by Tami Lund
Cullen paused, and gave him a curious look. “No. If you did, I’d have punched you a long time ago. And I’d let Vanessa have her way with you.”
Jack shuddered. “That woman scares me.”
“Me, too. I don’t know how the hell Mac lives with her.”
“Obviously, not well, if she’s down here trying to hook up with me. Why me? What the hell did I do to attract her?”
“For some fucked-up reason, women find you attractive. And you have a reputation. Love ’em and leave ’em. She thinks if she has a quick, no-strings-attached affair, she and Mac will be even, and she can go back to her life and live happily ever after.”
“Do you think he cheated on her?”
Cullen shrugged and resumed his search. “Don’t know. Don’t care. Although having her around is stressing out Sabrina. And since I barely get to see my wife now that we’re working these shitty hours, I don’t particularly like having to spend what little time we have listening to her complain about her sister. Hey, check this out.”
Jack turned away from his own inspection of the body to watch Cullen bend over and pick up something off the floor. He straightened and peered into his glove-covered hand.
“What is it?” Jack asked.
“A necklace. With a pendant. A cross. Looks like diamonds, but I don’t know jack shit about that stuff.”
Jack walked around the bed and stepped up to look at the pendant his partner held in his hand. It was, just as he said, a cross, and it looked like it was composed of a multitude of tiny diamond chips encased in a gold setting. It was no larger than the tip of Jack’s pinky finger.
“Looks real to me. Finally, a legit clue. Bag it, and let’s get it over to the lab, see if they can use it to solve the mysteries of the world.”
“Or at least this case,” Cullen said as he slipped the thin necklace and pendant into a plastic bag. They both heard a commotion at the door to the hotel room and stepped over to investigate.
They found a hotel housekeeper arguing with the local cop who’d pulled guard duty. He had been assigned to blocking the door and keeping anyone from entering the room while Cullen and Jack did their investigative duties.
“Lady, it’s not my rules. Talk to them. They’re the feds. This is their gig.”
Awesome. Relations between local cops and FBI agents were often contentious. This particular case was proving no different.
“The feds?” the housekeeper repeated, scanning first Cullen, and then him.
Wearily, Jack lifted the hem of his button-down shirt so the woman could see the badge pinned to his belt. “FBI, ma’am. There’s an investigation going on in this room. You aren’t going to be able to clean it for a while.”
The woman was older, probably sixty or so. She carried an extra twenty pounds, all in her waist, and she had blond hair that did not compliment her ruddy complexion. Her eyes darted to the open door of the hotel room and back to them.
“I gotta clean. I’ll lose my job if I don’t.”
“You aren’t going to lose your job over this one, ma’am,” Cullen said as he lifted the plastic bag containing the cross pendant and tucked it into the pocket on his t-shirt. “We’ll make sure of it.”
Her eyes grew large as she stared at Cullen’s pocket. “What was that?” she demanded, stabbing her finger at his breast pocket.
“Hopefully, evidence that will help us solve a crime,” he said with a tight smile.
Jack stepped between them, knowing his partner had little patience for any potential interference with him doing his job. He gave the housekeeper his most charming smile.
“Why don’t we step down the hall here, ma’am?” he crooned, as he placed his hand on her shoulder and gently guided her toward the lobby area. “I’ll make sure your general manager knows that you tried to do your job, but it was our fault you couldn’t do it, okay? How does that sound?”
• • •
“It doesn’t feel right.”
“Of course it doesn’t,” Jack said irritably. “It’s a frigging crime scene. There’s a dead body laying three feet away from you.”
Ranger was still dead, and the killer was still on the loose. They had one clue, an irrationally hysterical housekeeper, and a bunch of pissed off dancers.
So far, this day sucked royally.
Cullen barely spared him a glance. “Not enough sleep last night, sunshine?”
“You tell me. We left at the same damn time. And you got the call before me.”
“That’s because you didn’t answer your phone the first four times. What the hell were you doing? You never not answer your phone.”
“Sleeping. You try dancing on that stage all night long and let me know how you feel the next day.”
“You weren’t even in your own bed,” Cullen reminded him. “So I highly doubt what you were doing was sleeping.”
Shit. He forgot that he’d told Cullen he hadn’t slept at home this morning.
“Fuck off,” he scoffed. “You’re a freaking newlywed. Don’t tell me you’re just going home and passing out every morning.”
“Maybe not,” Cullen agreed amicably enough. “But I’m also answering my damn phone and not acting like a baby at the crime scene. Now, can we get back to it? Look at the blood. Over there.” He pointed at the small area between the television and the window.
Jack studied the area and tried to make his sleep-deprived brain work. It finally clicked. “Why is there blood here, when the body is over there?” he wondered out loud. “And there’s no indication the body was moved.”
“There you go,” Cullen said approvingly.
He ignored his partner and continued to study the corner. “Do you think it’s the perp’s?”
“Hopefully,” Cullen replied, as he pulled his phone out of his pocket and called into the office. “But our perp has been too damn elusive until now to leave so much evidence at the scene. I’m guessing it’s another victim.”
“Another victim? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“I wish I were.”
Jack spread his arms wide. “Where’s the body?”
“Good question.”
• • •
Cullen’s gut was right, as usual.
While it would take time to analyze the blood and determine whether they could match it to a name in their database, they caught a break with a phone call from the local cops.
“Normally, I wouldn’t have even taken the info, considering she’s only been missing for eight or so hours,” the cop explained over the phone. “But when Mrs. Beauregard mentioned that her daughter, Hillary, was last seen at the Diamond Dancers’ show, I figured the feds would want to know. Might tie into your case.”
Might. Jack was convinced it tied directly to their case. He was willing to bet the excess blood in that hotel room belonged to a Miss Hillary Beauregard.
Jack’s interviews revealed that Hillary’s roommate left the club without her the night before. Hillary had been too busy drooling over Ranger to pay attention when she said she didn’t feel well and wanted to go home.
He’d alerted the lab boys to this recent discovery, but Jack didn’t need their confirmation. He already knew the second victim in that hotel room had been Hillary.
By the time they had to report to their undercover assignment, neither man had gotten any additional sleep, nor were they any closer to solving the crime.
“Buddy up,” Cullen insisted at the end of Sunday night’s show. “Nobody go anywhere alone until this is figured out.”
“I heard Ranger wasn’t alone,” somebody piped up. The dancers knew only what the media knew, which was a whole lot of speculation and little else.
“Seems to me if he was with someone else, somebody would have seen or heard something,” Jack said. He’d spent the better part of the evening chatting with his fellow dancers, trying to decipher what, if anything, anyone knew about the woman Ranger chose to take back to the hotel with him last night.
“She was just some local chick,”
was all he learned.
“She was all over him, though. She wanted it bad, and Ranger was happy to give it to her.” This was accompanied by a suggestive hip gyration.
They had a name, they knew she was twenty-six years old, that she’d recently ended a long-term relationship, and that she still hadn’t checked in with either her parents or roommate. The local cops had paid a visit to the ex-boyfriend, who became highly emotional when they suggested his ex-girlfriend might have been the victim of a double murder. He’d given them a few leads to follow, places she might be, but so far, they had no body, and no one had heard from Hillary since about two o’clock on Sunday morning.
Jack and Cullen made sure all the dancers were safely ensconced in their new hotel, with tighter security, and then they both headed to their respective homes to finally catch up on their sleep. On his way to his house, Jack drove by Kennedy’s house. It was three in the morning, and he knew she had to work in a few hours. He let his foot off the gas, slowed the truck as he cruised past, and continued down the street.
He turned at the next intersection and drove around the block. A few minutes later, he found himself sitting in the idling truck, at the curb in front of the small, cozy brick ranch.
Her house felt casual, relaxed, with worn-but-comfortable furniture and a sunny kitchen. She’d told him she’d been a nurse for eight years, so he had to believe she made decent money, yet she appeared to live well beneath her means. He liked that about her, liked that she wasn’t pretentious.
It surprised him that he was even thinking about her living arrangements at all. He didn’t normally put forth the effort, didn’t really care about his liaisons’ lives. He was supposed to just want to get laid. Kennedy was fabulous between the sheets, a red-hot bed partner, and that was why he kept coming back for more.
It had nothing to do with cozy houses or liking to wake up in her bed, whether or not she was even there. It had nothing to do with enjoying sitting in her kitchen, chatting about his case while she made omelets …. Well, that part had been enjoyable until he’d gone and fucked it up by leaving when she suggested she might actually care about whether he lived or died in the line of duty.
What the hell was wrong with him? He was thinking about domestic shit, but when Kennedy acted like she might care more than he wanted her to, he shut her down. He really needed to get his head straightened out, but he had no freaking clue how to do it.
The neighbor’s porch light flickered to life. Jack cut the engine and climbed out of the truck, figuring he didn’t need them calling the cops about the suspicious vehicle parked outside Kennedy’s house. He slowly and deliberately walked toward the front door so the neighbor could see he wasn’t trying to hide anything. Instead of calling her cell phone, he rang the doorbell and waited for her to respond to the sound.
“Jack, I have to get up for work in couple of”—he cut her off, stepped inside, and closed and locked the door. He tangled one hand in her sleep-mussed hair and pulled her close for a hug, surprising them both.
“I just want to sleep with you,” he said into her hair.
That’s all they did. At least, he assumed so. He was pretty sure he’d have remembered if he’d had sex with her, even as tired as he was.
CHAPTER SIX
She wondered if he would be there when she got home from work.
When she’d woken up—for the second time—this morning, he’d been lying next to her, one leg flung over both of her own, his hand casually resting just below her breasts. He’d barely moved when the alarm blared, but when she’d slipped out of bed, his arm had snaked across the sheets, reaching for her, she’d fancied. As if he hadn’t wanted her to leave.
She hadn’t wanted to leave either. She’d wanted to stay there, to snuggle with him, to enjoy the intimacy of just sleeping together. And maybe, when he woke, they could do more than just sleep.
Despite how they’d parted ways the last time he’d spent the night, she still craved him, still wanted to have sex with him. But that was all. She didn’t need anything more than the occasional mind-blowing orgasm at Jack’s hand. Or mouth. Or …
She had a better perspective now. After crying tears of frustration, she had determined that she was getting too close, she cared too much; she had begun to look at this affair as more of a relationship.
She needed to stop reading into his actions. He wasn’t a relationship guy. This was how he treated all of his flings, so she assumed. She found she felt sorry for all the women he slept with before her, and the ones who would be in his future. She doubted any of them were immune to his charms. Just like her, they probably fell for him, kept inadvertently believing that the little things he did meant more than just a good time.
The positive aspect to his returning time and again—besides awesome sex, of course—was that she had time to get her emotions under control. So when she walked into her own house after work and Jack greeted her with a glass of chilled white wine in his hand and a warm smile on his handsome face, she knew better than to think about how sweet he was, how attentive his actions were.
“How was your day?” he asked.
She accepted the wine, took a sip, and kicked off her shoes. “Do you want the honest answer or the polite answer?”
He chuckled. “Give me the truth. I can handle it.”
Yeah, right. Would he say the same if she confessed that these adorably considerate gestures did nothing at all to help her maintain the concept of a no-emotions-allowed fling?
“It was lousy. School bus accident. No one was killed, thank God, but it was mass chaos with all the kids’ injuries and the hysterical parents trying to claim them.”
“That sucks. Although, like you said, thank God no one was killed. Is the wine helping?” His voice oozed sympathy. His body language shouted concern.
“Yes, thanks.”
“Dinner’s almost done, too.” Now he was earnest, as if he hoped his actions would help to make her feel better.
“It smells divine.”
“Steaks. My secret rub. I hope you like it.” He was so damn sincere.
She could only remain emotionless for so long under this sort of treatment. She narrowed her eyes and asked, “What’s going on, Jack?”
“Maybe I feel guilty because I keep waking you up in the middle of the night. And maybe I really appreciate you letting me sleep here last night, even though I was kind of a dick the last time I spent the night.”
It wasn’t exactly the profession of love that she may or may not have been hoping for, but it was honest, and Lord knew Kennedy could certainly appreciate an honest man. She lifted the wine glass and motioned toward the hall leading to the bedrooms.
“I’m just, uh, going to change out of these scrubs.”
She escaped to her bedroom, gently closed the door, and then leaned heavily against it, closed her eyes, and gulped wine. Time for another internal pep talk.
Do not take his actions at face value. Jack was a master playboy, a man who knew how to seduce women. He probably never didn’t succeed when he decided he wanted a particular woman to share his bed.
Why had he chosen her? How long did he intend to stick around? With the crazy hours he was forced to keep, thanks to his current case, she ought to just give him a key to her house. That way, she wouldn’t have to stumble out of bed whenever he showed up in the middle of the night. She could just roll over, and he’d be there.
Tempting. Very tempting.
Except giving a man a key … that was not very casual. If she offered, Jack would probably react the same way he had when she suggested she didn’t like the fact that he put himself in harm’s way for his job.
So no key, then. Luckily, she only had one more day to work, and then she had a few off, so it wouldn’t be so disruptive when he knocked in the wee hours of the morning.
She finally stepped away from the door, conscious of the fact that a delicious-smelling steak dinner awaited, and quickly shed the scrubs and replaced them with a fitted t-shi
rt and a pair of gym shorts. When she opened the door again, Jack was heading toward her. She stepped into the hall and he paused.
“Good call. I was pretty sure if I made it all the way into the bedroom, we wouldn’t come out for at least a half hour, and those steaks won’t taste nearly as good in half an hour.”
Kennedy smiled, feeling slightly off kilter and a lot bewildered by Jack’s behavior.
• • •
Dinner was pleasant.
They sat across from one another at the table on the covered back porch, an oscillating fan keeping the temperature pleasant and the bugs at bay. They shared a bottle of wine and ate steak, green beans sautéed with onions and garlic, and smashed redskin potatoes.
It was delicious, and the conversation was comfortable, stimulating even.
“Should you be telling me all this?” Kennedy asked after Jack informed her that they now suspected this last murder had involved two victims, and one body was as of yet unaccounted for.
“Probably not,” he admitted as he sipped his wine. “But since you’re the only one I’ve told, I’ll know who to blame if the media gets wind.”
“I won’t tell, I promise.”
“I figured as much. You seem to be handling it better than the other day.”
She smiled and sipped her wine. “Sabrina assures me the mortality rate for FBI agents is actually quite low.”
“You told Sabrina about us?”
About us? What are we, precisely? She wanted to ask, but she was afraid. Instead, she shook her head and said, “No. We just talked in general terms, about Cullen’s job.”
Jack nodded. “I’m pretty sure the married guys tell their wives everything. I figure it’s okay to tell you.”
The comment hung in the air between them, turning an otherwise enjoyable and comfortable dinner suddenly awkward. She cleared her throat, finished her wine, and then stood up and began clearing the table. When Jack started to stand, she shooed him back into his seat.
“You cooked; I’ll clean.” The little bit of space and activity helped to alleviate the tension his comment had created. By the time she’d loaded the dishwasher and set it to run, Jack had wandered into the kitchen and leaned against the counter, a hungry look in his eye.