by Pam Godwin
“It’s too late for that.” He leaned over her, bracing an elbow on his knee. “You wanted me. Now you’re stuck with me.”
Tomas had reached a level of worn-out that hurt. Every muscle wanted to surrender to gravity. What he needed was sleep. Any horizontal surface would do.
But there was a corpse rotting in the desert. An unfinished conversation with Cole. An IV drip that required monitoring. An unwashed, blood-splattered woman in his bed. And too many unanswered questions.
“I’ll ask again.” He put his face in hers. “Who are your enemies?”
Her teeth ground together. “I already told you—”
“We know you’re a criminal psychologist, Rylee.” Cole gripped the upper frame of the doorway, leaning into the small bedroom. “You aid in apprehending scoundrels and testify against them in court. I’d say you make more enemies than we do.”
“Since you know my occupation, you also know that I contract for small-town law enforcement.” More teeth grinding. “I deal with petty thieves and potheads. Tracking devices are a part of your world, not mine.”
“You must be bored out of your mind.” Tomas scrutinized her bleary eyes, willing the sedative to kick in faster. “So you show up here with your fancy, underutilized degree, hoping to dissect a real criminal mind.”
Her mouth stopped grinding, her jaw falling slack. Her head lolled to the side, losing strength. Then she snapped it back, her tone deadened. “You’re the reason I chose that field of study.”
“Excuse me?”
“I went to school for criminal justice, but as I got to know you…” Her words slurred, fighting the sedation. “Your emails…changed my major.” A long, lethargic blink. “I don’t…feel…right. You…drugged…”
Next thing from her mouth was an angry, muttering exhale. Her lashes drooped over her cheekbones, and the tension visibly left her body. She was out.
Finally.
He turned off the drip of the narcotic and swapped the sodium chloride with a new bag.
“She’s taken a lot of interest in you.” Cole approached the bed.
“That’s her problem.”
“She’s making it your problem. Seems she’s in the habit of getting mixed up with the wrong men. Nine months ago, she filed a protective order against Mason Sutton. Three months later, Paul Kissinger started watching her.”
“You think Mason and Paul are connected?”
“Maybe.”
“We need eyes and ears on Mason. Find out what he knows about us.”
“I’m on it. He’s an orthopedic surgeon. Runs a booming practice. On the surface, he seems too busy to get involved with a troublesome ex-wife. What would be his motivation?”
“Jealousy. Obsession. He never remarried and has more than enough money to hire people to monitor the object of his obsession. Especially since she lives five hours away from him.” He let the weight of his head hang, fighting exhaustion. “She’s sexually involved with one of her neighbors.”
“Evan Phillips?”
“Who?”
“The single guy who lives next door to her. Divorced. Forty-something. Good-looking. Works construction. He’s collecting her mail and looking after her house while she’s on sabbatical. I’ll dig deeper, see what I can find on him.” Cole narrowed his eyes. “You look like shit. When was the last time you slept?”
“I need to deal with the stiff in the desert.” Sleep closed in, heavy and persistent. He slumped onto his side in the narrow space next to Rylee. “In a minute.”
“The stiff can wait.” Cole rubbed his whiskers and stared at Rylee’s unconscious form. “Go grab a few hours of sleep in the other bedroom. I’ll clean her up.”
“You’re not touching her.” Christ, that came out sharper than he’d intended. He softened his voice. “This is my mess. I got it.”
“Yeah, I see that. Suit yourself.” With a grunt, Cole left the room and shut off the light. “Stubborn fuck.”
Within seconds, Tomas passed out.
He slept hard and deep, but not long. An hour maybe?
When he woke in the dark, he registered Rylee’s body pressed against the front of his. With his arm around her tiny waist and her head tucked beneath his chin, he didn’t move.
Had she rolled into him? Or had he subconsciously grabbed her to keep her from escaping?
His eyes slowly adjusted to the dimness, bringing the room into focus. A new bag hung from the IV pole. Cole must’ve slipped in and swapped out her fluids. Her boots were off her feet. Cole must’ve done that, too.
She still wore her grimy clothes and reeked of sweat and desert dirt. Or maybe the odor was coming from him.
He removed the phone from his pocket and stared at the locked screen, stunned. He’d slept three hours? Jesus.
Without waking her, he untangled himself from her soft, small body. Then he checked her vitals and headed to the bathroom.
After a quick shower, he set out bottles of water and apple juice on the nightstand, checked her breathing, and left her sleeping to go deal with his other unwanted visitor.
Cole perched on the couch in the front room, eyes glued to a laptop.
“Feeling better, princess?” The man idly flipped a black coin-sized disk back and forth between his fingers, his gaze never leaving the computer screen. “You two looked so cozy in there I didn’t want to disturb you.”
Tomas didn’t acknowledge the dig as he lowered into the armchair. “Any updates?”
“The guy she’s banging, Evan Phillips, walked through her house an hour ago. In and out in ten minutes. No other movement.”
“You think he knows something?”
“I think we can’t rule out pillow talk. If they’re fucking on the regular, she’s telling him things, sharing secrets, like how she’s been reading the incriminating ramblings of a dumbass vigilante for ten years.”
Pounding heat flared beneath his skin, his system flooding with the ire he’d been holding back for days.
“You have something to say to me, fucking say it.” He shot from the chair and stood over Cole, hands clenching. “Better yet, use your fists. You’re the one who taught me how to fight. We both know you can kick my ass. If you’re going to do it, fucking do it already!”
Cole slowly shifted his gaze from the computer screen, moved it over Tomas’ rigid stance, and stopped on his eyes.
The air thinned, and the tension in Cole’s lethal glare grew taut. Then he blinked.
“Nah.” He returned to the laptop. “You’re beating yourself up enough for the both of us.”
Irritation twitched through Tomas’ muscles. He spun away and paced the room, noticing the lack of dust on the surfaces. Cole had kept himself busy for the past few hours.
Everything that once filled these rooms had been replaced with new furnishings. Nothing remained from his childhood. No photos. No keepsakes. He’d moved it all to the Milton house and burned it.
His mother’s home and the land it sat on was the only tether he allowed himself to keep.
“I was seventeen when I sent the first email.” Tomas paused at the kitchen table and rubbed his brow. “It started out harmless. Just the words of a boy who missed his dead girlfriend.”
After his mother died, he’d spent two weeks alone in this house. That time in his life left a black hole in his memory, the grief more than he could bear. The only thing he could recall was his urgency to leave, to go somewhere, to be anywhere but here. So he’d left.
“Two weeks after my mother was put in the ground, I drove east. Ended up in Austin.” He laughed hollowly. “A small-town kid in a big city. I’d never seen anything like it. So many tall buildings, flashing lights, loud noises, and the people… Christ, they were everywhere, packed together on the streets in every size, color, and creed. I was so fucking out of my element. It’s no wonder I didn’t last a week.”
“That’s when Van captured you?”
“I was easy prey. A young, naive boy with a decent physique and no sense
of danger, wandering the streets, utterly lost.” Lost in life. “I walked right up to Van’s car and asked for directions. Next thing I knew, I was chained in his attic.”
“No one blames you for continuing the emails after your captivity. If writing to her was therapeutic…”
“She was the only one I could talk to. A dead girl. I know that’s fucked up. I knew it then, too. But it kept me sane.” He released a slow breath and turned to face Cole. “I fucked up when I started writing about you and the team. As much as I covered my tracks and meticulously monitored the account, it was still reckless. Fucking careless. And I’m paying for it now.”
“Maybe it’s not as bad as it seems.” Cole typed something on his laptop. “I hacked into the neighbor’s home network. Look at this.”
He joined Cole on the couch as the image of a shockingly gorgeous woman filled the screen.
His heart stopped, and his breath fell on a gobsmacked groan. “Holy fuck.”
“Yeah. There’s more.” Cole flipped from one photo to the next, each candid snapshot of Rylee Sutton more intoxicating than the last. “She’s not on social media. These photos are from Evan Phillips’ personal computer. All of them. We’re talking hundreds of pictures just of her.”
Completely enraptured, Tomas couldn’t look away from the screen, his gaze greedily feasting on her flawless features, the glossy shine of her brown hair, those sexy full lips, gleaming silver eyes, the healthy glow of her porcelain skin, and the curves of her exquisitely toned body in a glittery dress, a tiny swimsuit, obscenely short shorts—
Cole snapped the lid of the laptop closed, breaking the trance.
“Christ.” Tomas cleared his throat, trying not to imagine her naked and failing miserably.
“That battered woman in your bedroom is undeniably attractive. But when she’s healthy?” Cole made a whistling sound. “She’s the kind of beautiful that makes a man do crazy, desperate shit.”
No shit. The last time Tomas had such a gripping, ravenous reaction to a woman was…never.
And he wasn’t the only one. Paul Kissinger should’ve used the last of his energy to find water and survive the desert. Instead, he’d circled back and forced himself on her. A stupid fucking move but at the same time, sickeningly understandable for a guy who’d been ogling her through his binoculars for six months.
“Maybe,” Cole said, “we’re dealing with something as simple as an infatuated lover. Could be the ex-husband or the neighbor or some random hookup who’s feeling extra possessive of a beautiful woman.”
That didn’t sit well with him. He’d rather Rylee be a person to blame, not a victim. “Does the neighbor have pictures of other women?”
“No.”
“Did you come across compromising photos of Rylee?”
“None. No sex tapes or anything that implies that Evan is creeping on her without her permission.”
“He has a private photo collection of her.” An uneasy sensation coiled in his stomach. “I don’t like it.”
“I agree. It looks suspicious.” Cole turned to him, his gaze probing. “Maybe he loves her. Or maybe he just appreciates her beauty. I mean, if you were fucking a woman who looks like that, wouldn’t you keep photos of her?”
No question, he would keep them. And stare at them. Hell, he was never going to fuck his hand again without a visual of her in his head.
“Collecting photos is one thing.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, thinking. “But we’re dealing with someone who hired a man to watch her. Someone who is obsessed with every detail of her life. What she eats, where she goes, who she talks to, and most of all, who she’s banging. Those were Paul’s exact words.”
“Sounds like a domestic issue. I should be able to determine who hired Paul within the next few days. Once we know that, we’ll know if it’s connected to us.” Cole drummed his fingers on his knee. “Best case, she has a creepy admirer and hasn’t told anyone about your emails.”
“Then we clean up and go home.”
“Yep.”
He wanted to spank the ever-loving shit out of her and leave a permanent reminder on her ass. But a few threatening words against her loved ones would be sufficient in keeping her quiet when he vanished from her life.
“The worst-case scenario…” Cole rolled that small plastic disk between his fingers again. “She’s planning to do something with the evidence she has against us, and she’s not working alone.”
“She didn’t know Paul Kissinger.”
“No, but she’s somehow connected to whoever hired him. Think about it. We send our people on missions all the time with tracking devices. We bug their cars, their clothes, their bodies.” Cole’s lips twitched. “I heard Camila once wore a GPS chip in her tooth.”
“Yeah.” He grinned. “She’s fucking crazy.”
He missed her. He missed his whole damn team and longed to return to them.
If Rylee was working with someone, it made sense that they wanted to track her whereabouts and jump in when needed. That would explain Paul. She disappeared in the desert, and he showed up to find out what happened.
The device on her truck was the only one Tomas found. He’d scoured her belongings but… “I didn’t check her body for chips.”
“I have a reliable detector.” Cole nodded at his bag on the table. “She’s clean.”
“And you verified her occupation.”
“Yes, but it could be a front. Especially if a three-letter agency is involved.” The disk in Cole’s hand stopped moving. He looked up and tossed it to Tomas.
He caught it and turned the plastic coin-shaped object this way and that, baffled. “What is this?”
“A high-tech GSM bug. I pulled it from her house and disabled it. There are dozens more there.”
“Shit.” He inspected it more closely. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“Brand new technology. Insanely long battery life. High-speed transmissions. You can’t even buy that on the black market. It’s impossible to obtain unless you’re tied in with NSA or black ops.”
A chill trickled down his spine. “You think she could be involved with a government agency?”
“An agency or an agency rogue.” A dark look clouded Cole’s expression, and he ran a hand down his face. “She could be working for someone. Running from someone. Or she has a lusty-minded stalker with access to cutting-edge espionage tech.”
“Fuck.” Tomas dropped the bug on the coffee table and slumped back on the couch. “So in summary, she knows everything about us. We know very little about her, and at this point, anything is plausible.”
“Pretty much.”
Tomas scraped a hand over his head, impatient to be back in Colombia with his friends and eager to leave the desert memories behind. Ghosts lived in these walls, in the dust, in the arid sand.
He didn’t want to be here.
Cole pushed off the couch and ambled to the kitchen. A moment later, he returned with two Bud Lights.
“Thanks.” Tomas accepted the cold beer and reluctantly said, “Thanks for coming.”
“Yep.”
Cole would scour Rylee’s life from end to end until he flushed out the truth. In the meantime, Tomas needed to bury a body and babysit the meddling woman.
She wasn’t going to be cooperative. By the time she woke, she should have enough strength to bathe herself. And fight him tooth and nail. After the hell he put her through, escape would be her priority.
Her health, however, wouldn’t be one-hundred-percent. She hadn’t eaten in three days. He could starve her for up to three weeks. That had been his plan—keep her weak and hungry, wear her down, and offer her food in exchange for information.
He’d put the rule of threes in play to fuck with her head and prove his ruthlessness. No air for three minutes. No water for three days. She knew what came next.
He drained the beer. “I’m going to starve her.”
“What?”
“You heard me.” Resting his elbo
ws on his knees, he met Cole’s eyes.
He didn’t need to explain himself to anyone, but there was no reason to be a dick. So he told Cole why he’d put her in the desert and what he planned to do with her next.
“Jesus.” Cole blew out a breath. “What if she knows nothing, and her only crime is reading your emails?”
“If you tell me you never tortured an innocent suspect during your unofficial government career, I’ll eat my shoe.”
“I can’t tell you that. But I will say this. It fucks with you, Tomas. Doesn’t matter what cause you’re fighting for. When you hurt someone who doesn’t deserve to be hurt, that shit leaves scars. Nightmare-inducing scars that keep you awake at night. The guilt festers and changes the makeup of your character.”
“Which government agency did that to you?”
“Can’t say.”
“Are you still working for them?”
“I work for myself.”
“What happened?” He directed his eyes at the tattooed silhouette on Cole’s arm.
From wrist to elbow, black ink filled in the figure of a woman on a dance pole. Last year, she was the only tattoo on that arm. Now a tapestry of drawings crowded in around her as if he were slowly working his way toward fading her out.
There was so much chaos in the illustrations it was hard to guess if each piece had been a spontaneous addition or somehow part of a premeditated vision. Spider webs, fire, chains, plants, various depictions of the sun, and random unknown symbols—all of it overlapped and blended together, sleeving both arms and one entire pec.
He returned his attention to the inked dancer. “Is she the one you hurt?”
“One of many.” Cole stared at his beer. “The only one who mattered.”
“How long ago?”
“Years. A lifetime ago.”
He’d never seen Cole with a woman. Couldn’t even imagine it. At the headquarters in Colombia where they lived, there was no shortage of willing pussy. The cartel loved their girls. But not Cole. Whenever one of the ladies approached him, she was met with a sneer of disgust.
“When was the last time you got laid?”
“None of your goddamn business.” Cole stood and strode back to the kitchen, grabbing two more beers.
