by Aiden Bates
“Appreciate the sympathy, Detective. You have a good night.”
But as the SUV pulled away, I found myself crossing through Nick’s backyard with a nagging little question bouncing around in my head.
Ansel had realized the SIM card was gone. Knew that I was the one who had taken it. He had my number. Could’ve called me. Could’ve just asked me point blank.
Instead, he’d followed me around in an SUV all night. Not exactly typical police procedure. Unless…
Unless he’d thought I was going to lead him to something.
But if so…then what?
10
Nick
Every night since I’d taken that bad pill, I’d dreamed of sex. Rough sex, all ragged moans and bared teeth, six pairs of hands on my body all at once. Gentle sex, the long passionate kind where lips lingered against lips, stealing wanton kisses with every slow, measured thrust. Sex while pregnant—that had been a recurring theme ever since I’d realized that one of the Alphas at Coda had managed to knock me up. I’d dreamed of being ridden from behind, my belly swollen and heavy while I arched my back so I could slam my ass back to meet every stroke, or being taken while lying on my back, a big, strong Alpha folding his body over me with care to avoid putting too much pressure on my womb from above.
But every night, no matter what the wet dream was, I always woke up the same way. Gasping with need, my sheets soaked with sweat and my cock rock fucking hard.
That night was no different—only this time, the Alpha that I’d dreamed of finally had a face that I could focus on as my balls ached, full and heavy with cum.
Harper King. His golden-brown hair, his green eyes and his scoundrel’s smile had left me cockstruck from the moment I first met him. Now that he was living in my house and keeping me safe from harm, it was no wonder that he was showing up even in my most X-rated dreams. I woke with his name on my lips and his body on my mind—tall, broad-shouldered, muscular and dangerous. Everything I could want in a man, all distilled into a PI with a loaded pistol and an ass that could make an angel weep for joy.
My fingers were already curled into a fist around my cock when I awoke. By the time I was half-conscious, I was already completely stiff, precum turning the sheet that covered my nude body dark and damp where it brushed against my tip. I only hesitated for a moment—was it wrong to jerk off to the thought of the man who’d so selflessly sworn to protect me from the people who had just murdered his brother in cold blood?
No, I decided tentatively, convincing myself of it with a slight tug of my cock that left my hips bucking upwards with need. Looking the way Harper did, it wouldn’t be the first time an Omega had stroked himself off to the thought of him. And the way he’d looked at me last night as I sat on the bed of his hotel room, that undeniable hunger glinting in the golden shimmers in his eyes…
I worked my fingers up over the ridge of my swollen glans, letting my precum serve as lube. Before pregnancy, my cock had already been ridiculously sensitive. Now that I had all of these new hormones rushing through my veins, the effect had only tripled. I cupped my balls in my free hand, arching my back and sinking deeper into my pillows as I conjured image after image of Harper there in bed with me. I imagined his breath washing over me, green eyes staring up at me with desire. The heat of his mouth as he dipped his lips down to suck me off, smirking like a bastard all the while.
In only a few minutes, I worked myself up enough to feel my balls clench in my palm, shooting cum up onto my chest and neck so hard that I nearly made it into my own mouth from the sheer force of my orgasm alone. The last few ropes of cum splattered onto my stomach, still flattened down and ridged with abs—though I knew it wouldn’t be for long. In just a few months, I’d be showing—and unless I rid myself of these fantasies of Harper by that time, I’d be coming for him onto my own freshly round, pregnant belly as well.
I grabbed a towel from my master bath, drying myself off as I ran the tap on the sink. When I could feel the water run warm, I cupped my hands to catch it so I could splash it up on my face. A look in the mirror left me smirking—with my dark, tousled hair and healthily flushed cheeks I looked positively well-fucked. I pulled a pair of sweatpants on, tucking my still-hard cock into the waistband before I shrugged on my robe. Normally, it would have gone down by now. I supposed I had my pregnancy hormones to thank for that as well.
But as I tiptoed into the living room, thinking that a cup of peppermint tea with some sugar might help get the lewd thoughts of Harper out of my mind, I quickly realized that I couldn’t have made a bigger mistake.
Harper King was passed out on my couch, shirtless and looking even sexier than he had in my fantasies. I’d imagined his chest flawless, the sunshine brown hair on it softly curled over unmarred skin—but now, I knew that wasn’t quite right. His skin was puckered with what must have been the scars of bullet holes. Two on his left shoulder. Three on his right. There was a long, faded white line that slashed diagonally across his washboard abs—the remnants of a mishap with a box cutter, maybe. With as huge as it was, it could just as well have been made with a sword.
I swallowed hard. That was a grim thought. I didn’t like the idea of Harper going up against the kind of men who still carried katanas any more than I liked the idea of him tussling with someone wielding a switchblade. But then my eyes fell on my coffee table—or, more accurately, on the pistol that Harper had left there before taking off his shirt and falling asleep.
Of course he had one. Harper King was exactly the kind of man who brought a gun to a knife fight.
I did my best to edge around the couch in silence, trying not to wake him. But the second I came within five feet of him, Harper’s eyes opened. He sat up immediately, his fingers twitching toward his gun without hesitation.
“Oh.” Harper blinked twice, then let his hand fall onto his knee instead. “Sorry, Nick. I thought—”
“You’re a light sleeper.” I cut him off before he could explain—I didn’t want to know what kind of person Harper had actually been expecting to find sneaking around my living room at six in the morning.
“Ah. Yeah.” Harper chuckled, reaching behind his head to massage the back of his neck. “I’ve been in a few tight spaces over the years. Leaves me a little on edge while I sleep, I guess.”
“Lucky me.” I cocked my head toward the kitchen, trying not to think too much about what kind of situations would leave a man as capable as Harper sleeping anything but soundly at night. “I was about to make breakfast. You hungry?”
Harper looked up at me like a Neanderthal who’d just been introduced to the man who’d invented fire. “Starving. You’re a saint, Nick.”
I laughed. “Minus the red suit, the big white beard and the fleet of elves to do my bidding. Can’t stuff your stocking, but give me ten minutes in the kitchen and I’ll whip up something you can stuff your mouth with instead.”
I watched Harper’s Adam’s apple bob up and down in his throat as he looked me up and down. A quick glance at his lap told me that I’d either made some phrasing choices that he was very interested in, or that I wasn’t he only one who’d woken up with morning wood. Maybe both.
Christ.
“That’s, ah… You don’t have to, you know.” Harper shifted on the couch, positioning his knees away from me. “Make breakfast, I mean. I can run out and grab something from the Sunoco, if you don’t want to go through the trouble.”
I rolled my eyes, secretly enjoying that I’d made him a little uncomfortable in such a particular way. “Don’t be silly. It’s no trouble—and if you keep eating all your meals from that gas station, I won’t be the only one who has to watch their blood pressure.”
“Can’t argue with that.”
As promised, ten minutes later I had a tower of flapjacks, a plate piled with bacon and another heaped with fluffy, cheesy scrambled eggs ready for us at the kitchen table. Harper whistled lowly as he entered, letting his gaze roll over the spread.
“You weren’t kiddi
ng. This looks incredible.” He poured himself into a chair at the table as I splashed coffee into his mug—not missing the way he still hadn’t bothered to throw on a shirt.
“Even found some caffeine for you in the cabinet. You need cream or sugar?”
Harper shook his head. “I drink it black. Medicinal, you know.” He grinned up at me, raising his mug in thanks. “Like I said—you’re incredible.”
“Keep laying it on thick like that, and I’ll make lunch too.” I glanced across the room toward Harper’s open equipment kit on the floor. “You make any progress with things after I went to bed last night?”
“In a way. Got Josh’s phone stuff figured out. Disconnected it from the Wi-Fi and cell network, just to be safe. I’ve got access to his messages and emails now, but there’s some important stuff missing. He must have backed it up somewhere else. Paranoid little shit.”
“Paranoid for a reason,” I reminded him as my eyes fell upon the gun at the coffee table again. “Good thing you’re as armed as you are dangerous, I guess.”
Harper followed my gaze and grunted apologetically. “Shouldn’t have left it out. Sorry. Just wanted it to be within reach. Just in case.”
“Now who’s paranoid?” I sat down next to him at the table, surprised at how comfortable I actually was with having the gun in the house. If it had been my own, I might have been a little more uneasy about it—but if the bullet scars on Harper’s chest told me anything, it was that he was a man who could be more than trusted to handle a piece. “Anything interesting in the files that you could access?”
Harper shrugged. “A lot of stuff confirming what we’d already guessed. Josh was chasing down intel on that batch of pills that fucked you over. Josh seemed pretty sure it wasn’t an accident. From the looks of things, all signs were pointing to the idea that someone might have tampered with them on purpose.”
“They what?” I paused just before I took a sip of my tea, grateful that the revelation hadn’t come a second later—or else I would have been spitting my peppermint brew all over Harper’s bare chest. “I don’t know about you, but I… I definitely wasn’t expecting that.”
“That someone might’ve fucked up your pills intentionally?” Harper stared at me for a moment, then reached for a strip of bacon. “It’s not a nice possibility, no. But it would explain why someone wanted Josh dead for nosing around into the case.”
“Why would anyone do something like that, though? What would the point be?”
Harper shrugged again, crunching down on the bacon and chewing a few times. “Experiment, maybe. Maybe just sowing chaos. People are fucked up, Nick. Fucked-up people do fucked-up things all the time for no fucking reason at all—pardon my French.”
“Merci.”
“Anyway—it’s not exactly cut-and-dry terrorism, but it’s close enough that I wouldn’t rule it out. You’re an Omega. Imagine you know how nutjob traditionalists can be.”
I nodded, munching on my own slice of bacon while I mulled over the possibility. These days, women and Omegas had just as many rights as any Alpha did. Our current president and VP were proof enough of that. But it hadn’t always been that way—and when it came to nutjobs, as Harper had said, sometimes the old ways were all too easy to cling to.
“Say it’s not terrorism, though. It takes a lot of high-level organization to fuck up an entire supply of birth control…”
Harper sighed. “That’s what I’m worried about. That level of coordination…well. Journalism is like any other kind of investigation. It’s not a bad idea to look where the money’s flowing. Who’s getting paid and why. When it’s being paid out. Who’s signing the checks.”
I choked down the rest of my bacon, feeling my mouth suddenly go dry. “This doesn’t feel like we’re just looking into Joshua’s murder anymore.”
“No?”
I shook my head. “Feels like we’re finishing his work.”
Harper cringed. “Ah…maybe so. Might be part of it, anyway. But this story is our best lead on why Josh was killed. Could be unrelated…”
“But your gut says otherwise,” I guessed.
He nodded, his lips thinning out into a sharp, grim line. “And we ought to follow up on it either way.”
“We?” My heart leapt in my chest a little. “You’re going to let me help?”
“Well, I wasn’t exactly—”
I held a hand up before Harper could backpedal on the matter. “Look. I work from home. I deal in data for a living. Let me go through the phone, flag anything that looks related. I can run the tech side of things while you do the, ah…” My eyes lingered on Harper’s firm, well-muscled chest for a moment. “The muscle work.”
“I… I don’t know about that, Nick. You’re too deep in this for my liking already. I don’t know that it’s a good idea for you to get more involved than you already are. Could be trouble.”
“I’m already in trouble,” I reminded him. “And I feel… God, Harper, I feel terrible about what happened to Josh. Maybe we’re wrong—maybe his death had nothing to do with any of this and it would have happened either way. But I owe it to Josh.” I stared down at my tea, feeling my stomach turn somersaults on itself. “He called me right before it happened. If I had answered…”
Harper reached out to me, curling his fingers around my arm. “Don’t dwell on that. Can’t live in the past. It’ll eat you up from the inside out if you do. All we can do is move forward.”
“So you’ll let me help you?”
Harper grimaced, but finally nodded in agreement. “On one condition, anyway.”
“Anything.”
He held my gaze, his green eyes hardening as they locked with my blues. “This gets any more dangerous, you drop it. Pack your bags, leave town. I’ll give you some cash so you don’t have to use your card. You got somewhere safe to go?”
I thought of Bucky’s offer for the rooms at his place in California and nodded. “My brother’s, sure. I can live with that. But until you say so…”
“You can help,” Harper agreed. “Only for as long as it’s safe.”
“Thank you.” I breathed a little sigh—this was all a lot, and the plot was thickening almost faster than my head could track it. But if I could even give Harper the smallest amount of assistance in this thing, it would do my conscience a world of good. And despite how scary it all was… I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t kind of exciting, too. Especially if Harper continued his end of the investigation without his shirt on. “So, what’ve you got planned for the rest of your day now?”
“Immerse myself in Josh’s world, I guess. Hopefully we’ll stumble on some more pieces of the puzzle. Anything you can give me is of value to our goal right now.”
A little smile played on my lips. “How about access to my shower?”
Harper raised an eyebrow, then lifted his arm slightly, turning his head to sniff himself. “That some kind of hint or something?”
My grin widened teasingly. “What do you think?”
Harper held up his hands in surrender as he rose from his chair. “Okay. Okay. Shower first—then, we hit the ground running on this thing.”
11
Harper
For the next two days, I spent so much time beating dirt beneath my boots at Josh’s old stomping grounds that I might as well have become a journalist myself. The history on his Google Maps account led me to where Josh had spent his last few weeks, and admittedly, most of it didn’t surprise me. Lunch at his favorite coffee shop. Research at the library. Drinks at Simmer after. Occasionally, he’d dip into the movie theater to see a few action flicks, or pop into an indie bookstore to pick up some new reading material. Otherwise, nothing out of the ordinary.
At least, not in the real world.
Online, Josh’s life was a different story. He had emails and texts from half a dozen different exes that I combed through, only feeling a little uncomfortable about nosing into Josh’s personal life. Nothing angry or threatening enough to consider any of them suspe
cts. There was a tinge of bitterness to some of their replies to him, but I felt reasonably certain about ruling out a crime of passion once I’d finished taking them all in.
For the most part, Josh’s exes just seemed disappointed. A few of them, maybe even a little hopeful that maybe they’d get back together someday—but as far as I could tell, the consensus was that any reunions were out of the question until Josh had sorted out his work-to-life balance. Their complaints were all in the same vein: Josh spent so much time focusing on his stories, he barely had time for anyone else.
As I sat behind the wheel of the Mustang outside of Nick’s house, thumbing through notes and thinking about the life my brother had led, I couldn’t help but feel a little guilty. I’d known Josh could be a little obsessive when it came to something he was passionate about. I’d lived with him through enough video game launches and midnight blockbuster releases to have figured out that much. But I hadn’t realized how much of his life had been living and breathing his career. If I’d called more, made a better effort to say in touch, I could have figured it out easily enough—but I hadn’t.
As it was, it was hard to know if Josh had even been happy with his life or not.
Glancing down at my notes, I felt my brow furrowing the same way it had been all week. At this rate, I was going to end up with Dad’s frown lines as well as his coloring. The bits and pieces of information I’d put together so far weren’t much more than that—bits and pieces. Sloppy at worst. Patchy at best. I’d called the phone number that had sent Josh the warning text a dozen times every day since I’d scrawled it down on my pad. Never got an answer. Now, it was ringing up as disconnected completely—meaning that lead was as dead as Josh himself.
The other addresses and numbers I’d stuck in my notes were only more dead ends. The people Josh had interviewed in the weeks leading up to his murder didn’t know anything worth mentioning. The only person he seemed to have warned about any potential danger was Nick.