by RJ Scott
Sawyer rubbed his temples and closed his eyes. “Is that your criminal profile?” he asked softly.
“Not at all. We don’t have enough to come close to a cohesive profile if we include Adam Gray, and without him, then we have one vicious aggressive attack and then another where the victim looks untouched aside from the head wound, which is staged to mimic suicide but is obviously not.”
Sawyer nodded, and I understood this had to be the hardest thing he’d ever faced. Lesser men might have crumbled, but there was an intelligent, focused light in his eyes, and he was keenly observant. “How do I tell Iris and Drew McGuire about Rowan’s death? He was a good husband, and after losing Casey, we could be causing so much harm.”
“We will tell them with the greatest possible honesty that we have no idea if Rowan died accidentally and that we have suspicions about the case. Then we’ll be there to help if needed. Avery and I are both trained in family support.”
My cell vibrated in my pocket, and I checked the message. “Okay, Avery is on her way back, and there is a team ten minutes out to work the scene and support your guys. We’re done here, and we have a lot to talk about.”
“Like who the hell has a chemistry degree or the ability to buy chemicals online, and who is strong enough to wield a knife that well so as to sever the spinal cord?”
“Let’s take this back to the PD and work your theories then, and I can think of how to tell Drew and Iris McGuire.”
I had this sudden urge to see Josh’s smile, maybe get a hug from him or a kiss, and the thought of locking myself away all night in the PD was about as tempting as a maggot sandwich. “How about we take it back to the hotel, order pizza, and work out of the way of prying eyes?” See Josh. Find out if he wants a repeat of last night. Get him to come to my room, or I go to his, and maybe it would be my turn to—
“Fuck.” Sawyer sighed noisily, so loud that Logan looked up from what he was doing, concern obvious in his expression. “Logan, Heather, get this scene contained, then get back to the PD. This is getting out of control.”
Nineteen
Josh
Waking up in bed with Lucas was one thing; waking up to him burrowing under the covers to give me the best morning blow job of my entire life was another thing altogether.
This morning was the twelfth in which we’d ended up sleeping in my bed. There’d only been a handful of nights where we’d slept apart; those were either because he’d worked the entire night and fallen face first onto the sofa in the front room, or he was out of town chasing a lead.
But this morning he was here, and he did that thing with his tongue, sucked, tasted, his fingers cupping my balls, his whiskers rough on my skin. I was warm and hot and so close to coming it was ridiculous. I should’ve pulled him up, maybe return the favor, some kissing, hugging, maybe even some talking, but any second now and…
I came with a silent groan and whimpered as he licked and sucked his way back up my body. When his tousled blond hair poked out from the covers, followed by gray eyes filled with mischief, I yanked him up to kiss me, but he was having none of it, rolling off and muttering something about morning breath but not before nibbling on my left nipple and making me writhe.
“You just swallowed,” I defended. “How is that worse than morning breath?”
He sent back a wink and padded into the shower. I scrambled out of bed to follow him, getting tangled up in the sheets and tripping over an abandoned sneaker, hopping and cursing my way into the bathroom, where he was brushing his teeth, naked, and grinning at me in the mirror. Then he was bent over rinsing, his ass out, legs apart, and I stepped into the space behind him, already getting hard at the thought of pushing my way in. He was versatile, and boy was I versatile when it came to Lucas Beaumont. I reached for the lube and a condom.
“Stay right there.”
He rinsed a final time, but he didn’t move, just widened his legs a little more and glanced over his shoulder at me. “I have a meeting in fifteen.”
“Fuck. I can be fast.” Hell, just getting inside the tight heat of him was enough for my balls to draw up, and rolling on a condom and with the quickest prep ever, along with so much lube I slipped all over him, I was inside, and he bent some more, looking left at the long mirror, which gave us a full-length view of him taking my cock. He smiled at me, but the smile only lasted so long when I angled my thrusts and caught his prostate. He closed his eyes, used a hand on himself, hung his head, gripped the sink, and I took way less than ten minutes to orgasm for the second time this morning, as he was coming into his hand and grunting my name. I rained kisses on his back.
This kiss was for like. This one for hope, another for desire. That one for love. Every single kiss was an invisible mark that he’d never see but that I’d tell him about one day.
It has been a while now since he’d stepped through the door. The case he was facing was long, complicated. There was no common thread to anything, and I knew he was frustrated, he and Avery both. We showered, and after I’d brushed my teeth, we spent a lot of time kissing as we dressed. I thought we’d gone past ten minutes, but time with him was boundless and weird, and it could have been three hours, and I still wouldn’t have wanted him to go into the poker room. Every time he came out of there, more of his positivity had been chipped away, and I was sure today would be no different.
He still wore a suit, but he’d pared it down to just pants and a shirt, his tie in his bag in case he needed it, and hooking his ID to his belt because he was leaving his jacket on the back of the chair. He was sexy in a suit, sexy out of a suit, and I stopped him just as he went to open my bedroom door. I knew we needed to get a move on in case Harry saw us because Lucas wasn’t ready for my son to know his dad was sleeping with a federal agent when said agent was on a live case.
“What happens after?” I asked him.
“After?”
“When you leave, when you’re done here? What happens then?”
He didn’t pretend not to understand the question, and he took both my hands in his and tugged me close to kiss me gently.
“What we have isn’t easy to label,” he murmured. “It’s like we’re soul mates or something. All the talking at midnight, the snacking, the sex, the way you touch me when I’ve had a shitty day, the honesty of us together… I’m falling for you.”
“I think… all that and more.”
We didn’t have to say anything else. We’d said it all in that simple exchange, and smiling at each other with stupid grins and holding hands, we stepped out of my room.
“Morning, Dad, Lucas,” Harry said on a yawn and passed us to the main bathroom.
I was frozen. “So much for telling Harry,” he faux-whispered.
“I already knew!” Harry called through the door.
The looks we exchanged then were of laughter, and we only let go of each other’s hands when we reached the bottom of the staircase. Lucas went into the poker room and shut the door. I went over to the deli, picked up pastries, stopped for Cali-coffee, and then passed it in to them.
“How is it you’re not married,” Avery said, spraying crumbs, and with a blissful expression on her face.
I winked at her. “Just waiting to be asked,” I said, and then without looking at Lucas, I shut the door on them both and really hoped that today might be the day they solved this case. Taking my coffee and a muffin, leaving a bear claw on the side for Harry because I was the best dad in the world, I headed for my office and booted up the main accounting PC. I loved that there would be no encrypted messages about the other work, no instructions to phone my contact, but even if there were some random job, nothing would have upset me this morning.
Everything was rose-tinted and perfect.
I did have one message from the board where I’d posted my earlier questions, but I didn’t expect much, as no one had actually had anything positive to tell me.
This was different, though. In the post was a list of results, drilled right down to the very basics,
subdivided by things that the young women had in common. Like me, whoever had worked on this had found very little, although the seventies and early eighties weren’t exactly digital heaven for resources. I kept scrolling, but nothing was jumping out that I could pass on as an anonymous tip to the feds in the poker room. And then the list ended with one last match on a place that connected three of the names—Jessica, Angela, and Amelia, all at different dates, with no specified reason for attendance.
Belmont Pines, Claydon Creek, outside Attica.
It probably meant nothing, but a general search on the place showed an exclusive members-only health club. It was closer to Buffalo than it was to Corning, but maybe it was somewhere that the girls had gone at one point or another? I sent the information in an anonymous email to Lucas, zigzagging through various destination routing on the dark web, then carried on my research. There was nothing on the website to indicate how old the place was, but the building had been there a long time. A tree in the front yard had been planted in 1880, so there had to be something else. Just as I was about to follow the rabbit down the hole, Lucas bellowed my name and hammered his fist on my door.
“Open the fucking door, Josh!”
Shit, this did not sound good, and sudden guilt consumed me. “Coming.” I instigated the kill switch on my accounting computer but left the printout I’d made so I could give him the information. I unlocked the door, ready to step into the hallway. Only Lucas barged past me and into my office and stared into each corner of my room. My high-tech equipment had been locked away and not been touched since that day we’d talked, but he had an expression that dripped with suspicion.
Very deliberately he closed the door and then leaned his ass on my desk, and I said nothing because his eyes were flinty, and the color of them had the look of dark clouds before an explosive thunderstorm.
“You told me you weren’t hacking anymore.”
“I’m not.” I waved at the locked doors where the hi-tech stuff sat.
“That’s funny because I’ve just had a phone conversation with a colleague in Cyber Division.”
He paused for so long that I thought for a minute he was expecting me to say something, but as it was, he seemed to be taking the time to calm himself down.
“Do you recognize the user name MelropeScatter?”
Shit. Shit. Shit. The same person who’d just given me the information on Belmont Pines. “From where?” Lying was my default setting, and I was good at it, but I desperately hoped I’d find the escape button on this particular conversation.
He crossed his arms over his chest. “We’re not playing games,” he snapped, and the tension between us grew even thicker.
“Lucas, we shouldn’t—”
“Do you recognize the name?”
“Fuck. Okay, yes,” I admitted because some freaky FBI shit was going down here, and I was abruptly panicked that this was a serious problem with a capital P. “I have some information for you—”
“The dark web, Josh? Really?”
“In my defense—”
“You fucking idiot. There’s a case officer in Cyber Division watching you, an FBI operative under the pseudonym Lupin. Getting caught by a watch file? Now, that was sloppy fucking work for someone who promised me that his criminal days were behind him, Mr. Baker.”
I cringed. “I wasn’t a criminal. Jeez, Lucas—“
“Is this how you act with your lovers, tell them what they want to hear? Telling a federal agent that you’re ‘oh so innocent’ but still hacking into systems, into places you shouldn’t be, breaking the law?” Lucas had a strong moral compass and sense of duty. Finding out what I’d done meant he would have to fight his instinct to turn me in. After all, I was breaking the law.
“No! Yes. But I’m a white hat hacker. I work for third parties who want to test their systems. What I do has its own level of confidentiality.”
“We’re tracking you because you hacked into Borronti Systems and stole software!”
“What? No! I hacked Borronti to show them they had vulnerabilities.”
“They reported missing code, and pointed the finger at you.”
“I have no answer. If code is missing it wasn’t me. I identify errors, and I pass them up to my guy at—”
“The FBI has a file on you.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong. Fuck, I sent anonymous files to agencies when I found anything that I thought they’d be able to shut down.”
“I trusted you,” Lucas murmured. “And you’re committing crimes under my nose?”
“You can still trust me. I was just coming to tell you what I’d found, and this was requested weeks ago when I was still—”
“Whatever.” His tone was flat, and I knew I’d fucked up. “Avery and I are following this lead to Attica. For now, I’ve said I’ll take care of you, so thank god the Cyber Division team don’t know we’ve been fucking.”
I winced at that. In my mind, we’d been doing more than just that; we’d been making love.
“I’ll find out what happened at Borronti—”
“No—”
I was getting desperate now for him to look at me and believe me. “I swear I didn’t go anywhere I shouldn’t. Yes, I get this was information in a secure area that—”
“We’ll talk when I get back.”
He’d changed right in front of my eyes; he wasn’t the man who’d fallen off his chair that first night, the one who took time to talk to Harry, the one who gave me good morning blow jobs or laughed at my stupid jokes. No, this person was distant and disapproving and thought I’d let him down.
I have. I should have gone next door, told him about the message, had him watch me extract it. How would I have even thought that was necessary?
“This doesn’t have to change us,” I said, desperately aware of what I was losing.
He narrowed his eyes and then shook his head. “Don’t be so naïve.”
I spent the entire day feeling stupid, pissed, tired, and frustrated. I alternated between guilt and righteous indignation that I’d done nothing wrong, veering from acknowledging Lucas had every right to arrest me on the spot to how he should maybe thank me for handing him a potential break in the case. I went online, tracked down the missing Borronti code, followed the source to a hacker who wasn’t as ethical as I was, and sent the whole folder of it to the feds as anonymously as I could. Then, I couldn’t focus on the hotel or starting dinner or the books, and after deleting all my online accounts and disinfecting my system of the watch file that had come in on a freaking smiley face, I turned every screen off and locked the door. I had to decide if I wanted to try to keep the hotel. As I flicked through places for sale in Lancaster Falls and over in West Falls, I knew I’d already made my choice. If I managed to stay out of jail at least.
“Joshy!” I didn’t want company, but Drew and Sawyer arriving at the hotel to visit was something I would never turn down. Drew was on edge, and for a moment, I thought he’d found out what I did and judged me as badly as Lucas had. Sawyer, on the other hand, looked as if the rug had been pulled out from under his feet. I didn’t think that was to do with me, and neither of them started asking me why I’d skirted the law.
Would they even care?
“What’s happened?” I asked, and when neither of them said anything, and Sawyer seemed to pale even more, my mind began spinning scenarios, each one more outlandish than the last.
“We need beer,” Drew said and took three from the fridge.
He and I had worked hard at getting back to the friendship we’d had as children, but it was a work in progress. Still, he felt comfortable enough to take a beer, and that was good enough for me. He strode out into the garden, Sawyer close on his heels, and sat on the wall in the shade. I followed and waited for one of them to start. Normally, it was me creating conversation, but today wasn’t a good day, however well it had started, and Sawyer was shell-shocked.
“So there’s no easy way to say this,” Drew began, and my chest t
ightened. Was he ill? Was he leaving town? Not that he was in town much after he and Logan had bought a place in West Falls. Was it Sawyer? Was he ill? I wasn’t sure how much more stress I could take today.
“Tell me!”
“I found Sawyer in the park on the bench, and he needs your advice about Chris, and it’s a delicate matter.”
“They have blue pills for that,” I deadpanned; anything to break the weirdness going on here.
Drew elbowed me so hard my beer sloshed over my hand. “Asshole, not that kind of issue. This is serious.”
I stared at Sawyer, waiting for him to explain, but he was so quiet, and then he held out his fist, slowly unpeeled his fingers, and exposed the platinum ring lying there.
“What is it?”
“A ring,” Sawyer said, dazed.
“I can see it’s a ring. I mean, is it from you to give to someone?”
He shook his head. “No, it’s for me. I was just sitting there, minding my own business, and Kota had wormed his way onto the sofa. He had his head in my lap, and I was talking to him about what a good dog he was and how much he was the best boy, and he was doing this happy little snuffle thing he does, and when I glanced up Chris was just standing there with this box. Then he went down on one knee, and he asked me to marry him.”
He delivered the story in a curious monotone, and I could see that he was in shock.
“What did you say to him?”
“I didn’t say anything.” He looked at me, his eyes wide. “I fucked up.”
“You said no?”
“No! I didn’t say anything. Kota thought Chris was playing, and he jumped him, and I stood up, and then I was in the park.”
“With the ring,” Drew commented.
“Wait, did you want to take the ring and leave?”
“No!” Sawyer snapped, then deflated. “Yes. I don’t know what I want.”
Chris stepped out onto the patio, but I was the only one facing that direction, and when he tilted his head in question, I nodded slightly. Chris seemed broken, and I wondered if he and Sawyer would actually talk. Sawyer was so dragged down by everything happening in town, but he and Chris needed to talk. There was one way to handle this because Sawyer and Chris were the perfect couple, and they belonged together as much as Drew and Logan, or Tate and Jennifer.
