"If I can wrestle Mackey into my car, I will give the park thing a try. Maybe he will like other dogs more than he likes me."
"I'm assuming you got him from the pound exactly because he seems like he hates everyone and everything. He'll warm up to you. You are, after all, the one in charge of the can opener."
"I think--"
Whatever I was about to say was cut off by the insistent ring of Quin's phone. If I wasn't mistaken, there seemed to be regret in his eyes as he reached for it. But I guess both of us knew that a man as important as himself couldn't just ignore his phone when it was going off. Not just for something so simple as coffee with a woman he barely knew.
"Jules, get your ass home already. You've pulled thirty-hours of overtime this month already. You're young. You need a life to..." He paused as, I assumed, Jules spoke to him. There was a deep sigh and a resigned nod after that. "Yeah. Alright. I'll be in. Tell that sonofabitch that this is the last goddamn time. Yeah. Okay."
He hung up his phone, looking up at me. "You have to go," I said before he could tell me himself.
"Repeat client," he agreed with a nod. "He's got as much sense as a sloth crossing a highway," he added as he moved to stand. Left with little choice, I moved to stand as well. "Come on," he said, holding out a hand and, when I moved to walk past him, his hand pressed into my lower back. It was a common, chaste contact, but I somehow felt a spark at the touch, a little electrical current that seemed to run up my spine and move through my very bloodstream.
It stayed there, an anchoring presence, as we wove through the tight tables, then out the front doors, and out onto the sidewalk, the autumnal air full of moldering leaves and dampness - a combination I always found comforting. He tossed his coffee into the bin, and I tossed mine as well - too cold to drink anyway.
His hand pressed harder as we rounded the hood of my car, as he led me right to my door.
"Thank you for this," I told him, turning to face him, making his hand slide away, the absence something I seemed to miss instantaneously.
"Shouldn't thank me for a little common decency," he said, shaking his head.
That was all this was.
Common decency.
Of course.
Somehow, with the touch of his hand at my back, I had started to entertain ideas of something more.
I had always been more of a realist than anything else. I don't know what possessed me to think anything that fanciful.
I guess an argument could be made for my head just not being in the right place given what had been happening over the past several months.
"Hey," Quin said, his voice softer. Before I could raise my head to see his face, I felt the gentle brush of his fingers down my jaw, his finger and thumb snagging my chin, and tilting my head back up. "Don't take it all back on," he said, his tone at once both pleading and demanding. The weight, I was sure he meant. "Make a plan for tomorrow. Get up. Go to work. Come home. Take Mackey to the dog park. Drop him at home. Maybe come back out for a bit to grab dinner. Then only go home when it is time to sleep. Don't let the walls close in on you."
"Steps," I agreed, seeing the logic in that. It had helped in the immediate aftereffects of the attack. If it could work for that, it sure could work for this as well, this muddling through until I felt better.
"Exactly. Then pretty soon, you'll just start doing this stuff without having to think about it, without having to think about why you are doing it. By then, everything will be cleared up. And maybe you will be able to move on to a new house that doesn't hold the same ghosts."
"You make it sound easy."
"Easy? No," he said, his thumb stroking gently at the side of my jaw. "But you can do it."
"How could you know that?" I said, rolling my eyes, even as my belly started to do flip-flops at his touch. "You don't even know me."
"Not much, no. But I know enough to say you're going to get through it. You got through eight months of harassment with no help from anyone, no one to lean on. So you can get through this. And now you have me."
I was in the middle of convincing myself that he didn't mean that the way I was maybe hoping he did when I watched his eyes flicker down to my lips.
I could barely even process that before his head was lowering down, and his lips were pressing into mine.
Really, it was just a hint of a touch, just the promise of an actual kiss, but I felt it somewhere deep. I could feel myself swaying into him as it deepened, as his hand slid up my jaw, then back around to the base of my neck, holding me still as his lips demanded more, as his tongue moved out and invaded, stroking over mine, as my belly went liquid, and my heartbeat skittered into overdrive.
"I knew something was up with her!" a familiar voice called a few feet away. "Didn't I say she was acting weird, Kenny?" Oh, God. My boss, Kennedy. And her best friend, Benny. "Homegirl has a booooyfriend!"
I shocked back at that, my hips slamming against my car, eyes shooting open, wide, as Quin looked down at me, then over toward the sidewalk, assessing the situation.
"We tell you everything!" Benny said, moving closer. "Ev-ry-thing. I told you about my bitter custody battle over my baby." His dog. Technically, his ex-boyfriend's dog. But there had been a, ah, custody battle since the breakup.
I felt Quin take a step back as I half-turned toward Benny who was closing in on me.
"It's not what you think."
"Making out on the sidewalk in front of She's Bean Around with that sexy piece of man flesh? It had better be what I think. Oh, girl. And look at that car."
It was right that moment that I realized said car was purring.
Meaning, he was in it and had turned it over.
Even as my head turned to look, he was reversing, and pulling away.
He didn't even look in my direction.
SIX
Quin
What the fuck was wrong with me?
I had no business texting her at all, let alone asking her out to coffee.
I wasn't the kind of man who sat and wondered what his client was doing, how they were coping, if they needed anything.
It was always someone else's job to check-in, to make sure everything was going the way we had told them it had to go.
Yet that was all I could think of after five, when I knew she was likely heading back to that house that no longer felt much like home. I managed to bury the urge under work for a few hours before I couldn't fight it, and reached for my phone.
When she first walked into the coffeehouse, it looked like she was Atlas, shouldering the world. It was a feeling I understood, that I knew many other people I had come across understood, that I knew from experience would slowly lessen until only a small bit of it was there on your shoulder anymore. You had to survive. Eventually, your brain got the memo and shut that shit down, only to haunt you in rare moments, or in sleep.
It wasn't my place to want to lift that, not even for a little while.
Yet that was what I had tried to do.
Then I went and kissed her.
It was a good fucking one too, up until her coworkers interrupted.
Which, as I drove away, I tried to convince myself was for the best. A two-minute kiss out front of the coffee place was never going to be enough otherwise. I'd have offered to follow her home. And then I would have told her I would look through the house for her, ease her mind.
Then shit was going to go down.
Whether or not it was smart - or even ethical given the situation - I was interested. Maybe not in settling down and raising a family, but in getting to know more of her. Naked. Preferably naked.
But that wasn't a place I could go.
First, because it wasn't professional.
Second, I wasn't some shithead who took advantage of vulnerable women. That wasn't my deal.
Aven had been stalked for months - to a degree that even she didn't fully understand - and then had almost been raped in her own bedroom. Then she had needed to kill the man who had tormented her.
From the looks of things, she still hadn't dealt with that, at least not from an emotional release standpoint.
She couldn't be in her right mind right now.
It was wrong to lead her into a situation where she had to make a decision about something like sex when she couldn't even sleep in her own bed at night.
"That's a nice mood you're wearing," Jules greeted me, coffee in hand, somehow looking no less fresh and ready to take the day on now, after about eleven hours at work, than she had first thing this morning.
"Long day."
"That you have to end with Fenway," Jules agreed with a grimace.
The whole office barely tolerated the man. He had been the worst client to date, which was really saying something since we dealt with a lot of pains in the ass. He was more frustrating than anything, refusing to take anything serious, even if it was gravely so, not following direct orders, yanking our chains for kicks. But he was also a client with very deep pockets, and a habit of doing stupid crap without thinking of consequences, which frequently landed him at my door. Even after I told him a year before that my fee doubled - though that was only true for him. He hadn't even blinked.
And, well, I might have disliked the man, but when he was bringing that kind of money to the table, you didn't really have a choice but to take on his cases.
Sometimes running a business sucked.
Anytime Fenway Arlington came to my office was one of those times.
"Did you get any prelim on what he did this time?"
"It involved a yacht," she told me, handing me a file. "That wasn't his own. A wall he crashed it into. And a woman who had been on board who happens to be married to a Korol."
"The Russian Korols?" I specified, looking up from the file suddenly.
"The one and only," she agreed with a false smile. "He really likes to make you work for the money, doesn't he?"
"Go home, Jules," I told her, knowing she would be back in the office at seven-thirty in the morning regardless of when she went home and got to bed. "But keep your phone on," I added as she went behind the desk to grab her purse and phone. "In case I need bail money for beating the shit out of him," I specified. "Anyone around to walk you out?" I asked, knowing she wouldn't have let anyone into the office if she was alone, that she was too smart for that. She sent me a slight brow lowering. "What?"
"The Ghost has become corporeal once again."
Jules got along with all the guys well.
All except Gunner, who was referred to around the office as The Ghost. Granted, Gunner wasn't exactly friendly. In fact, he had about all the charm of a lion on his fifth day without a kill. He was surly, impatient, and tended to bark things instead of say them. But those were things she put up with from all of us since she first started, and did so with no qualms.
But she and Gunner had somehow gotten off on a bad foot right from her first day of work, and had continued to avoid each other whenever possible, and snarl at one another whenever that wasn't.
Luckily for the morale in the office, Gunner wasn't around as much as most of us were.
"Alright, I'll walk you out," I agreed, holding a hand out to the door, knowing she was parked out front in the only spot that wouldn't subject her to towing, leaving the rest of us to park in the back lot. This was agreed upon because, one, she was often the first in the office. And two, none of us wanted her walking down the alley alone late at night or early in the morning, especially in this part of town.
When I walked back in, there was Fenway Arlington, standing behind Jules's desk, flipping through a pile of paperwork she had stacked there.
Fenway was young for the amount of trouble he had found himself in already. But, I guess, when you grew up richer than God and raised by housekeepers and valets, you had a lot more freedom to stir up shit early on in life, and then get in a habit of it even when you were pushing twenty-five.
At about six feet with somewhat long on top sandy brown hair and unassuming light brown eyes, and the classical bone structure that came from three generations of men marrying Russian models, wearing an immaculate black suit, you would never know from looking at him that he was a walking, talking tabloid story.
"Files are confidential, Fenway," I snapped, not bothering to temper my mood. "Or would you like other people walking in here, and reading this?" I asked, slapping his new file on the counter. We didn't keep physical files after a case was closed. They were all transferred onto zip drives, and kept somewhere that only the people in the office knew the location of. And could only be accessed with the fingerprints and voice scans of three of us saying a certain combination of words.
When it came to confidentiality, we were about as fanatical as the CIA who didn't want their dirty deeds getting out there for public consumption.
His smile was slow, arrogant, boyishly charming if you were a woman noticing it. I guess that was why a woman from such a prominent - and notoriously violent - family could be stupid enough to run away with him. "Quin, old buddy, long time no see."
"Not nearly long enough," I shot back, feeling no need to stroke his ego since it didn't need it, and I was the best around, so no matter how much attitude I gave him, he would take it.
"Oh, you know you've missed me," he announced, sitting down on Jules's chair, kicking his expensive light brown leather loafers up on her desk, his hands going behind his neck. "I liven up the joint."
I was up for a night - and if I knew Fenway, a long overnight - of pulling teeth, trying to keep him focused, demanding he follow directions I knew he would thumb his nose at. All the while he treated it like a game. Even though the Korol family was most certainly not a game, and this was the worst trouble by far that I had needed to fix for him.
And to do it, I was going to have to pull Smith, Lincoln, Miller, and Kai off of Aven's case, as pressing as that one still was until we found the fuckhead's identity and home base. But Miller would need to negotiate with whoever owned the yacht; Lincoln and Kai would need to deliver whatever message was going to be made to the Korols. Smith, well, he would be keeping an eye on Kai and Lincoln from afar.
I would also need to be clocking hours on Fenway's case. That left... who? Finn, who didn't do casework. Ranger, who was too far away to do any good. Really, it just left Gunner, who would give me a world a shit about it. This wasn't his kind of case, even if he had the skills to handle it.
That left the case way too under-staffed.
My stomach twisted as I led Fenway down the hall, knocking on Gunner's door as I did so.
Fenway made his way into my office, rifling through his own file as Gunner moved out into the hall to talk to me.
All of my men were badasses. Each and every one had skills that gave them extreme value. And every one of them was lethal.
But Gunner, Gunner was the only one who truly looked the part.
He was six-three, solid, covered in ink that he was currently showing off with a white tee with a sleeveless gray and black plaid shirt left open in the front. His dark blond hair was slicked back, and his beard, while carefully groomed, made chicks from here to the fucking moon go crazy.
He also looked perpetually mildly pissed off.
Even as he approached me, his arms were crossed, his brows lowered. "I'm not dealing with that fuck."
If only we could all draw those lines.
"Figured as much. That's why everyone else is on Fenway. But since they are, I need you on Aven's case."
"Aven?" he repeated, shoulders easing slightly. "The stalker case that became a full clean-up?"
"Yeah. That one. We can't figure out who he is. We need to--"
"Figure out where he lives so we can clean that."
"Exactly. This needs to happen, Gunner. I know it's not your usual kind of case. But I need someone on this before it blows up in our faces."
"Got it. I'll head over there, see if I can find some traces in the woods that Finn would have overlooked."
That was, after all, part of his speci
alty.
"Appreciate it," I said, meaning it more than he could have known.
"Hey," Fenway said, coming out into the hall holding some desk pendulum thing Jules had gotten me that I thought was silly, until one day, I caved and used it, and found it oddly relaxing. "I'll give you a thousand for this."
I went to reach for it, but he snatched it away. "It's a hundred bucks in any office supply store."
"I don't want one of those. I want this one."
I took a steadying breath, so not in the mood for his childish shit. Gunner shot me a smirk, one that said he was infinitely glad that this was on me and not him. Even if that meant trudging through the woods all night to avoid it.
"Better you than me," he declared, clamping a hand on my shoulder before heading out toward the front door.
"You're not taking those fucking either," I growled at Fenway who was holding up my cufflinks to the light in my office, having completely forgotten the pendulum.
Maybe I should have avoided answering my fucking phone.
This was the kind of night that not enough coffee existed for.
Then, as I moved in to get to work, the oddest thought crossed my mind.
I'd much rather have stayed on that sidewalk all night with Aven.
But I couldn't have that.
I had the annoying presence of Fenway Arlington to keep me company instead.
That was, until Aven came to the doors, beating on them with her fists, hysterically calling my name.
And bleeding.
SEVEN
Aven
There was someone outside my house.
I mean, to be fair, they weren't exactly hiding the fact that they were here. Which was maybe even weirder.
The all black SUV - literally, even all the usual metal accents on the thing were black - with blackout windows, was parked just a few feet to the side of my house.
The door slam was what made me realize someone was here in the first place.
I had, foolishly, jumped up, heart fluttering, belly flip-flopping, hoping that it was Quin.
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