by Abbie Roads
“Working.”
She hadn’t thought about him having a job. Of course he had a job. How much time had he taken off just to help her? Maybe she should feel guilty about that, but she just wanted to kiss him. “When will he be back?”
“I don’t know.” The way Gill said the words made her believe he really didn’t know.
“Cream?” she asked and walked to the chair across from him.
“He doesn’t do dairy.”
“Doesn’t do dairy?”
When Gill didn’t elaborate, she sipped the coffee and tried not to grimace at its bitterness.
“Who gave you Janie Carson’s eye?”
The cup slipped from her fingers, crashed to the table, spilled. She jumped up to get a towel, but Gill put a hand on her arm.
“Sit.” His tone was warm. He began cleaning up the coffee with a wad of paper towels.
She sat, not because she trusted him, but because at this point she needed some answers for herself. “Janie Carson. She was a real little girl?”
“DNA preliminaries point to the eye being hers,” he said and tossed the wad of wet towels into the trash bin. “We’re running some other tests—checking out a few other things—but that’s the one thing we are fairly certain about.”
She met and held his gaze. “I already told you everything I know about the eye.”
He seemed to calculate her words before he spoke. “What about last night? What was that?”
“Another one of those dreams.” Another one. She’d had two of them. What if she kept having them? What if she had one every time she slept? Good-bye, sanity.
“Tell me everything.”
Just like the first time, he picked apart every sentence and tried to trip her up. But the truth was easy to remember. Finally, he asked her write the dream down. After she finished, he read over her words.
“Lathan says you aren’t involved in the Janie Carson case or whatever case the hair and tooth belong to.”
“Lathan says? Does he work for the FBI too?”
“What Lathan does is nobody’s business but his own.” A bit of the asshole tone crept back into Gill’s voice, and the way he glared at her warned her never to ask again.
What was going on? Was Lathan some top-secret spy or something? Her own personal James Bond. A smile ticked up her lips. No wonder she felt so safe with him.
“Junior drugged Brit—your roommate. Slipped her a roofie.” Gill’s voice was calm again.
The smile faded. Poor Brittany. “Is she all right?”
“She’s not physically harmed.”
“You know nothing’s going to happen to Junior. Nothing ever does.” The dull sound of resignation took over her vocal cords. Time for a subject change. “What time is it?”
“Two forty-five.”
She had just enough time to arrange a new room, take a shower, and get over to Sweet Buns. “You really don’t know when Lathan’s going to be back?”
“I don’t.” Gill sounded sincere.
“I hate to ask this of you, but can you take me to work?”
“Call off today,” he said, as if her job were no more important than a grain of sand on a beach.
“No.”
His head snapped up at her abrupt answer.
“If I’m not at work tonight, I’m fired. If I’m fired, I’m homeless in two days.” She wished she was exaggerating, but she wasn’t.
“How do I know you’re not going to skip town?”
“I don’t have a car. Junior took it, and the police won’t ask him about it. I don’t have any money. And if I wanted to skip town, I would’ve hopped in one of the long-haul semis and been gone by now.”
“Lathan wanted you to wait for him.” Distaste crossed Gill’s features as he spoke.
Right there was part of his problem with her. He didn’t want Lathan to want her. Why? Gill didn’t look like the type to have a boy crush on Lathan. So that wasn’t it. She wasn’t exactly a pillar of Sundew society. But she wasn’t the lowest gutter roach either—to use Gill’s term. She worked. Supported herself. No longer relied on anyone for anything. That was respectable. Right?
Or did Gill somehow know about her past with Matt? No, he couldn’t. Everyone speculated, but no one knew for a fact, except her and Matt. And neither of them was likely to tell anyone.
“Trust me. I’d rather stay here than wait tables, but I need the money.”
“If Lathan’s pissed, I’m blaming it on you.”
“Fine. I just need to get my stuff.” She ran upstairs to get her clothes. Lathan had washed and dried them again. She wiggled into her shorts and the Ernie-approved shirt, but when she caught sight of her reflection in the mirror—breasts spilling from her cleavage—she put Lathan’s T-shirt back on over everything.
She followed Gill out to his car. Neither of them spoke as he pulled out of the driveway and drove them through the isolated countryside toward town. The silence wasn’t awkward, but it wasn’t exactly friendly either.
“How much do you know about Lathan?” he asked when they reached the outskirts of Sundew.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, do you know his birthday, his favorite color, his favorite food, what kind of childhood he had…” He rattled off an extensive list, all of which she didn’t know. But somehow, none of it mattered.
She kept quiet.
“Listen, I don’t mean be a dick, but my top priority is protecting Lathan.”
Yeah, she knew how to read between the lines. “Protecting him from me?”
Gill gave one solid nod of confirmation. “Why are you messing with him?” he asked as he waited to make the left-hand turn into Sweet Buns parking lot.
She felt his gaze on her, studying her as if he expected the way she looked to give away some vital answer. “What do you mean?”
“He’s a big, scary-looking dude, but he has the heart of a puppy. I don’t want you messing with him.”
“I’m not messing with him.”
He turned to her, gave her a full-body scan—eyes lingering on her bare legs. “Sleeping with him qualifies as messing with him.”
Suddenly, the giant T-shirt dress and the clothes underneath felt invisible. “I’m not sleeping with him. I slept with him—the snooze, snore, snore kind of sleep.”
Gill cocked an eyebrow at her. It was the same as calling her a liar. He parked in front of the diner. She opened her door.
“I don’t know what your motives are, but if they are less than lily-white angel-babies, I’m going to find out. And the full force of the FBI will come down on you.”
She got out of the car but left the door open, trying to formulate a response that didn’t sound defensive, but she couldn’t come up with anything.
Gill leaned over the passenger seat to see her. “There’s a lot you don’t know about him. Ask him about himself. Ask him about his hearing. Ask about his childhood.”
She slammed the door and walked toward Morty’s.
Gill might be a big and mighty FBI guy, but he wasn’t subtle. She recognized his last words for what they were. A setup. He thought something about Lathan’s past would scare her off. Nothing about him could scare her off. The only thing she really feared was her own past.
* * *
Lathan left his office, shutting the door behind him, then stepped up to the retinal scanner, and waited for the internal light to switch from green to red—locked. He stepped off the porch and started down the short trail back to his house.
His office looked like a hunter’s cabin in the middle of the woods. Except that it had security rivaling a bank and an underground air-filtration system so there would be no scent contamination among the evidence.
He massaged his chest. It had ached all day. Well, not really all day, but from the moment he’d left the house, it’d felt like he h
ad a bad case of indigestion and it hadn’t eased one bit. In fact, it had only gotten worse. He saw a roll of Tums in his future. He hated to eat things like that, but sometimes they were all that helped.
When he walked through the back door, he saw Gill at the table, typing on his laptop.
Lathan set the evidence bag with hair and tooth inside on top of the fridge—out of Little Man range—and handed Gill the reports. “You’re going to find this interesting.”
Gill leafed through the pages.
While Lathan waited for the moment when everything clicked for Gill, he rubbed the pain in his chest.
Gill sat up straight. “The Strategist? Never saw that coming.”
“Me either.”
“So Janie Carson and the hair-and-tooth victim are both linked to the Strategist.” Gill seemed to be speaking the words out loud as if that would make them more believable. He scribbled a note on a pad of paper next to him. “One thing the lab noticed was the slower rate of decomp on the eye comparative to Janie Carson’s body. They’re running tests to see if a preservative might’ve been used. We might even be able to find a brand and then get a list of purchasers. The eye could give us the lead we need to find him.”
And all because Honey had a dream. “You get me some comparison samples, and I can tell you which preservative was used.”
“If the tests are inconclusive, then we’ll bring you in.” Gill sat back in his chair and pinned Lathan with a sharp look—the kind that would cut a lesser man. But Lathan had a thick skin. “Don’t you think this is strange? She claims to be having dreams where she brings stuff back to reality, and that stuff just happens to be things from the Strategist’s victims. And you just happen to be the only person who knows the Strategist exists.” Gill shook his head. “I don’t believe in coincidence.”
“I don’t either, but I’m telling you, we went to bed and she had nothing with her, but when she woke up, she had the hair and tooth. I can’t explain it. I just know it happened.”
Gill didn’t say anything. There wasn’t much to say. He had been there, had seen her reaction, her terror when she opened her hand. And when she passed out, Gill had been the one who thought she needed to go to the ER. It wasn’t until she woke ten minutes later, teeth chattering from cold—just like Lathan told him she would—that Gill left the room. That was when the shift happened for Gill, when he started to believe.
“What I do is nearly impossible to explain. That’s why we keep it so secret. What if she’s got some weird thing like me?” Part of him felt sorry for her having to go through what she did, but part of him felt less alone too. Like he wasn’t the only person with a freakish ability.
“I’ve been thinking the same thing. Have you ever heard of…?” Gill typed the letters in his phone and handed it to him.
O N E I R O L O G Y. Oh-nay-ruh-ology
“Say it five times in a sentence.” Lathan put his hand on Gill’s throat to feel the vibrations of the word.
“Oneirology is the scientific study of dreams. Oneirology is the scientific study of dreams…”
Lathan memorized the pattern of Gill’s lips moving over the word, the way his mouth opened and closed, the length of the movement, and the vibrations under his fingers.
He put his hand to his throat and tried to form the word, looking to Gill for his accuracy.
“Close enough. Get this. There’s an Institute of Oneirology just outside Sundew. Doesn’t that seem bizarrely coincidental?”
“I wonder if she’s been in contact with them.” The knot in Lathan’s chest clenched. He thumped on it with his fist.
Gill noticed his action but didn’t say anything. “I’m wondering that too. While you were doing your thing with the evidence, I checked them out. Eric says they’ve got serious pull with Homeland Security, but couldn’t find anything else.”
“Why is a place that studies dreams involved with Homeland Security?”
“That’s what I want to know too. I’m thinking we make an appointment for Evanee and ask them all our questions.”
“I’ll ask her about it when she wakes up.”
“She’s not here.”
“What?” Surely he didn’t understand that right.
“She asked me to take her to work.”
The lump of pain in Lathan’s chest felt like it was going to explode. He grabbed his keys off the counter. “Junior’s out there. The Strategist too. And the simple fact that she is somehow connected to his cases puts her danger. If anything has happened to her—”
He ran out of the house to his bike before he could think how to finish his sentence.
Chapter 8
Lathan blasted through the diner’s door. Stopped. Scanned the place. No Honey. But he smelled her scent mixing with greasy food and the musky stench of male desire.
The whisper of last night’s memories wrapped around his brain and squeezed. Junior on top of her sucking at her face like a vampiric demon. Her, so small and fragile in the shower.
His heart fell out of his chest and landed in his boots. He was supposed to keep her safe. That was his compulsion, his duty, his obsession. And he feared he’d failed. Again.
She emerged from underneath the counter, placing a bottle of Tabasco on her tray next to a platter of food.
His heart slingshotted out of his boots and lodged back in his chest. Seeing her safe just wasn’t enough. Touching her was the only way to wash away the stain of panic that still colored the fringes of his world. Before he was even aware of it, he was halfway to her.
Honey delivered the food to a pumpkin-round man who stared at her chest like he was sitting at pervert’s row in a strip club. He wasn’t the only one. That musky stink Lathan had noticed when he walked in… All of it was for her.
He fisted his hands, gripping them so tight his knuckles popped. Oh, how satisfying it would be to rampage down the row of booths, systematically plucking out the eyes of every asshole that ogled her.
She turned. Surprise flared in her eyes at seeing him, and then she smiled a smile so radiant, it rivaled a sunrise. And that smile was aimed directly at him. A gift to him alone.
“Are you all right?” He stopped in front of her, looking her over. She looked safe. Whole. Healthy. Even her bruises from the night before had faded to mere shadows.
“I’m fine. I didn’t mean to worry you, but I had to be at work at four.”
Not knowing her work schedule was a mistake he wouldn’t make again.
She grabbed his hand and led him down the row of booths. He should’ve taken his gloves off. He needed to feel her skin sliding against his.
She stopped at the last booth in the back. He slid in but didn’t let go of her hand.
“What would you like?”
What would he like? He hadn’t been in a restaurant since he was a small child. He couldn’t eat food other people touched. Their scents affected the taste. He could smell every person who had sipped from a coffee mug or used a utensil. Could practically taste their mouths. His stomach rolled end over end.
“If you’ve got a paper cup, I’ll have a coffee.” The roasting process usually eliminated all traces of human touch from the beans. Usually.
“Be right back.”
He hated to let her go, but he forced his hand open to allow her to walk away. That’s when he became mesmerized by her skyscraper legs, by the perfectly rounded globes of her ass, by the sensuous sway of her hips in those hooker sexy shoes. No wonder every man lusted for her. She was sizzle-your-innards hot.
He tore the gloves from his hands. A desperate need rode him. He craved her skin against his like a crack addict craved white rocks.
She returned to his table with a Styrofoam cup, a lid, and the pot of coffee. “Black, right?”
He nodded, his voice buried far beneath the urge to touch her.
His palm found her
just above the knee. Her skin was supple satin. She leaned into his touch, shifting closer to the opening of his booth.
The residual echoes of panic and fear evaporated. Only desire remained. His dick grew hot and heavy and uncomfortable in his jeans. The stupid thing sent a message up to his brain—Kiss her. His little brain took control, bypassing his big one.
Slowly, to show his intention, he reached up to her neck and drew her down. In her eyes, he saw himself. Saw the blur of the tattoo on his cheek and knew, in the deepest sense of knowing, that they were destined to inhabit the same space. Just as their lips touched, she closed her eyes, but he didn’t. He watched her as he felt the softness of her mouth on his.
She licked the seam of his lips. More from a sense of surprise than any knowledge of kissing, he opened his mouth to her. Her tongue swept inside and met his. Warm, sweet honey exploded across his taste buds. She tasted as good as she smelled. He devoured her, felt her hand on his head, pulling him closer, grinding their mouths together in mutual hunger.
All his senses, except for hearing, were dominated by her. He tasted her honey. Smelled the warm sweetness of her desire. Felt her straining into his touch. All the while, he watched her beautiful face as he kissed her. He reveled in the sanctity of her.
He slid his hand up her thigh until his fingertips brushed the edge of her shorts. His dick was going to bust the zipper, but he couldn’t stop. He wanted her. More than he’d ever wanted in his life. Her. Only her.
“Order up!”
Holy Jesus. Even he heard that.
She jumped away from him, sloshing coffee over the table. She blinked as if just waking from a dream, then winked—winked—at him and hurried to the kitchen window.
A giant smile cracked across his face. He probably looked demented, but he couldn’t help himself. Not only had he finally had his first kiss, but she’d winked at him without regret or embarrassment at his ill-timed sprint toward first base.
From the kitchen window, Mr. Clean shot hate bullets directly at Lathan’s head, but that did nothing to dim the wattage of his smile.
Lathan drank a barrel full of coffee while he waited for her shift to end and focused on his new hobby: watching her—and only her. His hands had begun to tremble from the caffeine overload, and he’d started to notice the SMs. Even though he’d had no problems controlling them since he met her, they now hovered at the periphery of his mind, testing the firmness of his boundaries.