no action.”

Something inside of Mary—her patience, her restraint, her tenuous grip on rationality—shredded into vapor. All that mattered was wiping the smirk from his lips, the satisfaction from his voice, the smug triumph from his eyes.

“All talk?” She tangled her fingers in his dark curls. It was good hair to sink a hand into; soft and thick and just long enough to be an excellent handhold for the reckoning to come. “How’s this for action, you—”

And she hit Dominic, lips first.