I explored her delicate collarbone, the thick bone of her sternum, exploring the tops of that bra and what lay underneath. Then I made my way further down, falling to my knees in front of her as my hands found her thighs again, pushing her heavy skirt up as far as it was willing to go. She leaned back on her hands, the moan of a woman who hadn’t been properly explored in a long time slipping from her lips. I took my time, determined to learn as much about this woman in this act as I possibly could. This could be the last time I ever touched a woman. I wanted to experience absolutely everything.
The feel of her, the taste of her…it was driving me insane! And I clearly wasn’t the only one. Such sounds were slipping from between her lips, quiet at first, but growing in volume as we continued. Her legs trembled where they rested on my shoulders, the way they slowly began to tighten around my neck telling me exactly how close she was to that moment of ecstasy. When she reached it, I stood and joined her, filling her as she rode that wave of pleasure. She wrapped her legs around me and buried her fingertips in the muscles low on my back. We rocked together, losing ourselves to our pleasure. I held on for as long as I could, needing to see that ecstasy on her face again, needing to feel the tension leave her body again.
We both cried out when the end came, one voice mingling with the other until they were one. If there had been neighbors, we might not have been alone for much longer. The power left my body with everything else and I sank forward, resting my weight against her as she rested her own weight against the wall. It was a long few moments before either one could consider ourselves beginning to recover. But when my weight became too much for her, I lifted her as best as I could with one arm and took her weight as I sank down onto the bed of pillows I’d made for myself on the floor. I cradled her against me, holding her tight against my chest.
“If I had ever imagined you would be touched by my mess, I never would have—”
She touched my lips, forcing me to keep my words inside. And then she kissed her finger before moving it and kissing my lips. It was a gentler kiss this time, a loving kiss that made my heart swell in my chest in a way I’d never known before. I’d never felt for a woman the way I did for her in that moment.
But it couldn’t last. Reality came back when her cell phone buzzed on the counter. She reluctantly pulled away, unfolding her slender legs as she stood to find it. I watched with admiration, this beautiful woman with her blouse undone and barely hanging from her as it slipped down off her shoulders. Was it possible to want her again so soon? I didn’t know, but I did. I even reached for her ankle as she found her phone.
She cursed under her breath as she read the message.
“What?”
“I have to go. Something’s happened.”
“Something? What? Was someone hurt?”
She glanced at me, her eyes haunted. “I have to go.” She grabbed her bag and headed for the door, her fingers shaking as she tried to button up her blouse. When she realized she’d kicked off her shoes long ago, she came rushing back to slide them back on.
I reached for her again, but she was just out of my grasp.
“Kinsley!”
She ran for the door, never bothering to look back at me. I screamed her name again and again, but it was drowned by the sound of her car engine and her squealing tires as she raced away.
She’d forgotten more than her shoes, however. Her panties—a lovely lace-trimmed pair of boy shorts—were still on the floor. And her keys.
My freedom was sitting on the counter, six feet from the tips of my fingers.
Chapter 9
Brock
It looked like it was going to be a boring assignment. I caught up with Lindsay at his condo on the south side of town. It wasn’t hard to track him, not with Cheryl and her little gadgets. She was able to hack his car information from the police department’s computer system and send me exact details on where the car was sitting.
Simple. Illegal as hell, but simple.
I sat outside his house for several hours, waiting for something to happen. All that was happening was that the guy was probably inside screwing his wife and getting a few Zs. I settled back with caffeine purchased at a convenience store on the way over and tried not to get too jittery, or too tired, while I watched the silent house.
I found myself thinking about Luna while I sat there. We’d met on a case—practically lived together while in Paris—and were still seeing each other. It had been a little complicated the past few weeks because she was traveling a lot to sell her line of jewelry. But when we were together, it was fireworks. The woman was more passionate than anyone I’d ever known. When she wasn’t yelling at me for something I didn’t even know I’d done wrong, she was turning that passion to other things. The funny thing was, I missed both sides of her whenever she was gone. Whenever I did something I knew she wouldn’t like, I could hear her screaming in the back of my mind and I’d undo it… but it made me miss her like a child missing his parents.
Was that what it was like to care about someone? I didn’t remember feeling that way about Eva, the only other woman I’d ever come that close to loving. But everything about this thing with Luna was different from how it had been with Eva.
I was a different man when I was with Eva.
I was seriously thinking about suggesting to Luna that we try moving in together. I mean, hell, we already spent every moment together at her house whenever she was in town. I’d already practically moved in. I even had a key. What if we made it official? What if I stopped living out of a duffle bag when I was with her? It was time for me to move out of my parents’ mansion anyway. Let them find someone else to maintain the damn place!
I wanted to ask. I really did. The only problem was, the last time a woman moved in with me, I was badly burned in a fire a month later and never saw her again. Would suggesting to Luna that we live together be a precursor to another disaster? It was stupid, I knew, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. What if I was always meant to be alone? What if the fire was God’s way of telling me that I didn’t deserve happiness, that I didn’t deserve the love of a good woman?
Besides, Luna had never said she loved me. Maybe this was still just a fling for her. That’s how it had started, just two lonely people finding a little bit of pleasure in one another. But… maybe…
I liked that there were maybes in my life now.
Lights came on in the Lindsay house just a little after dawn. I could see shadows moving behind the curtains, counted four distinct shapes. A little before seven, the front door opened. I slid down in my seat, tugging my baseball cap further down my forehead as I peeked out the window. Lindsay’s wife and two children—they looked to be about middle-school-aged—came out of the house, dragging their feet. The wife directed the kids into the car as she turned back to offer a kiss to her half-dressed husband. Lindsay himself was in the doorway, a T-shirt and pair of boxer shorts his only clothing. He spoke briefly to his wife, offered a peck on the cheek, then turned her and shoved her toward the red minivan in which the children were waiting. He waited until they drove off, then he disappeared back inside.
It never failed to leave me with a slight sense of awe to realize that bad guys had normal family lives, too.
Lindsay was in the house for about twenty minutes before a car pulled into the driveway. This was a Dodge Charger, a black four-door car that looked expensive if the perfect paint job and polished chrome wheels said anything about it. The driver honked, and Lindsay came out, dressed now in jeans and a different T-shirt, a light jacket over it with the hood pulled over his head.
Not looking a bit suspicious, was he?
I started my engine the moment they disappeared around the curve half a block down the street. I followed, careful to keep a distance between me and them. I didn’t want them to know I was there, but I didn’t want to lose them, either. However, it didn’t seem like they were in a big hurry. They were driving under the speed limit and stopping at every light.
&nb
sp; The drive took us into a nicer part of town, one of those neighborhoods where all the houses cost at least three times my annual salary. Luna lived in one of these lovely neighborhoods. They drove along one block very slowly, turned the corner and went back around. I realized what they were doing almost a second too late. I stopped, pulling up to the curb and sliding down in my seat, waiting to see what it was they were trying to scope out. The third time they made their drive through the neighborhood, they pulled into the empty driveway of a house across the street from where I was parked, a nice stone house that looked like something an executive’s wife would cream over.
I took a few pictures of them—there were four men altogether—walking boldly up to the front door. They used an electric lock pick, this device that looks sort of like a gun and picks a lock in seconds. In most states they were illegal to possess unless you were a cop. I suppose it was just luck that these gentlemen were cops.
I texted the address to Cheryl as I watched closely, waiting for any sign of the intruders. They kept the curtains pulled tight, the blinds down. There were no lights, no shadows on the walls, nothing to tell me which rooms they were in or what they were doing. I was already anxious to move closer, to get a good look at these guys, but when Cheryl came back with a text message that contained far too many exclamation points, I knew I had to get closer.
That’s Ox’s house, Brock!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I’d never seen Ox’s house. Somehow, I’d kind of assumed he lived at the office, or had a bachelor pad downtown somewhere. It’d also crossed my mind that he perhaps lived with his mother because of her drinking problem. But apparently not. Our man had an impressive house in an even more impressive neighborhood.
I got out of the car, glancing around to make sure no one was taking notice of me. Even at this early hour, most of the driveways were absent of vehicles, most of the owners probably executives who were always prompt to the office. I walked up to a house that looked particularly empty, slipping up to the door that was blocked from view by a large column. I stayed close to the front of the house, sliding around to the backyard and then into the alley behind. It wouldn’t do to walk straight up to Ox’s house. One of the men who’d entered it might be on lookout, watching for something like that.
I took the long way, moving quickly down the eastern side of the alley, cutting across the street a block and a half away, then cut through the alley that ran behind Ox’s place. He had a fence that looked brand-new, the cedar still sporting that slightly red hue. I went into the neighbor’s yard—thank goodness they didn’t have a dog!—and hopped the fence where the two massive houses practically touched. There were no windows on this side of Ox’s house, making my movements invisible to the men I hoped were still inside.
Cheryl had another gadget installed on all our phones that turned them into listening devices. If I could get close to a window, I could hear anything inside the house within five hundred yards. I turned it on, sliding earbuds into my ears before I cautiously made my way to the back of the house. There was a large deck of stone and wood, the latest style of propane grill shiny and waiting patiently in one corner. I ducked and made my way around to the far side of the deck, sidling up to a window that likely looked into a study or sitting room. I held the phone close to the edge of the window and immediately picked up a voice.
“This has got to be where it’s at,” a male voice said. “The bedroom was clean—bare almost, sort of pathetic—and there’s no other room where it would make sense to hide a safe or to put papers of that sort of importance.”
“Would you hide something that you could get killed over in your desk drawer?”
The second voice was clearly Lindsay.
“Maybe there’s a safe in here.”
“I still think it’s in the office,” Lindsay said.
“Lieutenant said we had to search the house first.” The first guy sort of chuckled. “I guess it’s a good thing Winn disappeared. “If he hadn’t, it might have been tricky keeping him in jail long enough to get a search warrant, what with that flimsy warrant you somehow got the judge to issue last night.”
“What makes you think he would have gotten out of jail at all?”
“The arraignment judge would have looked at the paperwork and seen that his father’s death was ruled an accident. He would have sent him home instantly!”
“What makes you think he would have made it to an arraignment?”
The blood ran cold in my veins. Had Lindsay just said he planned on killing Ox? What the hell?
The other man seemed to be just as shocked by Lindsay’s announcement because he didn’t have much more to say. I could hear them opening and closing drawers, moving books around, shuffling through paperwork. They were clearly not finding what they were looking for because the movements I could hear were growing louder, more intense. Drawers were being slammed, paperwork was slapped onto a flat surface. Whatever they were looking for must have been really important to them.
Finally, Lindsay said, “Let’s get out of here. This is a dead end.”
“Will we search the office next?”
“You’re fucking kidding me—right? With all those eyes there to watch? No. Not until tonight when the building’s empty.”
“Why didn’t we do it last night?”
“Because the goddamn security guard was there.” There was a noise, like someone pushing another person up against the wall. “Have you not figured it out yet, rookie? What we’re doing isn’t exactly sanctioned by the fucking lawmakers in this country. We can’t just go walking into those offices, guns blazing, and commit a crime. The whole point to this thing is to keep the world from learning that we don’t always function within the restraints of the law.”
“I get it,” the first man said, his voice slightly strained, like there was an arm pressed against his throat.
“You better. Bad things happen to rookies who can’t get with the program.” Heavy footsteps filled my ears, then Lindsay’s voice a little further away. “Let’s get the hell out of here, boys!”
I moved back to the side of the house and stood in the shadows, watching the swath of street I could see from my position. I could hear car doors slamming, then an engine. A moment later, the Dodge Charger backed into my swath of street and peeled out.
They were gone.
I turned off the app and slid the phone into my pocket. I took a chance and ran straight to my car, in a rush to keep up with them. I imagined Lindsay would spend the rest of the day searching for Ox—though I was fairly sure he wasn’t going to find him. Akker had assured me Detective Salazar had him stashed away somewhere safe. It might have been my untrusting nature, but I wasn’t sure Salazar was someone we could trust. I’d done a little checking on her while I waited for Lindsay to get going this morning. The woman was an enigma. She had no history up until she turned twenty-one, almost like she came into existence as a grown woman. And what history she did have was minimal. She didn’t have any social media accounts, didn’t have any wild swings in her credit history. She maintained a bank account that always had a positive balance, several credit cards that she never charged the full balance on and that she paid off completely every month. The woman lived like she was intentionally trying to stay off everyone’s radar. It was almost creepy.
But Ox hadn’t shown up at the police station. He wasn’t in any hospital within a hundred miles. So, unless she’d shot him and left him in a distant ditch somewhere, she had him in a safe place. And Ox could take care of himself. If anyone was going to evade Lindsay and his thugs, it was Ox.
But I still needed to stay on Lindsay, just to be on the safe side. If they did, by some miracle, find Ox, I wanted to be there to keep them from going through with the threat Lindsay had made back inside the house.
I pulled my keys from my pocket halfway across the street and slid into the driver’s seat. I had the engine started and was about to put the car into gear when a face popped up in my rearview mirror.
&n
bsp; “You shouldn’t have come after us, brother,” a deep voice said.
The sound of the gun discharging was a mild little burst of air. I didn’t realize what had happened at first. But then blood began to bloom across the front of my shirt.
“It’s not personal,” the voice said. “If Ox had kept playing the game the way Lindsay told him to, none of this would have happened. You… this… it’s just a message to your boss.”
I heard him get out of the car, but my body suddenly seemed very heavy. I tried to sit up, but the message got lost somewhere between my brain and my muscles. Blood continued to pour from a wound in my belly. Must have been a damn big gun to go through the back of the seat like that. And the sound… a silencer.
They’d been prepared.
My vision began to darken around the edges. I screamed at my arm, yelled at it to move. I wasn’t sure it was listening. After all that damn physical therapy I’d endured, trying to get the use of my hands back. All that work to repair the damage the fire had done. All those years hiding behind a mask because I was ashamed of what my act of heroism had done. All of it—all the stupidity, all the wasted time. All the loneliness. I’d finally come out the other end and I was going to die like this?
Fuck that!
My arm finally answered and the last thing I heard before I passed out was the blaring irritation of a car horn…
Chapter 10
Akker
I don’t know when I fell asleep. I just knew that something woke me—a sound, a movement—and I was sitting up, my sidearm in my hands. My heart was pounding, and I was searching the dim room for a target. But there wasn’t one. I’d been dreaming.
Caballo Security Box Set Page 85
