Consumed

by J. R. Ward

  “I don’t know nothing.”

  Anne looked back and forth between the two of them. “Ollie, I’d like to give you some dates and ask you where you were on them.”

  “I don’t remember where I was.”

  “I haven’t given you a date.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Where were you last—”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Anne was not surprised when, after she listed each of the six dates, the response was the same. She even asked him what his addresses were and got his party line. She was going to inquire where he’d left his brain, but the problem wasn’t his gray matter.

  Although it had certainly taken a beating courtesy of his drug use.

  Anne smiled. “Well, I’m just going to assume I know where you stand with regard to working with Ripkin Development—”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “So you don’t deny you’re working with them. You just can’t recall when it started.” She got up. “That’s all I need to know—”

  Broward jumped in sharply. “My client has not responded in the affirmative to that question or any others pertaining to Ripkin Development. In fact, he has denied such an allegation.”

  “When did that happen?” Anne asked. “Wait, I don’t think he has. Let’s give him a chance, shall we?”

  She cupped her ear and leaned in. “Come on, Ollie, say the words. And then maybe when they kill you and throw your body off a trawler and into the ocean, they might not drag out the murder part.”

  That got Broward out of his chair—and good thing it was bolted to the floor or he would have knocked it through the wall behind him. “You are out of line.”

  “It’s a statement of opinion.”

  “By a city investigator in their official capacity.”

  “Now you’re remembering I’m an investigator, huh. I’ll make note of that. When I get my pad.” She shook her head at Ollie. “Don’t take the plea, Doug. Considering the people you’re dealing with, you’re safer here behind bars than you are out on the street.”

  chapter

  44

  As Anne stood in front of her stove at home, dinner was making itself. Which was why she’d picked up a box of fettuccini, a flat of chicken breasts, and some broccoli after she’d left the office for the day. She’d already had a jar of alfredo sauce in her rearranged cupboards—something that, if her mom hadn’t worked her magic, she might not have known.

  It seemed strange not to have her mother under the same roof even though it hadn’t been a long stay. But Nancy Janice had gone back to her own house after ADT came and put a contact on that new window.

  Almost seven.

  When her cell phone started to ring, she hoped it wasn’t Danny cancelling, but told herself that if it was, she’d have leftovers for two nights and that didn’t suck.

  “Hello?” She frowned when there was nothing but a whirring sound. “Hello?”

  There was a click and then silence over the connection. Frowning, she went into her call log. Unknown Caller appeared at the top of the Recents page.

  Heavy pounding on the front door brought her head around, and Soot jumped up from his spot by the back door, his ears flattening as he growled.

  “Anne?” More knocking. “Open up.”

  “Danny?” She jogged over and unlocked things. “What’s—oh, shit. What happened to my car?”

  When she went to go out, he caught her by the shoulders and shoved her back into the house. “You’re not going out there—”

  “My windshield’s broken. I want to know what the hell happened—”

  He pushed his way inside and shut the door. “I think it was shot at.” He put his phone to his ear. “Neither one of us is going out there—Jack? Hey, I got a problem. Can you get someone over here to Anne’s on the QT? Right now.”

  Back in the kitchen, the pasta water overflowed with a hiss and she went to turn the heat down. As soon as she got to the stove, her phone went off, but this time it was with a text.

  The message had been sent from WatchingAnne@gmail.com:

  Boiling over. Better watch.

  She glanced over her shoulder to the glass panels where her office was. Then she looked out the window over the sink. Night had fallen, and she didn’t have any of the security lights on, so she couldn’t see anything.

  Or, rather, what illumination was thrown from her neighbors’ houses was so spotty, there were plenty shadows for someone to hide in.

  “What’s on your phone.”

  As Danny spoke in a flat voice, she focused on him for the first time. He’d taken a shower and his hair was still wet, his NBFD navy blue hoodie adding heft to his shoulders.

  “This.” She turned the screen to him. “Can we trace it?”

  He leaned in and read the message. “Probably not. There are all kinds of apps and websites both for iOS and Androids which allow people to be anonymous for shit like this. All you have to do is sign up with any random Gmail account and you’re good to go. And if they’re smart enough to do it from a burner phone as an extra level of protection? Those burners are untraceable if you buy them with cash, and God knows they’re available at everywhere from Walmart to Target. The cops deal with these things all the time with harassers and it frustrates the fuck out of them.”

  That Unknown Caller had to be the same person, she thought. “Is Jack coming now?”

  “Yeah. Let’s close all the drapes in your house.”

  Moving quickly, they worked together, pulling halves together, dropping venetian blinds, closing shutters. When they were done, they returned to the kitchen and she tried to make like things were fine.

  “Dinner’s ruined.” She took the overdone fettuccini noodles off the stove. “I think these have lost all their structural integrity.”

  Danny didn’t buy the distraction. He just stood with his boots planted and his brows in a caveman half-mast that suggested his frontal lobe was arguing with his brainstem’s base urge to go after whoever it was.

  “Maybe you’re wrong about my car window.”

  “I’m not.” He shook his head. “I heard the impact.”

  “The shot, you mean?”

  “No, they used a suppressor. I heard the bullet hit the front windshield.” He jabbed his finger at the phone. “What is going on.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, you do. What are you working on now? Those fires down at the wharf, right?”

  Anne cursed. It looked as though Ollie wasn’t the only one who needed to heed a warning about who they were dealing with.

  * * *

  Oh, man, it was good to have friends who were members of SWAT, Anne thought thirty minutes later.

  Jack came with two friends who were trained killers just like him. And they didn’t announce their arrival. They simply showed up at the back door, a trio of black-draped wraiths who moved in silence and were covered with weapons.

  As Anne let them in, she had to take a step way back to accommodate their sizes, and Soot immediately started growling in earnest, something she’d never seen or heard him do. Then again, the SWAT guys had ski masks pulled down over their faces, only their badges IDing them as law enforcement.

  “Sorry,” Jack said as he took his off. “Don’t mean to scare your dog.”

  Anne went over and sat with Soot as the other guys likewise revealed themselves. “Did you see anyone?”

  “No.” Jack took something out of his pocket with gloved hands. “We found this in your car, though. It was lodged in the inside jamb of your trunk.”

  The lead slug was small, but that didn’t mean a thing considering how fast it could go when it was shot out of a frickin’ gun.

  “She’s getting harassed on her phone.” Danny nodded at her. “Show them.”

  Anne tossed the phone over. “The code’s four-nine-nine-nine. I got a call from a blocked number right before it happened. I didn’t check first when I answered because I thought it was Danny. All
I heard was whirring on the other end.”

  “Did you meet with Ollie today?” Jack asked.

  “Yes. And he had a lawyer with him. Sterling Broward.”

  “I thought he just had a public defender. That’s what I saw listed on his case.”

  “Broward identified himself as the attorney. I looked into him when I got back to my office, and he does a lot of work for Ripkin Development. He keeps a very low profile, and doesn’t appear to have a background in criminal defense.”

  Danny looked over. “I never liked Ripkin. Never. That fire at his house on the ocean was always bad news in my opinion. And he was creepy as fuck at the opening of the new firehouse two years ago.”

  “Let’s get this incident logged in,” Jack said. “And we’ll have—”

  Anne took her phone back. “I don’t want Ripkin to think I’m scared.”

  “You just had a bullet put through your fucking window,” Danny snapped. “Next time it could be your head.”

  Jack nodded. “I gotta back my boy up here. Brave is just this side of stupid sometimes.”

  Anne shrugged. “Fine, put in a report if you want. Take that lead slug to the lab. Come back during daylight hours and see if there are footprints. Try and find out who called me and sent me the text. But I will bet that it all goes nowhere. If this is Ripkin, he would hire a professional to scare me and they will leave nothing behind.”

  There was some arguing at that point. And then she enjoyed a lecture by Jack and his SWAT boys about staying safe—after which they left, disappearing into the darkness to whatever vehicle they had ghosted into the neighborhood in.

  “I’m spending the night,” Danny announced before the door was even closed behind them.

  Anne crossed her arms over her chest. She was about to say no when she saw Soot staring up at her, his eyes worried, like he sensed danger.

  “Okay.”

  “Good.”

  “I have to take him out, and then we can see if the chicken is edible—”

  Ding!

  As her phone went off, she felt a spike of adrenaline. But it could be anyone, really. Right?

  It was a text from that Gmail account: Left you present out in backyard.

  “Shit,” she whispered.

  Danny grabbed the phone and then marched to the back door. “Stay here.”

  “Are you out of your fucking mind.”

  Before she could stop him, he ripped open the—

  When he didn’t move, her throat closed up. “What is it?”

  Leaning over her desk, he took a pen out of the mug she stored them in and crouched down. When he turned back to her, there was a gun hanging upside down off the Bic, speared through the trigger circle.

  “Guess this is what they used,” he muttered grimly. “And it looks like we’re calling Jack back over here.”

  Her phone went off again with another text.

  “Read that out loud,” Danny demanded.

  Anne had to clear her throat. “ ‘Stop now and I go away. Your choice what happens next.’ ”

  chapter

  45

  Anne must have fallen asleep upstairs in her bed because she came awake in the midst of an explosive blur of movement. Her brain, used to dealing with accident scenes, caught up quick with what was going on: Danny, who had been naked in between the sheets with her, had jumped out from under the covers with such force that he hit the wall across the way.

  “Danny! Are you shot!”

  Even though the drapes were unruffled and the windows were intact and the security system wasn’t going off, somehow it was as if a bullet had hit him in the gut.

  In the nightlight’s glow, he was clutching his stomach like it had been struck.

  Scrambling over to him, she pushed his hands out of the way—

  Nothing but clean, unmarred skin. Yet he was staring down at himself in horror, his face contorted from pain.

  “Danny?” When there was no response, she tugged at his arm. “Come over here and sit down.”

  His eyes, wide and white rimmed, struggled to focus. “Anne?”

  “I think it was a bad dream. Come back to bed.”

  He followed her as a child would and stretched out on the messy sheets. Trailing her fingertips over the tattoos across his torso, she double-checked that her assessment was correct. But he wasn’t injured.

  “I think it was a nightmare,” she murmured as she slid in next to him and pulled the covers back into place.

  Danny put his hands up to his face, his biceps thickening, his heavy chest rising and falling a number of times like he was trying to reel in his brain.

  “Do you want to tell me what it was?” she asked softly.

  She wasn’t surprised when he shook his head. Night terrors were not uncommon in first responders, although she had never known him to have them before. Then again, when had she ever slept in the same bed with him?

  Not that there had been much “sleeping” going on tonight. After an anxious, anemic dinner of chicken, broccoli, and the entire half gallon of chocolate chocolate-chip ice cream she’d bought as a dessert, they’d put Soot in his crate and made no pretenses about what was going to happen the second they got upstairs.

  Three times: Once in the shower. Once on the rug by the bed. Once in the bed.

  As she put her arm around him, she hoped to ground him in reality. “It’s okay.”

  She said that even though she didn’t know if that was true. She just wanted him to come back from where he had been.

  “Yeah.” His voice was rough. “I’m all right. It wasn’t me.”

  With a surge, he turned to her and kissed her urgently, bringing her against him, his warm hands traveling over her skin, delving between her thighs. As their mouths ground against each other’s, his hips surged, his erection hot and hard against her leg. Rolling over, she pulled him on top of her as his lips kissed their way down her neck to her collarbone. Lower. To her nipples, which he sucked as he stroked her sex.

  “Anne . . . I need you.”

  Raking her nails down his back, she arched against him. “I need you, too.”

  He pushed his way between her legs and all but impaled her, his sex driving into her own and pumping like he was possessed. The headboard banged so hard against the wall, she was glad she didn’t live in an apartment, and as he shoved the pillows out of the way, one of them knocked some stuff off her bedside table.

  Not that she cared.

  She had things she didn’t want to think about, too. Things like that bullet, and Ripkin, and fires she was fighting even though their flames were out. But as Danny pounded into her and she linked her legs around his hips, nothing else registered. It was just the pleasure and the heat, the rising tide of pleasure that wiped out everything but him.

  She was dimly aware of him shifting, and then his hand was between them, his talented fingers going right for the top of her core. He knew exactly what she wanted and how to touch her—and the orgasm that shot through her was so violent, it was as if she hadn’t had sex in years.

  Danny took things from there, his rhythm going back to haywire until he locked in against her and kicked deep inside of her.

  And then all was still except for them breathing.

  As he dropped his head into her hair, he mumbled something.

  “What?”

  “Must be heavy. Me. I.”

  Except when he went to roll off her, she shook her head. “I like the way you feel.”

  Over his big shoulder, she measured the light bleeding around the edges of the drapes. Dawn had arrived, the new day and all that BS. But she wanted to stay in the cocoon of her bedroom forever, just the two of them.

  Sweeping her hand down his back, she felt the muscles that fanned out from his spine, the smooth skin, the heat from his flesh. It felt good to not hurry, and with the security system on, she knew if anyone tried to get in, they’d hear about it. Also, Soot was downstairs in his crate, and going by the way he’d greeted the SW
AT guys before he was properly introduced, the dog was an equally good alarm.

  If Danny kept staying over night, she was going to have to bring the dog back up. Maybe she could put him in the bathroom.

  Wrapping her arms around the vital man who was still inside of her, she put her face into Danny’s neck, his hair brushing her forehead, the shadow of his beard on her cheek. For some reason, she became acutely aware that her blunted arm was against his rib cage, and she thought about how he didn’t treat it as any different from any other part of her: He welcomed the contact, cherished it, craved it.

  The way he treated her partial arm was better than any list of words he could have spoken to tell her he still found her beautiful, desirable . . . whole, even though she was missing a part. And though it scared her to admit it, this time here, with him, had healed her, even though she had no more open wounds.

  Acceptance was a balm to that raw place she had refused to acknowledge.

  Closing her eyes against sudden tears, she held onto him. “Danny . . .”

  “Yes?”

  I love you. “Thank you,” she breathed.

  He pulled back a little. “For staying the night? Are you kidding me, I wouldn’t leave you here by yourself to deal with this. And whenever I’m off shift, you’ll have me back.”

  “I would like that.”

  “Me, too.”

  His staying over wasn’t even about her car window getting shot out. It was about so much more, a connection that had started the day she had walked into the 499 as a probie and looked up, way up, into the blue eyes of an Irish wild man. Sometime along the way, over the passage of days and weeks and months, he had become part of her life, part of her history.

  She told herself that it was only through retrospection that things felt inevitable. She wasn’t sure she believed that in her heart.

  As the sun rose higher, it seemed as though they had been destined all along for each other.

  And because of that, she decided to stop fighting it, fighting him . . . fighting the outcome that seemed to, no matter the particulars or the place, always bring them together.