H.E.A.T. Book Bundle (H.E.A.T. Books 1-3)

by Nicola Claire

  “Someone phone Damon and get him to stop for something,” I suddenly said, speeding up and closing the distance when a gap in the traffic allowed.

  “Stop for what?” Pierce asked.

  “I don’t know,” I cried back, adrenaline making my voice rise uncharacteristically. “Milk. Fucking sugar. Anything that would seem normal for Damon to stop and buy.”

  “What the hell is going on, Keen?” Pierce demanded.

  “Just do it! There’s not much time.”

  “Nick’s phoning him now. So tell me. What… have you… got?”

  “Classified, Sarge.”

  “One of your cases?” he queried, cottoning on.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “OK. Your plan?”

  “Distract, while Damon’s buying his tea making supplies, and then he can slip away and make it to you guys safely.”

  “Sound idea, but you’ll be showing your hand.”

  “He saw us together at Purewa Cemetery,” I pointed out. “It wouldn’t seem too unusual to see me again heading in the same direction as Damon.”

  “You and Michaels met up?” Pierce asked incredulously.

  “He’s pulling over on Parnell Road. Probably by the dairy there,” Nick advised.

  “Good,” I replied, turning onto Parnell Road myself.

  “What the fuck, Keen? Can’t you two spend one fucking day apart?” Pierce demanded.

  “Wasn’t my choice,” I snapped back.

  “If he saw you, someone else might have seen you, too,” he pointed out.

  “At a fucking cemetery?” I growled.

  “He’s got a cloak.” Fuck, Pierce was right. Cawfield had a cloak suspiciously like those worn at the Irreverent Inferno.

  “I’m getting out of the car,” I advised, opening my door. “Make sure Damon doesn’t leave until I’ve made my mark.”

  “Keep your line open,” Pierce said, voice clipped. He was pissed off. I couldn’t blame him. Everything seemed to be working against us right now.

  I spotted Cawfield sitting in his car a few ahead of mine. His eyes were locked on the dairy Damon had just entered. I strolled up, not bothering to hide myself, knowing he’d spot me in his wing mirror before I reached his driver’s side door. He’d either hope I moved on, or move on himself. I was betting he was going with the former.

  Cawfield always underestimated me. He probably thought I was here for Damon and had overlooked his vehicle completely.

  I tapped on the roof of his car. He let out a beleaguered sigh and wound down his window.

  “Just happened to passing by, huh, Keen?” he said, when I leaned down and looked inside. I made a point of scanning the back seat and his passenger side, checking out the surveillance equipment he hadn’t bothered to hide.

  “Didn’t know you were on a case here, Cawfield?” I said pleasantly. “Need a hand?”

  “You bored?” he asked. “Tired of being sidelined?”

  I shrugged, ignoring the pinch my heart felt at his jab. “Departmental cooperation.”

  “Since when have you ever cooperated with me?”

  “Come on, Cawfield,” I said, all mock smiles. “We’re on the same team. What’re you working on?”

  “Top secret,” he shot back. “Above your pay grade.” His pay grade was exactly the same pitiful level as mine.

  “Not even a hint?” I teased.

  “Not even a bone,” he said with meaning. Joe Cawfield thought I was a bitch.

  I laughed, genuinely amused. I had no idea if Damon had left the dairy yet; my back was to it. Cawfield kept his eyes on me, but I was sure he was watching Damon’s car out of the corner of his eye.

  “I tell you what,” I said, making myself comfortable rubbing up against his car. “I’ll tell you mine, if you tell me yours.”

  “You got a secret, Keen?”

  “I’ve got a ton of them, Joe.”

  “Now, that is interesting,” he said, giving me what appeared his full attention; shifting his body in his seat to better face me. “A woman like you having secrets. I bet they’re juicy.”

  “Is yours?”

  “Nah-uh,” he said, with a shake of his head. “You first. Tell me something I don’t know, Lara?”

  He rarely called me Lara. It sounded foreign on his tongue.

  I stared at his stunning blue eyes. He stared unabashedly back. Oh, what secrets I could tell this man.

  I smiled. His lips quirked, matching mine. He really was a handsome bastard. Fucked in the head, but good looking at the same time.

  I held his gaze and considered my options. If he was the CIB traitor, then there’d be one thing he wanted most of all.

  Carl.

  “I get these phone calls,” I said, voice lowered, as though my secret was intimate.

  “I bet you do,” he said with a smirk.

  “No one talks in them, but I know.”

  “Know what?”

  “Who it is.”

  He leaned forward, close enough that I could smell whatever off the shelf cologne he wore. “Who is it, Lara?”

  “Who do you think?”

  A huff of amused laughter left him and he moved back in his seat, placing distance between us.

  “So, he’s not just simply disappeared into thin air.”

  “Oh, he’s still out there. Biding his time. Watching. Waiting.”

  “Waiting for what?”

  I shook my head. “Fucked if I know, but I wouldn’t put it past Carl to have a plan.”

  His eyes came up to meet mine.

  “You are one crazy woman,” he commented pleasantly, as though discussing the weather and not my sanity, or lack thereof. “You attract the most fucked up men I’ve ever met.”

  I raised an eyebrow at him.

  “Carl was a singularity.”

  “You think?”

  “I know.”

  “Sweetheart,” he drawled. “You don’t know nothin’.”

  “Care to enlighten me?”

  He smiled, shaking his head softly.

  “Wanna know my secret?”

  “Yeah, Joe. I do.”

  His hands flexed on the top of the steering wheel in front of him. His eyes looked out of the windshield at an empty parking space in front of the dairy across the road.

  Damon had gone.

  I was so busy trying to check my peripheral vision to see if I could see Damon’s car further down the road that I missed any sign that Cawfield was about to move. His hand shot out and wrapped around my shirt, pulling me in through the window before I could raise a finger in defence. His lips crashed against mine, tongue forcing entry. My chest crashed against the window frame, my knee connected with the side panel of the car. Strands of hair came loose as his free hand twisted in amongst them at the back of my head.

  A gun being cocked beside his ear made him stop.

  We were both panting when we pulled apart. For entirely different reasons.

  “Always wanted to do that,” Cawfield said on an unhinged laugh.

  “You fucking lay one hand on me ever again and I’ll pull the bloody trigger,” I ground out.

  “So melodramatic, Keen. Do you do that with Michaels? Do you swear and kick and spit like a rabid dog in heat when he ties you up to fuck?”

  “You bastard,” I said, flicking the safety back on my gun and holstering it with shaking hands.

  “Does he whip you when you fight back? Does he reward you when you beg? How does it go, Keen? I’ve never been into that whole master and slave shit? Help me out? Should I try it? Does the chick orgasm harder when your hand is wrapped around her throat as she comes on your dick?”

  “You’re sick,” I managed, taking a step away from the sedan. Feeling entirely too imbalanced to fight back. Cawfield had always brought our conversations down to the gutter, but never like this. Never so personal, so raw, so offensive. There was a fine line between black humour and taking things too far. Joe Cawfield had just crossed it.

  And the shit
of it was, he’d crossed it because he thought Damon enjoyed kink. He’d seen him at Sweet Hell. He knew about the Irreverent Inferno and what went on in their back room. He’d pegged my lover and tarred me with the same brush.

  That’s OK. I could have put him in his place.

  But lately Damon had become more demanding in bed. Lately Damon had pushed my limits and more.

  And let’s not forget the murdered woman on Karangahape Road. Death by erotic asphyxiation.

  “Fuck you,” I said, voice soft and lethal.

  “No, Lara. Fuck you. That’s what he does, isn’t it? Fucks you? Not just sex. Not just making love. He pushes you up against the wall, spreads your legs like a whore, then shoves his cock between them and makes you scream. Doesn’t he?”

  “What is your fucking problem, Cawfield?” I demanded.

  “You. You’re my fucking problem, Keen. You get everything handed to you on a silver platter because of your name and your sex. And the fuck of it is, you’re just a kink toy. To your father. To your lover.” He started his car, revved the engine, and then looked back at me. “To any man. That’s all you are. That’s all you’re fucking good for. And from what I hear,” he offered me a salacious wink, “you’re fucking good at it, too.”

  Then he roared out of the parking spot, almost driving over my toes and collecting a passing car.

  Holy fucking shit, what just happened?

  I stood there, practically in the centre of the street, staring after a police issue sedan driven by a lunatic. A misogynistic lunatic who carried a fucking gun. You couldn’t make this shit up. I shook my head, feeling completely out of sorts, and walked back to my car. Needing the safety of metal and glass around me. Needing to get off my shaking legs and suck in much needed air.

  A glass of whisky wouldn’t have gone astray either. Which just reminded me of my father and his penchant for a wee dram or two after work. And Carl who carried a flask in the glovebox of his car, sometimes stashing the fucking thing in mine.

  I slipped into the vehicle, reached over to my own glovebox, knowing there was nothing there but needing a miracle, and opened it up. Papers, pens, wet wipes. That was it.

  Never a good drop of whisky around when you need it. So always carry a little spare.

  Good advice, Carl. Shame I never listened.

  A long pent up breath escaped me as I sat back in my seat and stared out of the window at nothing.

  “Keen!” I heard, muffled by my jacket pocket.

  I reached down and pulled my cellphone out, noticing the call was still running to ASI. My eyes closed, my head tipped back, and I let a frustrated growl out from the back of my throat.

  “Keen! Pick up the fucking phone!”

  Louder this time. Filling the inside of the vehicle up with Pierce’s shouted words.

  “I’m here,” I said, once the phone reached my ear. “Stop yelling. You’re as bad as Carl.”

  Pierce let a long breath of air out down the other end.

  “You OK?” he asked, voice soft as if soothing a baby.

  “Peachy.”

  “We got it on tape,” he advised. “You could file a sexual harassment suit against him. He’d lose his job, for sure, with the shit he just threw at you.”

  Silence. At both ends of the line.

  It wasn’t worth it. If I went after Cawfield for this, we’d lose any chance of pinning the CIB traitor tag on him. Besides, you don’t go there. You just don’t, if you’re a cop. It was only words. We all say things when the job gets too much for us. Sometimes we regret them. Sometimes it’s the truth. If I pursued this, the whole department would know. And I wasn’t sure if they’d believe what he said was not the truth.

  I rubbed a hand over my face and sighed.

  “Who heard it, Pierce?” I asked.

  A long pause. “All of it? Nick and myself.”

  I waited.

  “The last bit?” he added. I closed my eyes. “Michaels was here.”

  Brilliant. Fucking brilliant.

  “Lara,” a voice said that wasn’t Pierce’s. My shoulders drooped, my chest compressed. “I’ll fucking kill him, love. Just say the word.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “Public spaces, where cameras might be lurking, make for an interesting playground, indeed.”

  It took five minutes to arrive at ASI, in which time Damon had calmed down enough to stop threatening the life of a man in front of a senior police detective and a private investigator who tended to tape that kind of thing.

  Of course, he was still steaming. But it was a simmering kind of heat as opposed to a volcanic one.

  I entered the control room, having met the face that went with the sass at reception, and came to a halt across the small space from Damon. Pierce and Nick watching on with mild intrigue.

  We stared at each other for a long, drawn out moment, and then he was across the room, hand at the nape of my neck, hot breath washing over my cheek, smooth lips to my ear, as he whispered, “I’m sorry.”

  I closed my eyes and let him hold me.

  I held him back and to hell with Pierce and Nick.

  “OK,” Pierce said eventually, signally the end of his patience with the whole scene.

  Damon and I pulled apart reluctantly, but he wouldn’t look me in the eye. He might have apologised, and really, what was the apology for? Saying those things back at the cemetery? Cawfield’s horrific words? Everything? But it hadn’t changed a thing.

  We were still standing on different sides of a wide divide. He pulled at my heart, but not in the way my body wanted.

  Damon needed to find Carole. I could aid him in that. Right now that was all I was to him.

  His singular focus was commendable. As a police detective I admired that trait. If it wasn’t for the fact I was the one being cast aside, in order for him to focus on what he needed to achieve.

  “It’s likely they’ll up the game tonight,” Pierce went on to say, when it was obvious Damon and I had turned our attention to the job at hand. “At some stage they’re going to want to get you to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement. Our guess is that they wanted to see how committed you were with pursuing this and last night’s task would have indicated that. So, tonight, it’ll all be on.”

  “Also,” Nick added. “It appears the cloaks are a permanent part of this set-up. But we need to see identities. So, aside from the cameras and mics I’ve had sewn into the cloak itself, I’m also going to attach one to your watch and give you another in a signet ring for you to wear. They should give you a better chance of catching a facial image underneath one of those hoods.”

  “But be careful,” Pierce said. “One false move and you could show your hand.”

  “I know what to do,” Damon said with a stiff nod of his head.

  “Well,” Pierce said, scratching at his beard. “That’s debatable. Gluttony,” he added, looking at each of us in turn. “Keen made a valid point earlier today. It could mean overindulgence in practically anything.”

  “I’d narrow that down to overindulgence in practically any addictive type activity,” I clarified. All three men looked at me. I shrugged. “This place reeks of immorality. Overindulging in knitting is not going to get you into the fourth circle of Hell.”

  Pierce and Nick smiled. Damon remained stoic.

  “Good point,” Nick agreed. “So what does that leave us with?”

  “Sex, drugs and money,” I replied. “It’s what makes the world go ‘round, isn’t it?”

  “OK,” Pierce said, picking up that thread. “Sexual pursuits, all manner and probably some we don’t even want to consider. Drugs and alcohol and a lot of them. And gambling. All of it in excess.”

  “That’ll be the theme,” Nick mused. “Excess.”

  “So,” Pierce said, looking directly at Damon. “How good are you at gambling?”

  “Good enough.”

  “They’ll expect you to pick something that is a weakness for you. An addiction.”

  Damon’s jaw
tensed. His lids fluttered. As though he wanted to look elsewhere. But he kept his gaze on Pierce and resolutely said, “I’ve been attending the casino part of Sweet Hell for the past week or so. That should do it.”

  “It will have to do it,” Nick said, looking purposefully at me. I raised an eyebrow but didn’t make a comment.

  “Right, if you’re ready?” Pierce said, indicating the cloak lying over a chair in the corner.

  “Do I need to do anything?” Damon asked, walking the short distance to pick the cape up. He stared down at it with ill concealed dislike.

  He might have been focused on finding his sister, but he was not enjoying doing so at all.

  “Just press the little lump in the right hand sleeve to activate all cameras and mics,” Nick advised. “Same timeframe as last night: Three hours.” He handed Damon a watch and ring as well. “These will activate at the same time. They’re all locked on the same frequency.”

  “What’s the chance of these being detected by Marcroft?” I asked.

  “As long as he doesn’t employ any additional security, other than what was used last night, you should be fine.”

  “And if I’m not?”

  Silence filled the room.

  Then Pierce said, “Worse case scenario: They find you out and chuck you out.”

  “You don’t believe that,” Damon challenged.

  “Well,” Pierce said, squaring his shoulders. “It’s a good thing you know how to throw a punch.”

  My eyes were drawn to Damon’s knuckles immediately. Which could have been Pierce’s goal all along. Damon didn’t try to hide them, but then he didn’t have anything new to hide. His knuckles were healing just fine. No reopened injuries.

  “All right,” Damon announced. “I’m going to swing by my home and get a clean change of clothes.” Both Pierce and Nick made a point of sweeping their eyes over last night’s outfit. “Then I’ll head on in.”

  “Good luck,” Nick offered.

  Damon shared a nod of his head with both men and then moved to the door.

  “I’ll walk you out,” I offered.

  He paused, let out a long breath of air, and murmured, “I’ll be fine.”

  He was through the door before I could register the brush off and decide how it made me feel.