Still very aroused, Cael leaned against the wall outside the bathroom where he’d left Vivi, the closed door between them once again.
He wanted to come so badly—as he drove into her, taking pleasure and giving it, flashes came through that he couldn’t process correctly. He’d taken Vivi before, scared her and excited her all at once—tonight he’d laid claim to something that was already his and it both frightened and exhilarated him.
But he’d pushed harder than she had. Vivi had trusted him with her body … her life. And he’d taken that.
He felt his body shake, the way it had when he’d crashed from the drugs.
It had been like he’d supposed hitting a brick wall would feel. The doctors refused to sedate him through the withdrawals because they were afraid of interactions—and he’d toughed it out, but strangely didn’t remember much at all. It was a haze of pain and doctors. Then Noah’s face … and Reid’s. And then Mace’s, the bandage still around his throat.
“What the hell happened to you?” he’d asked and Mace’s face had darkened—he’d looked as confused as Cael felt.
At that point, Cael and the rest of his teammates knew that something was really wrong. But the remaining members of the team were thankful to be alive. They were being sheltered from the world for debriefing and evals from both medical and psych. Slowly, memories filtered in—before he left, he remembered Noah and Reid and asked for Kell too.
But his memories of the woman on the other side of the door remained achingly out of reach, even though the woman herself wasn’t.
The water ran for a while and then stopped—he heard some splashing and a few soft sniffles.
If you go back in, what will you say?
Actions, not words, had always been his strong suit. With that in mind, he walked into the small bathroom again.
The air was still steamy. Vivi was sitting in the middle of the filled tub, her back to him, curled up with her knees to her chest.
She didn’t turn around or give any indication that she knew he was there. He knelt by the edge and used the sponge to rub her back with the hot, soapy water. He moved her hair off her neck and washed there too, and down her arms, making it a gentle massage.
“I’m sorry, Vivi.”
Without lifting her head, she said, “Please don’t say that. You enjoyed it. So did I.”
His bare hand touched her back. “So why are you upset?”
“Because you don’t remember me. You don’t know me. And you have no interest in learning more. I can’t live in the past, Cael. I have to move forward.”
“I can’t do that. Not until I remember everything.”
“And if you don’t?”
“Then it sounds like I’ll lose you before I’ve gotten the chance to know you.”
She didn’t say anything for a long time after that and then finally she asked him for a towel. He helped her up and she accepted the hand—he wrapped her in the towel and she stood there while he dried her off and then led her into the bedroom where she’d slept last night, where she grabbed a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt and dressed in them.
She didn’t ask him to leave or to turn away and so he didn’t. Wasn’t sure what any of that meant, wasn’t sure what he wanted it to mean, but it had to mean something. And then she curled up at the head of the double bed and watched him.
“Can you talk to me, instead of at me?” she asked finally.
He’d been doing just that, talking at her, hitting her with a barrage of questions and answering her with facts, trying to keep her out so badly instead of embracing the fact that he’d fallen in love with a smart, beautiful woman … and admitting to himself that he could most likely do it again. “I’ll try. I know you asked me what I’m most afraid of.”
“I know what you’re most afraid of,” she said, moved forward to put a cool hand on the back of his neck when he bowed his head. “We don’t have to talk about that again.”
“I scared the shit out of you in the bathroom. I’ve been trying to scare you since you got here. I scared Paige when I made her touch me and I’m freaking Mace out too.”
He turned his head, stared at her for a long second. “Me too. Instead, I ended up scaring the shit out of myself.”
“How did you scare Paige?”
“You know she’s psychic, right?” he asked, and she nodded. “I forced her to touch me after I found Harvey’s body and remembered some things. She flipped, said she saw a lot of shit, but she couldn’t pick it apart because of what I do for a living.”
“I was scared of you when we first met. Now I’m just scared for us. Scared for me that maybe a week of happiness with you is all I was meant to get.”
“I’d say I’m sorry, but I’m goddamned sick of apologizing to people.”
“I don’t want apologies, I want the truth.”
“Me too,” he admitted. “I’m getting closer. There’s no permanent damage, as far as the doc could tell. My brain didn’t swell or bleed, so the specialist’s assumption is that the fallout—the amnesia—is from the drugs.”
“What kind?”
“Strong mixes of hallucinogenics. A cocktail meant to subdue me enough so they could plant their influence.”
“Do you ever hear them now, talking to you?”
“No. Not since …” He stopped then, like he wasn’t sure what he was about to say. “Damn, that’s what happens. I’m so sure of something, I start to say it and then it slips away. So goddamned frustrating.”
“But Mace said … you said, when you saw that man’s body, you remembered things.”
“That triggered a lot. It was like a minor avalanche.” In the days since finding Harvey’s body, the memories had come fast and furious, settled innocently in his mind as if they’d never been errant bastards.
“But not enough. Not everything. Not me.” Her voice was soft and held no reproach but he felt it anyway. Wasn’t sure what to say, but the lights slamming off stopped any and all conversation as they waited together in the dark for the generator to kick on.
After a full two minutes of waiting with Vivi in total silence, and total darkness, Caleb knew the generator wasn’t coming on. It had to have been tampered with again, and recently, since he’d checked it just before he closed the bar.
He heard a door slam downstairs—one of the few benefits of the place being poorly insulated.
“Stay up here,” Caleb told her before he went down the stairs with the benefit of the lantern Mace always kept at the top of the stairwell for nights like this.
Reid was already out the back door, tackling someone in the snow, dragging them up and toward Cael.
A woman. A knife gleamed in the snow where Reid had forced her to drop it, clean as a whistle, and still it made Caleb pause. He stared at it for a few seconds longer than was necessary, hating that something like that could now throw him off balance. But there were no memory flashes this time, and he quickly followed Reid as he pulled the squirming woman inside.
She was yelling, until Reid told her to shut the hell up, and his tone must’ve scared the shit out of her, as it was meant to, because she did.
She was closer to a girl, really. Probably no more than twenty years old, if that, medium build, wearing jeans and a coat, with a black T-shirt underneath. Her hair was blond—Paige’s hair color, but from a bottle—and pulled back from her face, and her cheeks were red from the cold, as were her bare hands.
She had on too much makeup, which made her appear much older than she was—her face was drawn, as if she’d seen things, had a tough life.
“You’ve got her?” Caleb asked on his way out the door to check the rest of the area, waited until Reid nodded.
Before he retrieved the knife, he did a search of the immediate area, his own gun drawn, Reid watching him from the doorway in case he needed backup.
There was no one—no car even. The woman appeared to have come from nowhere.
He moved to collect the knife from the snow, did so carefully
, with his shirt pulled over his hand to avoid screwing up fingerprints, brought it in and put it on the desk.
Reid still held the woman, one arm twisted behind her back. It wasn’t taking much to restrain her and there was no way she could’ve killed Harvey by herself unless he was passed out drunk when she did it.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Reid demanded of her. Caleb watched her face carefully, shining the light in her eyes so that she was mostly blinded. “Answer me, dammit.”
“I’m looking for Paige—do you know her?” she asked in such a calm manner it was goddamned creepy.
“Most people just knock,” Caleb told her as he dialed Ed. “I’m calling the police.”
“You can’t hold me like this. I didn’t break in. You came after me.”
“Sure, darling, you keep thinking that,” Reid drawled in her ear. “Until then, I’m going to ask you some more questions and you’re going to answer me.”
“I’m not saying a word.”
“Guess I’ll have to tell Jeffrey how badly you failed him.”
She didn’t say a word.
“You’re ready to go to jail for him? What the hell has he ever done for you?”
She glared at him. “He’s my man. I’ll do anything for him.”
“You’re dumber than you look,” Reid muttered.
“I followed her here. Wasn’t that hard—her car’s for shit,” she burst out, and then bit her bottom lip hard.
“How did you know where to find her?”
“She was on the news.” A shrug, like none of this scared her at all, but that couldn’t be true. She obviously wasn’t a career criminal, but if she continued doing Jeffrey’s bidding, she would be.
“What’s your name?” Reid asked her, but she shook her head and refused to answer, no matter how many times Reid continued to ask. He even slid his hands into her pockets as she protested—loudly—but came up empty.
“I know who she is.” Vivi was standing in the doorway, holding a flashlight of her own.
“Vivi, you should go upstairs.” Caleb started to tell her, but Vivi held up a hand and talked over him, a trait he found kind of endearing—which was … odd.
“Adrienne Brite,” Vivi said, and the woman struggled against Reid’s hold like she wanted to go after Vivi. “Her nickname on the site is Star.”
To Vivi’s credit, she didn’t even flinch. She hadn’t been with the FBI long enough to learn a whole lot, so the toughness had to have been born and bred into her. “I saw her on a website devoted to Jeffrey. The best I can do now is show the police a screenshot—the Internet’s out and there’s no wifi around here.”
“Great,” Caleb said.
“That message board’s private,” Adrienne spat.
“Nothing’s private on the Internet,” Vivi told her calmly as she moved closer to her. “Look at you—Jeffrey has you dyeing your hair to look like his sister—you don’t see that you’re just a poor substitute for her? And you’re running around doing his dirty work, for what? You’re going to go to jail for him and he thinks of you as disposable. God, you’re an idiot.”
The woman attempted to lunge but Vivi held her ground, smiled even, and then turned her attention back to Caleb just as Ed entered the back room. He asked Adrienne a few questions before reading her her rights; she gave him nothing but a “Fuck you, you’ve got nothing to hold me on,” and Ed simply shook his head and said, “Breaking and entering’s a crime, so we’ll start with that.”
Leaving Vivi inside, Caleb and Reid walked Ed to his car. Ed locked Adrienne in the backseat and turned to the men.
“Did she tell you anything of interest?”
“One of Jeffrey’s women, according to this website devoted to the asshole. She was breaking in,” Reid said. “We don’t know where she’s staying. There’s no car, and it’s too cold for her to have walked far.”
“Old man Stanton’s cabin,” Ed said.
“I thought that burned down,” Caleb said.
“It did. Stanton’s kids had it rebuilt.”
“Shit.” Caleb shook his head. The cabin was a perfect hiding place.
“After I book her, I’ll come back and check the cabin,” Ed said.
“How about I get a head start?” Reid asked, and Ed stared at him. “Suppose there’s more than one person out there?”
“Don’t touch anything. Don’t move anything,” Ed warned. “And wait for me there.”
Caleb had his doubts that Reid would obey, but he was good enough that Ed would never notice. Ed was no slouch, couldn’t afford to be in this environment, where he was the only cop, but Delta had taught the men tricks that even the most discerning of law enforcement officials couldn’t pick up, and he knew it.
“Thanks, Ed,” Caleb told him, and Ed nodded, got into the car and drove Adrienne away.
The men walked inside, neither of them feeling exactly at peace that she’d been caught. “She’s the tip of the iceberg,” Cael muttered, and Reid grunted in agreement.
“He won’t get much more from her. She’s not organized enough to do any of this on her own. She couldn’t keep her cool when she was talking about Paige,” Reid pointed out. “But she was definitely part of the harassment.”
“I didn’t see signs of anyone else, no tire tracks. Maybe you’ll find something at the cabin.”
“If I can, I’ll get the generator up and running before I go, and I’ll call you from the cabin.”
He took off at a light jog around the side of the house and Caleb went back inside, shutting the door against the cold.
Vivi was quiet now, as if all the adrenaline and anger she’d shown toward Adrienne had left her drained.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” Her arms were folded tightly around her body, and he tried not to think about what had happened between them just an hour earlier. Because he wasn’t fine and he suspected she was nowhere close to it either.
The hum of the generator broke through the silence, and yes, the Adrienne woman had simply turned it off, which was good news. Seconds later, the lights went on, lower than normal, and he heard the old boiler kick in.
“Great—if the cable’s not out, we should have Internet access again.” She leaned across the desk, tapped a few keys and nodded in confirmation. Then she moved behind the desk and pulled up her chair.
“The FBI’s probably really sorry you left.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Is that a backhanded compliment?”
“It’s a real one.”
She went back to her work, not convinced. “I should’ve delved into this website more thoroughly when I first found it. Dammit. There are a lot of screwed-up women in the world and most of them appear to be on this message board. Jeffrey’s got these women obsessed with him. He’s trying to be like Manson, getting these women to prove their love by doing who knows what.”
“Like killing Harvey and trying to frame Paige for it?” he asked, more to himself than her. “We’ll have to track them down, one by one.”
“There are so many of them—it would take too long to find them all.” She turned the monitor and showed Caleb the full website devoted to Jeffrey, paging through the various features, all of which were supposedly locked unless you were a member.
“If you’re not with the FBI, are you utilizing resources you shouldn’t be?”
“Don’t ask, don’t tell, right?”
“Way to twist that slogan,” he started, but she shushed him, actually waved a hand at him, completely dismissing him in favor of the computer, and a strange sense of déjà vu rocked him. He went to the window and looked out and then he went back to the desk, lost in some kind of strange time warp, his mind going a hundred miles an hour, trying to connect everything that was happening, until Vivi’s voice broke through his consciousness.
“You’re pacing—stop it.”
“This has all happened before.”
She looked up, blinked. “We’ve had conversations like this, yes
.”
“If I stop pacing, can I help with the names?”
“I’d have to let you in on a few secrets,” she mused, and Christ, forget the secrets—all he wanted to do was kiss her, finish what they’d started. It had nothing to do with the past … no, this attraction was all in the present.
“Are you willing to do that?” he asked. “Let me in?”
After a moment’s pause, she told him, “I think I always have been.”
And he really wanted to kiss her then, would have, if Reid hadn’t chosen that exact second to call in. Worst timing ever.
Reid started talking right when he answered. “She was definitely staying here. I found her bag, her ID—Vivi had the name right. There’s also a couple of audiotapes, the same message on Paige’s voice mail, and then another.” Reid paused. “It’s more intense.”
“A threat?”
“Unmistakably so.” Reid sounded angry as hell. “I’ll play it for your voice mail in a second so you can send it to Mace. There are photos too, of Paige. I took pictures of them, or else Ed would have my ass—those can be forwarded to Mace now.”
Yes, Mace needed to be told about this development, because Cael had a feeling this storm was far from over.
CHAPTER
13
Mace took the call as Paige buried her head in her arms, the tattooist working the tender skin of her shoulder while he flirted like hell with her.
For the moment, Mace was grateful she was distracted, because he knew the news wasn’t going to be good just by the tone of Caleb’s voice.
“I’m here with Reid—we caught someone breaking into the bar. She’s one of Jeffrey’s … girlfriends, I guess you’d call her. She’s a member of this website devoted to him. It’s like he’s re-creating the Manson family, except he’s doing it from inside jail.”
“Shit. Is everyone okay?”
“We’re fine. But listen, Vivi broke into the message board on the site. They know Paige is visiting Jeffrey—there are messages about it.”
“What are they planning?”
In the Air Tonight Page 20
