by Sylvia Day
He didn’t have the luxury of closing his eyes and refocusing, not when he had to convince her to let him examine that picture. But he wasn’t thinking about investigating as he rubbed the back of her hand with his thumb or glanced at the gorgeous swells of her cleavage pushing up from the deep V of her sexy black dress. Below that, the lush curves of her hips and sleek thighs had him clenching a fist. He felt his mental restraints snapping loose. She had maybe five seconds to break this spell before he lost control and kissed her.
“The bar is in the back,” she managed to choke out.
The music throbbed back there, powered by a whole system of speakers meant to project throughout the club.
He shook his head. “Someplace quieter.”
His demand took her aback, and Jon intentionally gentled his face. She might be a woman, but in her experience with men, she was a girl, and he had to be mindful not to scare the hell out of her.
“M-My sister’s office—”
“Is right above the deejay booth. You know it’s pounding in there.”
And it was also visible to everyone in the club. Jon didn’t want all those prying eyes as he examined the photo. Having worked undercover here, he knew the building housed some normally vacant apartments upstairs.
She nodded, and Jon stood, tugging her with him. “Come with me. I know just the place.”
He was asking her for her trust. She nodded and rose to her feet, giving it.
That fact wasn’t lost on him. On some level, she not only felt safe with him, but had unconscious submissive tendencies. Fuck, with the right amount of time and the right situation, what he wouldn’t like to do with that…
But there was nothing right about now.
Gritting his teeth, he jumped off the stage to avoid all the dancing couples blocking the stairs at the far end, then turned to Lucia, arms raised expectantly, ready to catch her.
She bit her lip uncertainly. “I’m too heavy.”
He set his face into unyielding lines. “Bullshit. Jump.”
“I’m not sure I can in these heels.”
“I’ll catch you,” he promised. “Trust me. Hand me the picture and jump to me now.”
Lucia paused for a single moment, then did as he instructed. She landed against him, her breasts smashed against his chest. Automatically, his arm wrapped around her waist, his fingers hovering over the curve of her gorgeous ass.
Shit, he’d never been this close to her, and it was overloading his system. Two years ago, Lucia had skewed his self-control. Now she crushed it. Against his will, he tightened his grip on her and he buried his face in her hair. Fucking strawberries. That’s what she smelled like. And some sort of purely female musk that made him ache to shove her against the nearest wall and have his way with her…
He sniffed again, and that musk was stronger, more pungent.
Then he realized what that meant. Lucia was aroused.
Every instinct he had as a man shouted to get her naked and slide between her legs.
Let her go to the Bahamas and get her brains fucked out by a stranger. I’ll slip a box of condoms into her suitcase…Nicki’s rant rang in his head. His gut tightened. Lucia probably should find a guy closer to her own age and explore her sexuality. But the thought of anyone else touching her, helping her out of her clothes and taking her virginity, made him downright murderous.
Shit, he really was strung too tight. He had to let go.
Jon stepped away from Lucia stiffly and gestured toward the back of the club with what he hoped was an encouraging smile. She hesitated for a second, then started walking. Swaying would have been a better description. In that tight dress, her hips shifted and rolled with every step. The tight material hugged her ass, and he couldn’t look away. He barely managed to stop himself from shoving her inside the stairwell, pushing her against the wall, and kissing her senseless. Instead, he nudged her through the stairway behind the bar, letting the door close behind them, and flipped on the lights so they wouldn’t trip.
But watching her every step up was torture. After three flights, his dick throbbed behind his zipper. Lust, aggression, need—they all seared through his veins. He did his best to swallow them down and prowled around the top floor until he found a familiar door and the sparsely furnished apartment he’d lived in two summers ago.
Ignoring the perfectly useful bed in the next room, Jon turned on the lights and led Lucia to the sofa. He sat her at one end and resisted the urge to plant himself right beside her. Instead, he settled on the other end. With the picture in his lap, he glanced into her uncertain face.
“It’s been a long time, Doc.”
Jon frowned. That wasn’t what he’d meant to say. He’d stood down some of the most soulless killers and sex offenders and never groped for words. This woman tied his tongue in knots.
“It has. How have you been?” Her face said that she genuinely wanted to know.
“Busy. A lot of ugly cases.” He nodded, searching for some way to reduce the tension, get back on task. Make her smile. Yeah, he’d like that. But he came up blank, so he gripped the frame and asked, “No idea why your father would have left this for you?”
“None. I also can’t fathom why he would have asked his attorney to give it to me now, like this.”
Jon hesitated. The fact that she had a vacation planned tomorrow—where she intended to let complete strangers buy her drinks and seduce her out of her innocence—didn’t bode well for persuading her to pursue this cold case with him. But he had to try since it could help his brother. He was pretty damn sure it would ultimately help her, too.
“Consider the reasons he would send this to you, Lucia, and not your sister.”
“It’s already occurred to me that it’s some riddle I’m meant to solve. My father wasn’t a warm man, but when I was little, I’d crawl into his lap, and we’d work puzzles together. All kinds of puzzles—crosswords, anagrams, word searches, jigsaws, three-D models. As I got older, he’d challenge me with riddles and different codes to break.” She smiled. “He was really proud of the fact that, if I’d worked as a code breaker in World War Two, I would have been able to break the Japanese and German codes.” Then her smile died. “I didn’t see as much of him when I went off to boarding school.”
“When was that?”
“I was nine.” A faint smile flitted across her lips. “Before then, I didn’t realize that War and Peace wasn’t what the average middle schooler chose for a book report.”
“Isn’t nine young for middle school?”
“I started skipping grades early. But even then, the teachers didn’t know what to do with me. If they challenged me enough, all my classmates made fun of me. Heck, they did anyway.”
“So your parents sent you off to Westover?”
Lucia cocked her head, sending him a sharp glance. “How did you know that?”
Jon looked down. Was that a flush he actually felt crawling up his face? Wincing, he rubbed the back of his neck. “I…um, did research on your whole family. For my undercover work a few years back.”
That skeptical rise of her brow damn near made him squirm, but Lucia didn’t challenge him outright. “Dad and I had summers and holidays together, and we’d always do puzzles. Then I started my doctoral program, and my schedule got crazy. He grew more distant. But I still have the last code he gave me to break. When I solved it, the result said, ‘I love you, little girl.’ He was gone a month later.”
Lucia closed her eyes to rein back her pain, and Jon couldn’t be immune. He’d lost his own father damn young, as well as countless friends and coworkers. He understood grief.
Scooting closer, he grabbed her hand and rubbed her shoulder. “I know it’s hard to dredge all this stuff up. I’m sorry to do it so close to your birthday.”
She forced a smile. “It’s sad, Jon, but I’m not going to break. I’m really not fragile.”
Exactly what Nicki had said earlier. Good. If the purpose of her father’s gift was what he suspected, she
was going to need a whole lot of fortitude and backbone. It could be both emotionally trying and dangerous.
“The problem is, if your father was trying to say something, we don’t know what. Would you mind if I examined this picture a bit more closely?”
“I meant to do that after the party.”
Jon heard her subtext: She wanted to do it alone. Freeing his brother was important to him, but he didn’t want to trample all over Lucia’s grief.
He handed the framed picture back to her. “I can step out and give you a few minutes—”
“That’s okay.” She bit the inside of her cheek, then nudged the picture back into his hands. “You go ahead.”
She trusted him, and he shoved aside the implications of her sharing this moment with him—or he’d have her naked in nothing flat.
Instead, he turned the frame over and quickly saw that it had been waxed shut. Unusual. But no mistaking the thin veneer of clear wax melted all around the seal. Had Nicholas DiStefano done that in an attempt to make sure his attorney didn’t tamper with it? Perhaps. He’d been abundantly cautious, which made sense in his line of work.
Withdrawing a pocketknife from his jeans, Jon flicked open a blade, then carefully broke the seal. The solid backing, wrapped tightly in blue velvet, came loose. He pulled it off without issue and inspected the back of the picture. The older generation sometimes wrote names, dates—anything important—there. But the back of this photo was a pristine white, as if it had been printed from someone’s computer and deposited directly into this frame.
At the bottom of the frame, however, sat two objects that made certainty hum through his veins. He was on the right track.
Lifting the first, a small piece of paper with a series of random numbers written in pencil, he handed it to Lucia. “This mean anything to you?”
She took the item, wonder sprawling across her face. “It’s a cipher. He wants me to solve for a message. This will tell us exactly how to decode the cryptovariable once we determine it.”
“Cryptovariable? A document he based the cipher on?”
“Exactly. Once we determine the cryptovariable, we bump it against the cipher, figure out the pattern, and solve. But I have no idea what document he might have used. He chose different ones every time.” She smiled wistfully. “He liked to keep me on my toes.”
Next, Jon dug into the picture frame and found a little silver key. He held it up. “This looks like it belongs to a padlock.”
Lucia peered, too. “You’re right. I have no idea where that lock might be, though. He never mentioned one that I recall.”
As grief moved across her face again, Jon took her hand and squeezed. “My guess is that we’ll find answers, and maybe even the lock, somewhere near Celeste’s.”
“Yes.” She stared at the picture. “That would be like him.”
“This could be dangerous.” It was only fair to warn her.
She scowled. “I’m naïve, but not an idiot.”
“Do you know what role Pietro played in your father’s death?”
Lucia speared him with a sharp gaze, a bitter determination crossing her face. “I suspect he’s responsible. I can’t prove it now. Someday I will. Did he ever tell you that he had something to do with my father’s death when you worked undercover in his organization?”
“No. He was all innuendos. An elbow and a chuckle, but nothing firm. He definitely didn’t grieve when Nicholas died. That’s suspicious, but wouldn’t hold up in court.” Jon hesitated, searching for the right words, but not finding them. “Look, I’m sure you’ve figured out that your father may have sent this picture to you as part of a puzzle to help solve his murder.”
“Of course. He wasn’t sentimental, and if he’d wanted to give me a gift, he’d have given me some shiny bauble.” She laughed softly. “I don’t think he ever really understood women. He presumed all of us thought that diamonds are a girl’s best friend.”
Jon had already figured out that Lucia didn’t fall into that category of female. “So you have a whole bunch of jewelry you never wear?”
Her thick, dark lashes swept across her cheeks again as she grinned. “It’s pretty, but…”
“Nicki appreciates that sort of thing far more than you.”
She nodded. “My mom always sent me books. I was way happier to receive her packages. But I hear what you’re trying to tell me. Pietro being in this picture—he and my dad weren’t really close—is odd all by itself. The fact that my father gave this picture to me in this way, with a cipher and the key to a padlock…I’d already figured he was trying to tell me something important.”
“Your father believed that Pietro would off him, at least according to my brother. To protect his interests and keep you from learning the truth, he may be willing to kill you, too. My question is, are you willing to follow this clue and investigate? I’ll help you.”
“As soon as I get back from”—she bit her lip—“vacation. I’ll, um…call you, and we can hook up. I mean, get together and—”
“That’s not going to work, Lucia. It’s been almost four years. Do you really want to wait longer to solve this? We have no way of knowing if your father arranged to have this clue sent now because it’s time-sensitive. I can’t help you after this week. I’ve only got now.”
She frowned. “The Bureau put you on this case with a time frame?”
Lucia might not appreciate his honesty, but he was going to give it to her. “I’m on leave. This is personal.”
“Your brother?”
He nodded. “Stefan isn’t safe in prison. He might deserve to do hard time for all the lousy things he’s done, but he doesn’t deserve to die by some thug skewering him with a rusty, makeshift blade in the prison yard. He’s all the family I’ve got left.”
Regret crossed her pretty face. “I can’t bail on Ashley at the last minute. She’s taken time off, spent a lot of money…” She sent him a grimace that pleaded his understanding. “If you want to get started while I’m gone, I’ll pick up where you left off when I return. I’m good with research, and—”
“No.” In some ways, that would work better, Jon conceded. He liked to work alone, and Lucia had no experience with dangerous situations. But chances were, he was going to need her help with that cipher. Nicholas hadn’t sent these clues to the police or the FBI. He’d sent them to his daughter. Something in her memory or her skill set would likely be the key to understanding what the man had left behind. And she wouldn’t be safe working these clues without a protector. She was going to need him, too.
“You have to come with me now.”
“Jon, I just explained…It’s not possible. As soon as I get back, great. In fact, I’ll have the rest of the summer to devote to this.”
“I don’t. Neither does my brother. And frankly, I don’t think your father would have wanted you to put off solving his murder so that you could run off to some hedonistic resort and let a sloppy drunk you barely know tear off your clothes and take your virginity.” It was dirty pool, and Jon knew it. But he couldn’t manage polite now.
No, that wasn’t the only reason. He also refused to sit by idly while she let someone else fuck her. There, he’d admitted it. Jon had left her once. In the back of his mind, he’d always hoped that their paths would cross again, and she’d be older, more prepared…Faced with the possibility of letting her slip through his fingers a second time, he was unwilling to let her go. She might not completely grasp everything he wanted, but she was a grown-up girl. And he wasn’t backing down again.
Lucia gasped. “That’s low.”
“That’s the unvarnished truth. Or are you going to try to tell me differently?”
She gritted her teeth. “My sister told you where I was going and what I planned to do. Damn it! It’s none of your business. You had your chance. Two years ago, I all but threw myself at you, and it was so goddamn embarrassing that you didn’t even once notice—”
Jon was all over her in an instant, slanting his mou
th over hers, silencing her with a searing kiss. He didn’t test the waters or gauge his welcome; he just forced Lucia’s lips to part under his, prowled inside, and made her take all the hunger he could shove into that kiss.
Under him, she gasped, then clutched the lapels of his suit coat, pulling him closer. God, she tasted like rum and tropical fruit and pure lust. A hot surge of desire pumped through him, and he didn’t think twice before he covered her body with his. He wrapped his arm around her and planted his hand on her voluptuous ass, bringing her body directly against him, notching his cock against her.
She moaned as he took even deeper possession of her mouth. There wasn’t a hint of resistance or rejection, and Jon felt like he would crawl out of his damn skin if he didn’t touch her soon. Her every curve pressed against his body, and he felt her breasts tighten until her nipples stabbed his chest. Her tongue curled around his, seeking and soft. He demanded more of her, taking her lips in another scorching kiss that had her arching and wrapping her arms around his neck.
