It takes ages for the silent sobs to abate. It occurs to me that Luke might worry and might come up and check on me. But I can’t bring myself to stand, to pretend I’m fine.
I’m not.
He doesn’t bother me though, and finally, the well of sadness runs dry. That’s the thing about sadness. If you sit with it long enough—or lie in a steamy shower with it—eventually it morphs into something manageable. Smaller, tighter, put-in-your-pocket-able.
If you fight against it, that’s when the sadness gets ugly. Too big, too scary to get on with your day.
It’s okay to be sad. It’s a mantra I tell peer counseling clients all the time. A lesson that took me a long time to learn.
My problem is that I’m not a nice sad person.
I’m not a nice person at all. I’m prickly and picky and generally high-maintenance.
Everyone is different. None of us are better or worse than others. Another mantra I tell people.
But this one isn’t a lesson I’ve been able to internalize. I am definitely worse than others, and that’s just my burden to bear.
I take my time once I’m out of the shower. Each step of putting myself back together is a piece of self-care. Moisturizing my face, braiding my hair, putting on clean clothes.
By the time I get downstairs, I feel nearly human.
Luke is on his phone, but he gestures at the kitchen, where I find coffee. Yes.
“Can I make you some breakfast?” he asks when he joins me a minute later.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Okay.” He sets his phone on the counter. “I just got an update from the captain. She got read the riot act last night, but stood her ground that the best place for you to be right now is somewhere nobody knows.”
“So you’re nobody?”
“Close enough.” He taps his fingers on the counter. “The deal here is that both of us are going to keep our comings and goings to a minimum. Nobody knows I own this place, but I can’t guarantee I won’t be followed back from the station.”
“Are you going to work?”
“Not today. But the FBI lab is almost done with our forensic evidence, and I’m going to want to be there when they get walked through what the techs have found.”
“They’ll allow that?”
“Sure. They don’t like that we lost you, but that risk is on us, and we need to have a permanently functional working relationship between local and federal law enforcement. Right now there are at least three quiet investigations of LAPD wrongdoing by the FBI, and probably one going back the other way.”
My mouth falls open. “No way.”
“Way. Doesn’t mean they won’t be watching me like a hawk, though. They’re not going to trust me any further than they can throw me.”
I don’t know why I’m shocked. Nothing should shock me now. But I really thought the dysfunctional world I grew up in was the worst, exceptionally terrible, and I’d gotten away from it.
Turns out, no so much.
“Maybe I should actually go somewhere on my own. So you don’t need to lie to them.”
“Get that thought out of your head.”
“But you said—”
“I will find you.”
“Like you did in Washington?”
“Yes, like—” He cuts himself off.
Tension lights up the space between us. “Wait. How did you—”
He moves in, lightning fast. Blocking me from moving, even though he isn’t touching me. One of his hands presses against the cabinet beside my head, the other arm is out wide. A human barricade.
“Luke?”
“I did what I needed to do to keep you safe.”
“You put a tracker on me. Where is it?”
“Your wallet.”
“You fucking asshole.”
“You ran away at the first fucking opportunity.”
“And I was fine.”
“Only because the asshole who wants you dead didn’t know that you’d left the fucking state.”
“But why didn’t they?” My pulse is racing. “The FBI knew we were going to D.C.”
Luke’s eyes narrow.
“I’m not an idiot,” I tell him. I’m so fired up right now. Jesus, how did they all miss that fact? “You should ask him that. And get off my fucking back until you have more information.”
“You’re a brat. You know that?”
“Excuse me?” I push against his chest, and he takes a step back. Now there’s plenty of space between us again, and I fill with all my pent up feelings. “My life has completely exploded. Literally! In front of you! And I don’t really care if you don’t like me, Detective Vasquez. I’m doing the best I fucking can with the crappy cards that I have been dealt.”
“I didn’t say I don’t like you, Taylor. I said you’re a brat.”
“And let me guess, you think I need a spanking? Go fuck yourself, Detective. You want me to get on my knees and give you an appreciative blowjob? Never going to happen. Never. Not in a million—”
“Stop it,” he growls. “I don’t want sexual favors from you.”
“No? That would be a first.” I step into his personal space. Now it’s my turn to crowd him. “You know my past. You know what I’m capable of. You telling me you haven’t thought about it?”
His jaw flexes, and he spreads his arms wide. “Bring it on, princess. Unload.”
“I’m good,” I whisper. “Glad to get all of our secrets aired like this. Stalker.”
He laughs. “That’s a good one. You’re the queen of secrets, aren’t you?”
“You don’t have any right to my secrets,” I hiss.
And then I hear myself. I’m hissing at him, picking a fight for no good reason.
With a gasp, I step back.
Luke follows, reaching for me. His hands curve around my biceps, then slide down my arms, until he’s holding my hands. “Come here. It’s okay.”
“What? Are you going to try to hug me again? I’m so broken and angry I can’t even be hugged.”
“Enough,” he says, his voice cracking now in anger. “Stop. That’s enough.”
“Is it?” I shake my head. “I don’t know where the line is, Detective. Sorry. But I guess you’re right about me. I guess I’m just—”
He lets go of my hand and hauls me close, one arm wrapping around me, the other hand clapping over my mouth.
Literally stopping the verbal assault that I cannot put a lid on my self.
So I lick him. I slide my tongue between his fingers, slicking his hand, and being as crude and lewd as I once was.
17
Luke
She got under my skin with the spanking comment. That hit a little too close to home. But right now I don’t want to paddle Taylor. Not at all.
I want to show her some basic human kindness. And I don’t want her to say anything awful about herself.
God damn she’s making it difficult to be nice her.
She glowers at me, her eyes bright and spiteful, as I refuse to move my hand.
But I see what she’s doing. Taylor is testing all of my boundaries. Testing to make sure I’ll still be on her side, no matter what. No matter how rude she is and no matter what buttons she tries to push.
Slowly, without breaking eye contact, I shift my hand from covering her mouth to cupping her face. “You done?”
“You did not just cover my mouth like that,” she spits out.
Clearly not done.
I lean in, pushing my forehead against hers. “Taylor, Taylor, Tay—”
Her mouth collides with mine, shutting me up with a kiss that knocks me back a step. I’m holding on to her, so she follows, and we slam into the wall behind me.
She. Just. Fucking. Kissed. Me.
I stare down at her face. Bright eyes, wide wet mouth. Shock is written all over her expression. I know the fucking feeling.
“Taylor,” I whisper again, but this time my voice is rough and unsteady. She pushes up again until her lips are
against mine.
Soft.
Wet.
I demand the next kiss, and it’s so fucking wrong and so fucking good at the same time.
She tastes right. Like her mouth is supposed to be this soft, this responsive, this perfectly matched for mine. Everything else fades into a fuzzy blur. We’re nothing but lips and tongues and hot, breathless pants as we jockey back and forth for more, deeper, harder.
“Luke,” she whispers.
Hey, Luke.
Fuck.
“We can’t do this.” A lie. A fucking weak string of noises that mean nothing, because she’s already on me again.
When we wrench apart, she stares at me.
I stare right back. The taste of her is still on my tongue.
And the walls go up. She glares at me. “What the hell was that?”
I hear the rudeness. But I also still hear the way she said my name. Luke.
Danger, danger.
I shake my head. “Nothing.”
She touches her mouth. Her glorious, fuck-me-I’m-so-dead mouth. “You kissed me.”
She kissed me first. But she’s free to do that, and I am not. I stick with clarifying that it was a two-way kiss. “You kissed me back.”
Pacing into the living room, she shakes her head. “This cannot happen.”
I follow. “That’s supposed to be my line. Obviously, it was a mistake.” I scrub my hand over my face, a useless action which does nothing to reach the weird and inappropriate feelings swirling inside me right now. “I need to call the captain back. Talk to her about getting a map of who knew what, and when.”
“What?”
“Your point about the FBI knowing you were in D.C.. That’s a good one. We need to follow up on that.”
“Oh.” She goes still for a moment then nods. “Right. Yes. Do that.”
“We’re not done with—”
She laughs. “The mistake? Yeah, no, we’re done with that.”
“The conversation.” I give her a tight, controlled smile. “We’re going to be stuck together for a few days, though. Let’s pace ourselves.”
“Sure. Whatever you want.”
I use a burner phone app to call the Captain from yet another encrypted number.
“Hello again,” she says after I introduce myself. “How’s vacation going?”
I leave out the fight—and the kiss it lead to. “We need to consider the angle that whoever left the note at the safe house expected Taylor to be there, or arrive there soon. As in, they didn’t know she was in Washington.”
“Unless the point was to spoil the safe house,” Woods says, musing it over. “But I hear what you’re saying. The leak maybe wasn’t internal to the FBI.”
“Who else was looped in? The Secret Service?”
“Yeah, I believe they got a heads up on the safe house. But Ferdinand and I kept your travel plans tight.”
“Well, that narrows down our list of leak suspects, doesn’t it?”
“It sure does.”
“Ferdinand should be relieved that the loose lips aren’t on his own team.”
“I’ll be sure to point that out.”
“Thanks. You’ll let me know if they bump up the forensics report?”
“You got it.” She ends the call. And I go hunting for my houseguest.
I need to spend the next thirty-six hours entertaining her in a more appropriate way than throwing my tongue down her throat.
I find her curled up in the window seat that overlooks the backyard—such as it is. There’s a covered deck and a small pool.
“Can I go swimming?”
“I don’t think I have a suit that would fit you,” I joke. But that only brings up the image of her skinny-dipping.
“I brought one,” she said. “Packed it when I thought I might be able to stay at the Wilshire while this was being sorted out.”
“I’m sorry that this isn’t the Wilshire.” I take a deep breath. “How about when it’s dark? I don’t want to be too paranoid, but it’s harder to be seen from overhead that way.”
She nods, staring out the window. “After the last two days—and the rest of my life behind it—I don’t think there’s such a thing as too paranoid.”
I sit down on the chair nearest her. Close enough to talk, but not so close that I’m crowding her. “About before…”
She pauses a beat before turning a brilliant, but cold smile on me. “That was wrong of me.”
“It’s been a long couple of days. It’s normal to develop intense connections—”
“I use people for sex.” She stares me down like she wants me to argue. “I manipulate men like other people breathe. Don’t make this something that it’s not.”
Well, all right then. “Deal.”
She looks back out the window for a moment, then sighs and turns back to the small living room. “Can I watch TV?”
“Knock yourself out.”
I go to the kitchen and double-check what I have in terms of food on hand. I’ve got enough to get us through the day, but I’ll need to do a grocery run soon.
I use people for sex.
Don’t we all? Obviously, not the way she means it, but that’s what dating is.
I manipulate men like other people breathe.
That one is harder to normalize. She probably does. Looking back over the last forty hours, I could probably pick out moments when she manipulated me.
Hey, Luke.
Heat crawls up the back of my neck.
But the kiss wasn’t that. For one thing, she was out of control when she did it. For another, it didn’t advance any kind of cause. It wasn’t good misdirection; it wasn’t getting me off course of an investigation.
She has no reason to truly want to manipulate me.
Which brings me to the thought that she just can’t help it. That she was sexualized from an early age, and was manipulated herself through her teens. She learned a lot of harsh rules about life as she moved into adulthood.
Nobody has ever shown her any other way to be.
Police work isn’t social work. That’s a rule drilled into us all the time. But I don’t think I’m trying to fix Taylor.
I wasn’t lying to her when I said I like her. In a weird way, across our very different worlds, Taylor feels like someone I could be friends with. One of those rare personality matches where we just click.
And then I had to go and fuck it up by kissing her.
I’m not doing either of us any favors by pretending our relationship is a normal cop-protecting-a-witness dynamic. That went off the rails somewhere and we’re not going to go back. But we can’t move forward unless I try something else.
I can’t expect her to be honest with me if I’m not honest with her.
I pour myself a cup of coffee and go back into the living room. The TV is on, but she’s not watching it. She’s flipping through a magazine.
Sitting down on the far end of the couch, I wait her out. She takes a while, but finally she sighs and puts down the magazine. “Yes?”
“I thought we could talk.”
“No thanks.”
“Not about the kiss. I thought we could get to know each other better.”
“You know me as well as anyone.” She says it flippantly, but I wonder if it’s true. Which isn’t to say that I know her—I don’t. But maybe nobody does.
“Then I need to play catch up on the sharing. Remember how I told you that you’re my only case?”
“Sure, I guess.”
“You might be my last case as a detective. At least for a while. I’ve put in a transfer request to an undercover unit.”
That gets a flash of interest. “Dangerous.”
“It can be.”
“Why do you want to transfer?”
Because it’s dangerous. “I’m ready for the next challenge.”
“Bullshit.” Her eyes are bright now. Curious.
“That’s the polite version of the answer, I guess. It’s not a lie.”
“But it’s not the whole truth. You want to share, Detective, you gotta share for real. Because it’s hard to compete with my mom pimped me out to her billionaire friends when I was a ripe little Lolita.” She purses her lips. “Have you ever shot anyone?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about that.”
“No.”
“You’re no fun.”
And now we’re back to bratty. Fantastic. Instead of rising to the bait, I relax back in my chair and drink my coffee.
It doesn’t take long for her to shift uncomfortably.
I smile.
“Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“That’s a classic trick, creating silence so I’ll fill it.”
“It’s not a trick. You didn’t seem to like my efforts to make conversation.”
She looks down at her own mug, sitting on the coffee table.
“Do you want more coffee?”
She shakes her head. “I’m fine.”
“Let me know when you’re ready to eat something. I’m a decent cook.”
“Stop!” The word tears out of her, a bark, and then she slaps her hand over her mouth—in exactly the same way I did just a little while ago.
I slowly raise my free hand, palm out. “Hey. It’s okay.”
“It’s just…all too much.”
“Sure. I get that.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“No problem.”
“You don’t need to be nice to me. I won’t tell anyone we kissed, okay? It’s fine. It’s stupid and forgettable and really, very fine.”
I resist the scowl that wants to pull my brows together. Stupid and fine, sure, I get that. But there was nothing forgettable about that kiss. And whoa, is she way off base about why I’m being kind. “You don’t have anything to worry about like that from me. I’m not going to pressure you to keep my secrets.”
“Then you would be the first.”
“That’s shitty.”
“Yeah.” She looks me over. “How about you? Broken man, haunted past?”
Unhealthy relationship with thrills and chills and commitment to anything—a job, a woman, even family. “I’ve got my issues.”
“Come on, Detective. I gave you my issues in a perverted little box with a bow on it. Tell me more than that.”
Wicked Sin Page 9