by Mary Stone
So, what was he to her?
Significant Other? Man? Man Candy? Male Accessory? What?
Whenever she thought about it too hard, it made her head hurt. Besides, maybe they were nothing now. It’d been three days since she’d last seen him, and she hadn’t gotten so much as a text. Of course, he was notoriously awful when it came to texting. Or communicating with anything not a canine.
Still, she smiled, thinking of him. He was so damn…yummy. Yummy and hard and hot and sweet, even though it was a challenge to get him to say more than two words on a good day. He was definitely that strong, silent type.
AKA, the opposite of Kylie.
She, like her mother, could carry on a conversation with a wall. That’s what made her and Linc so good together. She was her, and he was the wall. Seriously. The man didn’t have an ounce of fat on him.
Just then, Vader licked her hand, reminding her to stop grinning goofily and get back to work on the nightmare of notes she had before her. The hunting-and-pecking was definitely taking its toll. Her eyes crossed.
She’d been working on reports all morning and only completed three of the fifteen she had to do. Her doctor had told her that she should have a full recovery, but that she should take it easy and keep her arm in the sling, but she wasn’t exactly good at listening to him. She would never win any awards for patience.
As she was sitting there, floating away on another daydream that involved Linc—their most recent foray into his barn had been particularly hot, even though she still had the scratches on her butt from the hay to show for it—the door opened and her boss walked in, holding a big bouquet of irises.
“For me?” she asked, patting her chest and batting her eyelashes.
Greg grunted a, “Yes,” and laid them on her desk.
Really? She’d only been kidding. Her boss wasn’t exactly the bright ray of sunshine and liked her only about fifty percent of the time. But he did have a soft side. She smiled and leaned over to sniff the flowers.
“Aww…they’re beautiful, thank you! What’s the occasion?”
He shrugged as she winked at him and went to get a vase in the kitchenette. “Thought your desk needed some brightening up.”
That was bunk. Her desk was plenty bright, what with the photos of her mom and Vader, a funky, hot pink modern-art balloon-dog sculpture, a little African violet plant, and her big smiley-face mug. It was the rest of the place that looked morbid. He was just feeling guilty that she’d ended up shot, even though more than two weeks had gone by. He was blameless, though. She’d told him that, a million times.
Told him that she had a knack for getting in trouble and it had nothing to do with him, since he hadn’t even wanted her on the case to begin with. But Kylie could tell Greg still felt bad about it. He didn’t say as much, but she had a suspicion he thought of her as the daughter he never had. Though, maybe he did have daughters? Greg was a little tight-lipped about his personal life. She’d been trying for weeks to set him up with her mom, but it was like lassoing a mountain and bringing it downtown.
“You finish those reports?” he grumbled when she started to arrange the flowers in the vase.
“My five fingers are working as fast as they can,” she said brightly, wiggling them for him. “Everything seems to be taking twice as long. Can’t imagine why.”
He gave her his droopy bloodhound frown. “Well. Just stick with it. You finish the report on the Spotlight Killer case?”
She nodded. “On your desk.”
He went around and opened the file, reading it over. “What the hell is this? ‘Lincoln Coulter heroically burst into the shed, growling fiercely, with no regard to his own personal safety?’”
She nodded. “What’s wrong with that?”
“It sounds like you’re trying to write a romance novel. Just the facts, Kylie. I know that man of yours is dreamy, as you kids call it, but keep your personal feelings out of it.”
Dreamy? She wasn’t a member of the Brady Bunch.
She shrugged and slunk down in her chair. “Too much? I thought I was keeping my feelings out of it. I refrained from calling the killer a total psycho bitch, didn’t I?”
“Great. But your objectivity still needs a little work. Coulter arrived on the scene. That’s it.” He motioned to the file folders behind her. “When you’re not busy, take a look at some of the ones I’ve written. God knows, after decades in the business, I have enough of them. Learn, short stuff.”
Kylie sighed. Well, there went her idea of spicing the job up a little by adding flair to the reports. “Fine.”
He sat down in his chair and leaned back, yawning. “Any messages?”
She shook her head.
He sighed. “Any messages you’re hiding from me because you want to meddle in the case first?”
She gave him an innocent look. “Who do you think I am?”
He smirked at her. “A pain in the ass?”
Okay, so he had her number. Kylie’d been hired at the end of the spring as his secretary, but she wasn’t really good at sticking within that role. She’d already gotten herself embroiled in two cases which had started out as messages for him. It was all her fault. She was just too curious. Too excited. Too itchy for adventure to sit behind a desk, typing a bunch of crap and doing what voicemail could easily do, when there were actual wrongs out there that needed to be righted.
“Really. No messages. I haven’t even gotten a phone call since that sweet little Emma Jennings called the other evening, needing our help.”
She still couldn’t believe he wouldn’t let her take that case. Her shoulder was practically one-hundred-percent better now. She shrugged, hiding the wince. Okay, maybe seventy percent better.
“All right,” he said with a suspicious lilt to his voice, sitting down in his chair and fishing out an orange to peel.
She finished arranging the flowers and sat back down at the typewriter, wondering if Greg would ever step into the present and get a computer for this place. He’d told her the day before that he’d just gotten a fax machine last year. In return, she’d told him she was surprised he could find a fax machine since no one used them anymore. It was funny watching him try to use it. Like a Neanderthal trying to work an iPhone.
Ten minutes later, Kylie looked up from the six words she’d had the heart to type and saw him staring at her contemplatively. “What?”
He pointed to the report. “And I quote, ‘The killer stalked the young private investigator mercilessly, leaving her no choice but to put an end to the horror.’ Really?”
She rolled her eyes. “Okay, okay, I know, just the facts. It may sound a little like a Masterpiece mystery, but you asked for details. And it makes the work fun. It’s so dull, otherwise.”
“Yeah, yeah. But there are so many things wrong with this, beyond that excessive prose. One: You’re not a PI. I just made you my assistant. I’m training you. But nearly getting offed by a serial killer doesn’t change the fact you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. And two…” He threw a hand against the report. “This is serious shit, short stuff. She stalked you to this office and she followed you to your apartment.” He was dead serious now. “Shit, Kylie. Why didn’t you tell me any of that before she tased your ass and shot you in the shoulder?”
Kylie shrugged. “She actually tased my neck.”
Greg scowled at her.
She worried her bottom lip. She’d actually forgotten that her boss hadn’t been privy to most of what was happening with that case, but she’d kept him in the dark because she’d known he’d strip the case from her quicker than she could blink if she’d told him. “It’s okay. I survived, didn’t I?”
“Barely,” he muttered, dropping the report and closing the folder. “Look, Kylie. Consider this your first warning. I hired you to be my office girl, and I’ve told you time and time again that that’s your first priority. If you feel the need to spice up the reports, spice them up. But don’t pull shit like that without telling me.”
Greg threw up his hands. He was the easiest boss around, really. Maybe too easy. Hated a lot of rules. Expected her to govern herself. She probably wasn’t the best employee for that kind of arrangement. She had a knack for getting into sticky situations when left to her own devices.
“Call it what you will, but the fact is, you’ve been getting your cute little ass in too many jams since you started working here, and I don’t want to see you get into one you can’t pull yourself out of.”
She pouted. Probation. That made her sad, especially since she’d been busting her butt to do well at this career. “You know I do all the filing and answering phones and menial stuff fine. And I can’t help it if—”
“You can. You choose not to. Your handling of the menial shit around the office is acceptable. It could be better.”
“It could be, if it didn’t bore me to freaking tears,” she muttered under her breath. Like she really cared that the R-S-T filing cabinet was overflowing while the U-V-W-X-Y-Z cabinet had barely anything in it. She was pretty sure that “filing” was the definition of insanity.
“Even so. It’s your job. Your job is not getting shot at by serial killers. I’ve told you this before, but you don’t seem to listen to me. You need to concentrate on your job.”
His voice was harsh. Harsher than she’d ever heard it. It sounded like he was at the end of his rope. She sat back, stricken. She didn’t know what to say.
It was a rare moment for her, not to know what to say, and clearly, Greg felt bad about it. He started to backpedal. “It’s not glamorous, but it’s essential to the day-to-day operations of this business. I’m out a lot, Kylie. I need this help to keep my little outfit chugging along, shipshape.”
Kylie had the urge to give him shit, but then she glanced at the pretty flowers and swallowed that back. He suddenly looked a lot older than his sixty-some years, his salt-and-pepper hair sticking up and baring the receding hairline he usually kept it combed over. She hated to think she was contributing to the graying—or losing—of his hair.
So, she nodded. “Okay. If you say so. Even if the mundane stuff drives me insane, I will stick to it. No life-or-death stuff. I promise.”
She crossed her heart for good measure.
“Good.” He reached for his old blazer and straightened his tie. “I’ve got a meeting with Impact again. More workers’ comp surveillance crap. See? I have my own shit to wade through. But that’s why they call it work. If it was fun, they’d call it…fun. You’ll be good?”
She gave him her brightest smile. “Always!”
He rolled his eyes. She swore she saw him lose some hair on the way out the door.
She kept plugging away at the report, feeling uneasy and depressed. She didn’t do well with mundane. And this was the first time Greg had really, seriously, slapped her hand. Probation. Meh.
She’d failed at so many career starts in her life, and she didn’t want to fail at this one, because this one, she actually liked. She’d changed her major half a dozen times before deciding to give up on college for a while and take this summer job. After the summer, she’d decided to keep with it.
This was the first thing she’d ever done in her adult life that felt like it could be her real career. It was more than like. She loved investigations. She wanted to keep this going, because she knew she’d be good at it.
And Greg was right. All jobs had bad parts. If she wanted to enjoy the many perks to being a private investigator, she just needed to learn how to stomach the bad moments.
When Greg left, she went to his old boom box and turned the radio off of Smooth Muzak 106, to a pop station, jamming out to some 5 Seconds of Summer as she tried to finish the report. After about a half hour, she’d broken a sweat, but still hadn’t finished the damn report.
She draped herself over the typewriter, playing dead, and wondered if Greg would allow her to hire an assistant. This was cruel and unusual.
Her phone started to ring, and she pounced on it, eager to do anything but this infernal report. It was her mom. Kylie answered, ready to have a good, long conversation with her, like she usually did. The two of them were pretty chatty together, even though they spoke nearly every other day.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Oh, honey. Did I catch you at a bad time?”
“No. I’m at work, but you know,” she leaned back and gave the typewriter the middle finger, “it can wait. What’s up?”
“I just miss my little girl. How’s the shoulder? I thought you’d want to come to dinner again?”
Kylie smiled. She liked cooking almost as much as she liked filing. Most of the time, her dinners amounted to stale cereal, but it was even worse now. Now, she had less of a reason to want to cook, being mostly one-handed. All these things she’d thought were simple, like brushing her teeth or driving down the street…were pretty hard. She’d pretty much lived at her mom’s for two weeks after her injury, and she’d eaten nothing but fast food in the three days she’d been back at her apartment. “Aren’t you getting sick of me?”
“My only daughter, the light of my life? Never!” her mother cried in her usual dramatic fashion. “Anyway, I’m making lasagna, your favorite.”
Mmmm. Her mother’s lasagna. Her mouth started to water, since all she’d had all day was a bag of chips and a Diet Coke. And it wasn’t like she had anything else to look forward to. In fact, since that little roll in the hay—literally—three days ago with Mr. Strong and Silent, she’d been pathetically unsocial. All the friends who’d had her phone ringing off the hook, wanting to know the deets about the serial killer, had pretty much gone back into the woodwork. No, for the last few days, it’d been her and Vader against the world.
“Well, I…”
She trailed off when she peered out the window and glimpsed Linc walking down the sidewalk, toward the building in the dying light of day. Speak of the devil. God, he was a hot devil. He had Storm, his dog, with him and was just kind of loping down the street unassumingly, like he wasn’t God’s gift to women.
She ignored how her heart picked up speed. “Um. Actually. L—”
“You can bring him too. You know I’d love to see that hot hunk of yours.”
That hot hunk had a name, but she wasn’t sure her mom remembered it. All she’d ever called him was The Hunk. Her mom was right…he was a hunk. Tall, broad-shouldered, tanned, with chocolate brown eyes Kylie’d drowned in numerous times…his entire body was chiseled and strong and well…intimidating. Where she played at being a badass, Linc was as badass as they came, and he had numerous battle scars all over his body to prove it, every one of them infinitely lickable. He just oozed pure male sexuality, so much that her tummy tightened more with every step he took.
Kylie watched him, entranced, until it finally hit her, just what her mother had said. Had Kylie even finished saying Linc’s name? How did her mom do that? Sometimes, her mom’s psychic connection to her daughter was completely freaky. Or maybe her mom had a psychic connection to Linc.
The very first time she met him, she’d practically jumped into his arms and proposed on Kylie’s behalf. Then she’d proceeded to tell him all about Kylie’s lack of love life. Embarrassing? Hell yes.
Hmmm. Would she risk a replay of that embarrassment for epic lasagna? It was a close call.
“I’ve got to go,” Kylie murmured as he started to open the door, pulling the phone from her ear.
“Is that a yes or a no?” rushed out of her mom’s mouth before Kylie could end the call.
“It’s an, ‘I’ll call you back,’” Kylie said, hanging up and wiping her chin discretely to make sure it was dry. She fluffed her hair, sat up straight, and tried to act as if the movement didn’t cause her a little twinge of pain.
“Why, hello stranger,” she said when he appeared, cringing as she realized all her efforts to sound sexy just made her sound like a goober.
But him? With hi
s muscles bulging beneath the arms of his rolled-up denim shirt, which was open at the throat a little to reveal a flash of his hard pecs… He was sex. Pure, blatant sex.
God, how the hell did he do that to her? How the hell did he get better and better looking every day?
3
Linc had made a massive mistake.
He’d known it three days ago, the very moment he made his confession to Kylie in the throes of postcoital stupidity that he shouldn’t have said it. One minute, she was looking smoky and satisfied and happy as hell after a good hot round of sex on a bale of hay, and the next…she’d been terrified.
And why? Because he’d stupidly told her that he wanted to make her a more permanent fixture in his life.
Also why?
He wasn’t good with relationships. In fact, he was shit at them. Hadn’t had a real serious girlfriend since college, and things hadn’t changed. There was a reason he’d spent the past few years since Syria in the company of dogs. He had a hard time relating to humans. Female humans, especially, unless it was a quick one-night stand.
He only had one excuse for himself. After they’d had sex in his barn, Kylie had been so cute, confessing all these little things to him, and it’d only felt natural to confess something of his own.
But did he have to drop such a massive bomb and spook her like that?
Hell, he’d spooked himself. Badly.
So badly he hadn’t spoken to her in three days. Which just made him an asshole. He knew it, but since he was shit at communicating his feelings—outside of postcoital stupidity apparently—he’d found it easier to just work from dawn to dusk and not think about much else.
Except he hadn’t been able to get her off his mind.
He didn’t know why he’d expected her to jump into his arms and share a happily-ever-after kiss with him. He’d gotten it in his head that she was into mating, into forever, and that she was just waiting for him to declare it.