by Lucy Score
She frowned at him. “Would you please stop talking in fortune cookies?”
“I am unfamiliar with fortune cookies,” he said, still smiling.
“Seriously? I wish I would have known that. We could have had Chinese food.”
There were two women at the table next to them. The first, in the perky pink polo, was jabbering on and on about Malcolm from accounting. The second, was methodically twisting the ends of her long black braids around her finger and suffering in silence.
“Please. Shut. The. Fuck. Up. My God. When is the last time this girl breathed? I’m never gonna get this time back. Hang on. Hello! Who is Mr. Hot Chocolate over there?”
Riley noticed the woman with the braids zero in on Gabe.
“I would very much like that,” Gabe said.
“Huh? Sorry. What?” Riley asked.
“Have food from China with you.” His puppy-dog sincerity was as sweet as it was annoying.
“Look. I just want you to understand that you were sent here under false pretenses. I don’t want to learn to use my powers. I want them to go away.”
He beamed at her. “The best way to quiet your powers is to learn how to control them.”
The contents of her wrap flopped onto her plate. “You can teach me that?”
“How to control your powers? Yes.”
She put down the wrap. “You can teach me how to block all this stuff out?”
“If that is what you wish. It would be my pleasure,” he said, giving her a little bow.
20
5:30 p.m., Wednesday, June 24
Santiago Investigations was housed in a small brick duplex-turned-storefront on 3rd Street. The block was a mix of residential and commercial spaces, where the parking was tight, and the air smelled like early home-cooked dinners and laundry drying.
Riley had thought about Nick’s offer all afternoon. And while the extra money would come in handy, she really didn’t want to get involved. She’d rather forget the whole thing had ever happened and move on with her boring life and stick to her boring plan.
She tucked the Jeep into a space down the block. A movement in her rear-view mirror caught her eye. A dark sedan stopped in the street three cars back. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. Cops.
“Looks like you’ve got company, girlie.”
“I can see that, Uncle Jimmy.”
“Think they’re coming to arrest you?”
Her dead uncle was annoyingly chipper about the possibility. “I didn’t do anything besides ask them to do their jobs,” she complained. “And now I’m carrying on a conversation with an empty Jeep. That doesn’t look crazy or suspicious.”
Frustrated, she got out and slung her purse over her shoulder. Deciding it was best to pretend she hadn’t noticed that she was being followed, Riley dutifully crossed at the crosswalk. Once on the sidewalk, she paused between parked cars and pretended to tie her nonexistent shoelace.
Behind the wheel was the grumpy-looking Detective Weber in a tie and dark sunglasses.
“Crap,” she whispered to herself. It felt like at any moment, he was going to jump out of the car and handcuff her. The fact that she felt guilty annoyed her even more. She hadn’t done anything wrong. And if he was still convinced she had something to do with it, she was going to have to do his stupid job for him and prove her innocence.
“You do know you’re wearing sandals, don’t you, Ms. Thorn?”
Riley looked up and realized the detective had rolled down the window and was looking at her.
Well, shit.
She stood up. “Just, uh, doing some stretches,” she said, making a show of raising her arms over her head. Totally normal. Completely nonchalant. “Can I help you with something?”
Please say no. Please say no.
“You’re just stretching, and I’m just driving around,” he said.
A lie for a lie.
“Okay then,” she said, wondering if she should throw in a quad stretch for good measure.
“Tell Santiago I said hi,” Detective Weber said and drove off.
Riley decided it would be best to not relay that message and hurried down the block to the office.
A large plate-glass window looked in on the reception area that housed two desks and a wall of dented green filing cabinets. Riley opened the door, pretending like she’d visited her fake fiancée a hundred times before.
The guy behind the far desk gave off sexy nerd vibes. He was dividing his attention between three huge computer monitors and the woman perched on the desk swinging her combat boots. They both turned to look at her.
Cute nerd grinned. “You must be Riley,” he said. He pushed away from the desk, and she spotted the wheelchair for the first time. “I’m Brian, Nick’s cousin and doer of everything he doesn’t want to.”
“I’m Josie, Nick’s bodyguard.” There was a fifty-fifty chance that wasn’t a joke.
Josie was petite, but there was definitely a “don’t fuck with me” vibe. It probably had something to do with the knife tattoo on her shoulder.
“Hi,” Riley said, exercising her stellar conversational skills. “I’m Nick’s fake fiancée.”
Four eyebrows raised. The cousin and the bodyguard exchanged a look. It was the kind of telepathy that existed between people who’d known each other for a very long time.
“It’s nice to meet you, Riley,” Brian said, grinning.
“Are you two…” Riley pointed her finger back and forth between them.
“Married? Yes. Ovulating? Also yes,” Josie announced, leaning back on her hands. She gave her husband a seductive look.
A door, the same Army green as the cabinets, between the two desks opened, revealing Nick and his dimples.
“Hey. Glad you could come,” he said.
No matter how many times she saw him, he was still delicious looking. Like a giant ice cream sundae that she knew would give her a stomachache if she ate the whole thing, but she still really, really wanted it.
“Riley was just explaining your engagement,” Josie said, batting long lashes in Nick’s direction.
“Fake engagement,” Nick and Riley said in unison.
Brian and Josie shared another knowing look.
“Come on back, Thorn,” Nick said, shooting his employees a glare.
When Riley glanced over her shoulder, she saw Brian and Josie making obscene kissy faces. Nick flipped them the bird. “I hate when they get all telepathic,” he grumbled, then seemed to think better. “Ah, sorry. No offense.”
“None taken. Good luck with your ovulating,” Riley called to the happy couple.
Nick shut the door.
Much like his SUV, Nick’s office was a disaster. The trash can was overflowing with hoagie wrappers, and every flat surface in the room was buried under files and stacks of paperwork. There was a path that cut from the door to behind the battered metal desk. The carpet beneath was shit brown.
He ushered her to the only other chair that wasn’t serving as a temporary filing cabinet.
It was a bit of a relief to know that Hot Nick didn’t have his life together everywhere. It humanized him and those devilish dimples.
“Nice place,” she quipped.
“I’ve been busy, and I hate paperwork,” he said by way of an explanation.
“So because you hate it, you’re just not going to do it?” she clarified.
“Life’s short. Why waste it doing things you don’t want to do?”
The life philosophy of Nick Santiago, ladies and gentlemen.
“Are you hoping that the paperwork fairies will magically appear overnight and start filing?” she asked.
“If you tell me the tooth fairy isn’t real, this fake engagement is over.”
He tossed her a bottle of water and got one for himself from the mini-fridge she hadn’t noticed since it, too, had sixty pounds of paperwork and a backpack on top of it.
“So,” he said. Nick didn’t take the chair behind the desk. No, he le
aned against the front of it, stretching those long legs out in front of him until her feet were between them. Worn denim over muscled thighs. His t-shirt—Freddy Mercury, another point in his favor—was a faded classic that fit him as if it had been handmade for his chest and shoulders.
It was annoying how everything about him was unequivocally hot.
“So,” she repeated.
“You’re here.”
“So it would seem.”
Nick grinned. She noticed his left dimple seemed maybe a millimeter deeper than his right. “Are you willing to continue our temporary engagement?” he asked, drawing her attention away from his facial perfection. “For semi-generous financial compensation, of course.”
His expression was downright lecherous. She liked it.
“I haven’t made up my mind yet,” she told him.
“Then I’ll just have to convince you.”
Yes, please.
“Here’s how I see this going,” he continued. “We hang out at your place. You provide the access for me to casually interview your neighbors.”
She crossed her legs, bumped a bruise, and immediately uncrossed them. “Do you honestly think that one of them knows something?”
He shrugged and took a swig of water. “They all knew Frick a lot longer than you. It’s possible one of them knows something that will be helpful.”
“It’s more probable that they all know a whole lot of nothing, and you’ll drown in inappropriate, loud small talk.”
“I think I can handle it. Little old ladies love me. I’m charming. Which brings me to the next ask.”
Riley unscrewed the cap on her water. “What’s that?”
“A sleepover.”
She choked and bobbled the bottle. Gasping and coughing, she watched in horror as a geyser of spring water gracefully arced from the bottle through the air before splashing down on Nick’s crotch.
“Shit. Sorry,” she said, jumping up and looking for napkins or paper towels.
She found a box of tissues and grabbed a fistful.
“Relax, Thorn, it’s just—”
He cut off abruptly when she pressed a handful of tissues to his groin and began to dab with enthusiasm.
“Boss, we’re heading out—whoops. Sorry to interrupt,” Josie said with a feline grin.
“It’s just water,” Riley insisted, still blotting tissues to his crotch.
“Sure, it is. Have fuuuuuun,” she sang as she closed the door.
“For the love of God, Thorn,” Nick said, sounding pained. He grabbed her wrists.
It appeared that spilled water was now only a secondary problem in his crotchal region.
They stood that way—Riley trapped between his thighs, Nick’s hands gripping her wrists, and a conspicuous hard-on between them—for a long moment.
She looked at the ceiling. It seemed safer. There was a hum vibrating through her body that started with where his fingers touched her skin. It was redirecting her nerves to feel something other than the soreness that accompanied hurling oneself down a flight of stairs.
His laugh was low, husky. “You’re cute when you’re embarrassed and turned on.”
She ignored the latter part of his statement. “Your employee thinks I was… you know.” If her face got one degree hotter, her skin would start to melt.
“Who cares what people think?”
Ugh. It was such a typically hot, confident, badass, black sheep thing to say.
She cleared her throat. “What were you saying before… that?” She pointed in the direction of his erection.
“A sleepover,” he said, with a dirty, dirty grin.
“A sleepover,” she parroted. “You want to have a sleepover. With me.”
“I want to search Dickie’s apartment. And what better way to do that than while spending the night with my fiancée?”
“Oh.” She didn’t know if she was more relieved or disappointed.
There was something blooming, burning, in the air between them, and Riley had concerns that she was the only one who felt it. Had she just walked into a cloud of pheromones? Was she just that overdue for an orgasm that she couldn’t handle even the most casual of touches? Were her wrists a previously undiscovered erogenous zone?
“Breathe,” Nick said smugly.
“Huh?” she croaked.
“You haven’t taken a breath in about a minute.”
Desperately, she sucked in a breath. “Have too,” she argued.
He ran his hands up her arms and back down, eyeing her. “You know, if we’re going to sell this engagement thing, you can’t jump out of your skin every time I touch you.” His thumbs rubbed little circles over her pulse.
He was playing a game with her, and she didn’t know the rules.
“So what do you say, Thorn? Be my fake fiancée? I promise it’ll be a good time.”
Riley didn’t need to be psychic to know that Nick Santiago was not the get-down-on-one-knee type. Unless it was to spread a woman’s thighs and use his tongue to take her to a new level of orgasmic bliss.
“Um. Okay.”
His smile was triumphant. “Good. How about I take you to dinner to celebrate?”
21
6:00 p.m., Wednesday, June 24
“Why do you need thirty pounds of paperwork to go to dinner?” Riley asked with suspicion as Nick slid behind the wheel of his SUV.
He waited to answer until she was belted in and his GPS app was calculating the first stop. “Thought you could help me do some serves on the way.”
The look she shot him was pure gold. Annoyance. Trepidation. Surprise.
“Come on, Thorn. It’s the least you could do since you mauled my crotch in front of an employee.”
“You’re such as ass.”
He gave her knee a squeeze and then consciously put his hand back on the wheel, heading south. He liked touching her. And that was a potential problem. In his office, all he’d thought about was how much he wanted to clear his desk, strip her naked, and show her how limber his tongue was.
It had seemed safer to get her in the car. But now he was running calculations on back seat dimensions. One thing was for sure—Riley Thorn made him think about sex.
“What better way to get to know each other than by being locked in a car together on a boring road trip that includes such central Pennsylvania highlights as the sketchy side of York and a mobile home park in Peach Bottom?” he asked cheerfully.
She groaned. “You sure know how to show a girl a good time.”
“Have something better to do?” he asked.
Her sigh almost fogged up the inside of the windshield. “Nope.”
“Think of it as an adventure,” he advised. “And if you’re a good girl, I’ll buy you dinner and snacks.”
“I do like snacks,” she mused.
They agreed on music—’80s hairband—and interior temperature. Signs that, had he been looking for them, would have indicated compatibility outside the bedroom. But compatibility that didn’t involve nudity had never been a priority for Nick. So he didn’t quite know what to do with it.
Riley skimmed serves while he piloted them south on Interstate 83. Farmland and mega warehouses flanked the rolling hills of the highway.
“Tell me about this psychic thing,” he said.
She glanced up from a divorce and waited a beat. “There’s not much to tell,” she said finally.
“How does it work? Do you see in pictures, or do you hear stuff like voices?”
Once again, she was looking at him with suspicion like she was waiting for him to get to the punchline.
“What?” he asked.
“Aren’t you going to ask me to give you the winning lottery numbers or ask me what number you’re thinking of?”
He snorted. “Get that a lot?”
“No one’s actually interested in what it’s like, just what it can give them.”
“I’m interested,” he insisted.
“Okay. So then, I guess both,” she said
grudgingly. “Like sometimes it plays out in my head like I’m watching TV, and sometimes it’s really insistent whispers, but they’re coming from inside my head.”
“What was it with Dickie?” he asked.
“Awful,” she said. “I thought it was a food poisoning hallucination at first. I ran into him in the hall between our apartments, and it just hit me. Like a movie playing out. Dickie was answering his door and calling someone a cocksucker. There was a hand wearing a glove and holding a gun. Bang bang. Dickie goes down, looking surprised and pissed off.”
“Cocksucker,” Nick repeated. Odds were, Dickie knew the person on the other end of the gun and hadn’t expected them to put some brass in his brain.
“Sometimes I dream about dead people telling me things,” she confessed.
“How do you know when a dream is just a dream?”
“I don’t really. That’s part of the problem. I don’t have any control over it, so I can’t just tap into it and use it like a tool. I also apparently can’t turn it off. Yet.”
“That must be annoying,” he guessed.
“It is,” she said emphatically.
“Is there like a Hogwarts for psychics? Or some kind of training?” he asked, genuinely interested.
That got a smile out of her. “No Hogwarts unfortunately. But there’s a guild, and apparently there are things I could learn to manage it,” she said, her focus was out the window.
“You kind of make it sound like a disease,” he pointed out.
“It feels like it. These messages invade my head, and it makes me sweaty and nauseous and clammy and shaky. It’s like getting a bad flu in five seconds. I threw up tacos after the Dickie vision.”
“Does every clairvoyant feel that way?” he asked. Yeah, so maybe he’d done a little internet research on the whole psychic thing.
She shrugged. “I don’t think so. But it’s not something that I get into with others.”
“I want points for not directly asking you why you don’t want to embrace this whole thing.”
“Points awarded,” she said and then looked at him. “My turn for questions. What’s with you and the detective?”