Kiss of the Goddess - Tessa Cole

Chapter 1

Annie

My phone rang. With hands numb from the cold, I pulled it from my purse, fumbled, and dropped it onto the icy sidewalk.

“Fuck!”

Several of those around me on the early morning crowded Chicago street turned my way with expressions varying from shock to annoyance at my outburst, and I flashed them my winningest grin, which I hoped said “sorry, go about your business” before turning my attention back to my phone.

Except before I could kneel to get it, another pedestrian unknowingly kicked it across the sidewalk.

“Fuck!” I snapped again and this time didn’t care who heard it or what they thought.

My life was on that phone.

More importantly, my job was on that phone.

The start-up I worked for didn’t have work phones, so everything went on our personal ones. And I had a lot on there.

As the Operations Coordinator for Siren’s Call Software, I was the “everything else” person at the company. With only seven of us in the office and five of those being developers, that left myself and my cohort Diane, to take care of the rest of the business. We were HR, office managers, finance, shipping-receiving, and most importantly internal sales. We reached out to all the police in the area to set up demos of the software, so they’d hopefully buy it.

And that meant I had the contact information for every police service in all of the Chicago area on my phone.

Something I couldn’t afford to lose.

Siren’s Call wasn’t that big yet, but we were growing and I needed that information — not to mention I was sure some of my police contacts wouldn’t have wanted their phone numbers available to just anyone.

I huffed out a breath, misting a cloud of cold air around my head, and scrambled after it.

But moving through the thick crowd of people who were all hurrying to their jobs to start their day wasn’t easy. I may have been tall for a woman, but I wasn’t particularly forceful. So, by the time I reached where my phone had been, it had been kicked again, skittering away… into a dark alley.

Wonderful.

This was the icing on top of a very foul cake, which had been the last month for me.

To start, I’d only just managed to save my job after messing up the paychecks at the beginning of the month. I’d been working overtime during the holidays at the end of December, and it had been on my list of things to do, but that list had been far too long for one person. The rest of the company was off. The checks were usually Diane’s thing, but she’d been in Mexico, and with everything else and my family commitments, I’d been so frazzled that I’d simply forgotten.

My boss, the boss, had been furious, but I’d managed to resolve that quick enough to avoid getting fired. Except the late check meant I hadn’t had enough in my account and my rent check had bounced. Then my landlord was furious. I had only just gotten that sorted out when my heater had died and the sadistic landlord — perhaps as payback for the late payment — had taken a week to fix it. Which meant my place had been freezing, so I’d stayed at my brother’s place.

Except he was getting ready for his wedding, and that meant my ex — one of his friends and a groomsman — had been there a lot, so of course I was interrogated and harassed about my pipe dream of living and working quietly in the tropics, which reminded me why we’d broken up in the first place. Not to mention that the aforementioned wedding was in two days, and I still didn’t have anything to wear.

And now, to top it all off, my phone was in some creepy alleyway, probably already broken and beyond repair.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!

I finally reached the mouth of the alley and stood there for a long moment. I wasn’t in the worst part of town, but I also wasn’t in the best. And smart girls didn’t walk into dark alleys — even a pre-dawn dark alley — alone.

Behind me, the barely risen sun sent long shadows stretching through the Chicago streets.

Okay, so it wasn’t exactly pre-dawn, and my phone was only about a dozen feet in, but still. Dark alley. At least my phone looked to be undamaged. Though perhaps some snow had gotten into it. God, I hoped not.

I pulled my thick coat tighter around me and slipped beyond the bustling sidewalk