“That seems a little mundane to me.”
“Yeah? What would you suggest?”
He picked her up—mindful of her thigh—and twisted, resting her on the edge of the narrow bar. “We could just get naked here.”
She nodded slowly as though she was really considering it. She opened her mouth to comment, but he swallowed her words as he stole a kiss, and then another and another.
She wrapped her legs around him, tugging him as close as they could physically get with that many clothes on. He loved being that close to her, smelling her hair and her skin, tasting her lips. He wanted to taste every inch of her, wanted to hold her until she couldn’t stand it anymore and wiggled away. He wanted every moment they were together to last a lifetime.
Was this what it felt like to be in love? He’d never felt this way before, never allowed himself close enough to a woman to feel this way. He hadn’t expected to feel this way with her, either. When she climbed under those blankets, her naked body pressing against his to warm him, his only thought had been physical pleasure. If he’d known that would bring him to this, he wasn’t sure what he—what that Axel—might have done. But he was glad he hadn’t known.
He tugged at her jeans, needing to be inside her as quickly as possible. She held on to his neck, her mouth sliding over his throat as a sigh slipped from between her lips.
What could be better than this?
Chapter 37
Springfield, Illinois
Oak Ridge Cemetery
Durango listened to the lovely words the preacher spoke for Kyle, listened to him pretend to know her and to eulogize her like his very religion didn’t teach him that she was some sort of aberration. He listened and wanted to argue with every word coming out of his mouth just because it was about Kyle, just because it was at a funeral when Kyle should still be alive, should be looking forward to weddings and babies and all the good things being alive was all about. But this wasn’t a wedding, wasn’t a baptism. This was a funeral.
In some ways, he still couldn’t wrap his mind around the idea that Kyle was gone.
People were sobbing all around him. Kyle’s mother was hunched down in her winter coat, her shoulders shaking every few seconds with the sobs that tore through her. Nathan had his arm around her, his own shoulders tensed. Their kids were crying openly, Leslie sobbing audibly. And others, people he knew, some he didn’t, dabbing at their eyes as the pastor spoke. They were all crying for what should have been, and what would never be.
He should have cried too, but he couldn’t. He was too fucking angry!
Gracie was seated beside him, her own tissue balled up in her fist. She stared at the coffin; her body stiff with tension. She wasn’t crying openly, but her eyes had that telltale rim of red that suggested she had been.
Durango leaned forward, needing this to be over. He needed to get up and walk around, needed this day to be over so that he could go home and drink the bottle of tequila sitting on his kitchen counter. He’d bought it with the intention of drinking it every night since Wednesday, since walking into the Peters’ home and finding all the happy, joyful people he knew lost in their grief. But there was too much to do.
Not tonight, though. Tonight, he was going to get very drunk in Kyle’s name. He thought she would probably appreciate it.
Gracie touched his hand as he leaned forward again, running his hands over his pant legs. He glanced at her and nodded, letting her know he was okay. Why that was important to him, he didn’t know. But it was.
The funeral ended abruptly a few minutes later. Durango stood and turned, but Gracie had disappeared. He spotted her in the crowd, walking toward the lane where everyone had parked their cars. But she was gone again before he could decide if he should go after her.
He wanted to talk to her. Without her, his office would be an absolute mess. She’d filed the bulk of stuff waiting on his assistant’s desk and then took it upon herself to hire a new girl. And this girl seemed as though she was going to work out. Just for that, he owed Gracie a raise.
But he also wanted to thank her for what she said to the cops.
It’d been six days since Kyle was killed. The cops had turned Mastiff’s offices upside down in those days, finally retreating to their precinct only yesterday. Between that and this mess with Axel Kinkaid’s case that finally resolved itself, he’d been unable to breathe, let alone hire a new assistant. And when he wasn’t in the office, he was trying to comb through the information he’d gotten from Kyle’s office and computer, to try and figure out who could have done this. His only clues, unfortunately, were scraps of notes that made little sense to him.
The coffin sat on its stand, alone as the mourners huddled together near the cars. Durango went to it and laid his hand on the cool surface, aware that she wasn’t in there, not really, but not sure how else to talk to her.
“Who was it, Kyle? Who did this to you? Who did you know well enough that you let them into your apartment to do this?”
He said it quietly, not wanting anyone else to overhear. But someone did anyway.
“If only the dead could talk. It would make our jobs much easier, wouldn’t it?”
Detective Hyde was standing just to the left of his shoulder, staring down at a carnation she held in her hands.
“Why are you here?”
“Protocol. You know that.”
“Not when you have a good idea who the killer is.”
“You know something I don’t? As far as I know, we haven’t made a determination on guilt or innocence.”
“You think I had something to do with it. And, if I were in your position, I probably would, too.”
“My partner thinks you did it. Me? I like to reach my own conclusions.”
“Good for you, Detective.”
“I think you loved her. She was the only female you let close to you after what happened to your fiancée. But, I suppose, you loved Sarah, too.”
Durango glanced at her, his fists clenching in his suit jacket. “I thought you liked to come to your own conclusions.”
“I do.”
“Then you shouldn’t make assumptions about my past. I was acquitted of Sarah’s death.”
“Only because you knew how to get rid of the evidence.”
“If you’ll look at the coroner’s report, you’ll see the reprised time of death cleared me.”
“A coroner who happened to be a good friend of yours. Didn’t you take him to a Cubs game just a week before Sarah died?”
It was a line the prosecutor had used, too.
He began to argue, but then he was just tired. Exhausted. His limbs felt like they weighed a million pounds, and his eyes wanted to slide shut. If he could just crawl into that coffin with Kyle and disappear for a while, he thought he’d be pretty content with that. But he couldn’t.
“Durango,” Axel said as he approached them. “We’re ready to go.”
Durango nodded, glancing at Detective Hyde one last time.
“I hope you do come to your own conclusions, Detective. It would be really refreshing for a cop to do that for once.”
* * *
The reception was held at the Peters home in Thayer, just a thirty-minute drive from the cemetery. If he’d driven his own car, Durango might have circled the block again and hesitated before going inside. But this time he was in the back of a limo with Axel, his new girl, and several secretaries and operatives from Mastiff who’d elected to ride in the car he’d rented for that purpose.
Durango found himself watching Axel with the girl, this Abigail Rains who’d been nothing more than a picture attached to a file until this morning. The way he looked at her, the way she looked at him, it was obvious this wasn’t a fling. He was happy for them, really. And he hoped it meant that Axel would take the job he’d offered. That would be one less box to check on his to-do list.
They went into the house en masse, one big group together. Durango assumed Gracie had gone home because she wasn’t in the car with them.
But then he spotted her in the kitchen, talking with Mrs. Peters.
He waited until they finished whatever it was they were doing until Gracie was alone at the kitchen counter. He moved up behind her and took her hand, guiding her to the back door and out into the yard.
“I’ve been trying to get you alone for the longest time.”
Her eyebrows rose as a blush burned bright on her full cheeks. She pushed up her glasses even as her eyes fell to the ground.
“I just wanted to thank you for everything you’ve done for me. The files, the assistant. The things you said to the cops.”
Her eyes came up sharply. “The cops?”
“You told them Kyle and I weren’t fighting Saturday night. But we were.”
“That wasn’t a fight,” she said dismissively.
“Maybe not. But thank you for what you said.”
She shrugged. “I was just being honest.” She glanced toward the house, her bottom lip trembling a little. “It breaks my heart to see the pain in that house. Young people should never die.”
“No one should die, but that’s, unfortunately, the way it works.”
“I suppose so.” She sighed as she slowly pulled her eyes to his face. She lay her hand on his arm. “How are you?”
He shrugged. “No one’s asked me that. But I don’t suppose I have a right to be upset, do I?”
“Of course you do!”
“Everyone thinks I had something to do with this. Hell, I think I had something to do with this.”
“What do you mean?”
“If I hadn’t come into her life, if I hadn’t brought my baggage to Springfield, she might still be alive.”
“You mean what happened back in Chicago?”
He bit his lip as he looked away. He’d kind of hoped that Gracie didn’t know about that.
“This isn’t your fault, Durango. It’s no one’s but the man who did it.”
“How do you know that wasn’t me?”
“Because you’re a good man. You couldn’t hurt someone, especially someone you love.”
“Yeah?” Durango touched her face, smoothing his palm over the curve of her jaw. “I love that you can say that, that you might even believe it. But don’t fool yourself. You can never truly know anyone.”
She studied his face a moment. “I think a man who loved his fiancée as much as you is incapable of such behavior. What happened to Kyle was the work of a sociopath, and you are not that.”
“Thank you.”
She smiled, the shyness suddenly gone. She moved closer to him, rising onto her tiptoes. Her kiss was meant to be a consolation, a show of affection meant to be friendly. But it turned into something else the second her lips touched his.
He wrapped his arm around her waist, drew her close, encouraging her to open to him. When she did, it was like the doors of heaven opening, that taste, that sense of pleasure that rushed through him like nothing he’d ever felt. He pulled her closer, not willing to let her go, not just yet. And she seemed to feel the same, moving up against him, her tongue dancing with his.
But it felt too good. It felt too perfect. Her touch had the power to make him feel things he’d thought long gone, and he couldn’t allow that.
He stepped back, breaking the kiss abruptly.
“I’m sorry, Gracie.”
“Durango—”
He walked away, determined to keep Gracie as far from him as possible.
Chapter 38
East of Virden, Illinois
Rain Drop Farms
Abigail watched the front loader finish dropping the last bucketful of dirt on the grave. Her heart felt heavy. She’d been to far too many funerals in the past week. First Mrs. Philips, then Axel’s boss, Kyle Peters. And now Romance.
“Why did he have to shoot Romance?”
Axel slid his arm around her shoulders and drew her close to him. “Morty is a bitter man. He must have understood how much that horse meant to you.”
“Maybe.”
They stood there for a long while, staring at the pile of dirt. There was no rush to get back to the farmhouse because Axel had a team of Mastiff employees in there searching out the cameras that Morty admitted to placing there. She was creeped out by the idea still, but she also found herself wondering how sick a man must be to get off on watching his ex-girlfriend in her home. How many things had he seen? Had it given him any peace?
Somehow, she doubted it.
“There’s one thing about the cameras I still don’t understand, though.”
“What?”
She was quiet for a second. “Morty said that he knew we slept together. But we didn’t do . . . we didn’t actually have sex in the barn. Only in Dan Tuxli’s house.”
“Yeah.”
“How did he see us in there?”
Axel kissed the top of her head. “Maybe he’s just assuming. He was baiting you.”
But she didn’t think that was the case, and it made her deeply curious what else Morty might have been working on in the three years they’d been apart.
Axel finally took her hand and led the way back up to the house. His team was just finishing. She watched as he had a conversation with the guy in charge, but she didn’t want to know what they were saying. She’d made that clear to Axel. She didn’t want details; she just wanted the things out of her house. When the Mastiff guys were gone, he came back to her and drew her into his embrace.
“All done.”
“Camera free?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
He walked backward, pulling her toward the front door. She hadn’t stepped foot in the house since she left that night over a week ago. Damn, was it really just a week?
She wasn’t sure she wanted to go in there now, but Axel was pulling her after him, dragging her with him. And he had that look in his eye that promised a ton of pleasure.
How could she resist?
He lifted her into his arms the moment they were over the threshold, carrying her up the stairs. She laughed when he hit his head on a low beam, kissing it to make it better. The stitches had come out of his head, as had hers from her head. Her leg would heal on its own, the stitches absorbable. They were still there at the moment, but she could see they were slowly disappearing.
She was getting her wish, her body and life back. But it wasn’t quite the same, was it?
Axel lay her in the center of her own bed and tugged at her jeans, not bothering with the heavy jacket and flannel shirt she was wearing. She laughed, sitting up to pull her clothes over her head, watching as he tripped around the room, struggling to get his boots off.
“You’re addicted, you know.”
“I know.”
“Have you always had this problem?”
He cocked his head like he was trying to remember. “No,” he finally said. “I think it’s just you. I’m addicted to you.”
She could live with that.
He crawled onto the bed with her and kissed her, his lips lingering against hers. She moaned as his hand wandered the length of her body, and he touched her in all the right places. He knew just what to do, just where she longed for his touch. His fingertip against her clit, his palm against her nipple. Just the right amount of pressure, just the right level of pleasure. She tried to learn from him, tried to touch him with the same sort of consideration, but she felt like there was so much she still had to learn.
Not that he seemed terribly disappointed by her touch or her naivety.
But it was always about the moment their bodies became one when he slipped inside of her and she accepted him like he was a lost limb. She loved the feel of him, loved the way his breathing hitched when he first entered her. The idea that her body could provide him with such pleasure just made it all so much better for her, too.
They moved together slowly this time, no rush now that they’d connected the way he so desperately wanted. But then he stopped moving, his hand pushing the hair back fro
m her face, turning her head so that they were staring into each other’s eyes.
“What?” she asked.
He bit her lip lightly, drawing the swollen, beautiful lip between his teeth. And then he kissed her gently on the tip of the nose.
“I want to be in this moment for as long as possible.”
Tears filled her eyes. She touched his face, reached up to kiss him.
“I love you, too,” she whispered, not really intending for him to hear. But he did. She could see it in his eyes, could see the conflict her words had created for him.
“I’m not good putting my emotions into words,” he said softly. “But I feel the same way.”
And then he began to move again, taking her on a ride through heaven and hell, just like his broken soul was doing to her heart.
Chapter 39
Springfield, Illinois
Durango Master’s Residence
It was late on a Sunday night, a full week after Kyle’s murder. Durango lay on his couch, his arm thrown over his eyes, the bottle of tequila finally consumed and lying empty on its side on the floor in front of him. He was sick to his stomach, but more because of his thoughts rather than the booze. He’d learned at a young age how to handle his booze. His father saw to that. What a disgrace it would be if he suddenly failed to keep it in now.
A week. He’d survived an entire week without his partner. But it didn’t feel like survival. It felt more like stumbling and managing not to fall flat on his damn face.
He missed her more than he ever imagined he could miss anyone other than Sarah. Tears burned in his chest, in his throat, but they wouldn’t find an outlet, or couldn’t. He wanted to cry. He wanted to sob and scream and rant, wanted to yell at the gods and choke the life out of the person who’d done this. And he wanted to flog himself for his role in the whole damn thing. But all he could do was lie there on the couch and feel damn sorry for himself.
It was all bullshit!
He wasn’t surprised when the doorbell rang. A part of him was expecting more trouble, for a cop with a warrant to show up at any moment. He got up and wrenched the door opened, surprised to realize he was half right.
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