“Hey, just relaying what I heard. You know people talk. So, what’s the deal.”
“I don’t know, man. I like her. She’s funny and nice, and a great mom, and fucking amazing in bed.”
“Oh, so you…?” Dylan interrupted.
“She was waiting for me to get home. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is she overheard me take the call from the boss and thought she should get a say in what I do related to my job.”
“Well, she should.”
“But, dude, we’re not serious. At least she made it seem like it was a one-time thing and I don’t do relationships. You know this.”
“What if being with you made her change her mind. Did she seem like she wanted to leave or did she hang around?”
“She hung around. Of course, we couldn’t seem to keep our hands off each other. Fuck, I don’t think I’ve ever had so much sex in one night.”
“Well, it seems like maybe she was second-guessing the one-time rule and was hoping for more. Unless you go home and apologize to her, I guess you’ll never know.”
Preston sat and considered what his friend was saying. He had a hard enough time reading a woman’s signals when they were merely flirting, but trying to read their lust versus love queues was even more daunting. Thinking back to the way she lingered at his house, patiently waiting for him to take his phone call when she clearly could have used that cue to leave. Even after she stormed out of his house, she had continued to stay in the cabin. He knew moving wasn’t the most straightforward task, but he knew Cassidy’s place was available to Shelly.
“Fuck,” he shouted, slamming his fist against the steering wheel.
“Just realize that you both have feelings for each other?”
“Dude, we barely even know each other. Like I only know what I do because of her exes case. She knows next to nothing about me.”
“First, love doesn’t care how long you’ve known someone. It happens when it happens. Second, I think it’s long past time you tell her about how your paths have crossed in the past.”
“She’ll hate me.”
“You really think so? I would think she would be glad to know that you’re the one that saved her. But, I don’t know women that well, so who knows.”
Leaning his head back against the headrest, Preston closed his eyes and imagined a scenario where he told Shelly that he was in love with her and he had been the one to arrest her and her boyfriend eight years ago, and she still loved him afterward. That situation would only exist in his dreams.
He took a few minutes to run through a bunch of different ways he could tell her, but every scenario ended poorly. He was doomed. Thank goodness he hadn’t told his mother about her yet.
“Nothing concrete on the image, but it did flag a few profiles, one of which was for a Damon Durcett who was pulled over for a non-identifiable license plate in Carson, North Carolina.”
“Hm. . .keep that information handy and submit. I knew something about him seemed fishy, though he did carry a Georgia driver’s license.”
“Sun is setting. I think this is everything that we’re going to get. Let’s head back to the headquarters.”
“Agreed. I’m ready to get home.”
“I just bet that you are,” Dylan added snidely.
Preston pulled out into traffic and began the tedious trek of heading toward downtown Atlanta. He stopped at the red stoplight, noticing a car pull in behind them and one stopped to his left.
“Behind and left,” Preston said, grateful for the dark tinted windows of the sedan so that the people in the other cars couldn’t make them out.
Dylan looked up from the computer and checked the two vehicles before nodding at Preston.
The light remained red, but Preston pressed the accelerator to the floor, gunning the vehicle across the intersection. He noted how the two vehicles darted forward a second later, colliding with each other.
“What the hell was that?” Preston asked, but he knew that Dylan had no answer. Someone had been spying on them, which explained why there were no conversions at the warehouse. He wondered where Damon Durcett fit into it all.
At the headquarters, they explained the information they gathered during the week and tacked on their suspicion of a mole in the case. The SAC and the assistant SAC agreed to look into the contacts on the case as well as gather more data on Damon Durcett.
After the debriefing, Dylan was ecstatic to be heading home, whereas Preston was filled with worry. He wasn’t sure how Shelly would react to seeing him, but he had to try and make things right with her.
It was early morning by the time he arrived in Carson, weary and worn out. The drive from Atlanta seemed longer than before and he wanted nothing more than to fall face-first into his bed. But he needed to stop by the veterinarian’s office where Ace was being boarded first. He would have asked Shelly and Abel to watch the pup for him, but with the way things had ended, he assumed that requesting their assistance wasn’t the way to go.
Of course, it was still dark outside when he crossed the main area of downtown and he decided to head back home to catch some sleep then grab Ace in the afternoon.
Continuing his journey, he drove the back roads by memory as Preston fought a losing battle against exhaustion. His brain began shutting off as he pulled his truck in front of the garage, knowing that sleep would soon be near. But from the corner of his eye, he saw a figure dart around the side of his house. That was all it took before he woke fully alert.
Alarms were ringing in his head as he grabbed his gun from the glove box and inserted a new magazine. Preston exited the truck, leaving the door wide open as he scooted around the opposite side of the house, hoping to sneak up on whoever was on his property.
A figure came into view, black material pooling around the body, appearing like a shadowy ghost in the early morning light.
“Stop where you are or I’ll shoot,” he commanded in his most authoritative voice.
“Preston!” the dark ethereal voice cried out and Preston didn’t know if he should be thrilled or enraged that she had been the one sneaking around his house.
Pleading with him, Shelly said as she approached slowly, “I promise I can explain.”
***
She wasn’t actually sure how to explain why she was gallivanting around his house in nothing more than her black silk robe that skimmed the bottom of her calves. All Shelly could hope for was that he would at least listen to her.
“Alright,” he replied, lowering his gun and flicking on the safety. He then looked at her with a sense of longing, or that was what she felt when she looked at him, and she could only imagine her expression looked similar to his.
“So, I was having trouble sleeping and I got up to get a glass of milk. When I looked out the front window, I saw headlights coming down the driveway. At first, I didn’t think anything of it, assuming it was you coming home. But as it got closer, I noticed that the lights were much smaller than your truck’s lights, and the vehicle was much closer to the ground. Like I just knew that it wasn’t you.
“So, I snuck through the path to see what was going on. That’s when I noticed someone come from around the other side of the house and get into the car's passenger seat. As they pulled away, I ran down the yard to see if I could catch a glimpse of them when they turned the bend in the path, but I tripped on a root and twisted my ankle a bit.”
He tore his gaze away from hers as he looked down at her dirt-covered bare feet. “Are you okay? I can take a look at it.”
“It's fine. Really. Anyway, something didn’t seem right, so after a few minutes, I put my weight on my foot and checked the house's parameter. Then you showed up.”
“So, you saw someone trespassing and possibly someone breaking into my house?” he asked skeptically.
“Yes?” she replied, the entire scene sounding strange even to her own ears now as she heard herself repeat it to Preston.
Tucking his gun into the waistband of his pants, Preston looke
d at her, his eyes trailing up her body from head to toe. “And you thought you should track them down wearing nothing more than a silk robe, putting yourself in danger.”
“Well, I mean. . .” she stuttered, her brain not triggering the right words to explain what she had been thinking. Sure, it was dangerous, but she hadn’t really considered any of the ramifications had the trespassers caught her.
By surprise, Preston cupped both sides of her jaw and leaned forward, kissing her with all of the pent-up frustration that she felt.
She had missed him incredibly and hated that her reaction to his job was the reason he had left on bad terms. The entire week she thought about how she would feel if something had happened to him. Would she be able to live with herself knowing the way she had spoken to him? It didn’t take a rocket scientist to tell her that she had fallen head over heels in love with the protective man that she knew far too little about. Her heart didn’t seem to care, though.
And as she opened her mouth to him, he slipped his hands inside her robe and rubbed the delicate skin of her back beneath her sleep shirt. Shelly knew it wouldn’t take much for this kiss to turn wild and ferocious within seconds, so it took all of her willpower to step away from him, her body aching for his touch as his hands dropped to his sides.
“Sorry, Abel is still sleeping in his room.”
“I missed you, Shelly. I want to apologize for the way things ended our last time together.”
“That was all my doing, Preston. You have nothing to be sorry for. I need to learn that not every man I meet is untrustworthy. And I missed you too.”
“Can I take you out to dinner?”
Shelly wasn’t sure what she expected from their proclamations, but a date was not one of them. “Like a date?” she asked. And he nodded, a sly smile growing on his face.
“And dessert,” he added, raising his hand and stroking a path down the center of her chest between her breasts.
“I need to get back to Abel,” she said breathily. “But I’m free tomorrow night. He’ll be with the Connelly’s.”
“Pick you up at six?”
“Sounds good. Be careful, Sheriff,” she called out as she began her trek back to her house.
“I will, sweetheart. I’m going to let Alexis know so we can take a more thorough look,” he said with that bit of Southern twang that she was growing to love.
Now she had to wait patiently for their date the next night.
Shelly twisted and turned in front of her mirror as she watched the red dress skirt around her knees. She felt delicate and beautiful in the dress Cassidy had gifted to her years ago, but she had never worn. Abel had even commented on the material as she hung the dress in her room earlier that day before taking him to the park.
A knock on the door sounded and Shelly was surprised that Preston had arrived right on time. She placed her feet into a pair of gold strappy sandals then went to greet him. She had to bite her tongue when she opened the door and found him standing on the other side wearing a navy striped dress shirt, rolled at the sleeves, and a pair of black slacks that hugged his legs in all of the right areas. Her body was melting in a puddle beneath his stare as she took in her own fill of him.
“Are you sure you want to go out tonight?” he murmured. “We could just stay in.”
As much as she wanted to peel his clothes away from his body, she wanted to go out on a date more. It wasn’t something she had done frequently enough in her life. From what Shelly could remember, she had only been on a handful of dates ever.
“I’d rather go out and spend some time with you, then if the date is everything I imagine it will be, we can come back and I’ll show you what I’m wearing under my dress.”
Slipping an arm around her waist as she shut the door to her house, Preston asked, “Can you give me a hint?”
“I’m not wearing anything at all,” she said, her voice sounding husky and seductive to her own ears.
He drove her to a winery about half an hour from Carson and took in the incredible sunset behind the mountain as they ate dinner. They talked about where they grew up and how they both had tremendous respect for their single mothers. Finally, she asked if he found anything from the night before and he explained that he hadn't found much other than a few footprints. His security camera had been triggered offline, so he didn’t even have a visual of the car.
Shelly began to wonder if she had imagined the entire thing, but he assured her that he believed her completely. He had noticed one of the windows to his mudroom had been opened, but he couldn’t say that it hadn’t been his own doing since he left in a hurry.
Worry filled her, not only that a stranger had been on the property that she shared with him, but that the sheriff of the town couldn’t figure out what had happened.
“Don’t worry. I installed a secondary set of cameras on an entirely different network. But I’m pretty confident it was a couple of teenagers trying to pull one over on the sheriff. It wouldn’t have been the first time.
Preston tried to put Shelly at ease, but the situation still didn’t sit right with her even as he drove them home and stripped the fragile material from her body, leaving her bare before him. He took his sweet time making love to her through the night, but as they drifted off to sleep, Shelly couldn’t help but think that Preston had something else on his mind.
Chapter Ten
The town was gearing up for the Fourth of July celebration at the end of the week; decorations and flags lined the downtown streets. Preston had already been called out on seven homes setting off illegal fireworks. He didn’t really care, but the mayor was worried one of the sparks would catch the surrounding forests on fire. Preston admitted that it was a valid concern.
“Sheriff,” Jackie beckoned as she hobbled into his office on a pair of crutches. He wasn’t sure what had happened while he was out, but Alexis said Jackie had twisted her ankle hiking. He wasn’t aware that his assistant liked the hike. “There is a file for you on my desk from Georgia.”
Realizing that the file was related to the Harposia case, he stepped around her and grabbed the large folder from her desk. “Thanks. Is there anything I can do for you? “
“Unless you can have me healed before the parade on Friday, I don’t think so. I’m not sure how I’m going to walk with the knitting club when I can barely go from my car to my house without falling.”
“Well . . .let me know if you need my help after all,” he said as he quietly shut the door.
He didn’t want Jackie privy to the sealed document's information. They had their own file for the Harposia case, but this one came directly from the FBI dated for the last ten years. Preston flipped through the pages of statements quickly and then changed his focus to the cartel members that had already been arrested. One of these men had a tie to the recent report of human trafficking in Georgia. He just had to figure out who.
Sorting through the stack, he tossed out the images of members arrested five years or later, knowing that they would be the least likely to have contact with someone in Georgia. The early dealings of the Harposia cartel happened in the New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania areas. The cartel didn’t begin moving south until four years or so.
By coincidence, Preston landed on the arrest record and image of DeShaun Taylor. The man had been high as a kite when he was arrested after being caught trying to sell an automatic rifle and a twelve-year-old girl. Preston and his crew had been tracking the online listing for weeks until they made a false inquiry. DeShaun had stumbled into the alleyway with the young girl that had been injected with enough drugs to kill her or keep her compliant. Preston had immediately paid for the girl and ushered her off to safety. The team had recognized the insignia all of the Harposia cartel associates wore on their wrists, which linked him to one of the worst alliances in the area. It took only one more day to track down where the lowlife lived and Preston’s team took him down. It was only a misunderstanding that Shelly had been involved at all. The agent
in charge of following DeShaun had forgotten to disclose her relationship with the suspect.
Shaking his head Preston set DeShaun’s paperwork into the old pile. He knew the man was rotting away in jail in New York, playing bitch to whichever man would give him the drugs they snuck into the facility. He sifted through a few more images and statements, but nothing was connecting the dots. Harposia herself could wield a mighty sword while locked away in her facility, but he didn’t think she had that far enough of a reach to start an entirely new union. He just needed to figure out how the cartel in Georgia knew every step the FBI was taking. There was a link somewhere and he was sure that Damon Durcett played a part.
He was so lost in his work, trying to piece together different segments of the case that he didn’t hear the door to his office open or notice that Shelly was standing right before his desk. He looked up at her, a ready smile on his face, but Preston frowned when he saw her gaze trained on the image of DeShaun sitting on top of the stack on his desk.
“What’s this?” Shelly asked as she lifted the paper and began reading it. He knew when she read that he had been the lead agent because a fury like no other beamed from her. Shelly’s body began to tremble as she curled her fingers around the paper.
“Shelly, I can explain.”
“I asked you what this is,” she seethed.
Sighing, Preston explained that it was the official FBI documentation from her exes arrest and the subsequent arrests made to tear down a drug, weapons, and human trafficking cartel.
“And you were a part of this? You were one of the ones that stormed into my apartment and arrested us?”
“No, Shelly. It wasn’t like that.” Preston dashed around his desk and tried to pry the paper from her hand, but she wasn’t having it. Her eyes were scanning over the official statement that he made along with DeShaun’s.
“It was a mistake that you were tied into this. I was one of the ones that pushed for your release.”
“And I should believe you?” she shouted. “My God, you’ve been lying to me from the start, Preston. You were an FBI agent and now you’re what, the town sheriff and an agent on the side? Do you even realize that you tore my family apart before it had even begun?”
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