I want to draw that chest. The way his neck meets his broad shoulders and the slight striations in the trapezius muscles. Good God, that six pack!
Forget drawing. I want to touch him. When he’s like that. I want those arms around me so badly, I can feel them. The warmth of his skin. His rock-hard strength, which inexplicably comes with the most magical of light, beautiful smiles.
Remembering the conversation they’d had in the workout room, she guessed that he’d welcome any move she made. Just what move she was ready for, though, was the issue.
She didn’t think she’d made a noise, but as she virtually salivated over the splendor of Gabe in all his almost-naked glory, he glanced up from his laptop screen. With a nod and a smile, he waved her over.
“Doc. Ragno—Andi’s here.” Full attention on Andi, he lifted a bicep-bulging arm and ran his fingers through his hair, smoothing it. “How’s Pic?”
She nodded and tried not to lick her lips as his arm fell back to his side. “Sound asleep.”
“Guys—you heard that?”
He was silent, looking at her as he listened to them.
“Okay. I’m going silent. Then knocking off for the night. Thanks, Doc. We’ll be on the lookout for that email, and we’ll give you a report on Pic in the morning. Ragno, call me during the night if you find anything.” He glanced at Andi. “They’re gone. It’s just us now.”
“I’m not sure how long Pic will stay here,” she said, from the doorway. “He’s still worried about Monica. She didn’t show up anywhere yesterday that he could find her, which has me worried about what I saw on Friday. Though I didn’t tell him about that, because I don’t want to worry him. But I can’t stop thinking that the girl could have been her.”
Gabe shook his head. “Don’t jump to that conclusion. You couldn’t really describe her for me the other day, remember?”
“I knew she was female, though. She was walking towards the river. Away from me, so I didn’t see her features. And I knew her dress was loose. The kind a pregnant woman would wear. And I told you on Saturday that I thought she had blond hair, right? It’s not my imagination playing that trick now, right?”
“You did tell me that on Saturday. But you also said most of her hair was covered with a scarf.”
“Old Navy. Not Muslim. I remember exactly what I told you, because those details are clear to me. But that’s exactly the way Monica would’ve worn her hair. I have a sketch upstairs of her, with a scarf tied in her hair like that. I did it two months ago.”
“But you didn’t recognize her on Friday. If she had seemed familiar to you, that fact would have been something that you remembered before now. Besides, there is nothing we can do about it right now, okay?” He paused, with an eyebrow raised.
She nodded, reluctantly.
“Chances are,” he continued, “Monica will show up somewhere she’s supposed to be tomorrow. And if concern for her is going to be what makes Pic leave, we’ll figure out a way to find her, okay?”
“Thank you.”
“Just doing my job, Andi.”
“I know it’s above and beyond, so...” As her voice trailed, she realized, once again, she was staring. Not at his physical beauty, but the depth in his eyes as she searched for the meaning of his words. While profoundly grateful that he was willing to take on tasks that most would look over, she wondered, with a sinking heart, whether he was looking at her as one of those tasks. Whether she was something that he thought he could fix. He arched an eyebrow, waiting for her to continue. “So, thank you. Again. Meds are due for Pic in five and a half hours.” She glanced at her watch. “At seven.”
“If you’d like, I’ll handle it so you can sleep.”
“No. I’ll do it. I heard part of your phone conversation. What were you asking Ben to draw?”
Lifting the iPad and phone, he patted the bed next to him. “Come see.”
The surreal-ness of the moment wasn’t lost on her. But he was so damn natural about inviting her in to sit with him, that any issues she could’ve had—and there were about a thousand—fell away. As though she hadn’t spent the better part of the last two and a half years erecting impenetrable walls between herself and the normal world, where people shared things like lives and beds, she walked towards him. She stepped up with one knee, then the other. She pulled her legs up and under her, as he moved over, repositioning the pillows behind his back as she faced him.
He handed her his iPad, his fingers brushing hers as she took it. His eyes lingered, and he gave her a slight smile, suggesting that maybe, just maybe, he felt the same jolt of electricity that she did at the touch of his fingertips.
“Pic ever mention someone named Aubrey to you?”
She shook her head. “He’s never mentioned anyone to me, other than the people he’s met on the streets. At first, I tried to ask questions about his life before here. He wouldn’t answer.”
Gabe pointed to the iPad. “We might not need to ask questions.”
On the laptop screen she read, ‘Aubrey. A Cross. Two doves, crying. Blue sky. Clouds. A doorway. Open. Flowers. Roses. A ring of some other kind of flower (?). Color. Blue. March 3, 1982. November 7.’
“What is this?”
Gabe held her gaze, silent. After a few seconds, he pressed his watch, typed a few more words on his laptop, pressed enter, and pushed the laptop away. “I take it you’ve never seen his chest?”
On the day Pic had pulled her out of the river, he’d been wearing a t-shirt. He’d stripped it off, but turned from her when he’d pulled on his sweater. She’d thought he was being modest. Ever since, even on the hottest of summer days, he’d worn a t-shirt, at least. “No.”
“Then you haven’t seen the tattoo over his heart. Ben studied it as he examined him.” He pointed to the iPad. “This is how Ben described it to me.”
Andi put the iPad on the bed. “I have a problem with having Ben spy for us. He’s a doctor. It’s…wrong.”
“The only way we’ll help him is by knowing what happened to him.”
“I know that, but…Pic trusted Ben. Dear God, if my doctors repeated what I’ve told them, or what they saw when they examined me, I’d want to kill them.”
“Cavanaugh won’t be repeating it to anyone else. He’s told me, and I’ve told you, and it ends there.”
“Ragno knows.”
“Yeah.” He gave her a nod. “But in my world, that goes pretty much without saying. I don’t do much sleuthing without her. She’s a cyber expert who, when necessary, will hack through databases to figure out what the clues I’m finding mean. Trust me, Ragno doesn’t repeat things.”
“Is she listening now?”
“No. When I say I’m going silent, like I just did, I mean it. That was as much for you as for them. I wouldn’t say that, then have her eavesdrop. Well…” He frowned. “To be honest, I might, but I won’t do that to you. It’s just me and you now.”
“It still feels distasteful. Plus, it’s a breach of doctor patient confidentiality. What kind of doctor does that?”
“A damn good one, according to Brandon. And apparently this doctor understands one of Black Raven’s guiding principles—that sometimes, to really help someone, rules have to be bent.”
She couldn’t help but glance at the iPad screen again. “Clearly, Aubrey was important to him. People don’t permanently wear the names of meaningless people. As was March 3, 1982, which isn’t his birthday. He’s way too young for that date to be his.”
“Yeah. You’re right about that. He’s too lanky. His eyes, when he’s not being a hard ass, seem almost innocent. As though he’s wondering how things went so wrong, instead of accepting it. Wondering comes with youth. Acceptance would mean he’s older. And he’s barely got facial hair, but he’s got some. He’s sort of where I was at seventeen. My body was still too busy growing tall and dealing with muscle mass for the hair to come out on my face and chest.” He gave her a disarming smile, and sat up, straightening his magnificent shoulders, coc
king his chin, inviting her gaze. “Then, look what happened by the time I was twenty.”
Dark chest hair complemented his tawny skin. Just the right amount of curls accented the tight brownish-pink nipples on his superhero-worthy chest. And just like the stuff of dreams, the dark hair trailed down, like a tantalizing arrow, to his waistband. With the ridged, tight abdominal muscles as a backdrop, the pathway to heaven provided by his body hair gave a solid indication that what was below the shorts would be scrumptious. “By the time I was twenty, I had to shave twice a day to avoid a shadow.”
And what were we talking about? Not licking this man’s nipples. Or slipping my fingers under that waistband, right? Right?
Glancing at the iPad, she refocused. Oh. Pic’s tattoo. “It might not be his birthdate, but it’s an important date to him.”
“Maybe because it’s important to Aubrey, whoever she might’ve been. So we’re working one scenario that March 3, 1982, might’ve been the birthdate of a woman named Aubrey. Ragno’s implementing searches as we speak. Social Security Administration. Birth records of individual states. Tax records. School records. Arrest records. You name it.”
“How?”
“Black Raven’s brand of cyber searching. Designed by the world’s foremost cyber genius, Richard Barrows. Because of him, we’ve got the world’s best data compilation and assimilation program. We’ve labeled different aspects of the programs different names over the years. Shadow Technology. Jigsaw. The technology is growing. The processors are learning.”
“You make it sound like a person.”
“It is. But smarter. Better. Our special brand of artificial intelligence. And now you know one secret as to why Black Raven is so successful. Because every agent in the field has a think tank behind him. Every variable of every job runs through our endless world of cyber intelligence. What we know, and what we can figure out, is almost limitless. Now, if you repeat what I just said,” he said, smiling, “I’ll have to kill—”
“But Shadow Technology and the fact that Barrows now works for you was in the news. It isn’t secret.”
“Media outlets were speculating,” he said. “We’ve never publicly acknowledged that we use it, nor have we explained the parameters, which grow every day. You can ask Brandon about it, if you don’t believe me. But don’t say I told you. Brandon is legal counsel, which means he knows everything. The lawyers always know where the bones are buried.”
Gabe shifted his attention to the laptop screen for a second. He typed in rapid fire clicks, focusing on the screen, then hit enter. “Okay. Let’s get back to Pic’s ink and what Ragno’s doing with it. From the million or so Aubreys that Ragno might identify using that full date, she’s going to run additional scenarios.”
“Such as?”
“Assuming Pic is 17, 18, or 19, she’ll comb through important dates in the lives of all those Aubreys. For every one of them who had a baby boy in the relevant time frame, she’ll work variables. For example, if Pic is 18 today, then he would’ve been born in 1999, and a woman who was born in 1982 would have had him when she was 17.”
Andi drew a deep breath. “I wouldn’t have been ready to be a mother at 17.”
“Yeah.” Gabe frowned. “And I wouldn’t have been much of a father at that age, either. Pic might’ve simply been the fall-out from a young woman who didn’t have the right resources to raise a kid.”
“I get it. If we know who Aubrey was to him, and if she was his mom, maybe we’ll figure out his real name. And if we know Pic’s real name, then we’ll maybe be able to figure out what went wrong in his life.”
“Right. It’s old-fashioned investigation, enhanced by our cyber-capability bag of tricks. Black Raven can do in hours and days what most investigators or law enforcement agencies would take weeks to accomplish. We can search and assimilate pretty quickly. The likelihood is damn strong that once Ragno stretches her legs on this—” He gestured to the iPad. “—we’ll know what went wrong in his life. And once we know that, we’ll figure out a way to help him.”
“But he trusts us to play by his rules.”
The seriousness in his expression made her breath catch. It revealed a river of emotion that ran deep, fueled by a rock-solid determination and confidence in his ability to get answers. Forget his chest, his shoulders, his smile, his eyes.
This.
This rock solid desire to help someone, with urgency and confidence that he’s doing the right thing, no matter how he has to do it, is the sexiest, most irresistible thing I’ve ever seen.
And dangerous.
Please God, don’t let him feel like he has to fix me. Because he’ll die trying.
“Someone broke the rules with him. My suspicion is it’s going to take breaking a few to help him. And he might never have to know that it started tonight, with Cavanaugh telling us about his tattoo. But if we have to tell him, I’ll take the heat.” He gestured to the iPad. “What do you say? You okay with this? ‘Cause I can call off Ragno, if you’d like me to.”
Considering the idea, she drew a deep breath. “I’m not sure—”
He leaned forward, so that his face was closer to her. “You’re whispering. What was that?”
She inhaled the fresh scent of soap and woodsy maleness. Because every fiber in her, every nerve ending, and every molecule, suddenly started singing a silent chorus of hallelujah, she forgot what she was saying. Goosebumps rippled along her arms, and her breath caught. Any reservations she had about him disappeared, as her nipples hardened, peaking with an intensity that shot straight between her legs. Lifting her face to his, as she thought ‘kiss me,’ she said with her last bit of logical sense, “Don’t call her off.”
“So you’re okay with us using the information in the tattoo?”
She answered his question with a nod, because when she opened her mouth to say the word, nothing came out.
Oh God, please touch me.
His slight smile, the default one he always wore, faded. His eyes turned serious, as his pupils dilated and his breath caught.
Yes, yes, yes!!!…I’m finally ready for some good old sex. Now.
She squeezed her thighs together against the delicious throb that, until now, had been a distant memory from a different, long-ago life. Now it was welcome, and she let it guide her into closing the distance between them. Pressing her lips to his, thinking he might need more than a hint as to how fast she could proceed, she pushed hard against his mouth and sighed as he opened his lips to her.
A heady groan sounded from deep within his chest, as though his body wanted hers as badly as she wanted him. It was a delicious sound. Deep. Feral. Male. Her nipples puckered and her toes curled with pulse-pounding desire.
“Oh,” she whispered, as he opened his mouth, sliding his tongue along her lips. A surge of moisture between her legs told her that her body remembered what to do and was doing it with great gusto. Breaking the kiss, she drew a deep breath. “Oh, Gabe. I want this so badly.”
Fill me. Make me feel alive again.
He leaned forward into the kiss, and their teeth scraped, as he reached around her and pulled her closer with one of his big, strong arms. His power should’ve felt good, but while her body shook with delicious anticipation, she froze. Unexpectedly and out of nowhere, passion fell away as spine-tingling fear charged through her in an adrenaline-fueled rush of hot blood that ignited sizzling fight-or-flight nerves.
Worse than freezing on him, she yanked her head back from his kiss, slapped away his hands, then pushed at his oversized chest with both palms.
Thank God, he instantly comprehended the message. With his hands flattening on the mattress, he pushed himself away from her.
“Understood,” he said, voice soothing, his hands raised above his shoulders. “Message received. Loud and clear.”
She drew her knees up to her chest and rested her forehead on them. She would’ve leapt off the bed and run out of the room, but she was still quaking with fear that she knew was irrational. Her l
egs wouldn’t carry her.
After a few more seconds where the only sound in the room was the two of them, breathing heavily as they regained their equilibrium, he asked, “Hey. You okay?”
“No. I’m sorry,” she whispered, all sexual urgency gone. In its place, breath-stealing fear raced through her. Diminishing. But it was real, and still there. “I guess it’s just been so long. My body wanted way more than a kiss just now. And then I freaked out.”
“Glad I read the signs accurately. Sorry I was going from zero to ninety in fifteen seconds flat.”
“That’s what I thought I wanted. But I haven’t done it since…you know.” His nod told her she didn’t have to say more. “And when you reached around me, to pull me closer, I just felt like…”
And I’ll never tell you what I felt like. I will get past this fear. That someone will hold me down and torture me. With sex. With fire. With my mouth, as his goddamn cock choked me. And I was too scared to bite it off, because each time I tried, he burned my back with a cigarette. And it hurt. Goddamn it, but the pain was excruciating.
“Hey. Tell me what just went through your mind. You’re shaking. I want to help.”
Eyes squeezed shut, forehead on her knees, she breathed deep, then pushed those thoughts away. “I don’t know. I need my brain to catch up with my body, I think.”
“Then we’ll just take it slow,” he said, in his endlessly optimistic tone, as though confident it would work out—whatever ‘it’ was. But his tone was gruff, reminding her that he was a man and he was aroused.
Opening her eyes, she lifted her forehead from her knees. One quick glance at his shorts—because there was no way to resist looking there—told her she’d guessed correctly. Thin exercise shorts didn’t do much to conceal what looked to be an impressive erection. Yes—God had built him to scale. Every delicious inch of him. How could she want him this badly physically and yet have her brain kick in to negate the need?
He chuckled when he saw where her gaze landed. “And that answers any question you might have as to where I’d have been happy to take that kiss.”
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