Her Dark Web Defender

by Dana Nussio

  Except for the corpses.

  He didn’t want to believe that his customer might be responsible for that unpleasantness, anyway. Even if the words from that chat-room hero had sounded enough like one of his more memorable clients to raise the hair on his arms, that didn’t mean the police had evidence to connect the murder with his business. And he knew more about suspicions and proof than the average Joe.

  He didn’t have proof, either. The Internet was a huge place, with sites and users all over the world. Just because a participant on a chat room the FBI regularly monitored mentioned princesses and his client also jonesed for minor royalty, that didn’t mean they were the same guy. Nor did one crushed crown at a murder scene confirm that either of those guys was guilty.

  It didn’t guarantee that one of them wasn’t, either.

  Would his customer be stupid enough to get himself into trouble again so soon after he’d helped him out? Didn’t the guy realize that their whole relationship depended on him avoiding run-ins with the police? All he’d been expected to do was stay occupied with the ample entertainment options Soleil Enterprises provided. Had it still not been enough?

  “Damn unreliable clientele!”

  He slammed the heels of his hands against the steering wheel and then rubbed them together because they hurt. He shouldn’t have to deal with shit like this. He offered entertainment, not a disaster-cleanup service.

  But because he just might have to provide both, he zipped his dark sweatshirt over his already sweaty chest and pulled his baseball cap low over his eyes. He checked around to make sure there would be no witnesses and threw open the car door. From the trunk, he pulled out the sheathed hunting knife and a pair of dark gloves. It wouldn’t do to leave any evidence on either of his stops tonight.

  What if you’re wrong? He refused to consider that he might be providing an unnecessary warning. Besides, his instincts told him he did have something to worry about. They’d served him well this far.

  He jogged across the lot, carrying the case flat against his leg, and crouched behind the car that had been parked there no more than thirty minutes. Pausing only long enough to unsheathe the knife, he plunged it into the tire just outside the hubcap. It only could have felt better if it was a certain person’s wiry neck. If he was guilty.

  It was time for him to find out for sure. After his adventures tonight, he would pop in for a checkup on his friend, Cory Fox.

  * * *

  Kelly awoke with a start and then shifted again as realization settled in her shadowy room. Though she was in her own bed, she wasn’t alone. That weight over her was an arm attached to one slumbering Tony Lazzaro.

  She held her breath and lay still, but her mind refused to cooperate, bolting in a half-dozen directions at once. The images were so vivid that when she tried to blink them away in the waning darkness, they bonded with her mind’s souvenirs of sweet sensations and sighs. Even now her body warmed and tingled from those memories.

  She yanked the sheet up under her armpits, the futility of her effort heating her face even more. He’d already examined, touched and sampled any secrets she could hide, and she’d been delighted to return those favors.

  This wasn’t about morning-after discomfort alone or even armchair quarterbacking her participation with a level of enthusiasm that called for pom-poms and a megaphone. She’d weathered embarrassing next-day moments before. This was different, and not just because this was the first time she’d ever brought a man into her apartment and her own bed. What did that mean? Was she brave enough to take a chance with someone like Tony?

  “Well, that’s going to take some getting used to,” he said.

  “What?”

  If only she could have kept her body from jerking again or could have prevented her voice from squeaking.

  “You know, waking up with someone who rouses like she’s leaping out of a moving car. Do you do that every morning?”

  “It’s not like that.”

  How was it that he’d described the way she often burst from sleep, breathless and clawing to escape? And what did it mean that she couldn’t remember dreaming at all last night?

  “Definitely will take a while to get used to that.”

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  His chest rumbled with his chuckle. Were her odd sleeping habits something he wanted to become more familiar with? Strange how she could see herself regularly awakening with that muscular arm slung over her hip.

  Her shoulders curled forward, but his arm only squeezed in a partial hug, his chin resting on her shoulder.

  “I’m sorry to have to point this out, but you weren’t watching yourself sleep.”

  Which meant he had been watching. For how long? And why? Now his thumb that had rested against her ribcage slid back and forth in the lightest of touches against the underside of her breast. The caress neither advanced nor retreated, only continued until she could think of nothing beyond that simple, repetitive motion.

  “How did you sleep?” he asked. “Well, until the last few minutes?”

  Sleep. It was the word and not his breath feathering over her ear then that made her shiver. She’d slept with Tony Lazzaro. Not just rested next to him as she had with every other guy in her relationship history. A short list and all of them brief, but she’d never slept with a single one. Until now.

  “Fine,” she answered honestly and shivered again.

  “Are you cold? Here, let me help.”

  He snuggled closer and pressed his bare skin to her back, reminding her again that so much more than sleep had taken place in that bed last night. From the press of him behind her, those were activities he would welcome repeating this morning. Whether it was wise or not, she wanted those things, too. Worse than that, she was torn between wishing he would release her and begging him never to let her go.

  “I’m fine. Just waking up. But it’s getting late. I need to shower, or I’ll never get to work on time.”

  “Oh. Right. That work thing.”

  Tony must have received the unspoken messages in her words. She would be showering alone, and she was dismissing him, whether she really wanted that or not. He slid his hand away, seeming to take care to avoid contact with sensitive flesh. A chill spread across her skin from the absence of his touch. She pulled the sheet tighter to her and forced herself to face him. She owed him that much.

  As he sat on the edge of the bed and reached for his clothes on the floor, the early light through the blind slats framed the shape of him, from wide shoulders to tapered waist. It was all Kelly could do not to reach for him again.

  Join me. The words were on her tongue, ready to be spoken, but she couldn’t force the air from her lungs to give them sound. She needed to think first, had to make sense of all this. The night before had been wonderful, magical, but it hadn’t been her. She wasn’t someone who trusted any man enough to allow him to sleep over at her place, and she’d certainly never let herself become unconscious in anyone’s arms before. She didn’t take risks like that. She couldn’t start now.

  Just as Tony pulled his T-shirt over his head and turned back to her, the alarm on Kelly’s cell phone beeped. He handed it to her and waited for her to shut it off. Then he flipped on the lamp and grabbed his own cell that sometime in the night he must have set on the nightstand next to hers. There was something oddly comforting about the two phones at the ready in case either of them received an emergency call.

  “Well, it’s about that time.”

  He stood and reached for the last item on the table: the box of condoms he’d bought last night. Her cheeks heated again as she noted there would be two less packets inside it now.

  “You know,” he said, pausing to turn back to her, “we should talk about what happened between us last night. Especially with us working together.”

  Do we have to? She was a veteran at avoiding difficult conversa
tions, and she would be happy to expand her expertise here. But she doubted Tony would go for it. “Can we make it later?”

  “Not indefinitely later.”

  “Okay.”

  He must have accepted that because he nodded and stepped to the doorway. There, he stopped again and turned back once more. “For what it’s worth, I don’t regret it. I hope you don’t, either.”

  Without waiting for her response, he left the room. His footsteps faded down the hall. When the click of her apartment door came, Kelly expected to feel relief. Her chest tightened instead. Her apartment seemed smaller and colder, its bare walls a picture of loneliness. It was as if Tony had finally brushed color over the multiple coats of eggshell paint and then washed it all away when he left.

  “I regret it, all right,” she whispered in the empty space.

  But not for the reasons he would have expected. Like because they worked together. Or because he’d been a jerk to her in the beginning.

  She threw back the covers and walked naked into the bathroom. The woman who stared back at her from the mirror had matted hair, swollen lips and smudges of leftover eyeliner. Even the pink marks near her collarbones, where his beard had abraded her skin, gave evidence of a woman who’d been well loved last night. And who just might—

  No, she was not falling for Tony Lazzaro. Last night had been about sex and nothing more. Even if it had been the kind of mind-blowing sex that people wrote poems about. She’d messed up and made herself vulnerable by sleeping in his arms, but she’d always been too smart to put her heart at risk. She would be equally cautious this time. She could never let someone have control over her. Not again.

  She turned on the faucet and didn’t bother waiting before stepping inside the shower. The frigid water should wake her up if nothing else had. As the temperature warmed, she washed away Tony’s scent.

  In an hour, she would present herself in the office as if nothing had happened. As if nothing had changed. If she had to work beside him today, she would do it with aplomb.

  Most of all, she wouldn’t allow herself to have any more romantic thoughts about the FBI agent she should have kept her distance from in the first place. She would not fall in love with Tony Lazzaro. But she couldn’t ignore the sinking feeling inside her, the one that said she already had.

  Chapter 15

  Not one. Not two. But all four.

  Tony grabbed his head with both hands, forgetting that he held his key fob in one, so it clanked against his skull. Served him right after all the mistakes he’d made in the past twenty-four hours. More so for those he’d made in the past eight. He even deserved the four flats from whichever hooligans had been vandalizing the apartment complex overnight.

  “Well, one of us will be getting to work late.”

  If Kelly looked down from her window then, she would know that he wouldn’t be going anywhere this morning. He pulled his phone from his pocket.

  As if the wham-whir-thank-you-sir he’d just received upstairs wasn’t bad enough after one of the most amazing nights of his life, now he wouldn’t even be able to keep his mortification a secret. At least he hadn’t driven his task-force-officer rental for an overnighter and had to file a police report, which could have gotten him fired. Still, any report from this address would make his car trouble this morning suspicious. By the time he finally made it to the office, everyone there would have a good idea what he and Trooper Roberts had been up to last night.

  He’d told a whopper when he’d said he didn’t regret it, but it was better than admitting that he’d hoped having her once would get her out of his system. It had only made him want her more. He should’ve known better than to let anyone get close to him again, to risk caring. Now he would have to live with the consequences.

  He tapped open the screen to dial and touched 9 then 1. But as his finger hovered over the button to dial 1 a second time, a car whizzed past him. Then another. And another. He frowned at the retreating taillights. The drivers were too bleary-eyed and attached to their coffee travel mugs to even notice him. Something wasn’t right.

  After he tucked his phone back in his pocket, he followed the sidewalk that edged the lot. Several other cars remained in their numbered parking places and under the carport structures. At least from where he stood, none of the other vehicles appeared to have been targeted.

  What kind of vandals picked one ordinary car when they could have damaged dozens? Also, why on the targeted car had they gone to the extra effort of slashing all four tires? At first the crime had seemed random, but now he wondered.

  Kelly had told him about the abduction in her distant past, but what about more recent stuff in her life? Could a jealous ex-boyfriend be stalking her? The thought of it made him want to do things that would earn him a free ride in the back seat of a patrol car, and he’d only been a one-night stand to her. Would she have told him about another danger she faced if he hadn’t been in such a hurry to get her out of her clothes?

  Could it have had something to do with the task force? He shook his head, ruling that out as quickly as he’d considered it. Only a select few knew who the members of the task force were. He might even have thought it was a coincidence if he hadn’t learned throughout his career not to believe in those.

  Because he’d also learned to trust his gut, when he pulled out his phone again, he dialed a different number. A man with a gruff voice answered.

  “Do you have a flatbed tow truck you can send out this morning? Four slashed tires.”

  Tony’s favorite mechanic laughed into the phone. “You must have really pissed somebody off.”

  “Maybe.” He would find out who from Kelly later that morning. “But can you pick up my car or not?”

  After the man took the address and gave him a timeframe, Tony climbed inside his car and rolled down the windows to wait. That only gave him more time to replay the events of the night before. It didn’t matter that her awkward dismissal this morning made it clear he wouldn’t experience those touches again. His fingertips were imprinted with the satin of her hair, the smooth contours of her body. He didn’t even have to conjure up the memory of her scent—wildflowers and pure femininity—as it lingered on his skin. How would he ever get her out of his mind?

  When Kelly raced out the front door of her building thirty minutes later, dressed in a pink blouse and navy pants, her wet hair tied up, he was tempted to ask her for a ride to work. But how could either of them have explained their carpooling plan? Even though he’d decided not to file a police report, they would have a difficult time keeping this thing between them secret.

  She didn’t approach his car, anyway. Had he ever noticed her taking in her surroundings so obviously before? She appeared to note all the building-and parking-lot entrances. That was probably part of her training, but he’d been too busy checking out her assets to take note of her habit.

  Kelly seemed so caught up in her thoughts that she didn’t notice him or his car, though he couldn’t fault her for missing his personal vehicle when she’d never seen it before. She also could have intentionally ignored him. Well, she wouldn’t get the chance to do that at work. He had plenty of questions to ask her now, and no matter how awkward it was, he would insist that she answer them all.

  * * *

  If Tony believed in coincidences, he would have used the scene he found at home as his best example.

  He pushed open his front door with a tap of his index finger. An obvious crack showed in the doorframe, the flimsy wood around the sidelight window offering no resistance to the scumbag who’d apparently come at it, foot-first. The doorknob-size hole in the closet door confirmed that his visitor had kicked his way inside.

  “Could this day get any worse?”

  Then he stepped inside to discover that it could. His house had been ransacked. Tables upended, lamps crushed on the floor, his leather sofa slashed, its stuffing dotting the carpet lik
e a Michigan February snow.

  A burglary? Breaking and entering? He was already leaning toward the second. Even his favorite collection of beer steins from the mantel were in a pile of broken pottery.

  Like his car that had just cost him a grand for four new tires, this home invasion was all about sending him a message. Someone wanted him to know that Kelly was off-limits. He frowned at the mess that would take hours to clean up. He could have saved the guy the trouble of warning him off. Kelly might have tasted the goods, but she wasn’t coming back for seconds.

  Way to kick a guy when he was down.

  He didn’t have time for this. He was already two hours late. A shower and another cup of coffee and he would be out of there, even if the place was a disaster. He continued down the hall, checking for additional damage and mentally weighing the time loss that filing a police report would add.

  Strangely, the guest room appeared untouched. The home invader had skipped his room, too. His closet door was closed. No drawers hung open. His half-full ceramic piggybank still waited for a feeding on top of his dresser, a clear sign that the suspect hadn’t been there for money.

  Needing that shower even more then, he stomped past the dresser on his way to the master bath. Then he saw it. A half-folded sheet of paper lay on his pillow. After putting on a pair of nitrile gloves from a box he kept in his closet, he crossed to the other side of the bed and nabbed it. As he read the words, formed with letters cut from newspaper headlines, something in his stomach dropped.

  Curiosity killed the cat...and the girl.

  He swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry. At least he had answers to some of his questions now. This had nothing to do with Kelly’s dating history. It was all about the task force. His tires and his house had been warnings. This part was a threat, and Kelly was the target.

  He shook his head, hard. He didn’t care if she wanted nothing to do with him. He couldn’t let anything happen to her.