“I ruined your relationship with Adrianna,” Jack pointed out.
“Well, for a minute, you did,” Riley said, shrugging as much as the position of his arms would allow. “But…” Riley stared at Jack in disbelief for a long moment. “Oh man—no, you wouldn’t have heard, would you?”
“Heard about what?”
Jack frowned. He knew that since he’d left town, since he had tried to distance himself out of shame for what he’d done, he hadn’t had much chance to hear about anything that had happened in his friend’s life.
“We got back together,” Riley told him, grinning broadly. “We broke up, obviously… but about a week after you and I parted ways, Adrianna called me. We met up at that restaurant—Angie’s.” Riley looked off into space and Jack could see the clear and obvious love in his friend’s eyes. “We talked about our situation; neither of us could stop thinking about the other. We decided to put it behind us and try again.”
“Oh, wow,” Jack said, glancing at Cassandra, trying to see if he was just being affected by his long relationship to Riley or if she believed the man too. He wasn’t sure when he had come to see her as something of a partner in his mission—but he couldn’t deny that she had handled herself better than he had expected.
For just an instant, his mind called up the feeling of Cassandra’s body pressed against the wall in her apartment, the way she had struggled against him. If he hadn’t had the element of surprise on his side, she would have given him a much tougher time. The memory of how Cassandra had felt, the heat of her body, the crush of her breasts against his chest, threatened to distract him and Jack savagely pushed it down. You’ve gone three months without sex before. Don’t let it distract you now. You need to figure this whole thing out, not fantasize about throwing her in the backseat and ripping her clothes off.
“We ended up getting married at the Justice of the Peace about two weeks later. It was no big, fancy wedding, just a couple of witnesses and a clerk.” Riley grinned again. “I wanted to tell you about it, but when things went south between us, I just deleted all your contact info. No one really knew where you’d gone.”
“Really?” Jack pressed his lips together, deliberating.
“Really, bro,” Riley said. “In fact, just a couple months later, Adrianna got pregnant.” Riley smiled again. “We had twins. And you know…” Riley shrugged.
Jack couldn’t quite work his mind around the fact that things had changed so much between him and the man he had once considered his best friend.
Riley tilted his head slightly, flexing against the strain from their earlier wrestling match. “After that…life just kind of got in the way, you know? Everything was the kids, Adrianna, work. I didn’t even think about it anymore.”
“I can’t believe it,” Jack said, shaking his head. “Congratulations, I guess.”
The man in front of him was happy, and there was absolutely no sign that Riley still resented the betrayal Jack had dealt him years before. There was something about that fact that almost rankled; Jack had put so much thought into the fact that he had ruined his friend’s relationship that the possibility of Riley moving on with his life and forgiving him had seemed almost nonexistent. He had been consumed with guilt; how could Riley not have been consumed with bitter resentment towards him?
“When I heard about the murder charges, I thought about trying to get back in touch with you. But Adrianna thought… She thought if I got in touch with you, it’d drag our family into it too, you know?”
“Yeah, I get that,” Jack said.
He couldn’t quite bring himself to believe what Riley was saying, but he also knew the other man well enough to know he wasn’t capable of making up a lie that was so involved when put on the spot.
“I saw kids’ toys in the front yard,” Cassandra said, breaking Jack out of his deliberations.
“Look,” Riley said, his face shifting into serious lines. “I know the way we left things. I know…that there was a time when I could have killed you happily, man.”
Jack smiled slightly; that at least was the Riley he knew. That, at least, was what he had expected from the man who’d been his brother in arms.
“But that was three years ago, man. Even if I still had any reason to hate your guts, I wouldn’t do something that’d risk me going to jail just to get even. Not with the kids.”
Jack’s hand hadn’t left the hilt of his knife. He gave the pommel a squeeze, trying to decide whether or not he could believe in this changed, family man. He’s let himself run a bit too fat, but it’s the same face. Riley never could lie worth a damn, unless I was backing him up. Could I really torture the guy who saved my life?
“I can’t believe you’re a married stiff,” Jack said, smiling around his clenched teeth.
What if I can’t get to the bottom of this? What if the cops catch up to me before I can find out who killed Laura? I can’t…I can’t just let this go. I can’t go back to prison without knowing.
Jack closed his eyes. Even with the nap he had taken in the back of Cassandra’s car, he was exhausted. He had spent every moment of the last three months thinking about his wrongful conviction, thinking about Laura Granger who—no matter what her sordid involvement with the city’s underworld—hadn’t deserved to be murdered. He couldn’t go back without knowing what had happened.
“Jack,” Cassandra said quietly.
He turned away from Riley, scowling at her. She was holding Riley’s wallet in her hands, and he realized that while he and his former best friend had been talking, she had been going through Riley’s things.
“Look at this,” she told him.
Jack’s scowl deepened, but he did as she asked. He took what looked like a playing card from her hands and glanced at it; it was a picture, taken in some medium-rate photo studio.
He recognized Riley right away, dressed in a polo shirt and khakis. Next to him, he saw Adrianna, dressed in a light summer dress. The two of them were each holding a young child—the two dark-haired girls couldn’t have been any more than two years old, and each one bore a resemblance to both parents, with Riley’s eyes and Adrianna’s nose and cheekbones. Jack smiled down at the picture and then handed it back to Cassandra, turning his attention back to Riley.
“They’re beautiful, man,” Jack said.
He stepped closer to the chair and pulled the knife out of its sheath. He tugged the handcuff strips around and cut them free of the arms and legs of the chair.
“With you as their dad, I bet they’re already a handful.”
Riley chuckled, and as Jack freed his hands, offered his former best friend a quick handshake. Jack pumped his hand and then, in an impulse, threw his arms around Riley’s shoulders.
“Let’s get you home before Adrianna comes for my head,” Jack said finally, stepping back and turning towards the storage locker.
Chapter Ten
Cassandra
Cassandra pulled up to Riley’s house, once more feeling the throb of fatigue in her bones. After the adrenaline of the kidnapping and the nerve-straining moments when she had been certain Jack Hardy was going to torture the man in a chair in the middle of a storage unit, she had lost something of her second wind while driving back from the storage facility. Riley sat in the passenger seat next to her, while Jack remained hidden in the back.
As Cassandra parked the car, Riley turned to look at Jack over the back of his seat.
“I wish I could do more to help, man,” Riley said.
Cassandra resisted the urge to shake her head in disbelief. Jack was all set up to torture this guy—to cut on him, maybe do things with that pair of pliers, and who even knows what else. Why isn’t he getting the hell out of the car as fast as he can?
“You’ve done more than enough, bro,” Jack said from the back.
Cassandra saw a loose fist come up from the back seat, and Riley didn’t hesitate before bumping it with his own knuckles.
“You get this cleared away, you come and visit me and
the kids, you got me?”
“Of course,” Jack replied. There was a brief, tense silence between the two men. “In case I don’t,” Jack said finally, “I wanted to apologize for—well, you know.”
Riley shrugged, smiling slightly. “It’s water under the bridge,” he said, shaking his head. “It means a lot to me, you apologizing—but I forgave you a long time ago.”
“All’s well, huh?”
“Yeah, man. All’s well.” Riley glanced at the clock on the stereo. “Hell, I didn’t even miss breakfast!”
Cassandra heard Jack’s dry chuckle from the back seat.
Riley looked at her briefly. “Take care of my man here, you got me?”
Cassandra hesitated before nodding. Riley opened the car door and started to climb out. He paused and ducked his head into the interior of the car once more.
“I won’t tell anyone about your visit…” Riley chuckled. “That’s an ‘us’ story, I figure.”
“Thanks, man,” Jack said.
Riley closed the car door and Cassandra watched him walk quickly to the front door of his house, barely casting a glance back at them. She took a deep breath and put the car into reverse.
“Okay,” she said, willing her brain and body to hold out a little while longer. “Where are we going now?”
Chapter Eleven
“Shit!”
Cassandra’s heart thudded in her chest as she slammed on the brakes. She felt as though someone were trying to drive a spike into her brain, spasms of pain flickering behind her eyes every few moments.
By the time they’d left Riley’s house, the sun had come up fully. Now, as she struggled to navigate according to Jack’s terse instructions, Cassandra wished that half the population of the state would have taken the bus. She took a deep breath. She wasn’t sure whether the surface streets would be worse than the highway; the suburban roads around Riley’s house had been just as congested as the Interstate in front of her now was.
“I can’t keep this up much longer, Jack,” she said, glancing at the muscular form in her backseat. When did I start calling him Jack?
“What’s going on?” Jack’s head rose slightly, not quite clearing the tops of the seats.
“Traffic is a nightmare. It’s rush hour.”
Cassandra took one hand off of the steering wheel and held it where Jack could see it; she felt her whole body trembling, but her hands were the worst.
“Stay on the highway a little longer,” Jack said, sinking back down. “There should be somewhere secluded along the way where we can get off. We’ll find a spot in the woods and you can get some sleep.”
“Gee, thanks,” Cassandra said, grimacing. She yawned, tilting her head back against the headrest to try and ease the ache in her neck.
“There’s no point in staying on the road anyway, if we can’t go more than fifteen miles an hour,” Jack pointed out, ignoring her sarcasm. “You haven’t noticed anyone following us, have you?”
“It’s not like I could tell,” Cassandra told him. “Traffic is so packed out there that someone could be right next to me, watching us, and I wouldn’t have a clue.”
“Find a decent place to get off the road,” Jack said, shifting in the back seat. “Where are we at?”
Her irritation rising up inside of her, Cassandra glanced at one of the highway signs as she came within sight of it. She read off the next three exits to Jack, slowing to a stop once more as the traffic in front of her inexplicably ground to a halt.
“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do.”
Cassandra raised an eyebrow, stifling another yawn as she listened for Jack’s idea.
“We’re about four exits away from an exit that leads off into a nature preserve. I’ll tell you where to go from there.”
Cassandra shrugged. “If I can stay awake that long,” she said, uncaring that the resentment was palpable in her voice. She had a right to be resentful, didn’t she? Jack had kidnapped her; he had nearly forced her to watch him torture an innocent man, something that would have given her nightmares for years to come.
She still felt a certain undercurrent of fear and distrust of the man in her backseat, but something in the fact that he had relented when it became clear that Riley bore him no ill will had lessened her certainty that Jack was guilty. If Riley had wanted Jack to meet his kids, surely Riley didn’t think that Jack was guilty of the murder.
“Stay awake another twenty minutes or so, and you’ll be able to get some shut-eye,” Jack told her. “We just need cover.”
Cassandra nodded numbly. Her eyelids felt unbearably heavy, her hands like wooden blocks at the ends of her tingling arms.
She battled the ebb and flow of traffic, watching the signs as they passed until she saw the exit that Jack had mentioned. Cassandra inched her way to the exit lane, shivering with relief once she was able to drive a little more evenly as she came off of the highway.
“Keep straight. The road feeds into the entrance of the preserve.”
Cassandra followed the signs and Jack’s instructions, continuing along the road as it petered out from a surface street to a glorified two-lane path through the thickening woods. Ramshackle houses disappeared, replaced by scrubby pine trees; the grass became steadily taller as oaks and other big, broad trees replaced the pines.
“Turn right on the little side road up here,” Jack said.
Cassandra made the right-hand turn onto a dirt road; glancing in her rearview mirror she saw that they were alone.
The early morning sunlight dimmed around her, dappled by the dense foliage, and Cassandra winced slightly at how bumpy the dirt road was under her tires. Sighing, she thought to herself that at least she would get some rest soon.
“Keep going until the road dead-ends,” Jack told her.
The road steadily became rougher, the bumping under her tires more pronounced, and Cassandra fought to keep her grip on the steering wheel. Arriving at the dead end, she came to a stop, glancing into the back seat.
“There’s a little path, right there,” Jack told her, sitting up and pointing over the front passenger seat. “Your car should just fit.”
Cassandra groaned. “If this fucks up my tires, we’re not going to get very far,” she said. She could hear the whining note of fatigue in her voice and hated it.
“It won’t,” Jack told her firmly. “We need to be as concealed as possible.”
Cassandra had to admit to herself that his logic was sound. She crept onto the path and followed it until they were completely obscured by the trees, the car so far away from any road that they would be nearly impossible to find, even if someone decided to search for them in the preserve. Cassandra shifted the car into park and turned the key in the ignition, shutting down the engine.
“You can put the seat back,” Jack told her, his voice surprisingly gentle.
Cassandra didn’t reply; she reached down along the side of the seat and found the lever, before reclining the seat as much as possible.
Exhausted as she was, Cassandra wasn’t certain that she would be able to fall asleep. She was keenly aware of Jack’s presence only a few feet away from her, and her memories of the coroner’s reports, and the storage unit she had been in just an hour before, made her heart beat faster with an instinctive dread.
Within a few moments, though, she felt her body beginning to relax. Almost against her will, the tightness in her neck, her back, and her legs began to loosen, and her eyelids became unbearably heavy. Her heart began to slow down, and before Cassandra could realize it, she slipped down into the comforting, velvety darkness.
Chapter Twelve
Hours later, she swam up into consciousness, unsure at first as to what had prompted her awakening. She couldn’t hear anything going on, but she knew she didn’t want to be awake. She was still so tired, so sleepy that even the thought of opening her eyes was painful. Why am I awake? She frowned, trying to remember what had been happening when she fell asleep.
Before she could br
ing any details to mind, Cassandra’s thoughts were interrupted by a pair of rough, strong hands beginning to move along her body. At first they seemed to merely be exploring the shape of her curves, examining her almost impartially. But as one hand moved from the swell of her hip, along the indentation of her waist and then up to caress her breast, Cassandra could sense the intention shifting.
What the—?
She remembered suddenly that she had fallen asleep in the car, that she was with Jack Hardy—and opened her eyes to see his tanned, muscular forearm wrapped around her waist. Her heart thudded in her chest and she squirmed, trying to get away, but Jack’s grip on her only tightened. “Shh,” he hissed in her ear. He kneaded her breast with one hand while the other skimmed at the hem of her blouse, tickling her lower abdomen.
“What are you doing?” Cassandra tried to pry his hands off of her, but her body betrayed her; she couldn’t force her hands to grip him properly, and her nipples hardened, straining at the fabric of her bra.
Jack’s fingertips found them, rolling and twisting the firm nubs, sending jolts of sensation shooting down to her already-wet pussy. Cassandra gasped and shivered, arching instinctively into the touches as her body refused to be repelled by the man’s advances.
“I know you’ve thought about something like this,” Jack murmured in her ear, his voice tight with lust. “You’re exactly the kind of woman who dreams of a strong man who knows what she wants…even when she tries to pretend like she’s in charge of everything.”
He gave one of her nipples another tweak, and Cassandra’s breath caught in her throat with an involuntary cry of pleasure. She pushed her hips back instinctively, longing for his body but finding only the leather of her car seat.
“It’s been so long, Cass. So long for both of us,” he said. “When was the last time a man fucked you properly?”
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