by Ruthie Knox
Her best self was rising from the ashes of the Louisville debacle. Yes, she’d walked out before completing her first assignment as a security guard. Yes, she’d sucked at casual sex. Yes, it was taking her longer than anticipated to flush all stray thoughts of the inscrutable Sean Owens out of her head.
But she wouldn’t give up. Being your best self was an ongoing project. You couldn’t let the little setbacks throw you. You had to drag yourself out of bed and throw yourself at your workout. You had to badger your brother into giving you a new assignment. You had to—
“Time for push-ups,” Caleb said. “With the medicine ball.”
“You’re evil.”
He smiled. “If you let me pick out the music, you can do normal ones. Hell, you can do the girl ones with your knees bent if we can listen to Pearl Jam.”
“Not a chance.”
Katie found the medicine ball and began a set of push-ups, rolling the ball from one hand to the other so each dip became an exercise in core stabilization. She hated these, just loathed them. But then Beyoncé came on, demanding that her cheating boyfriend put all his worldly possessions in a box to the left, and that cheered her up.
“I take it back,” Caleb said from the space at the bottom of the stairs, where he was doing one-armed pull-ups from the bar he’d mounted on the ceiling. “I hate this song more.”
Katie smiled and sang louder.
The doorbell rang upstairs. Caleb dropped to the floor. “Expecting anybody?”
“At seven thirty in the morning?”
“I’ll see who it is.”
Katie did another push-up and geared up for the chorus. It was probably just one of the neighbors letting them know the garbage cans had gotten knocked over or something. They had friendly neighbors, and everybody knew Caleb got up early because he was Mr. Army Guy.
Though he’d been out of the army more than a year now.
Since Caleb was no longer around to see her cheat, she skipped the last five push-ups and got on the treadmill, turning off the music in favor of the wall-mounted TV. She liked to watch the celebrity gossip while she cooled down.
After a few minutes, she heard the door at the top of the stairs open, and Caleb said, “Katie, can you come up here?”
“Why, what’s up?”
“Sean’s here. He wants you.”
She misstepped, kicked the plastic guard in front of the treadmill belt, and fell over. Luckily, she’d clipped the emergency shut-off thingy to her shorts, or she would have shot off the end of the treadmill like a cartoon character. Instead, she landed in an inelegant pile of limbs at the end of the belt, one arm still clinging to the safety rail.
Katie Clark: World’s Least Coordinated Woman.
“I’ll be right up,” she said, grateful Sean didn’t have X-ray vision. So far as she knew.
He stood by the couch, leather jacket draped over one arm, and he looked larger in her living room, rougher and ever-so-slightly scarier than she remembered him. She wished fervently she were wearing a shirt over her sweaty red sports bra.
“Have a seat,” Caleb said to Sean.
“Excuse me for a second,” Katie said to both of them.
She nipped into her bedroom and pulled a T-shirt out of the closet. No way was she going to sit down shirtless in front of Sean Owens. She was in good shape, but nobody was in that good a shape. Things would fold over other things. Pieces of her would bulge unattractively. But they would do it underneath a T-shirt, as nature had intended.
When she reemerged, Caleb disappeared into the kitchen, saying, “I’ll make some coffee.”
Left alone with Granite Man. He handed her a stack of papers bound with a black clip.
“What’s this?” she asked, flipping through the pages as she collapsed onto Caleb’s beat-up leather chair opposite Sean, who took a seat on the matching sofa.
“A report,” he said.
Katie’s head snapped up. “Whoa. Did you just talk to me? Voluntarily?”
Sean said, “Yes.”
She had no idea what he was doing here, she didn’t know why he’d started talking to her, and she didn’t know why it made her happy. But it did.
This didn’t bode well for her ability to forget he existed.
“Will wonders never cease?”
“Juh-just read it.”
She did. She stopped wondering soon enough, distracted by the document. “This is all about Judah?”
He didn’t answer.
She read. Caleb brought two cups of coffee and left them alone in the room. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she registered the sound of the shower coming on in the master bath off his bedroom.
“How did you get this stuff?” she asked after a few minutes.
“Hacked it.”
That got her attention. “Hacked it, as in the computer kind of hacking?”
“Is there another k-k-kind?”
“You’re a hacker.” Now she was just repeating herself like a moron, but it wasn’t as if she’d ever met a hacker before. She felt like she’d dropped into a movie.
Of course, she was also being charm-stalked by a celebrity. Her life had taken a turn toward the surreal a few weeks ago. Sean turning out to be the sort of computer genius who could do shady code-slinging things probably shouldn’t surprise her. Wasn’t that what geeks did in college? Flirt with the dark side?
She could see him in her mind’s eye, hunched over a keyboard in the dark. Total concentration. Ruthless determination.
“I wuh-was a hacker,” he clarified.
“Until when, a few hours ago?”
Sean shrugged. One corner of his mouth curved up into the closest thing to a pleasant expression she’d ever seen on his face. He looked almost human.
She turned her eyes to the papers he’d brought again, but her concentration wasn’t all it should be. His voice was wrong. He sounded nervous, but he didn’t look nervous. He looked … well, she wasn’t going to think about how he looked. Not nervous, anyway.
“Why do you sound so worried when you’re not?”
The line between Sean’s eyebrows deepened into a crevasse. “I sss—” He stopped, closed his eyes, and sighed. “I have p-p-problems t-talking.”
“No, you don’t,” she said automatically.
Sean didn’t open his eyes. “I have problems t-talking to ssssome p-p-people,” he clarified.
He stuttered. That was what he’d tried to say.
Sean stuttered, but only in front of some people. “Including me?” she asked, knowing even as she said it this was a worthless question, a filler while her brain took a few more precious seconds to decide what to think about what he’d just told her.
Because she’d heard him talk to quite a few people. A dozen or more. And she’d never heard him stutter before.
When he nodded, the furrow between his eyebrows was so deep it looked painful.
“I’m sssorry,” he said. “I sh-should have t-told you.”
She wanted to ask him why. Why didn’t you? Why do I make you stutter? Or Why didn’t you just say so to begin with and save me all the wondering? It wasn’t as if she would have cared.
Stutter away! she might have said. Just fucking talk to me.
But then he opened his eyes, and everything about him was wary, his shoulders tense and his jaw tight and storms flashing in his blue irises.
He didn’t like this. He didn’t like being here, he didn’t like talking to her, and he especially didn’t like talking to her about having trouble talking to her.
“It’s okay.” She wasn’t sure what else to say. She looked down at her lap, wanting to offer him something, some acknowledgment of how flattered she was to finally hear his voice directed at her. “Thanks for doing it now,” she said. “It’s, uh. It’s nice. Talking to you, I mean.”
Sean’s face went blank, and he looked out the window. Apparently, he didn’t return the sentiment.
She went back to reading the report, sipping her coffee and wondering wha
t kind of dork thanked somebody for talking to her.
He’d gathered a lot of information in a few days. A rundown of all the rumors about Judah, how long they’d been around, what the sources were. A list of people who seemed to hate him, and some speculation as to why.
Turning the page to a new section, she sucked in a quick breath. “Hoo! How many laws did you break to get your hands on this stuff?”
“Some t-terms of use. G-guidelines. No laws.”
“You’re not counting the Ten Commandments?”
Sean made a derisive noise. “No.”
“Don’t even try to tell me this is a moral gray area,” she said, delighted. Some of what he’d given her to read was public information, but a lot of it must have come from closed archives and personal accounts. Personal accounts he’d hacked.
“Charcoal, maybe,” Sean replied, and he sounded so different, she glanced away from the report. What she saw shocked the hell out of her.
He was smiling. Sitting on her couch, looking relaxed and mighty fine in an unbuttoned blue oxford shirt worn loose over a gray T-shirt and jeans, Sean Owens was smiling at her, and he stole her reason for a remarkably large handful of seconds.
When he smiled, laugh lines crinkled up that she hadn’t even noticed were there. His cheeks creased. His teeth gleamed, white and even. He had a dimple on one side, and kind eyes, and a beautiful, beautiful mouth.
He wasn’t a rock at all. He was a man.
A very hot man.
She’d known that already, but she kept forgetting, and he kept bludgeoning her over the head with it when she least expected.
Flustered, Katie returned to her reading. It took her a while to find the groove again, but the last section was riveting.
The last page was astonishing.
“Let me make sure I have this right,” she said finally, setting the report aside and meeting Sean’s steady gaze. “What you came here to tell me is, basically, two things: (a) Judah Pratt is gay, and (b) someone is kind of sort of threatening to kill him.”
He nodded.
She smiled.
“You’re going to think I’m a terrible person for saying this,” she told him. “But that is such a relief.”
Chapter Twelve
Sean raised his coffee cup to his lips, which made it difficult for Katie to decide if it was her imagination or if he was indeed struggling not to smile again.
A deeply dismaying thought occurred to her. “You didn’t know, did you? Tell me you didn’t know he was gay the whole time, because if you knew and let me make a complete ass of myself, I’ll have to disembowel you.”
Sean choked on his coffee, set the mug down, and wiped off his mouth with the back of his hand. There was no mistaking his expression anymore. He was definitely smiling. As she watched, the smile kept getting wider.
“You think this is funny?”
He shook his head and covered his mouth with his palm.
“It’s not funny,” she insisted.
Though it was, maybe, just a little bit. A new dress, new lingerie, and all that effort to sleep with a gay guy. You either had to laugh or cry. There was no real middle ground.
“He doesn’t look gay!” she said, and Sean’s shoulders began to shake. His cheeks went pink, and his eyes were so warm, so lively and compelling, she gave up and started egging him on. “Come to think of it, though, he smells gay. I think he had pomade in his hair.”
Sean tipped over sideways on the couch, overtaken by silent laughter, and the sight of him there—that deep dimple peeking out from beside his fingers, his infectious amusement—all of it filled Katie with a clean sort of pleasure that lit her up and made her smile back at him without reserve.
Who was this guy, and what had he done with Granite Man? He was … bright, somehow, brighter than she’d known he could be. She hadn’t thought Sean Owens capable of smiling, much less laughing until he collapsed on Caleb’s couch, but he was. How could she help but like him for it?
So she sat there and watched him, grinning through her bewilderment, until eventually she remembered that when she smiled big like this, her snaggletooth showed and she looked—according to an offhand comment Levi had once made—as if she’d been lobotomized. She dialed back the smile to a more attractive wattage, and the act reminded her of Judah for some reason, and of the (b) point in Sean’s report. Then she didn’t feel quite so much like smiling.
“I shouldn’t make fun of him,” she said. “Not if some psycho’s threatening to murder him.”
Sean pushed himself up and wiped his damp eyes with the hem of his T-shirt, giving her a glimpse of flat stomach that she would have given back if she could only figure out how. That thin line of golden hair disappearing into his jeans … she shouldn’t have seen that. It wasn’t something she could manage to un-see.
“I don’t know,” Sean said. “I get the impression he d-deserves it.”
“To be killed?” she asked, still marginally dazed. Sean and Judah hadn’t exactly hit it off, but surely Sean’s wishing Judah dead was a tad extreme.
“To be m-mocked,” he said. “For wearing hair p-product.”
Katie gave him half a smile, relieved. “Ah. Because real men don’t.”
“Exactly,” Sean said, his dimple making a brief, flirtatious reappearance. “It’s on the b-books. One of the Man Laws.”
“Last time I checked, though, it wasn’t a killing offense.”
Sean spread his hands. “I d-didn’t send those threats.”
“No? Who did?”
“That’s what we’re g-going to ffind out.”
The comment sobered her up quickly. He couldn’t mean—“You think we should start working the case again? You and I?” She didn’t know whether she liked the idea or not. Judah still hadn’t opened up, and she’d gotten used to the idea that the case was over, even if her relationship with him wasn’t.
But she certainly didn’t want him to end up dead. He was arrogant and insensitive, but also pretty funny, and he could be thoughtful when he worked at it.
“Don’t you think it’s out of our league?” she asked.
Sean shrugged. “I don’t know how sserious any of this is,” he said. “The m-messages aren’t explicit threats. They’re k-kind of odd, and odd messages go with the territory, I think. B-but I have to admit I’m damn c-curious about the whole situation. Enough to drive to Buffalo to t-talk to the guy again.”
Katie looked at the report on her lap. “Curious” didn’t seem an adequate word to describe whatever impulse had driven Sean to poke around in Judah’s online life and hack into his personal accounts to compile all this stuff. He’d never stopped working the case. She’d never properly started, and he’d never stopped. It suggested an intensity that fit with his usual manner. “Is that a problem for you? Insatiable curiosity?”
She hadn’t meant anything sexual by the remark, but when Sean smirked and said, “Mmm-hmm,” she wasn’t altogether sure he didn’t.
A coherent response eluded her.
Sean must have taken her silence as a sign that she was reluctant to get involved with Judah again, because he said, “I just want to t-talk to him. He hasn’t c-called in the police or any other agency, so far as I can tell. I don’t think he thinks his life is on the line, but he hired us for a reason. I want to know what it is, and why he’s been hounding the office all week trying to get you to c-come back.”
“Who told you he was hounding the office?”
“Your brother.”
“Does Caleb know about this?” She lifted the report.
“No. I wanted to talk to you ffirst.”
Sean wasn’t stuttering so much anymore. Because he’d relaxed, or because talking about the job distracted him? She didn’t know, but she filed the observation away to think about later.
“It is pretty strange.” Judah kept telling her he needed her, only her, but it wasn’t as if she brought any special skills to this security guard stuff. Despite what had happened in Louisvi
lle, she’d assumed there was some kind of ongoing sexual component to his interest. “Do you suppose he’s bi?”
The report didn’t contain any hard evidence that Judah was gay. It was difficult not to draw that conclusion, though, when you read all the accounts Sean had assembled from men who’d claimed to have had sex with the singer over the years—about a dozen gritty stories of hot, fast, unexpected encounters in locked dressing rooms and dark parking lots. Desperate sex, rather than fantasy sex, and the accounts rang true in the details, especially when you read them all together like this.
“Do you suppose he’s b-bi?” Sean tossed out the question casually, but his eyes held hers. His eyes asked her something different.
He wanted to know what had happened in that room between her and Judah, and it was no idle curiosity. Sean cared what had happened in that room.
Katie didn’t pause to consider her response. “Either I’m terminally unfuckable, or that man is gay.”
This time, when the smile came, it crept up on her slowly, and it made it surprisingly difficult for her to pull enough air into her lungs. “Sweetheart,” Sean said, “you are the farthest thing from terminally unfuckable I can possibly imagine.”
That was when she knew for sure Sean wasn’t flirting with her. Sean was coming on to her.
“Let’s go to Buffalo,” he said.
“Okay.” At that moment, she would have followed him anywhere. “But don’t tell Caleb.”
“Don’t tell Caleb what?” her brother said from behind her.
Her eyes shot to Sean’s, desperate for reassurance. Tell me he wasn’t just listening in on that horrifically embarrassing conversation.
Sean shook his head a fraction. Thank God.
“Don’t tell Caleb what?”
“Can you get Sean a refill on his coffee?”
Caleb fixed her with his most determined ex-military-guy look, but she just said, “Please?” and he gave up and went into the kitchen.
Katie looked at Sean. “Let me handle this,” she whispered. “I don’t want him to know what the messages say. Not yet. Besides, he won’t like how you found out about it. Caleb doesn’t believe in breaking rules.”