After the bombshell Bohannan dropped in his office, as I fought hyperventilating, he explained that this was not outside the norm. In fact, it had been one of the factors that led to him searching for someplace out of the way and safe for him and his family.
He’d been fulfilled by his work with the FBI, and as such, wanted to keep his name out of the high-profile cases. But the media tipped it, and investigative journalists-cum-authors pushed it, and he was outed.
And when you get that kind of reputation, it can detrimentally affect your work.
An example of which, it could trigger disturbed people to play cat and mouse with you.
“When I quit the Bureau, and we moved here, I installed the fence and gate. And I don’t have cameras and sensors around the property just because I want privacy for my family,” he explained.
I had not put this two and two together, but Bohannan went on to share that law enforcement types did not herald where they lived. From something as minor as keeping their names off their mailboxes, to taking pains to minimize their digital footprint, to Bohannan’s fortress-type setup.
So, although this bombshell wasn’t great, he was not surprised by it.
And he assured, “Baby, just because you might not be able to build an accurate profile because your subject is actively working to make sure you don’t, doesn’t mean you can’t investigate murders. Criminals leave clues. He’s leaving clues. We just have to find them and follow them.”
He seemed so collected about this, so unaffected by and aloof from that particular mindfuck, I felt a modicum of comfort.
But only a modicum.
I’d wanted to ask if I could read the letters.
But Jason and Jesse came back at that moment, and our brief reprieve to take a second to have lunch, a breath and think things through was obliterated.
The following hours were a jumble of happenings.
These included Bohannan not even blinking before he asked his sons to brief him in front of me.
They shared all about what they’d been doing. And in the intervening hours from them heading out and then, they’d tracked down someone who saw, on the other side of the lake, someone boating into the mist last night.
This was not unusual. Apparently, it was a thing in Misted Pines and its surrounding areas. It proved your mettle, like flying over the Bermuda Triangle just to say you did.
Though last night might be a different story.
Too far away, the person who saw this couldn’t see much of anything, except there was only one person in the boat, and it looked like a white fishing boat with a thick, dark stripe.
Not much to go on, but a clue.
It was around this time that all three of their phones started blowing up, and in a less dramatic fashion, mine did too.
It was actually a surprise it took that long.
First, there was Malorie’s death on the heels of Alice’s.
Second, there was Sheriff Dern’s shenanigans, and Bohannan’s threat had not been empty. He’d called members of the Board of Commissioners, and with increasing pressure from other citizens of Misted Pines, they were convening an emergency session.
Third, parents were freaking out, and they wanted the annual MPHS woods party shut down.
The problem was, the people who would do this were the sheriff’s department, and they were in disarray, with more than half of their deputies on walkout, and the ones left were under the command of an authoritarian who didn’t have his right-hand woman to even out his nonsense.
In other words, they were useless.
There were murmurs of setting up a crew of concerned citizens to go into the woods and break up the party.
Teenage rebellion was thick on its heels with pinging texts and underground high school social media posts moving the location around to undermine these efforts to put a stop to their fun.
In the meantime, Harry Moran had shown at the house with some of his brethren, and they were going rogue.
They might have been stripped of their badges, but they intended to find the killer.
This meant a closed-door session in Bohannan’s office that I wasn’t invited to.
It also meant, about half an hour later, he and the boys took off with Harry and his guys. But not before he took my phone, downloaded an app on it and gave me a quick tutorial.
This tutorial included how to activate the view on a camera that had been motion triggered (which would result in a specific ping and an accompanying notification on my phone). Or what to do if a sensor had been tripped (which also would result in a notification on my phone).
I was to keep the window coverings closed, the doors locked, my Taser and phone at hand, and I already had the app to open the gate…but I was not to open it, to anybody.
“The only people who should be going through can get through on their own,” he’d said. “And remember, me, Jace and Jess get those notifications too, so if we see something or suspect something, we’ll be on our way home.”
He’d said something else too.
“Move your shit to my room.”
This caused a probably inappropriate, but definitely strong clitoris tingle.
Then he and the boys were gone.
To the lament of my curiosity, they took the brown folder with them.
Before dealing with phone calls from Megan and Kimmy, the latter who I had, along the way, maybe rashly, given my number, or moving my shit to Bohannan’s room, I decided to go see how Celeste was.
Although she was not in full-on brat mode with me like she’d been with her father, when she ascertained I was not going to be on her side, she moaned, “I’m sure you think you understand. But none of your boyfriends’ sisters were murdered.”
Really, she had me there.
I decided to let her nurse her hurt. Maybe while doing that she’d realize how much pressure her father was under, how much he loved her and wanted her safe, how it would affect him in deep and ugly ways to fish a girl only a few years older than his daughter out of the lake at the end of his pier and cut him some slack (but I was not hanging a lot of hope on that).
I then had a long gab with Megan (she totally thought all this was about Audrey) and a short, one-sided gab with Kimmy, who clearly watched more true crime documentaries and was closer to what might be happening when she proclaimed, “Malorie isn’t a kid, this puts a whole different spin on it.”
I made dinner, knocked on Celeste’s door, was told, “I’m not hungry!” and ate my solitary meal with the lake closed off from me, not turning on music or the TV because, if something went bump in the night, I wanted to hear it.
I then moved my shit into Bohannan’s room.
Which semi-kinda brought me to now.
Because the boys had come home a half an hour ago.
They’d scarfed down the meals I’d kept warm for them, Jess and Jace rinsed their dishes and put them in the washer and headed to their place.
Bohannan and I went upstairs.
I spit, rinsed and lathered my face, wondering if tonight was orgasm night.
When I emerged from under the soap, Bohannan could be seen in the mirror, walking to the sink beside mine.
He was in pajama pants and nothing else.
The tail was gone in his hair, and it was flopping in his eyes.
I’d never seen his hair like that.
It was delicious.
His pectorals were life affirming.
He had chest hair that covered a good area, but it wasn’t too much.
He didn’t have a full six-pack, but under that fur, I counted four.
The veins running along his bulging biceps instantly became my new religion.
And since moving in with him, I’d used my vibrator, which was quiet, and I’d used it quite a bit…for obvious reasons.
But in that second, I vowed, tonight, I was using it again, even if he was lying beside me. He’d have to listen if he didn’t do something about it.
“If you keep looking a
t me like that, I’m gonna fuck you in the bathroom.”
My eyes moved from his chest in the mirror to his face.
I said nothing.
He went still.
I remained silent.
He didn’t move.
I didn’t either.
We stared at each other in the mirror for three years.
Then my upper arm was seized in a firm grip.
I was hauled across the space and my pajama pants were at my ankles.
My panties joined them.
My ass hit the counter between the sinks.
Bohannan hit his knees.
I guessed I’d had one kind of kiss that day and Bohannan was intent to run the gamut, because with no further ado, he spread my thighs and buried his face between my legs.
I was never allowing him to shave off his beard.
Never.
I lifted a bent arm over my shoulder, palm on the mirror, my other hand I clenched in his hair.
I came for him within seconds.
It was catastrophic.
I was not even remotely recovered before I was on my feet, whirled, one of his arms around my belly, holding me up.
He kicked my feet apart with one of his, wrapped his other arm around my chest, and I watched dazedly in the mirror as he drove up inside me.
I also watched as he buried his face in my neck as he fucked me.
The familiar intimacy of his whiskers at my neck and the newfound joy of his big cock thrusting inside collided in a way so profound, I shattered.
I wasn’t Delphine.
I wasn’t Larue.
I wasn’t a writer.
A mother.
An ex.
A woman.
I was a body.
A cunt born to be fucked.
By that cock.
His face came out of my neck, his eyes locked to mine in the mirror, his hand slid down my belly to curl between my legs, and he worked my clit as he fucked me.
His face in sex was an aphrodisiac. Brutish and barbarous.
We stared at each other as we stumbled back millennia. We didn’t know language. We didn’t know culture. We didn’t know manners. There were no rules.
There was instinct.
This wasn’t sex.
It was a rut, natural, evolutionary.
We were born to connect like this.
His finger wouldn’t be denied, his dick couldn’t be, my head flew back, colliding with his shoulder, and his hand at my chest covered my mouth, lightly, to muffle any noise, but there was something delectably villainous about it.
So when I came again, and it was going to be huge, I came, and it was colossal.
There was a cry, but what was happening between my legs was too much for it to be loud.
Mostly it was a gasp. A need. A need to pull in oxygen as everything that made me isolated between my legs, and I temporarily forgot how to breathe.
I clutched him with my pussy, he grunted, then, face back in my neck, cock buried to the root, he growled into my flesh.
Another three years passed as I clung to what we just shared, emotionally and physically.
“Shit,” he muttered against my skin. His lips slid up to my ear. “I hurt you?”
“Not even close.”
His mouth still at my ear, his head tipped slightly so he could look from under his brow into my eyes in the mirror.
God, he was pure fucking sex.
How did I survive without having this with him for two months?
He curled his fingers around my throat.
“That wasn’t what I wanted for us,” he told me.
“I’m not complaining.” A beat of concern, nerves, then, “Are you?”
“Baby, that was the hottest fuck I’ve ever had,” he said. I lost his eyes, and he licked the shell of my ear before he whispered in it. “And I like to fuck. It’s been a while. But for the record, my bed is a playground.” Pause then, “Anything goes. You want it. You ask for it. And I’ll give it to you.”
That was quite a promise.
I shivered.
From the other room, his phone rang.
He lifted his head and said to me in the mirror, “Goddamn fuck.”
I seconded that emotion.
He then slid out, fixed his pajama bottoms, knelt to help me step into my panties, which he pulled up, then my pajamas, and he stood.
“Be back,” he muttered, touched his mouth to mine and stalked out of the room.
I watched.
Full report?
He had an insanely beautiful back.
I allowed myself a second (okay, it took ten, but it could have taken a year) to reflect on how wholly beautiful what we’d just shared was.
Then I went to the little toilet room to do some clean up.
I came back out, he wasn’t there, so I washed my hands and wandered into the bedroom.
I was still in a daze, part of me happy we waited, thinking that might have built the need, which was what made what we shared so elemental, part of me ecstatic because I knew that wasn’t true.
That was us, and it might not be that intense every single time.
But it was going to be great.
Coupled with the rest?
Suffice it to say, I’d waited fifty-three years.
But in Cade Hunter Bohannan, I’d hit the motherlode.
On this thought, it struck me he wasn’t in the bedroom.
And on that thought, he prowled in from the hall.
“What were you—?” I began to ask.
“Checking on Celeste. Fortunately, she didn’t do anything stupid,” he bit off, walking directly to his closet.
Hesitantly, I followed him.
He was dressing.
“Bohannan, what’s going on?”
“Scared parents, an incompetent sheriff and defiant kids aren’t a good mix,” he muttered.
Ah hell.
As he did up his jeans, he looked at me.
“I gotta get to the woods.”
Thirty-Nine
Abundance of Caution
There were many bonuses to living in Misted Pines and being with Cade Bohannan.
One was, after he got home from dealing with the clusterfuck that happened in the woods, he worked off his frustration by fucking you so hard facedown into the bed, if you could think (and trust me, you couldn’t, but you also didn’t want to, you just wanted to feel), you’d worry that he’d have to buy a new mattress because there would be an indelible female-shaped dent in the springs.
And two, when you showed at the hustling, droning, riled, crowded meeting in the town council chambers the next evening, even though it was standing room only, five people would exit their chairs so Bohannan and his family could be seated.
This begged a question I had not thought to ask.
Why was Bohannan such a force in that town?
It couldn’t be denied him being ex-Green Beret, ex-FBI and an expert, and even famous, profiler was cool. And I would suspect, in a small, and what seemed until recently had been a sleepy town, this would lead to him being a favorite son.
From this, I could see the local townspeople wanting a man of his experience to replace an ineffective sheriff. I could also see them wanting him to be involved in a highly charged, highly emotional set of murders.
But people scrambling to give up their seats for him and his family took that to a new level.
He accepted two men’s seats and planted Celeste’s and my asses in them.
He indicated in a way no one would deny him that the women who got up should sit their asses back down, so they did.
Then he, Jess and Jace found a spot on the wall closer to the front and claimed it, assuming identical arms-on-chests, shoulders-to-wall, scowls-on-faces positions.
Yeah, the woods thing last night was not a clusterfuck.
It was a clusterfuck.
A shots-fired, thank-God-no-one-was-hurt, deputy-on-administrative-leave clusterfuck.
An
d that was only the worst part about it, it wasn’t the only bad part about it.
The long, curved desk up front was crowded, not only with all the town council members, but with seats added so the county commissioners could sit with them.
And there was a line down the center aisle of people waiting to take the lectern because they had something to say.
A gavel was struck, and the guy sitting in the middle, who was eighty-five if he was a day, didn’t have to request in his microphone that he wanted everyone’s attention.
Upon the gavel strike, quiet swept the room.
That didn’t last long.
“We sense it’s going to be a long night,” he began.
“Yeah it is!” someone shouted.
“Ya think?” someone else shouted.
“Remove Dern!” another shout.
This started up a chant of those two words that consumed the company with somewhat frightening ease.
Dern, who was at the very end of the curve, opposite to where Bohannan was standing, sat there, face set to a fundamental fury borne of a man who’d lived his entire life seated in the lap of privilege, and his adult life wielding power that should be handled with regard solely to protection and service, but he’d considered it elsewise. Therefore, he was utterly incapable of grasping the concept he couldn’t do whatever he pleased.
That room was filled with people who wanted him out, and they were all wrong.
He was right.
A man with black hair cut and carefully arranged into a style that should have died in the eighties, sitting next to the octogenarian, shoved forward with torso and hand, moving the microphone his way.
“Order! Order!” he yelled, commandeering the gavel after a brief tussle the older gent had no hope of winning since his bone density left the building at least a decade ago. “Order!” he bellowed.
Deputies moved forward, for what reason I didn’t know, and of course jostling began.
I reached for Celeste’s hand to be prepared to make a break for it if needed, my gaze darting to Bohannan.
It did this just in time to catch him thunder, “Cut it!”
There were still titters and a few hints of elbowing, but the majority calmed down.
Yes, he was a force in this town.
“He can be a jerk, but mostly, Dad’s super cool,” Celeste muttered under her breath proudly, yet sulkily.
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