by Jami Alden
“Sorry. Urgent situation with a client,” he said and rose from the table.
Kate sighed and rose to give him a hug. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, savoring her scent as much as the soft press of her body against him.
Not tonight, but soon.
He consoled himself with the fact that he would be the first one there to comfort her when the shit went down. He could feel it now. Kate warm and lush and soft in his arms as Marshall kissed away her tears. She’d turn to him in her grief, defenses down, and he would finally get what he’d wanted from the first day he’d set eyes on Kate Medford.
He was on the phone to Gates by the time the cafe door closed behind him.
CHAPTER 12
Danny slogged through shin deep powder as he walked along the edge of the road to the diner down the street. The woman working the desk at the motel had assured him he could get a decent meal to take back to the room for himself and Caroline.
It would have been easier to get something at the convenience store next to the motel, but he needed something more sustaining than a bag of chips or a hot dog that had spent days sweating on the roller.
Besides, he needed more time to put himself back together before he went back in that room with Caroline.
Snow was trickling down the tops of his boots and chilling his feet. He sucked in a lungful of freezing air, taking in the cold, hoping it would bring down his core temperature a few hundred degrees.
After all this time, she still burned him alive. He came to the diner and ordered a cheeseburger for himself and a chicken sandwich for Caroline, remembering her thing about ground beef. She’d always contended that it, like hotdogs, was a clearing house for all the parts of the cow they couldn’t use in “real” meat, and refused to touch the stuff.
It bugged him that he remembered that about her. It bugged him that he remembered lots of little shit like that about her. Because it reinforced what he’d already realized was true. Caroline wasn’t like one of the nameless, faceless fucks he’d had over the years, and he was an idiot for thinking she ever could be.
He’d been so cockily sure that there was nothing left but a big empty space where his feelings for Caroline used to live. There was a big space all right, but he’d realized it was crammed full with a thick dark mass of stuff he didn’t even want to begin to look at.
He had a bad feeling there were more masses like that lurking under his surface. Big emotional tumors he needed to excise before they destroyed him from the inside out.
Speaking of bad feelings, there was a call he couldn’t put off making any longer. Even before they’d come up here and spoken with Emily’s parents, the bad feeling had gnawed at his gut. Danny had always had keen instincts, especially when something bad was about to go down. It had gotten to the point that the men he used to command joked that he was psychic.
Now that he knew for sure Emily hadn’t returned to live with her parents after she’d left Harmony House, his instincts were screaming that hers was the body found near his mother’s. There was only one way to know for sure.
Detective DeLuca answered on the second ring. A twenty-five year veteran with the San Mateo County Sheriff’s department, he’d worked on Anne Taggart’s case after she’d initially disappeared, and had unofficially helped the Taggarts over the years as they’d continued their search privately. When the bodies had been found a little over six weeks ago, DeLuca had tipped them off that one of them could be Anne.
Danny was returning the favor, morbid though it was. “Hank, I think I have a lead on that second Jane Doe you found. Emily Parrish. You should be able to check dental records.”
“How did you come up with the name?”
He wasn’t ready to give that information up. He didn’t give a shit about protecting James Medford or anyone else connected to Harmony House, but he had a gut feeling that if word got out the police were investigating James Medford’s connection to this case, Caroline would be in even more danger than she already was. “I’ll promise to give you all the details as soon as I can,” Danny replied. “But for now, the name is all I’ve got.”
Hank’s heavy sigh echoed over the phone line. “You know I can only coast on an anonymous tip for so long. Eventually I’ll have to bring you in for questioning.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Danny promised. “I have some loose ends to wrap up,” oh like a thousand, “and I promise I’ll hand the whole thing over in a neat little package.”
“I’ll hold you to that. So Emily Parrish?”
“Yeah, two r’s, grew up in Whiskey Creek. That should narrow your search.”
Danny hung up with DeLuca and immediately dialed Derek.
“We were expecting you to check in several hours ago,” Derek said without bothering with a greeting.
“I’ve been busy. Besides, I’m wearing my watch. You know where I am.” Ever since they’d started Gemini, Danny, Derek, and Ethan wore GPS tracking devices in their watches. At any given time, they could locate one another by the exact latitude and longitude anywhere on the map.
“We still need an update on Emily Parrish.”
“Like I said,” Danny said, smiling through clenched teeth as he took his bag of food from the waitress, “I had some things to take care of.”
Derek barked a laugh into the phone. “Yeah, I bet you did. According to your chip, you left the Parrishes’ nearly three hours ago, and have spent the last two at the Whiskey Creek Motor Inn. Now you’re at the local diner. Let me guess. Caroline’s back in the room resting up and you’re getting a burger to refuel for round two.”
Dammit. Sometimes Danny really resented the hell out of this accountability bullshit. “Well I’m calling you now, aren’t I? At least unlike some people, I don’t blow off my clients for more than twenty-four hours and fail to check in so I can chase a hot piece of ass to the beach.”
“That ‘hot piece of ass’ is my fiancee, dickhead, and point taken.”
Danny quickly filled in Derek on what they’d learned. “You’re sure it’s her?” he asked soberly when Danny told him his hunch about the body.
“Like I said, it’s a hunch, but—”
“In the past your hunches have kicked ass over most of our careful analysis.”
Danny didn’t argue, but he took no pride in it. For all the accuracy of his hunches, most of the time they didn’t come in time to prevent disaster. His feeling that it was Emily up on that hillside with his mother certainly wasn’t going to help her or her baby at this point. “De Luca’s on the ID,” he continued. “But I want you and Ethan to go back up to La Honda, ask around about Emily and James Medford this time. See if you can put them there near the time Anne disappeared.”
“We’ll get on it.”
“How’s Dad?” Danny asked, not sure he wanted to know the answer.
“The same,” Derek said after a pause.
Danny pinched the bridge of his nose. He knew what that meant. Joe was still closed up in his den, drinking vodka by the bottle, the TV tuned to a channel he wasn’t watching as he tried to drown out the outside world. “Did you tell him what we found out?” Danny had hoped that news of progress on Anne’s case would start to pull his dad out of a nosedive.
“He doesn’t want to hear about it,” Derek said. Though his inflection barely changed, Danny could hear the repressed grief in his brother’s voice. Since Anne’s body had been identified, their father had done a complete one eighty. For eighteen years he’d searched tirelessly, single-mindedly, as focused on his mission as he’d ever been as a soldier. But when the news came down that Anne was dead, it was as if all the life drained out of him.
All those years Danny had resented his father for his futile quest to find a woman who didn’t want to be found. He remembered all the fights, all the arguments, all the times he told his father he was an idiot to keep up his search. He never realized the search was the only thing that kept his father going.
And now everything Danny thought he kne
w about his mother’s disappearance was unraveling. He could only hope that by finding out the truth of what happened to Anne, he could give his father some peace and comfort.
As for himself, it was too late.
By the time he got back to the motel with their dinner, Danny’s hair was soaked with snow and any warmth he’d soaked in from the diner was long gone. Caroline had showered and dressed. Her damp hair rippled down her back and her face was scrubbed clean of makeup. She nodded briefly when he walked in, then turned back to the news program she’d turned on, giving no indication that less than an hour ago she’d been naked underneath him and digging her nails into his ass, silently begging him to fuck her harder.
She’d made the bed too, obliterating any physical sign of their tussle. The bedspread was smooth, pillows fluffed, not a single crease visible in the cases. His duffel bag was zipped and stashed in a corner, and all the towels were hung perfectly straight in the bathroom. Everything was in perfect order, the room untouched, pristine, as though the last few hours hadn’t happened.
It pissed him off.
Danny tossed the bags of food on the little table. “I got you a sandwich.”
She raised an eyebrow and caught a bag before it slid to the floor. She opened the bag and wrinkled her nose as she pulled out a chicken sandwich and fries. “Ooh, breaded and fried and mayonnaise. My cardiologist will love this.”
He sat down in the opposite chair and pulled out his burger. “Sorry it’s not five star, but it was either this or gas station food.”
“You could have at least ordered me a salad,” she huffed.
“Or I could have skipped going out in a blizzard and let you starve,” he said and ripped a bite out of his burger. He watched her pull apart her sandwich and wipe off most of the mayo with a napkin.
By the time he polished off his burger, she was still picking the breading off her chicken breast. He tossed the bag into the garbage and paced, restlessness vibrating through his limbs until he couldn’t sit still. Usually after a good, lusty, fuck he could count on the relaxed satisfaction carrying through for at least a few hours, sometimes even a few days.
But he couldn’t shake the sensation that his skin was too tight for his body, like if he didn’t blow off some of the excess energy he was liable to combust. Leave it to Caroline to change the game on him. He didn’t even have to look at her. All he had to do was smell her from across the room, think about how good she’d tasted, coming against his lips and tongue, how hot and tight she was around him after all that time, and he was right back where he’d been for the last few days. Hard as a spike and pissed the hell off.
Meanwhile, Caroline sat there picking at her sandwich as though she didn’t even realize he was there.
“Just eat it already! Jesus, when the hell did you get so fucking picky?” Christ, it bugged him. The way his practical no nonsense Caroline had turned into such a snob.
Scratch that. She’s not your Caroline, and never was.
The thought jarred him back to reality, reminding him what they were doing out there in the middle of bumfuck nowhere in the first place. “I think the other body is Emily’s,” he said without preamble.
Caroline was shocked enough by the abrupt change in subject that she froze in the act of chewing the bite of sandwich she’d finally deigned to take. Her face went chalk white. She set the rest of the sandwich on the table and pushed it away and nodded slowly. “As much as I hate to think about it, it makes sense.”
“They’re checking dental records and should know for sure within a couple days. In the meantime, I asked Derek if he and Ethan can go back to La Honda, see if anyone can put Emily and James there around the same time Anne’s car was seen up there.”
“Why do you keep calling her Anne?” The anger in her tone was enough to stop his pacing. Caroline sat back in the armchair, arms folded, her dark eyes narrowed in a glare.
“Because that’s her name.”
Caroline pushed up from her chair. “She’s your mother, Danny.”
A fact he had no intention of dealing with, not here, not in front of her. Still, hazy memories forced their way into his mind. A soft hand in his hair. The smell of her face cream as she pressed a good night kiss to his cheek. A soft, slightly off key voice singing “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Little expressions of love, memories he’d buried in the time since she disappeared and he’d convinced himself she couldn’t have cared much about them at all.
He couldn’t let them in until he’d closed the case. If he let them in, he’d drown under the weight of his guilt, his grief. “Right now she’s a case,” he said harshly, reminding himself as much as Caroline. “Just like you’re a case. Nothing more, nothing less.”
Caroline’s mouth pulled tight. “Right. Nothing touches you, does it? Not even the fact that your mother is dead and my husband might have killed her, and maybe killed another girl too.” Her voice caught on a sob and she wrapped her arms around her waist as though she was holding herself together. “How did you get so cold, Danny? How did it happen, and how did I not see it coming? Even after your mom first disappeared, you weren’t like this. You need to deal with this, Danny. You can’t pretend this is just another case, because it’s not. I know you still care about her—”
“You don’t know shit!” he yelled. Her words battered him, cracking the barriers he’d put up so long ago. He couldn’t deal with this, couldn’t deal with her, and the dark soupy mess she threatened to unleash inside of him. He turned on her with a snarl. “You think because we fucked around when we were a couple of stupid kids, you know me? You think because I got you off a few times, you get to go all Dr. Phil and pry into my head? You don’t know anything about me, what I care about. And if you think what happened in this room changes any of that, you’re not nearly as smart as I gave you credit for.”
He waited in dark anticipation for his words to find their mark. A sick, twisted side of him wanted to see her flinch, wanted to see the hurt and devastation on her face. She shook him to his core. All he wanted to do was mete out his own destruction.
Her slow smile and laugh sent a shock wave through him. For the first time it occurred to him that maybe she cared as little about him as he pretended to care about her. “Don’t worry, Danny, I’m not the same idiot who convinced herself she was in love with the first guy she slept with and spent six years fighting tooth and nail for a relationship that should never have moved past high school graduation.” He felt his mouth drop open as she stripped her sweater over her head. “I was too young then, and too guilty, I suppose, to realize sex was the only thing we had between us.”
That young, idealistic idiot inside him wanted to scream in protest. That dumb kid who’d loved Caroline with every cell of his body fought to reject what she was saying.
But Danny shoved that kid right back into the hole he’d been living in for the past twelve years.
Lust raged as she came closer, her breasts swelling over the cups of her lacy black bra.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
Her eyes widened in feigned surprise as her hands stilled on the button of her jeans. “You don’t want to talk, and we can either sit here in silence, stewing about all the shit going on around us, or we can pass the time doing the one thing we’re good at. Unless you’re too tired from before?” Her fingers flicked open the button of her jeans and her zipper was as loud as a buzz saw as she eased it down.
God damn Caroline, always changing the game. This was the woman he remembered, always standing up to him, giving as good as she got. A surge of affection bubbled through his veins, and he shoved it aside. He couldn’t afford to like her, couldn’t afford to admire her, couldn’t afford to rehash all the reasons he’d once thought she was the only woman on the planet for him.
Black lace peeked through the vee of her jeans as she sauntered over, all smoldering dark eyes and slinky curves. She stopped close enough for him to feel the soft warmth of her satin and lace clad breasts through his T-shirt
. His cock hardened another inch, straining behind his zipper like it hadn’t gone off like a geyser less than an hour ago. His stomach muscles jerked like he’d been shocked as Caroline hooked a finger in the hem of his shirt and drew it up a couple of inches. “Come on Danny, what do you say? One more round for old time’s sake?”
She was calling his bluff, daring him to prove they were nothing more than two animals fucking for mutual satisfaction, and had never been anything but.
He whipped his shirt over his head and kicked his boots off. Caroline better watch out. If she remembered anything about him, she knew Danny Taggart never turned down a dare.
Caroline watched him strip in quick, angry motions. She swallowed hard, cursing the wild impulse that made her goad him on. She’d grabbed the tiger by the tail but she didn’t dare back down. She shoved her jeans off her hips and down her legs and watched him do the same.
His cock was rock hard, bulging with veins as it stood at attention between his thighs. His heavy sac was pulled up tight against his body. “All for me,” she murmured, proud of the way her hand didn’t shake as she reached out to stroke him.
“For now anyway,” he said.
She shot him a glare, but his attention was riveted on the sight of her slender fingers circling his cock. She squeezed her fist up and down his length and reached out her other hand to cup his balls. “For as long as I want it.” She pumped him again, pausing to run her thumb over the smooth head. He let out a harsh groan and her pussy clenched in anticipation.
Caroline leaned in and licked at a bead of sweat that was charting a course down his abdomen. His skin was hot, salty, intoxicating against her tongue. His groan echoed in her ears as she covered his torso with wet, sucking kisses. She slid lower, sinking to her knees, rubbing his cock against her belly as she slid to the floor.
He stood stock still in front of her, practically shaking with need. She could feel the faint tremor of his fingers as he laced them through her hair. But to give him credit, he didn’t tighten his fist and shove her where he wanted her to go.