Wicked Sin

by Ainsley Booth

  Detective Vasquez is rude. Harsh. Domineering.

  But he’s not cruel.

  That’s key. I know, because I’ve been pinned against a wall by many a cruel man, and it doesn’t feel anything like this.

  More than a few of my fantasies involve being held against a wall by a man like Detective Vasquez. A good man. Rude, crude, harsh—and good.

  Not now, Taylor.

  Not ever.

  But his face is right there. His full mouth, those perfect lips pushed up in an arrogant sneer. Why do arrogant sneers, fuelled by righteous indignation, have to be my undoing?

  And again, that little voice in the back of my mind whispers that we could turn him. He’s a good-looking man. We know how to play men.

  We could play him and get laid in the process.

  What’s the harm?

  “You could get yourself killed, Taylor.” Luke drags me back into the very unsexy life-or-death conversation.

  “I didn’t.”

  “That’s not the point.” His grip tightens, and the hard press of his fingers against my upper arm is more effective than a caress on my breast or between my legs.

  Heat rushes through me.

  “We agreed this would be by my rules,” he spits out angrily. “And then you tried to run. That’s not going to work.”

  “Clearly.” I don’t bother to hide the edge in my voice. Let him think I’m a petulant brat. It’s better than him knowing the truth. “I’ll try harder next time.”

  “There will not be a next time.”

  “Or else?”

  “Don’t test me.”

  “Sorry, that’s just how I roll.”

  “Fuck, Taylor. Do you have a death wish?”

  “I don’t know.” Three little whispered words.

  His eyes go wide.

  Fuck.

  The next thing I hear is his hand smacking the wall beside my head, and he brings his face—that mouth—right up against mine. “You’re hiding too much from me,” he snarls. “Too fucking much. I’m done playing in the dark, you hear me? Tell me what the hell is going on. Tell me why you’re here. Why did we have to come to Washington?”

  “I told you.” I take as much of a breath as I can manage. There’s an ugly lump in my throat. “I needed to talk to my sister and find out what she knows. She’s not wrapped up in anything. I promise.”

  “This isn’t where your sister lives.”

  “It’s where her husband works.”

  “Who’s her husband?”

  “His name is Cole Parker. He’s a crisis management expert.”

  “Jesus Christ, Taylor.” He lets go of me and paces backward. His face is still twisted in anger. “That’s what this is about? You tricked me to follow you just so you could start to cover everything up?”

  “What? No!”

  “I’ve read your father’s file. Cole Parker is all over his earlier investigations. That guy is a pro at making things disappear. But you are wrong if you think that will keep you safe. Someone wants you to do this. They want you running scared. You get that? We played right into their hands. Maybe he planted that device. Did you ever think of that?”

  “Why do you think I’m here?” I jut my chin at him. “I’m not stupid. That occurred to me the second you sat me down in that interrogation room. Who would want me to be scared? Cole, a thousand percent. That’s. Why. I’m. Here.”

  11

  Luke

  She seriously planned to walk into the lion’s den herself. “And then what was your plan? Confront someone who wanted to kill you? Assume that a former Navy SEAL would just go, oops, my bad, so sorry?”

  “If it was Cole, he didn’t want to kill me.” She looks me straight in the eye. None of the affected personality before.

  I believe her, or at least, I believe that she believes herself. “That’s a dangerous gamble.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first, won’t be the last. I know what I’m doing, Detective Vasquez.” She trips over my name.

  Hey, Luke.

  The breathy, lippy response is still rocketing around in my brain. Like, oh, you caught me, ha-ha.

  I’m playing with fire here. I can feel it, even if I can’t see it. “The problem is, I don’t know what you’re doing. That needs to stop.”

  Slowly, she nods. “Okay. You can come with me.”

  Like there was any other option. “And what’s the plan? The real plan this time. Not some cover story that allows you to abandon me, the person who is going to fucking keep you alive.”

  “We’re going to The Horus Group. They’re a crisis management firm that has worked for my family before. They’re ruthless. Ex-cops, ex-special forces. You’ll get along great with them.”

  “You don’t like them.”

  She smiles, and it’s sad. “I don’t like anyone in this town. It’s not personal.”

  I think it is completely personal, and when we’re done with this ridiculous exploratory mission, I’m going to poke her hard in that wound and see what slides out. “And we’re going to straight up ask them what they want with you?”

  “Pretty much.”

  It’s not the worst plan. “I’d like to give the D.C. police a heads up that I’m doing this. Questioning people out of jurisdiction and all that.”

  She screws up her face and nods.

  I keep her pinned against the wall while I place a call to the contact Captain Woods gave me yesterday—just in case.

  “Detective Kendra Browning,” the woman answers.

  “Detective, my name is Luke Vasquez, LAPD.” I give her my badge number. “I’m in D.C. for the day, strictly on background, and something has come up where I’m going to be introducing myself as a cop and asking some questions. I wanted to let you know first.”

  There’s a pause as she looks me up. “Okay, Detective. Shoot.”

  I give her the brief rundown of the car bomb yesterday, and the complicating factor of the Dashford Reid family connections. “So I’m going to a crisis management firm on K Street, and if you want to come with me, I’ll understand. No intent to ruffle any feathers here.”

  This time the pause is longer. “The Horus Group?”

  “Yeah. You know them? Anything I should be aware of?”

  She laughs. “You can do this one alone, Detective. Full disclosure: my ex-husband is one of the principals there. Don’t expect to get anything from them. But if you have any questions after, feel free to reach out again.”

  “Will do.” I disconnect the call and give Taylor a hard look. “One of the Horus Group guys was married to a local cop?”

  She shrugs. “I don’t keep a spreadsheet on who’s fucked who, Detective.”

  Yeah, I’ve noticed. “Let’s start keeping track of these things, princess. Now, take me into the lion’s den.”

  When Taylor announces herself at the locked entrance to the crisis management firm, we’re immediately buzzed in.

  The elevator indicates that the offices take up two floors. We get off at the first one.

  There’s a large man waiting in the middle of reception. I’m six foot three, and he looks like he’s about the same, but he easily has twenty pounds of muscles on me, and I can hold my own at the gym. More than.

  This guy is a tank.

  “Taylor,” he says, his voice full of barely contained fury.

  She doesn’t seem bothered in the least. “Cole. I missed your wedding.”

  “You weren’t invited.”

  I step between them and hold out my hand. “Detective Luke Vasquez. We’re here on official business, if you don’t mind me breaking up this family reunion.”

  He does his best to crush my fingers. I give back as good as I get. He grunts and lets go then leads us into a conference room.

  “You armed?” he asks me once we’re alone.

  “No.” I look him over. I can’t see a holster. “Are you?”

  “No.”

  Great. This is going great so far. “Mr. Parker, yesterday afternoon Ms.
Reid’s car was destroyed by a car bomb.”

  “Here?” He turns his intense stare to his sister-in-law. “Are you back?”

  I answer him. “No. I’m an LAPD detective. The explosive was set at her place of employment in Northeast L.A.. I was sent there to follow up on a bogus claim of Ms. Reid dealing drugs out of the back of her car. We’ve determined that was a false report, which raises the question of who would want to smear her reputation?”

  “And you’re looking at me? On the other side of the country?”

  “You have considerable resources. You’ve done worse to detract from scandal, to derail investigations into significant crimes.”

  “I don’t do shit like that anymore. As for the resources, most of the people Taylor here has pissed off over the years have a more significant reach than I might.”

  “How many of them have demolitions experts on staff?”

  “Lots.” He’s not fazed by my questions. “We didn’t do this.”

  “Do you have any associates in California right now?”

  There’s a long pause before he answers. “No,” he says finally.

  “That took you a while to consider.”

  “I was weighing the pros and cons of being helpful in another way.”

  “And what did you settle on?”

  “Still unsure.” He rubs his stubble-covered jaw. “What’s your deal, Taylor? Bringing a cop here to accuse me of something?”

  “I didn’t bring him,” she says smoothly. “He followed me. Trust me, I didn’t want to air this out in front of him.”

  I spread my hands wide. “Hey, I’m right here. And I’m not the enemy.”

  Cole’s eyebrows hit the roof. “You don’t know much about her family, do you?”

  “I know enough about her to know she’s not fond of her family.”

  “Really?” He smirks. “That’s new.”

  “And I understand you work for them.”

  “Worked. Past tense. Taylor’s out of the loop on that score.”

  “And now it’s my turn to say, hey, I’m right here.” Taylor snaps her fingers. “It’s not new that I want nothing to do with my parents. I left D.C. three years ago because I knew I needed to be somewhere else. I’ve stayed away, and now something has happened that I am genuinely in the dark about, because I stayed away. So give me some credit, Cole. I came here knowing you would be adversarial. Knowing you wouldn’t trust me. But I needed to look you in the eye and ask you if you tried to send me a nasty message yesterday on behalf of…who ever. Or even just yourself, because you can be that evil.”

  He glares at her. “It wasn’t me. You think Hailey would let me live if I did that to you?”

  “She hates me.”

  “She hates you because she loves you, and you hurt her. Repeatedly. But she wouldn’t ever want to see you harmed. If there’s anyone in your family who is that twisted, we both know it’s your mother. Have you asked mommy dearest where she was yesterday?”

  Mommy dearest. I had the same fleeting thought on the plane overnight, and discarded it. Now my gut twists hard.

  It wouldn’t be the first time I’d seen a parent hurt a child, but it’s never easy to go down that line of investigation. Nobody wants to come to that conclusion. Especially not Taylor. She’s gone white.

  “That’s offside, Cole.”

  “Is it? You know all sorts of sordid details about PRISM. Maybe she wants to keep you quiet, given that the Feds have shut down your trust funds.”

  “How did Hailey even notice? She doesn’t touch hers.”

  “She didn’t notice. She doesn’t care. You should take a page from her book.”

  I need them to back up a step to all sorts of sordid details about PRISM, as in, what the fuck is PRISM, and just exactly how sordid are we talking?

  But now we’re on the topic of Hailey, apparently, and that’s more important to both of them.

  “How can I take a page from her book when she won’t talk to me?”

  “Suddenly you care about that? If you showed up here just to lean on your sister when—”

  Another man appears in the doorway. He has a sleeping toddler strapped to his chest, which makes me do a double-take.

  “Whoa, guys, keep it down.” He points to the snoozing body attached to him. “Nap time.”

  “Wilson?” Now Taylor’s doing a double-take, too. “Is that…yours?”

  “Yeah. What the hell are you doing back here? I thought we agreed California was healthier for you in every way.”

  “We did.” She turns to me. “Luke, this is Wilson Carter, the resident hacker, and the only member of the Horus Group who I actually like.”

  “Luke Vasquez, LAPD.” I shake his hand. He doesn’t try to murder my knuckles, so I like him more than Cole already.

  “Interesting. When did Taylor start dating a cop?”

  “This isn’t a social call. I’m here because someone planted a bomb in Ms. Reid’s car yesterday and nearly killed us both.”

  His sharp features break into a pleased expression. “And you think Cole did it? That’s fun.”

  “Not fun,” his colleague growls. “A pain in the ass.”

  “Yeah. Exactly. Fun.” The bundle on his chest squirms and lets out a frustrated cry. “Well, fun for me, anyway. Come on, little bug. Let’s get you some milk.”

  He leaves, and Taylor looks at Cole. “Wilson has a baby?”

  “You’ve missed a lot.”

  “No kidding. I didn’t even know that he had sex.”

  Cole gives her a disapproving look.

  She just shrugs. “Okay, well, I’m going to leave the two of you to talk about…whatever, and I’m going to follow that adorable baby.”

  Cole’s look gets worse.

  “What? I like children.”

  “For brunch, with a nice chianti.”

  She growls and turns on her heel.

  I pull out my phone and double-check that the GPS tracker I stuck on her is still working. It is. Good. I don’t think she’s going to run again, but just in case, I’ll find her.

  “So,” I say, turning to the ex-commando turned Washington fixer. “I take it you didn’t try to kill her.”

  “No.”

  “Scare her?”

  “No.”

  “And PRISM is what?”

  “PRISM is the Project Responsible for International Security Measures. An extra-governmental organization with unlimited funds and shadowy purpose.”

  And we’ve taken a left turn into some James Bond shit. “You’re shitting me.”

  “I wish I was. Amelia Dashford Reid is a major principal player in it, and they’ve invested heavily in America First. They got Victor Best elected president.”

  “He’s a Democrat,” I say dumbly. Though I know as well as anyone else that means nothing. He’s also a billionaire who cares more about money than what’s right or wrong. I voted for his Republican opponent, but she didn’t have a chance in hell of winning California anyway.

  Cole shrugs. “Everything has changed.”

  I’m aware of the political upheaval in this country.

  I wasn’t aware until this moment that it had anything to do with Taylor Dashford Reid, resident of Glendale, California for the last three years.

  “So what does Taylor know that makes her a liability to her mother?”

  “That’s for her to tell you. Or not. To be honest, Detective, I’d assume that she’ll pick not. The secrets she knows could get her killed if she’s not careful.”

  No. That’s not fucking acceptable. “I don’t like anything about this.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “You don’t seem like you’d be heartbroken if anything happened to her.”

  “We have a history. Taylor does what Taylor needs to do for her own reasons, but she’s trampled on her family in the past.”

  “You don’t trust her.”

  He laughs. “That’s an understatement.”

  I pull a card from my wal
let. “Well, I do trust her. She’s the victim of a violent crime, and I’m going to get to the bottom of it and arrest whoever is responsible. I won’t hesitate to charge anyone who stands in the way of justice, either.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  “I don’t need luck, thanks. I’ll do my job.” I hand over the card. “If you think of anything that maybe slipped your mind today, anything you think I should know, don’t hesitate to get in touch.”

  I follow the sounds of a cooing baby and the corresponding laughing woman around the corner, where I find Taylor in a hacker’s paradise. A dark office, lined with computer screens.

  And the one thing that doesn’t fit: a sweet, fat little toddler who shrieks and pulls her dad’s hair.

  “While I was in social hiding, Wilson went and met himself a beautiful woman and made a beautiful baby,” Taylor says, beaming at me. “It’s almost enough to make me believe in true love.”

  “Liar,” Wilson says affectionately.

  My Alice-through-the-looking-glass dysphoria is getting stronger by the second. “What is going on?”

  Taylor makes a face, but then looks appropriately chastened—an act, no doubt. “Just catching up.”

  “We can get down to work, for sure.” Wilson grabbed a puffy cracker from a package on his desk and gave it to the little girl. “What exactly do you guys want to know?”

  Nope, we can’t do this. I glance at the bank of screens. A hacker. “Nothing. None of this is legal, and all of it will be fruit of the poisoned tree if you tell me literally anything, so we’re going to get going now.”

  Wilson shrugs. “Your choice man. But that’s no fun.”

  “Pointing out that he’s no fun will have zero effect,” Taylor says pertly. “Or I’d have tried it sooner.”

  “Funny,” I mutter, trying not to look at the dialog box open on the screen behind her. What could I ask him to look up? “Can we please leave?”

  “Not yet.” She hesitates. “I do want to ask Wilson a favor, though, so maybe you should step outside.”

  “No favors, Princess. Information by the book, without persuasion, or not at all.”