by KB Winters
Pain or no pain, Gemma was worth it.
33
“I think I’m going to have to misbehave more often,” Gemma declared with a wink as she rolled off of me, lying flat against the bed, her breasts still heaving from the exertion. Little beads of sweat coated her skin and her hair fanned over the pillow in a messy array.
She’d never looked sexier.
“I won’t say no. I knew you were gonna be trouble from the very beginning.”
Gemma laughed, but silence settled between us, and I could all but hear her wheels turning. I rolled over to face her. “What’s wrong?”
“Aaron?” She twisted to look at me, her stare suddenly dark and serious. “I’m sorry that I was such a bitch earlier.”
“You took your punishment like a champ,” I said, teasing her. She smiled but it faded quickly. I could see it in her eyes that she was sincerely torn up about our argument—regardless of how hot the make-up/punishment sex had been. I reached over and brushed her hair back. “You were right. I was being a macho dickhead with a caveman complex.”
Gemma giggled and the sound vibrated through me, loosening the remnants of tension and frustration from the argument in her kitchen. She rolled her had back against the pillow and let out a sigh. “Did you mean what you said…the falling in love part?”
My eyes swept over her profile, following each line and curve of her delicate face. I let her question sink in for a moment, waiting for the truth to come out, but was met with quiet comfort. “Gemma, look at me,” I said softly.
She rolled to her side and waited; her eyes wide as she watched me.
“I meant what I said.”
Gemma considered me out of the corner of her eye for a long moment, just long enough to turn my confidence into uncertainty. “Hey, listen,” I started, pushing myself up into a sitting position beside her. “There's no reason to make this all dramatic. I wasn't saying it to get anything in return. I just wanted you to know.”
Gemma turned to look me full in the face. “Well, don't go backing down now.”
“I don't want you to feel like you have to say something back right now.”
“There you go protecting me again,” she replied with a soft smile. She reached between us and wrapped her fingers around the tips of my fingers that stuck out of the cast. “I'm glad you said what you said. You don’t strike me as the heart on your sleeve type, so I know that must have been a big step...” she paused, and I didn’t correct her. She had me pegged.
So much had happened so quickly that there were moments when it was hard for me to decipher what was real and what was all in my head. But looking down at our interior locked fingertips, I knew that what was happening between Gemma and me was real. Somehow in the middle of the shit storm I'd gotten caught up in—there was a silver lining.
We basked in the aftermath for a few more minutes before the reality of our situation was thrown back onto me with the impact of a sumo wrestler, when Gemma said, “So, there’s something I need to tell you, but first you have to promise not to freak out.”
I groaned. "Don't tell me you're knocked up," I said teasingly.
Gemma slapped my forearm—not so teasingly. “No, but kudos for sensitivity.” She glared at me for a moment before continuing, “There's a little more to the story about my afternoon than I told you before.”
All of my relaxed muscles tensed, one by one, turning my body into a thick wall. Bracing myself for whatever was going to come out of her mouth next.
“I didn't get sent home from the ER early, like I said,” she started. “It was a slow shift. That part was true. But I was the one who asked for a few hours off.”
“Okay…”
She sucked in a breath. “I went up to Stallion Bay and did a little digging—”
“You what?” Fireworks of fury burst inside me. “Gemma please tell me you didn’t. Wait, is that why you were acting weird when I showed up at the hospital? Because you were planning this?”
She refused to meet my eyes and after a moment, she gave a slight nod before setting her jaw. “Hear me out, Aaron.”
I shook my head. I didn’t want to hear her out. I wanted to chew her ass for being so careless. When I’d been at the hospital, she’d blown me off and acted like I was invading her space, or that I was out of line, when really, she had just been counting down the minutes until she could run off to Stallion Bay.
“I can't even begin to explain how stupid that was, especially with O'Keefe on your tail!”
She twisted to meet my eyes, hers just as fired up as mine felt. “First off, this was before you called me and told me about O'Keefe. And second of all, I think we just spent the better part of the afternoon deciding that I can handle myself. And third of all, my gut instinct was right and if you’d shut up long enough for me to tell you about it, I'd tell you what I found!”
She flung the sheet off of her feet and launched out of bed. I was too angry to even react at the site of her stalking from the room butt-ass naked. Every fiber of my body was revved up and ready to fight. But before I could fully put my argument together, she reappeared, holding a white security envelope in her hand. “From everything you told me about O'Keefe, he's the type to play dirty.”
I snorted. That was an understatement.
Gemma ignored my reaction and continued, “I was at work and I couldn’t stop replaying everything in my head. It was like a deck of cards shuffling over and over again. Something just wasn’t clicking. I got to thinking about his other business endeavors and when I followed that trail I found that his last big development was in Stallion Bay. I did a little digging around online and found out that similarly to Holiday Cove, the citizens of Stallion Bay weren’t exactly waiting with open arms when O'Keefe came rolling into town, talking about luxury resorts and high-rise condos.”
“They didn’t?” I hadn’t paid much attention to the deal, and it was far enough away that it hadn’t seemed relative. Stallion Bay was thriving with the new resort and all the new businesses and residences it had brought in, so I’d assumed it had been embraced wholeheartedly from the beginning.
Gemma shook her head. “No. And I remembered something you told me about a while ago. You told me that when O’Keefe first came here with his proposal, there were protests and petitions at town hall to send him and his blueprints packing. The same thing happened in Stallion Bay. The difference was that it's a bigger city so there was more of a divide. Whereas here in Holiday Cove, it was a flat-out, nearly unanimous ‘no’, it was closer to fifty-fifty in Stallion Bay. Half of the residents thought it would boost commerce and bring in new people—money—which they saw as being a good thing.
“Naturally that crowd was ecstatic when someone of O'Keefe's caliber came forward with an offer. However, the other fifty percent were staunchly against it and took their concerns all the way up the political chain and managed to win the mayor over to their side. He used his political ties to side with the people against O'Keefe and after a little battle, got the proposal turned down and sent O’Keefe on his way.”
I shook my head, not following. “When was all this? Stallion Bay's resort has been up and running for almost a year now.”
Gemma nodded. “I know. It was a year and a half before they broke ground. O’Keefe had to file permits and everything twice.”
“How did he get around the mayor? Did he buy him off too?”
“Not exactly.” At this point in the weaving of her tail, Gemma opened the sealed envelope and handed me the contents. “He died before the proposal went through. I think O'Keefe had him killed.”
Chills ran over me as though the room had just dropped ten degrees.
I took the pages from her hands and began to skim the words on the pages but my mind was spinning and I couldn’t decipher what I was reading. “Okay hold on. Tell me what I’m looking at here,” I said, starting at the beginning again. It looked like some pages had a medical record but I couldn’t see what Gemma was trying to show me.
She sat dow
n beside me on the bed. “After I found the mayor’s obituary online, I left work and drove up to the hospital in Stallion Bay where he had been taken. I pulled a few strings with one of the doctors there and managed to get his autopsy results.”
I turned to glance at her profile, my eyebrows raised. Soldier, nurse…super spy? Who the hell was this woman?
Gemma continued, not even noticing my inquisitive stare. She gestured at some figures on the paper. “Turns out he had high blood pressure, which was a known condition and he’d been taking medicine to control it for some time. However, the medication that he was taking, when mixed with this drug,” she pointed out a line containing a long word that, to me, looked like jumbled nothingness, “would have been fatal.”
“Holy shit. And nobody knows about this?”
Gemma shrugged. “I don’t know. And I don’t know why nobody caught this. And I definitely don’t know who prescribed him this drug. I mean, maybe I’ve watched too many forensic science shows but it seems to me that at this dosage it was a deliberate poisoning. Even if he wasn’t on the other medication for his high blood pressure there’s no doctor that would have prescribed this drug to him, and certainly not at this dosage. Levels this high indicate a massive dose, which might not kill a healthy person, but it certainly wouldn’t be good for them, either. So, after everything you’ve told me about O’Keefe, combined with what the FBI and FAA teams found at the museum, it’s starting to look like O’Keefe is playing a very dangerous game and that he’ll do anything to win.”
My head spun as I stared down at the paper, the ink blurring together the more I stared at it.
“Gemma, did you tell anyone else about this? Does anyone know where you were this afternoon?”
She shot me a dirty look. “I’m not stupid, Aaron.”
I sighed. “I know you’re not.”
“Well then stop assuming I’m going to fuck this whole thing up. I think I just proved that I can be more of an asset in this mess. You don’t have to keep treating me like a liability. All right?”
I held her gaze, my eyes desperately searching hers for the right way forward. She wanted me to stand beside her when my natural inclination was to stand in front of her. Not because I thought I was better than her. Quite the opposite. Gemma was rapidly becoming the best part of me.
A part I was desperate to protect.
“I don’t see you as a liability, and I do appreciate this information, but that still doesn’t mean you’re safe. O’Keefe is not opposed to using any kind of leverage he can find and right now—that would be you.”
“Aaron,” she sighed and sat up, her breasts flattened against her thighs as she curled her legs up and wrapped her arms to tuck them in tight. She stared straight ahead at the wall. “I thought we just went over this…”
I grabbed her hand and gripped it tightly. Her eyes moved to mine, widening at the intensity of my hold on her. “Gemma, I can’t lose you,” the words came out in a strangled whisper, getting caught in my throat. “You’re not weak. But right now, you’re my biggest weak spot. If he threatened you—which, he already did, verbally at least—I wouldn’t be okay and as it is, I’m barely hanging on over here.”
The statement sank into the space between us. Weighty and heavy.
“You’re not going to lose me, Aaron.”
I reached for her and she melted against me. As I held her in my arms, safe and secure, I was overwhelmed with how raw and exposed I felt with my true emotions on the table. The closer we got, the more evident my old scar tissue became.
“We’re going to make it out of this, baby. I promise.” I dropped a kiss to her forehead, tasting the sweet saltiness of her skin.
As we huddled together on the edge of her bed, I wished I could find some way to freeze the moment and stay there forever. But we had to get back to my place where I was on my own turf. Safe and sound.
34
When the sun rose the following morning, I was awake and alert—despite having a rough night. All of the tossing and turning had reminded me of my first tour overseas. As a low ranking officer—brand new to the ship—every single noise was enough to jolt me from sleep and got my heart rate sky high until I got used to the sounds.
Now, I wasn’t in a tent, or in the desert, but up on the bluff it was quiet enough that each sound was pronounced and distinct. I usually slept through it all, no problem. In fact, most of the time I slept with the windows wide open to hear the soft roar of the ocean and the rustling of the wind through the trees. I’d never worried about my safety.
There was a gate at the end of the drive, that had been built to keep tourists out once the museum was closed, but half the time I didn’t even bother with it. I’d never had a problem with strangers showing up outside of business hours and the location was remote enough that there weren’t people trying to illegally camp out or park their RV.
But the night before, every whistle or rumble threw me from sleep into a cold sweat. I couldn’t even recall how many times I’d jumped out of bed to check the perimeter with a nine-millimeter and a flashlight. The most terrifying thing I’d found was a tag team of gulls who’d decided to come out for a midnight snack courtesy of a trash can lid thrown open in the night breeze.
“Did you sleep at all last night?” Gemma’s voice stirred me back to reality from my exhausted, glassy-eyed stare at the ceiling, watching the sunlight moving along the white surface.
“Not so much.” I heaved over onto my side and brushed a hand along her face. “You?”
She blinked a few times, clearing the sleep from her eyes. “Sorta.”
“The sooner this is over, the better.” I smiled at her, hoping that my attempt to project confidence and control would come across as more comforting than it felt. “If I should be up all night, it should be because of something a helluva lot more fun than chasing seagulls out of the fuckin’ trash cans.”
Gemma giggled. “You’re impossible. You know that, right?”
“What can I say? It’s part of my charm.” I kissed her slowly, letting myself get caught in the emotion of it.
“All right, Prince Charming, let’s go get this over with,” Gemma said as soon as I broke away from the kiss. She rolled off her side of the bed and padded off to the bathroom.
I smiled at seeing her naked ass and shook my head, marveling at how comfortable she was with herself. There was no duck, dodge, or scurry halfway wrapped in a sheet torn from the bed.
“Never has the expression, ‘I hate it when she leaves, but love watching her go’ been more true,” I called after her. Gemma’s giggle carried out to me and I basked into the relaxed moment, knowing it would be over all too soon.
As it turned out, convincing the FBI and FAA teams that something sinister was going on was a lot easier than I’d initially thought. After a quick breakfast—my not-so-world-famous, four egg scramble on dry toast—Gemma and I went over to the museum and just as expected, the two teams of agents were arriving to begin their day. I flagged down Montgomery as soon as we stepped inside.
“Good morning, Mr. Rosen, and…” his eyes drift over to Gemma, who stood at my side.
“This is Gemma Henderson. She’s a nurse in the ER where I was treated after the crash,” I explained. Gemma gave me a quick side glance. “And she’s my girlfriend,” I added, stumbling slightly over the correct title to use for the introduction.
Gemma smiled and took a half step forward to offer Agent Montgomery her hand. “Nice to meet you, sir.”
“Likewise. Listen, Mr. Rosen, Ms. Henderson, I assure you we’re all doing the best we can to get this wrapped up so we can get out of your hair and let you get back to business.”
“That’s not what we need to talk to you about,” I interjected when he paused for breath. “Gemma and I need to speak with you about the investigation. We have some documents you need to see.”
Agent Montgomery’s expression changed from PR perfection to a creased brow. I couldn’t tell if he was intrigued or annoy
ed by my declaration.
“Please, sir, it will only take a few minutes of your time,” Gemma added, her tone sweet and beguiling as I’d ever heard it.
“Of course, Ms. Henderson,” Montgomery replied, his expression changing yet again, the groove between his brows fading as he ushered her toward the back of the museum.
She shot me a look over her shoulder as she sashayed away, chatting with the agent as though they were old friends.
She certainly knew how to get results.
Along the way, Agent Montgomery pulled Gary from the FAA unit into the meeting, and we all entered my office. Once the door was shut, Gemma took the floor, and I sat back, content to let her work her female magic on the two men. I’d already tried my way and gotten nowhere. If she could get us the results we were looking for, then all the more power to her.
As I watched her explain her findings to the two men, I was reminded of what she’d said the night before, how we were in this together. Other than my time in the Navy, where being a lone wolf wasn’t exactly an option, I’d always been one to be on my own. As an only child, moving from base to base, I hadn’t really learned much about how to form and maintain long lasting relationships. I never saw the point. Every few years—sometimes months—they’d change again. It was easier being on my own, and over time, I’d gotten very good at both being alone, and taking care of myself. It wasn’t until I met Boomer that I really invested in another person, and even then, we went weeks without talking to each other as our lives were both busy and—at the moment—on different continents.
Watching Gemma talk, I wondered what it would be like to have someone beside me every day. A person who would work with me on common goals and plans. It was hard to imagine, as it was something I hadn’t done before, but somehow, it didn’t seem that far out of my reach for the first time. She made it easy. I didn’t have to direct her or tell her what I wanted or needed. She just knew. And yet, she also wasn’t afraid to push me. Even argue with me. Which—although it annoyed me—made me respect her more.
