by Lucy Score
Damn. The sneaky spiritual guide had her there.
“Don’t think I don’t see what you’re doing,” she muttered to him.
Okay. She could do this. Probably.
“Hey, spirit guides. It’s me, Riley. I’m new here. You showed me meatloaf before and… well, other stuff. I’m gonna need you to do me a favor and start filtering the crap—I mean, the messages I receive. I don’t want to hear the thoughts of strangers anymore. Unless it’s like essentially earth-shattering or whatever.”
This felt like a very awkward conversation. But the clouds pulsed brighter around her, and she took that as a yes.
“Cool. Thanks. We can work on it,” she said. “So. Since I have you here. Do you know who killed Dickie?”
No spirit guide took shape in her head. But something else did. The floating orb, the one she’d thought she’d seen through her peephole, bobbed into her mind’s eye.
“Great. So he was murdered by a circle. Mystery solved,” she muttered dryly.
“Be patient with yourself and the message,” Gabe advised from somewhere in the ether.
Was there a spirit guide dictionary, she wondered.
The picture in her mind changed. Now, instead of the murder circle it was a TV. Wait. No. A computer screen. It was playing a video of her ex-husband.
“What. The. Hell?” Did these spirit guides really think Griffin “I can’t switch the laundry from washer to dryer because I might damage my hands” Gentry was capable of shooting a man in the head? Griffin was a lot of things. A self-absorbed pseudo-celebrity with a Napoleon complex, for one. But he wasn’t a murderer. He didn’t get his hands dirty.
Something tingled in her periphery. Something that felt important, but she couldn’t quite reach it, couldn’t blow off the cotton candy swamp fog to examine it.
Then the vision was changing again.
Her spirit guides were probably annoyed with her, she guessed.
“Yeah, well. I’m new at this. Cut me some slack.”
When the fluffy clouds cleared, Riley saw herself. She was hefting a pitcher of beer and wearing an indecently short, plaid skirt. She had a sash draped across her body decorated with pins that looked like… erect penises.
“Oh, shit.”
And just like that, her cotton candy bubble popped, and Riley found herself sitting in the grass as a parent explained to little Tyler that “No, he couldn’t just walk up to other kids and take their candy and snacks.” The swift return to her body or the present or whatever the hell it was made her feel a little dizzy.
“Gah.” She tipped over backward and lay in the grass, staring up at the sky.
“Excellent work, Riley,” Gabe said, like she’d just scored a game-winning three-pointer.
“Mmph.”
“Did you learn anything of interest?” he asked.
“Interest isn’t the word,” she groaned. “Tell me again. Am I seeing stuff that’s destined to happen, or is it something that might happen?”
“That depends on a number of factors.”
She gave a strangled groan. She dragged herself to her feet. “Come on. Let’s go.”
“Excellent! We can run home.” He rubbed his bear-paw-sized palms together, obviously insane to enjoy the thought of more exercise.
She would rather cough up money to Uber back. “Have you ever had ice cream?” she asked.
“I have not.”
Definitely not human. She steered him in the direction of City Island’s ice cream stand. “It’s cold and creamy and sweet. I’ll buy you a cone before our next stop.” There was no way in hell even Ironman Gabe could run after a bellyful of ice cream.
She bought her spiritual guide a chocolate vanilla twist cone and, while he enjoyed his first licks, called Lily to come pick them up. He polished off his treat in record time, so she ordered him a strawberry milkshake, which he promptly and reverently attacked.
“Sweet goddess of the apocalypse. What is this pain?” he demanded, pressing beefy fingers to his right eye as they headed toward the parking lot. “Am I dying?”
Riley tried not to laugh. “It’s called brain freeze.” It looked like Spiritual Guide Gabe was human after all.
He bent at the waist. “I do not like this frozen brain.”
She snapped a picture of his contorted face. It was the first time she’d ever seen him look anything less than Buddha-like. “Don’t worry. It passes quickly,” she promised.
Her phone buzzed in her hand.
Nick: How’d Psychic School go? Want to meet for a late lunch?
She hadn’t expected to hear from him so soon. Especially after his brushoff last night. But she didn’t have the energy to hold a grudge. Sleeping with him would have been a monumental mistake. Fun. But definitely a mistake.
Riley: It was interesting. You’re not just asking to lure me away from Gabe, are you?
Nick: That only played a 25 percent factor in the invitation.
Riley: I’m not picking out winning lottery numbers for you.
Nick: Okay. We’re down to 50 percent. 25 percent of that is a thank you for last night.
Riley: What’s the other 25 percent?
Nick: Maybe I just want to see you again?
Riley: Ha. You’re lucky I’m feeling like Chinese for lunch. I have an errand to run first.
Nick: Come by the office when you’re done.
Gabe was upright again and glaring at his milkshake like it had betrayed him.
“You have to take it slower until you build up a tolerance for it,” she advised.
Advice that could apply to having Nick Santiago smolder his way into her life.
Hesitantly, he hazarded a small sip. He waited a beat and looked at her when he wasn’t struck by a second bout of brain pain. “You are very wise.”
“How do you feel about hitting a bar with me before we go to lunch?” she asked.
“I would go anywhere you asked me to,” he said proudly.
Lily’s station wagon cruised into the lot, windows down and big band music pouring out of tinny speakers. “Yoo-hoo!” She waved out the window.
29
1:35 p.m., Saturday, June 27
“Fuck you, line item,” Nick snarled at his accounting software. If there was one thing he hated more than paperwork, it was accounting paperwork. Technically, none of this crap was due for another week. However, he was looking for an escape from his exhausting mental gymnastics.
Stage One: Think of Riley. Feel good. Want more.
Stage Two: Remember that the last thing he wanted was to be tied down to anything or anybody.
Stage Three: Think about Riley’s body.
Stage Four: Recall the hot AF sunset kiss on the bridge followed by Hard-On Fest back at the mansion.
Stage Five: Dissect the ball-gripping panic he’d felt last night when he thought someone was breaking in to clean up loose ends named Riley.
Stage Six: Vow to stick to the plan. A life free of complications and responsibilities.
Stage Seven: Remember Riley’s breasts. Or her laugh. Or those brown eyes going all molten when he kissed her. It was right about this stage that he’d texted her an invite to lunch.
Stage Eight: Repeat.
“Get out of my head, Thorn,” he muttered, dragging his focus back to the menial labor.
Once the last receipt was scanned, one last journal entry made, Nick moved on to less boring things. He fired off an email update to his terrifying ex-gym teacher. He’d swung by the vic’s mother’s apartment that morning only to get covered in cat hair and choked by secondhand smoke. The woman hadn’t spoken to her son in six months. Which was typical for their relationship.
Most of her knowledge of her son came from his childhood and teenage years. She had no idea if Adult Dickie had any friends or who—besides anyone who met him—would want him dead.
Nick was just downloading photos of a stakeout to his computer when he heard the front door of the office open.
Riley.
/> He pushed back from the desk and, annoyed at the swoop he felt in his gut, immediately sat back down.
“Nick?” Riley called from the front office.
First she’d given him the hard-on to end all hard-ons last night. Then there was the fear that someone was trying to hurt her. Now, he was giddy over the fact that he was two seconds away from seeing her face.
Get a grip, Santiago.
He slapped himself in the face, then casually responded with, “Please tell me you’re good at QuickBooks, and I’ll have your babies.” Harmless flirting had always been his go-to defense. No one could take a guy seriously if he was never serious. Only now it didn’t feel so “harmless.”
“I have no experience with books that are fast, and you do not have a uterus.” Gabe’s super-sized frame filled his doorway, blotting out the light like an annoying eclipse.
“What the hell do you want, Human Sequoia?” The high of seeing Riley was smashed into a few hundred pieces by Gabe’s stupid face. Nick felt like a four-year-old who’d just been told Santa hadn’t shown up.
This was exactly why Nick Santiago didn’t get involved with sticky women. He couldn’t deal with the stupid roller coaster ride of emotions.
“Surprise!” Riley called out sunnily from behind the behemoth. “Gabe’s joining us for lunch.”
She peeked around the giant’s elbow, grinning.
“We are going to have fortune cookies,” Gabe announced happily.
Great. Now he was pissed off at himself for being disappointed he didn’t get to have her to himself. “There aren’t enough fortune cookies in the state of Pennsylvania for you,” he sniped at his competition.
“If you don’t stop picking on Gabe, I won’t tell you the good news,” Riley said, entering his office, hands suspiciously behind her back.
Gabe preened at her defense.
“What good news?” Nick asked, crossing his arms.
“I got you an insider at Nature Girls,” she announced.
“You didn’t give that purple-haired server cash, did you?” he asked warily.
“Even better,” she promised. With a flourish, she produced a plastic dry-cleaning bag from behind her back.
He eyed the Nature Girl uniform she draped over his desk. “You want me to go undercover as a server?”
“That is amusing,” Gabe rumbled appreciatively.
Riley rolled her eyes. “You’re not going undercover. But I am. You’re looking at Nature Girls’ newest server.”
“No.”
Her brow furrowed. “No, what?” she asked him.
“No. You’re not doing it,” Nick snapped. Great. The panic was back. If this was what caring about someone felt like, it was stupid and annoying. “What were you thinking?”
“What I was thinking is that you hired me to help you with this case. You need eyes and ears in that bar.”
She looked incredulous, like she couldn’t possibly come up with a reason why her working in that shithole wasn’t the dumbest, most dangerous bad idea ever. “Yeah. Eyes and ears, not tits and ass,” he said.
“I find that remark offensive,” Gabe chimed in.
“Stay out of this, Sasquatch.”
“Don’t call him Sasquatch, shithead,” Riley shot back.
Nick closed his eyes and took a breath. “Riley, honey. I get what you were trying to do, and I appreciate it. But you’re out of your damn mind if you think I’m going to let you prance around in that third-degree-felony-waiting-to-happen outfit.”
“Let me?” Her scoff almost bent her in half at the waist. “Last I checked, I’m an independent adult. I don’t answer to you.”
“Oh, don’t play that game with me, Thorn. You’ll lose if I have to drag you home with me and lock you in a closet until you come to your senses.”
“I would break you out of the closet,” Gabe promised her.
“Shut up, Gabe.”
“Shut up, Nick,” Riley snapped.
“I feel it would be wise for you to reconsider your stance. Perhaps you should take the afternoon to consider it. I will be happy to escort Riley to lunch without you,” Gabe offered.
“Gabe, I would very much appreciate it if you’d wait outside so I could discuss this with Riley,” Nick said through clenched teeth.
The guy gave an imperious pout followed by a little bow. “Of course.” He turned to Riley. “If he tries to lock you in a closet, you know how to reach me.”
The second the door closed behind him, Nick and Riley started yelling.
“You’re not doing this!” he insisted, rounding the desk to stand in front of her.
“You don’t get to tell me what to do!”
“Oh, I’ll tell you, Thorn. I’ll tell you good.”
“Then I won’t listen, and I’ll do it anyway.” She was standing toe-to-toe with him, eyes flashing.
Nick was suddenly faced with one pro to relationships that he’d never before considered. If they were actually dating, he could forbid her from disobeying him on this.
Of course, that meant she’d have the power to forbid him from doing a host of other things, but when it came right down to it, what would he really be giving up? It wasn’t like he was still twenty-three and partying five nights a week.
No, he was a man with a business. A grocery list. The sports package on his cable. He went to the gym instead of the strip club and drank protein shakes instead of warm morning beers. Hell, he’d actually mailed his cousin’s birthday card on time the other day.
“Why the hell would you even consider working in a shithole like that?”
There would be drunk assholes drooling over her in that short skirt. Dirty hands trying to cop a feel. He was back on that roller coaster again, and there was a double loop coming up.
“Gee, I don’t know,” she said, her tone dripping with sarcasm. “I thought it would look good on my resume. Why do you think I’m doing it?”
“First of all, you’re not doing it. Secondly, I don’t need you helping me by putting yourself in a situation where I’m going to have to kick in that door and hit some assholes in the face with a table!”
She crossed her arms over her chest. Her jaw was set. “You’re fighting with me like a real boyfriend. Besides confusing your ‘let’s keep this platonic’ message, you’re ignoring how great of an opportunity this is. No one there knows I have any ties to Dickie. I can ask questions and snoop around without raising suspicion.”
The pounding in his head was definitely an early warning sign of an aneurysm. He leaned back against the desk in case this really was it and he was about to crumple to the floor. Life would be so much easier if a guy could just tell a woman what she should do. Hang on. He’d found a loophole.
“You’re my employee,” he announced triumphantly. “And as your boss, I forbid you to work there.”
“Show me the employment contract where it says you get to tell me how to do my job,” she seethed. The heat from her glare was making his headache worse.
“Fine. I’ll have Josie do it,” he decided. Josie could at least break faces and pick locks. It would be like sending a shark in to swim with a bunch of eels. Riley, on the other hand, was like punting a golden retriever puppy into a mosh pit.
She took one of those slow, deep breaths that women took so they wouldn’t go nuclear on someone who usually deserved it. “Look,” she said. “Josie’s trying to get pregnant, which means timetables and ovulation. They already hired me. Why complicate things? Besides, I…” She trailed off, mumbling something.
He leaned in. “What?”
She bit her bottom lip and rolled her eyes. “I had a vision of myself in a Nature Girl uniform this morning,” she admitted.
He didn’t know how to argue with the psychic thing yet, especially not when she sounded so self-conscious about it.
He grunted instead.
“If it makes you feel any better, they also hired Gabe as a bouncer,” she informed him, brightening.
As a matter of fact
, that did not make him feel better. Now Gabe the Great Wall was going to be protecting her while Nick sweated his ass off in the surveillance van.
“I could also tell you that while one of the waitresses interviewed me, I saw a few stacks of cash exchanging hands. A lot more than a bar tab. The bartender wrote it all down in a book behind the register.”
He didn’t trust himself to say anything. Instead, he glared at the uniform spread across his desk.
“You were right, Nick,” Riley said, changing tactics. “Dickie was running some kind of gambling ring through Nature Girls. It’s a lead.”
It was the only lead. And this was the best option. And that pissed him off.
Hooking his fingers in the waistband of her running shorts, he pulled her into him.
“What are you doing?” she asked, hands settling on his chest.
“Pretending,” he said, nuzzling his face against her hair, down the slim column of her neck.
That weird swoop in his gut was back. Holding Riley in his arms felt… damn good.
“You are really sending some mixed messages, dude,” she told him.
“I am aware.” He nipped at the spot where her neck met her shoulder. Her skin tasted salty.
He couldn’t say why he was torturing himself this way. Or why the edge of her underwear at his fingertips was driving him out of his fucking mind. All he knew was he wanted to be touching her.
She drew in a shuddering breath, fingers digging into his shirt.
“Why did they hire Gabe?” he asked, pushing a curling strand of damp hair off her neck.
The smile she flashed him was guilty and made him want to bite her lower lip.
“He told them he was my boyfriend,” she confessed.
The bartender had probably shit his pants just looking at Gabe.
“Are you fake two-timing me, Thorn?” he asked softly. He brushed his thumb against her stomach under the hem of her shirt.