by Lexi Blake
Rafe Kincaid’s deep voice continued. It was far steadier than Cam’s heart rate, and, for a moment, jealousy and rage curled in his belly. Rafe had never loved Laura the way he did. How could he if he could stand there and talk about the man who had almost killed her the same way a college professor talked about a Shakespearean sonnet?
“As with all previous victims, this one was found with lipstick on her. Forensics has already verified that it’s the same brand and shade as the others. Purple Passion. Also, according to forensics, the victim had been killed at least twelve hours before. Blood spatter indicates she was killed where her body was found.”
That was the pattern. The lipstick. The victim was a prostitute. She’d been tortured before she was killed. Everything fit the pattern. He simply didn’t want to believe it. “He’s been quiet for years. Why has he started working again?”
At least twenty-five heads turned.
Rafe put a hand over his eyes as though trying to see across the distance. “Cam?”
Even in the low light of the auditorium, Cam could see Brad puffing up. “Briggs, this is a closed session. We don’t need low-level PIs here. If you need information on something, please go and ask the secretary.”
Rafe turned briefly and exchanged words with Brad Cam couldn’t hear. Before Rafe could turn back, the lights came on. An almost relieved sigh swept through the room. The picture on screen seemed to recede a little, no longer the main focus of the world.
“Cameron Briggs, you son of a bitch!”
Cam turned and couldn’t help but smile. Joseph Stone, his former Bureau chief, took the stairs two at a time, his familiar face lit with a smile. He’d aged very little since the last time Cam had seen him. Joseph was a big, athletic guy. As long as Cam had known him, he’d been bald, but even that made him seem a bit powerful. Joseph was the type of man other men followed.
“Special Agent Stone.” Cam took his hand and shook it. Joe had always been a good boss. He was Harvard educated and highly connected, but he’d always known how to make a guy feel welcome.
Joe pumped his hand twice and slapped him gently on the back. “No need for formalities any more. Did Rafe call you? I have all the paperwork set up to bring you in as a contractor. We need everyone on this. It’s going to take everything we have to catch this one. I don’t have anyone on the team with your computer skills.”
Cam looked to his former partner, who had his head down, one foot tapping against the floor. Guilty as sin.
“No, he didn’t call me.” Betrayal burned through him. Apparently, despite their oaths to one another, his former partner didn’t think it was important enough to call and tell him that the man they’d hunted for years had resurfaced. “I was here on another matter, but I can see plainly that Special Agent Kincaid is busy. I won’t interrupt him. Call me sometime, Joe. We can have a beer.”
Joe’s brows came together in a V. “What are you saying? You do understand what we’re talking about here? This is the Marquis de Sade’s work. There’s no denying it.”
Oh, he understood. He understood perfectly fine. He also understood that he had played his part, and he was naïve for thinking Rafe would play his. Rafe’s head came up, and those dark eyes of his narrowed for a moment. Ruthlessly intelligent, it wouldn’t take long for Rafael Kincaid to figure out why he was here interrupting this briefing. It wasn’t like Cam would come for lunch.
“I understand. De Sade is back.” It was time to make a strategic retreat. His fist closed around the paper in his hand. He was gentle with it. He didn’t want to crush it. It was the first glimpse he’d gotten of Laura in years. It was strangely precious to him. “Rafe’s your man. He and Special Agent Conrad can handle this. You don’t need me.”
He turned and walked out of the door. If Rafe wanted to renege on their deal, he sure as hell wasn’t about to give the man the keys to the kingdom. He would go after Laura himself.
It was better this way. Rafe could search for the killer and further his career. Cam could get what he wanted. He wanted Laura. Without Rafe around, maybe she would fall for him again. Yeah. He had a better shot without pretty, rich, smooth-as-silk Rafe around. It had been a flat-out miracle Laura had even noticed him.
“I need you, Cam.” Laura had turned to him, her plump lips red and swollen from Rafe’s kisses. Cam had kissed her and tasted the Scotch on her lips. Rafe’s drink. He’d plunged his tongue inside, not giving a damn that Rafe was behind her, his hands playing with her breasts. Somehow, in that moment, it had felt right to be there with Rafe. It had been perfect.
“Cameron!”
He stopped, pulled roughly from his memory. His feet had known which way to go. He was standing in front of the doors that led to the lobby. Rafe put a hand on his shoulder and spun him around.
“I’ve been yelling for two minutes. Why didn’t you stop?”
Cam shrugged, unwilling to betray his emotional state. He let his face go blank. He’d perfected it long ago so his father wouldn’t gain any satisfaction from knowing how deeply his insults cut. He never thought he would have to go there with Rafe. “I didn’t have anything to say.”
Rafe scrubbed a hand through his perfectly cut pitch-black hair. “That’s bullshit. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have something to say.” He glanced down at his watch. “I know you’re pissed at me. I would be pissed at me, too, but I have my reasons.”
“Were you going to tell me?” Cam asked the question as if the answer didn’t have the ability to rip his insides out. He also asked it as though he would actually believe any answer that came out of Rafe’s mouth.
“No.”
Well, at least the asshole was honest. “Then we’re done here. I’ll see you in the next lifetime, brother.”
“Stop. Come on, Cam. You know we need to talk. Let me explain, and then if you don’t want to talk to me, we can be done. I need five minutes, but I have to finish that briefing. I can meet you at Oscar’s at four, okay?” Rafe was already backing up, his five-hundred-dollar shoes squeaking against the marbled floor.
Oscar’s Pub. They had spent a lot of nights unwinding at Oscar’s. For a while it had been their favorite hangout. They’d spent every night there after work. They joked that there was a booth with their names on it. He and Rafe had taken turns sitting beside Laura while they discussed the workday. “Sure. Four o’clock.”
Rafe smiled. “Four o’clock. I’ll be there.”
But Cam wouldn’t. He waved at Rafe and then walked out the door, hopped on his bike, and motored right past the bar where he was supposed to give his ex-partner five minutes of his time. He wasn’t going to waste another second.
When he pulled into his rathole of an apartment complex, he carefully unfolded the newspaper clipping he’d printed from the Internet.
Billionaire Artist’s Bride-to-Be.
It was an article featuring someone named Jennifer Waters and her spectacular wedding plans. The picture was of the bride-to-be and her bridesmaids. There were five other women in the picture, but he only saw one one. She stood toward the back as though she didn’t want to be in the photo, but a smiling red-haired woman held her hand, dragging her in. Her lips quirked up in a secretive smile. She looked different with her hair down and very little makeup on her face. She looked vibrant and happy and so sweet he could eat her alive.
Laura Rosen.
The only woman he’d ever loved.
“I’m coming for you, baby.” He hopped off his bike and jogged to his apartment, eager to get the hell out of Dodge.
* * * *
Rafael Kincaid pulled his Benz into the parking lot of the Hampton Manor Homes and felt a bit of his rage morph into guilt. He’d been furious when he realized Cam had stood him up. He’d rushed through the meeting, anxious to talk to Cam, to clear the air between them, and that asshole had gone home. Cam had stood him up and gone home to a dilapidated fourplex that he wouldn’t have let a dog live in.
Cam lived here?
Damn it, h
e should have known. Cam had sent him an e-mail with his new address, but he’d been far too busy to do what he should have done. He should have helped Cam move. He should have checked this place out. He slid out of his car, which might be worth more than the entire building in front of him. There were four units, and at least three of them had to be housing meth labs. What the hell was Cam doing here?
Spending every dime he has looking for your woman.
It was obvious that Cam had spent all of his money on the computer equipment he needed to perfect his facial recognition software. Cam had given up comfort and safety.
Rafe scrubbed a hand across his face and felt years older than thirty-four. He could swear he’d aged twenty years since the night Laura Rosen had been captured by the Marquis de Sade. The minute he’d realized she was gone, his soul had become something older, heavier, than it had been before. Guilt weighed on him. Now he felt its press as he walked up the steps that led to Cam’s “home.”
Damn it. Why hadn’t Cam told him he needed money? He would have happily written a check.
He rapped his knuckles across the peeling paint on the door. “Cam? Cam, let me in. I’m not going away, and I can see that your bike is parked outside. I know you’re in there.”
“And I should care about that, why?” Cam shouted it through the door.
“Because I’ll tell you what you want to know. I brought the files and everything.” He felt infinitely weary. He’d wanted to avoid talking to Cam about this because he didn’t need anything else tugging at his conscience.
“I don’t want to know anything. I’m good. You could get in some serious trouble for sharing that file with me. I hope you catch the bastard.”
He was about to protest, to start to coax Cam out of his shell, but he’d known Cam for years. When Cam felt slighted, he could hold on to it like a baby clutching a prized toy. He was also tenacious as a pit bull. Cam should be drooling over new information about the man they had been hunting for years.
Four years before, they had made a deal. It had been almost a year after Laura had walked out of her hospital room leaving behind nothing but a note that told them a simple good-bye. They had killed themselves, splitting their time between trying to catch the Marquis de Sade and trying to track their missing lover. Neither one of them had had a decent night’s sleep. It had been time to make a change. He had stayed on at the FBI to keep on top of the case, and Cam had devoted himself to finding Laura. Cam had started a private investigations business, but it was almost entirely funded by Rafe. Cam had also started writing a software program that scanned the Internet not only searching for any mention of her name, but more importantly, looking for her face.
Cameron Briggs was not a man who gave up. Unless he’d found a much bigger prize.
“You motherfucker, you found her.” He pounded on the door, his prior guilt morphing into red-hot jealousy. He wasn’t about to let Cam waltz away with information on Laura. Laura was his, damn it. His.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Rafe heard the unspoken “sucker” in Cam’s shouted words. He lifted his leg and gave the piece-of-shit door separating him from his ex-partner a well-placed kick. The door itself held, but it cracked up the middle. Cam stared at him through his now ruined door.
“You’re an asshole, and you’re replacing that door.” Cam reached out, and after two loud clicks, the door swung open.
He wasn’t about to feel bad about the fucking door. “Where is she?”
Cam’s mouth became a flat, stubborn line. A long huff of breath came out of his chest, and he pointed to a table in the tiny kitchen. “Colorado.”
There was a printout of a newspaper article on the table. It was a copy of an article from the Lifestyle section of a Denver newspaper. He couldn’t miss her even though she was surrounded by other women. Laura Rosen. He could still remember the day she’d walked into the Bureau. He’d known the moment he’d laid eyes on her that she was the one.
Unfortunately, Cam had felt the same way.
Unfortunately? Was it really so bad? At the time, it had felt that way. At the time, all he could think about was how enjoying a three-way with his partner and his soul mate would affect his career. There wasn’t a single sitting Bureau chief openly involved in a polyamorous relationship. At the time, he’d been willing to fight his best friend over her. He’d been willing to throw her under a bus to get ahead. Oh, he’d told himself he was helping her, but he was only thinking of himself.
Yep. The guilt was back.
“She’s calling herself Laura Niles. Why does Niles sound familiar?” Rafe asked, his finger tracing over the picture. He wanted to touch her, to assure himself that she was real and alive and whole.
“Her grandfather’s name was Niles. Niles Rosen. She loved that old man.” Cam stood at his side, his arms crossed over his chest.
Rafe looked at the man he’d once been closer to than his own brother. Cam looked tired. There was a set to his shoulders that he recognized as defensiveness. Cam stood there in the piece-of-crap kitchen, a big, unmoving block of wood.
He could now understand what had truly happened this afternoon. Cam had come to the office to tell him he’d found Laura. He’d run through the building with this printout in his hand, and when he’d found Rafe, he’d walked in on what Cam had to assume was a betrayal of the worst kind. No wonder Cam hadn’t met him at the pub.
He had to play this carefully if he didn’t want to get his ass kicked.
“Stefan Talbot.” Rafe whistled as he glanced over the article.
“Who the fuck is Stefan Talbot?”
He felt a grin come and go. That was Cam. Despite the fact that he was built like a linebacker, Cam was a nerd. He was far more into his computers and watching bad sci-fi movies than art. And Cam couldn’t care less about society and powerful people. “He’s an artist. My mother has one of his works. He’s very reclusive. Supposedly he lives in a weird town in Colorado. And, according to this, Laura is in his wedding party.”
“What the hell is she doing in some backwater small town?” Cam’s shoulders relaxed slightly as he stared at the photo.
“Hiding. From the Marquis de Sade. From the Bureau. From us.” Laura had a lot to run from. “But if he’s back, then he could have seen this, too.”
“Yeah, nice to fill me in on that.” Cam’s eyes had sunken back into his face as though retreating. “I must have missed the message you left. You know how it is when your social life is as active as mine is. Oh, wait. That’s you. So, you too busy kissing the brass’s ass to give an old friend a call?”
Cam was firmly pushing a whole bunch of his buttons, but he was determined to be patient. “Please hear me out.”
“I don’t know what the fuck you think you can say that would make me care.”
How did he put this? He’d been thinking about this every minute since last Tuesday when he’d gotten word of the new victim. “I’m going to be honest with you. We found the body a couple of days ago. We’ve kept it quiet. I was worried about you. I remember what happened the last time you were on this case. I remember the drinking and the fights. I remember you nearly died on that damn bike. When we found that girl, do you know what I saw when I looked down at her? I saw you. I saw you falling into bad habits and getting your ass killed.”
“And that would matter to you?”
What the hell was he supposed to say to that? The asshole wouldn’t give him an inch. “I give a shit if you die, Cam. You couldn’t handle it the first time. I wasn’t about to send you down that path again.”
“I couldn’t handle it?” The words came out clipped, each bitten off through clenched teeth.
Rafe had tried to give him an easy way out. Cam was too damn stupid to take it. “You know you couldn’t. You punched another special agent in the middle of a briefing. You wrecked your bike twice. You got arrested for public intoxication. I’m not bailing your ass out again.”
“I wasn’t asking you to.
”
“Oh, is that what this is about?” He gestured around the room that seemed to serve as Cam’s kitchen, office, and bedroom. The whole place was covered in computer equipment. Wires and cords ran along the floor like thick vines. There was no rhyme or reason or organization to the place. He wouldn’t be surprised if Cam opened a window to pee. “You don’t want to have to ask me for money?”
“No, I don’t. I’m sick of living off you.” Cam’s booted feet widened to a predatory stance.
Rafe was sick of Cam’s insecurities. He’d put up with them for years. He’d never been able to convince Cam that he didn’t give a shit that he’d grown up in a trailer park. It was Cam’s problem. Not his. “You weren’t living off me, you stupid, overly proud prick. It wasn’t charity. You were working to find her. We agreed to this deal.”
Cam’s lips curled up in a smirking approximation of a smile. “Yeah, we agreed that you would share information with me, but you don’t have to uphold your end of the bargain, do you? You don’t have to share with a guy you consider your goddamn employee. That’s why I didn’t want your money. I didn’t want to be your butt monkey anymore. Tell me something, Rafe, you been fucking any admins with Brad there? Brad working out as your wingman? I’ll be sure to tell Laura when I see her that you’re fine, because you finally found a partner you could truly love.”
Without another thought, Rafe pulled back his fist and plowed into Cam with everything he had. Cam’s head snapped back with a crack, but his body stayed in place. Too late, he remembered why Cam had gotten into that fight with another agent.
Cam liked it.
A feral smile crossed Cam’s face right before he reared back and let his fist fly.
A lance of shock speared through Rafe’s gut. His breath shot out of his body, and he staggered back, hitting the wall with a thud. Cam pressed his advantage. He landed another blow, this one an uppercut to Rafe’s jaw. The pain exploded in his skull, and he fought back.