“Ah…” Kerry stifled a surprised laugh. “No, thanks. We’re on our way to lunch.”
Henry held on to Kerry’s hand and squinted at him from behind his glasses. “Don’t I know you?”
Bemused, Kerry shook his head. “I don’t think so. Unless you’ve been to the clinic?”
“Oh! So you’re a doctor, are you?”
“I am.” Extracting his hand, he reached for Jayne, who stood. “Well, it’s nice to meet you, Henry. But I promised my girl lunch—”
Jayne’s thirty-six-year-old heart, which really ought to know better, burst into a ridiculous song of pleasure and gratitude. His girl! That makes things official, doesn’t it?
“—and I don’t want her to get too cold.”
“Of course,” Henry said. “You’re a lovely couple. Have a good— No, Kramer! Bad boy!”
Kramer, who’d snuck in and snatched the plastic bag with the other sandwich half when they weren’t looking, hung his head and whined. Grumbling, Henry extracted the ruined sandwich from the dog’s mouth and tossed it into the nearest garbage can.
“Bye, Henry,” Jayne said, laughing.
“Goodbye, dear,” Henry said with a what can you do? smile. “I hope we meet again soon.”
With a raised-brow look, Kerry took her hand and led her down the path. “That’s a character.”
“I liked him.” Jayne eased closer as Kerry wrapped his arm around her waist. “So how was your morn—”
Without warning, Kerry backed her into the relative privacy of one of the columns and lowered his head. She was right there with him, looping her arms around his neck and melting into his urgent kiss with an involuntary mewl of pleasure. Only when he had her hot, bothered and breathless did he loosen his hold on her and ease back enough to see her face.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi. You didn’t miss me, did you?”
“Little bit.”
“Hmmm.” Her gaze dipped to his smiling lips. She lived for the way his entire body seemed to light up when he had her in his arms. “You can’t wait to get me into bed again, can you?”
“I cannot,” he said, his voice husky.
“In fact, you’re hot and desperate for me, aren’t you, doctor?”
“Objection,” he said. “Leading question.”
“Overruled,” she snapped. “Witnesses don’t object. Answer the question.”
“Can you rephrase?”
Laughing and staring him in the eye, she shifted her hips just enough, and there it was, plain as the nose on her face even through all the layers of their clothes and both coats.
“You’re hard as a rock right now, aren’t you, Dr. Randolph?”
“Guilty,” he said, dipping his head for another kiss.
It was firm. Gentle. Endlessly persuasive.
When he was done, he sighed, closed his eyes and pressed his lips to her forehead.
“It was all worth it,” he murmured against her skin.
“What?”
“Everything that got me to this moment.”
“Kerry,” she began helplessly, with no idea of what she would say. Probably some nonsense warning that she would fall in love with him if he wasn’t careful, when it should be painfully obvious to both parties involved that she already was—and had been for a while—hopelessly in love with him.
“Come on.” He let her go and took her hand. “Let’s get you some lunch. How many points today?”
“I think I’m entitled to a good ten points or so,” she said, leaning closer so they could put their heads together while they walked. “I won my motion.”
“You did? Great job—”
“Well, well, well,” said an amused male. “If it isn’t my favorite AUSA and Dr. Randolph. As I live and breathe.”
At this unwelcome reminder that the rest of the world still existed, Jayne and Kerry stopped dead. And came face to face with a pair of large, trench-coat-wearing men: Dexter Brady, who seemed to be having trouble dialing back his wicked glee, and Mateo Garciaparra, whose stricken look suggested he’d been force-fed a pint of raw sewage.
Jayne blinked, this collision of her work and personal lives making her dull-witted. And right there, sports fans, was one of the biggest problems with living in a romance bubble: it made you do unforgivably stupid things, like meet up with the guy you were seeing, a former criminal informant, within a three-county radius of your law enforcement work colleagues.
After exchanging a quick oh, shit! look with Kerry, she decided to just own it. She was a grown-ass woman who didn’t owe anyone any explanations. Besides. Brady was discreet and, for all she knew, Garciaparra knew nothing about Kerry’s background with the Kareem Gregory case. Just because he was a DEA agent didn’t mean he knew everything about all cases that ran through his office.
“Hey.” She hitched up her chin. “Brady. Garciaparra. What are you two up to?”
“Just grabbing some lunch,” Brady said brightly. “You?”
“The same,” Jayne said.
Brady shot Kerry a measured look and shook his hand. “How’re you doing, Randolph?”
“Not bad, man.” Kerry turned to Jayne. “I don’t know Garciaparra. Want to introduce me?”
Not with that glint in his eye, she didn’t. Garciaparra’s expression, meanwhile, had gone cold and flat. She didn’t think the menfolk would be meeting up for a cold beer after work anytime soon.
“Sure,” she said quickly, shooting Kerry a veiled warning look. “Special Agent Mateo Garciaparra, this is, ah, Dr. Kerry Randolph.”
Kerry blasted her with a sidelong look of deepest annoyance.
“Jayne’s boyfriend,” he added, extending his hand.
My boyfriend! He said he was my boyfriend!
“You’re a lucky man.” Garciaparra’s lips thinned as he and Kerry shook. Against all reason, Jayne felt a pang of guilt over never giving him a chance, because he was clearly hurt, although whether the injured party was his ego or his real feelings remained to be seen. “You probably know that already. Hey, listen, Brady. I’ll just meet you back at the office. I’ll see you folks later.”
He strode off, leaving Brady behind to rain the full weight of his amusement down on their heads. “Hey! Now I can have lunch with you two kids. Won’t that be fun?”
“Ah…” Jayne began.
Brady raised a hand. “Stand down, Jayne. Just teasing. And it looks like you were lying when you told me there was nothing going on with you two. Course, I knew you were lying at the time, but still. Not cool.”
Kerry raised his brows at her. “You discussed me with Brady? When?”
“When you were in the hospital,” Brady said.
“Really?” Kerry asked.
Jayne pretended her cheeks weren’t on fire, and glared at Brady. “When did you become such a gossip, Brady? We don’t need you running your mouth about our relationship—”
Beside her, Kerry made an indistinct sound of annoyance.
“—so please keep it discreet. As I have done for you and Kira.”
“There’s a difference between teasing you and being a gossip,” Brady said. “I am not a gossip. Neither is Garciaparra. And if you’re going for discreet, you two lovebirds probably shouldn’t be parading down Fifth Street with your hands all over each other. Just sayin’.”
Truer words were never spoken, Jayne decided, nodding glumly.
“You staying out of trouble, Randolph?” Brady asked, his tone just an inch or so away from being aggressive.
Kerry frowned. “Excuse me? You think I’d ever do anything to hurt Jayne?”
Brady subtly widened his stance. “Jayne’s a good friend and a good person. I’m taking a personal interest in seeing her treated like a queen.”
“Hang on,” she said, outraged at this unexpected time travel into the eighteenth century. “Jayne is also a grown woman who is standing right here—”
“Then it’s a good thing I’m on the job, Brady,” Kerry said, hiking up his chin. “Isn’
t it?”
“That remains to be seen,” Brady said flatly. “Doesn’t it?”
Kerry took a step forward. “You may not be up on all the news, but I’m a civilian now. I work nine to five and pay my taxes like everyone else.”
Brady shrugged. “That’s a great start. I look forward to that continuing for the next thirty or forty years.”
That did it. Hot anger swallowed up the last of Jayne’s equilibrium. “Excuse me, Brady. Maybe this self-righteous routine flies with Kira, but it sure as hell doesn’t work with me.”
Brady looked stung.
“You don’t know anything about how hard Kerry’s worked to rebuild his life the last several months. You don’t know about his job or what he’s been through or how much he’s changed.”
“I can speak for myself, Jayne,” Kerry said, but all Jayne’s focus was irrevocably centered on Brady’s fat head.
“I appreciate your impulse to protect me, Brady,” she continued, “but the best thing you can do for me is to realize that I can run my own life and judge people’s characters for myself. And if I’ve decided that Kerry isn’t the same man who worked for Kareem Gregory, then that’s all you need to know. So mind your own fucking business.”
She and Brady engaged in a brief glare-off, from which Jayne emerged the victor after Brady finally blinked.
“Fair enough,” he said, that tinge of amusement creeping back into his eyes. “Sounds like we’re all clear on each other’s relative positions. By the way, Kira and I are getting married.”
“What? That’s great!” Jayne cried, giving Brady a hug and kiss even though her foolish heart whimpered out a little uh-oh. She looked to Kerry, desperate to see his reaction to this news.
“Beautiful,” Kerry said, shaking Brady’s hand with what looked like genuine enthusiasm when Jayne let him go. A powerful wave of relief swooped through her. “Best wishes, man. How’s her ankle, by the way?”
“Almost a hundred percent.” Brady was all smiles as he turned to go. “You kids have a good lunch, you hear? Catch you later.”
He headed off down the street, leaving a shell-shocked silence behind him.
Unaccountably reluctant to meet Kerry’s gaze, Jayne took her time about turning to face him. His expression was both bright and turbulent, suspended somewhere between gratitude and disbelief.
“What?”
“You believe in me,” he said quietly.
“You know I do.”
“I feel like I could move a mountain right now,” he said on a shaky laugh. “Did you know you have that much power over me?”
Her heart soared.
“Nah,” she deadpanned. “If I had any true power, I’d be wearing a cape.”
Bursting into startled laughter, he reeled her in for another kiss.
“Dinner,” he said. “My place. Tonight.”
“Dinner?”
“Yeah. I’m continuing my audition for a place in the rest of your life.”
41
That evening, Kerry let himself in, hung up his coat and keys and headed for the kitchen, checking his watch as he went: six eighteen. He was running late (special shout-out to the guy at the fish counter who’d been so engrossed with telling Kerry his life story that he could barely weigh and wrap a pound of Dover sole), but he could still get a good start on dinner before Jayne got there if he picked up the pace. He set his phone and the paper bags on the counter, threw the perishables in the fridge and headed down the hall for a quick shower.
The ridiculous perma-grin he’d been wearing all week was still firmly in place, dammit, but there were worse problems a man could have. As he well knew. Even so, it would be nice if Katz stopped smirking at him every chance he got.
“Things are going well with Jayne, I take it?” the old man kept asking.
Kerry had taken to obscene gestures and living with the inevitable round of raucous laughter, but the answer was, for the first time in his life, a hearty hell yeah.
Things were going great with Jayne.
See? There was that grin again.
He turned into his bedroom, clicked on a lamp, toed off his shoes and unbuttoned his shirt. He was a neat freak, so he wouldn’t have to go through any contortions to get the place ready for Jayne’s first visit.
The bed, though. He hadn’t changed the sheets since…
He sighed. Yep. Better change ’em.
Muttering to himself—there went more time he didn’t have—he reached for the edge of the duvet and ripped it back— Jesus Christ.
A huge snake slithered out from behind a pillow, reared up in Kerry’s face and hissed loudly at him.
Crying out, Kerry moved blindly backward and stumbled over his shoes. He pinwheeled his arms and overcompensated, crashing into the nightstand.
The snake hissed again, long and emphatic, and revealed a black mouth.
Kerry’s frantic heart catapulted toward cardiac arrest. Somehow he kept his balance and backed up a slow step.
A knife? Should he get a knife from the kitchen? He didn’t want to turn his back on this monster, though. Maybe wrap it up in the blankets and call 9-1-1—
“I wouldn’t get any bright ideas if I were you,” said a man as he calmly edged out from behind the bathroom door, hands in his jacket pockets. “She doesn’t like loud noises or sudden moves.”
It was the old guy from the wisteria garden earlier. Kerry jumped out of his skin, too startled to keep his voice down. “What the fuck?”
The snake lashed out, biting at the air a foot from Kerry’s face and forcing Kerry to lurch backward again.
“What did I tell you?” the man said, sighing wearily.
Shaking with fear and frustration, Kerry lunged for the nightstand drawer, desperate to grab his—
“Looking for this?” Keeping his eyes on the snake, who was now settling into a polite coil right in the middle of Kerry’s bed, the man pulled out a hand—he was wearing blue latex gloves—and produced Kerry’s forty-five. Then he ejected the clip, checked the chamber and tossed the pistol to Kerry. “Here you go.”
Kerry, whose arms had turned to blocks of ice, bobbled and caught the thing.
“People really shouldn’t be so predictable,” the guy said, like they were discussing politics over a steak. “It’d make my job that much harder. Gun in the nightstand drawer. You’re a regular criminal mastermind. Mind if I sit? My hip’s acting up.”
With a contented sigh, he sat in Kerry’s corner armchair, propped his feet on the ottoman and steepled his fingers. “Sorry I’m so late, by the way. Would have been here much sooner, but I thought you were dead. I was following Kareem the night he stabbed you. Poked my head in to see how you were doing.” He shrugged. “You sure looked dead to me.”
“Nope,” Kerry said tightly.
“Should have read the paper to make sure. My mistake.”
The snake settled with its head atop the fatter tail end of its body, and flicked its black tongue at Kerry.
Kerry sucked in a strained breath and gathered his wits. If this guy wanted him dead, he’d be long dead by now without ever knowing what had hit him. Plus, the guy wasn’t Kareem, so Kerry was way ahead of the game.
He had a little wiggle room. He didn’t have his gun, his phone or a knife, but he had a working brain and he’d figure something out.
The one thing he wouldn’t do was go out like this. Not now, God. Not when he had a beautifully reconstructed life and Jayne.
“You’re the guy from the wisteria garden,” he said quietly. “The one with the dog.”
“Correct. Call me Henry. I represent my boss’s interests. Kramer would have loved to be here. He hates to miss the action. But he and Andromeda aren’t each other’s biggest fans. You understand.”
Kerry eyeballed the snake, who was still resting comfortably, and noticed, for the first time, that there was a carrying case with a handle, some sort of a hook on a stick and a cloth drawstring bag in the far corner.
“Andromeda,” K
erry said. “Fancy name for a black mamba.”
Henry’s eyes lit with new respect. “We have a player.”
Kerry sure the fuck hoped so.
He shrugged. “Not too many snakes look like that.”
“True.”
“What do you want?” Kerry demanded.
Henry watched him, a long, measured look.
“I want your boss’s formula for W-80.”
Much as he’d tried to school his features and brace himself for whatever twisted shit was coming, Kerry couldn’t stop himself from stiffening. Still, he recovered as best he could.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Synthetic opioid? More powerful and addictive than heroin? We like to lace it with fentanyl for a little extra kick? Your boss commissioned his own Walter White to manufacture it for him, then he cut Miami in on the deal. He set up a little test marketing here in Cincinnati before he died, and guess what? The druggies all love it. They can’t OD on it fast enough.”
Kerry thought of Brooklynne, his blood doing a slow boil.
“We had a limited supply of W-80 for the test market. Now the supply is drying up. We need to get some more in the pipeline, so to speak. Any of this ringing a bell?”
Kerry’s brain flashed back to the night Kareem raped Kira. Which was the same night Kareem put Kerry in charge of distribution.
“Are you ready to do some work with me?” Kareem asked. “Get some new responsibilities?”
Kerry’s heart rate kicked up with relief and excitement (maybe he’d finally get the info the feds needed in order to arrest Kareem on major charges), but he kept his expression blank and, he hoped, humble. He nodded.
“Yeah. I’m ready.”
“Good.” Smiling with satisfaction, Kareem clapped his free hand to Kerry’s jaw, pulled him in and planted a kiss on his cheek, the twisted fuck. “Let’s go. Got a warehouse to show you. Well, one of them.”
Kerry’s ears pricked up. “Just one?”
“I’ve got something special brewing at the other one. It’s going to be a game changer. Ten thousand times more powerful than morphine. We’re going to make some money on this one, brother.”
Deadly Secrets Page 26
