Watching Ames

Watching Ames XO Surveillance Book 1 R. Handler Watching Ames Copyright © 2023 by R. Handler All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, businesses, companies, organizations, events, locales, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental. Editing by Miriam Compton Cover by Natalia Junqueira Created with Vellum Eric, Thanks for being the inspiration behind every love story I’ll ever write. Contents Author’s Note 1. Her 2. Him 3. Her 4. Her 5. Him 6. Her 7. Her 8. Her 9. Her 10. Her 11. Him 12. Her 13. Her 14. Her 15. Her 16. Her 17. Him 18. Him 19. Her 20. Her 21. Him 22. Her 23. Her 24. Her 25. Her 26. Him 27. Her Thank You Acknowledgments About the Author Author’s Note This book contains explicit sexual content, profanity, and morally gray characters. While Watching Ames is not a dark romance, it does have some content that may be sensitive to certain readers. Please visit my website for a full list of content warnings. Chapter 1 Her The bouquet of flowers waiting for me in the kitchen felt ominous. I wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t the bouquet that was out of place in the center of the island; my boyfriend Peter often had his assistant buy me flowers for holidays and anniversaries. For years, his assistants had passed the key to my apartment between them as they shuffled between cities and internships, as they graduated law school, always having access to leave the flowers around for me to find when I woke up in the morning or came home from work. But Peter and his forever-rotating assistants had never bought flowers that reflected my style; those bouquets were always much more classic, with pale pink roses and white lilies, wedding and funeral flowers that looked good sitting among the white cabinets and granite countertops in my kitchen. But these had me frozen in the archway: white poppies, their pale, paper-thin petals contrasted with their dark centers, mixed among anemones and dahlias so burgundy they were almost black. These flowers were much more my style, dark and broody, almost sucking the light from the room, which was what discomfited me so much. My shoes squeaked across the tile as I reached my hand toward the bouquet, running my fingers over the soft petals, which shook in the wake of my touch. The smell drifted from the disturbed blooms, even the scent of the flowers darker and more sensual than I was used to. A silver envelope sat nestled among the blooms, the scrawl of my name across the front in bold letters - Ames - another irregularity to all the bouquets I’d received in recent memory. Peter was usually too busy at the firm or assisting his father in another re-election campaign to write me a card, and his assistants too unwilling to forge a sweet or sexy note to accompany the bouquets they were buying with their boss’s platinum card. So the bouquets often arrived with the standard typed notecard, stamped with an impersonal: Happy anniversary/birthday/Valentine’s Day. Love, Peter. I expected a similar notation when I slipped my fingernail under the lip of the small envelope and popped the seal, so surprise flickered through me when I instead found a thick silver notecard with black handwriting rather than typeface. Good luck, beautiful. XO The three words were written in precise lettering, striking me right in the chest and sending my heart racing as my lips tilted up in a smile. Considering the cold treatment I’d received from Peter since our argument a few weeks ago, I felt lighter than I had in a while, my eyes tracing over the scribbled hugs and kisses at the bottom of the card. He had been feigning work for the past month, choosing to stay at his townhouse in D.C. and avoiding spending nights at my place, which he usually did at least once a week. There had been radio silence for weeks now, save for the occasional text ensuring my calendar was free for a gala or business lunch I’d be expected to attend in the upcoming months. His current assistant - a blonde whose name I thought started with an S - stopped by a couple times a week, bringing in my mail and grabbing shoes and suit jackets from the stash Peter left at my place. She left little post-its with reminders: “don’t forget to wish Peter’s mother a happy birthday!” or “make sure to buy a dress for the Senator’s campaign luncheon!” with passive-aggressive smiley faces scribbled in the corners. But never anything from Peter, until today. And while some may consider flowers to be the lowest bar in terms of apologies, these exact flowers were a huge step in the right direction. Peter disagreed with my darker inclinations, claiming that my tastes were “unfitting for the future wife of a senator,” as his dream was to follow in his father’s footsteps. I usually agreed. Until I was standing in my kitchen, in an apartment Peter helped choose for me, surrounded by beige furniture and cookie-cutter decorations Peter’s interior designer had picked out, and the most beautiful thing in the room were flowers that I had no doubt he would never usually approve of. But he specifically chose these flowers for me and wrote a card in an attempt to bridge the gap between us. More importantly, he recalled that today was a huge pitch for my business, and despite initially arguing against pursuing my ceramics as a job rather than a hobby, his support of me now, when I