Buried Passion: M/M Mpreg Alpha Male Romance (Never Too Late Book 1)

by Aiden Bates

  Nick picked up his sandwich, and then he put it down again. "I don't know. I've never thought about it before." He squirmed. "I'm a little concerned, maybe. I mean, are you going to be able to be objective if we come across a case that involves foster kids?"

  Ryan rolled his eyes and pushed his plate away. "You come from a long line of cops. Are you going to be able to be objective if we come across a case that involves cops behaving badly? Or alphas acting out? Or people with a stick up their ass?"

  Nick snarled. "That's not the same thing and you know it."

  "It's exactly the same thing. You being bigoted about my background doesn't change that." He signaled the waiter. "Can I get this wrapped up please?"

  Nick glared at Ryan and finished his lunch. He wasn't going to give in to his temporary partner's tantrum and let him ruin lunch. The rest of the meal passed in silence, and Ryan didn't say a word for the entire ride back out to Framingham either.

  Back at headquarters, Ryan took a pile of binders back to his desk in Abused Persons to try to tease out possible connections. Nick stayed at his own desk and tried to go through binders of his own, but he had to admit that he was stymied by the confrontation.

  "You look like you ate too many prunes." Langer pushed his chair over to Nick's desk and leaned in, green eyes twinkling.

  "Aren't you sweet, to be so concerned about my diet?" Nick thumped his hands on his desk. "I'm still pissed about having to work with Ryan, man. It's never going to work out."

  "Seriously? You guys got through the binders in record time. Why don't you think it's going to work out?" Langer picked up the broken Mag Lite on Nick's desk and unscrewed it.

  "Dude was in foster care." Nick squirmed, crossing his arms over his chest. "I asked him about it, and he got all pissy."

  Langer gave him a knowing look. "Okay. Did you ask him about it, as in wanting to get to know him and his story? Or were you all kinds of accusatory?"

  "Well, I mean, you know how these things usually work out!" Nick sat back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. "They've got grudges, they've got issues—"

  "That would've come up before now. You're better than this, Nick. What's really going on?" Langer grabbed his wrist and shook it. "Talk to me, man. Work with me."

  Nick groaned. Damn Longer and his hippy crap, anyway. "He doesn't follow our procedures. Yes, the foster care thing is going to be an issue for me. Or at least, I think it should be an issue for me. He's smart as hell, but he doesn't seem to be following any kind of methodology."

  "And he's hot." Langer chuckled. "You can't keep your eyes off of him."

  "You wouldn't be able to either, if you were the one stuck working with him. That might be better, actually. You'd work well together. You'd get along." Nick scowled and turned back to his binder.

  Langer snorted. "That's what's really eating you. You're not getting along, and you can't get him off your mind."

  "We don't have to be friends, Langer. He just has to follow instructions."

  "He doesn't, though." Langer shook his head. "I mean, there's some degree of procedure that he has to follow, like he has to use the binders and stuff, but he was brought in here for a reason. And it wasn't because you need a junior detective."

  Nick felt a muscle under his eye twitch. "That's not how it works, man."

  "It is, though. He has something to offer. Yeah, we're alphas, but we have to put that aside when we're on the job. We're not here to assert our dominance; we're here to get justice for these victims." He nudged Nick's shoulder. "Focus on that, man. Don't worry so much about being in charge." He put the Mag Lite back on Nick's desk. "Your light works again, by the way." He scooted back over to his own desk.

  Nick checked the light. He hadn't even noticed Langer fixing it.

  Had he been trying too hard to be in charge? He didn't think so. He'd just been focused on trying to make sure that the right things got done the right way, in the right order. Maybe, though, he needed to rethink that.

  Chapter Three

  Ryan rubbed at his face and tried to wake himself up. Analysis of the materials found with Maureen O'Neal's body confirmed that she'd died on roughly the same day as James Townsend, but there was no possible way to establish the sequence of events. The DNA on the pipe and the baseball bat found with her body showed that both had been used on Townsend, but it was going to take some time before they could hazard a guess as to which had been the actual murder weapon. They might never get there. The most that forensic science could offer right now was to say that they were both consistent with injures found on Townsend's body.

  Neither pipes nor baseball bats were exactly unusual items for South Boston in the mid-1970s. They weren't unusual for the modern era, either. They didn't eliminate any of the possible suspects.

  His phone rang, making him jump. Who the hell called someone at ten o'clock at night? A quick check of caller ID answered that question for him. Nick Robles called people at ten o'clock at night, because he hadn't just been raised by cops. He'd been raised by mounted cops, in the horse barn, and it had been the horses that had taught him manners. Ryan considered ignoring the call. He should ignore the call, because he had no obligation to answer calls that came in the middle of the night like this.

  But he wasn't going to ignore it. He didn't even make the conscious decision to take the call, just slid the green button over before he could talk himself out of it. "What's up?" He closed his eyes.

  "Ryan, it's Nick."

  "I know it's Nick." Did Nick think that working in Abused Persons required the surgical removal of half of his IQ? "I have caller ID. What's going on?"

  "Oh. I, uh, I couldn't sleep. I figured maybe we could talk about the case." He cleared his throat. "I know you're awake."

  "Well, I did answer the phone and all." Ryan let his eyes fly open. "How do you know I'm awake?"

  "I can see your lights are on. I'm parked outside your house."

  Ryan hung up the phone and went to the door. He could see Nick's Ford sitting there in one of the parking spots outside his front door, just like he'd said. Ryan pressed his lips together and flung his arms out.

  Nick got out of his car and grabbed his briefcase, a little smile playing around the corners of his mouth. "At least we can work on the case together," he said.

  Ryan glowered, but let Nick into the house. "Because this isn't at all creepy. The part where you're sitting outside my house like some kind of creeper."

  Nick tilted his head to the side and looked up at the ceiling. "Okay. It's a little creepy, but I didn't mean for it to be. We haven't gotten together in person to talk about the case in a while and I thought it would be good for us to do that. So I headed over before I could talk myself out of it."

  Ryan forced himself to unclench his muscles. That was probably about as close to an apology as he would ever get out of Nick. "So you figured you'd just kind of come hang out on my couch?" He grabbed his laptop and his papers from the dining table and brought them into the living room. "All right. I've got coffee and cookies."

  "I'll pass on the coffee. I might want to try to get some sleep later on. What kind of cookies you got?"

  "Basic sugar cookies this time." He grabbed them from the cookie jar and stuck them on a plate. "What's eating at you about the case?"

  Nick put his coat on the back of a chair before taking a seat on the couch. "There's a lot that's eating at me about the case. We've got two dead kids, one of whom has a record with DCF, and we have it all against the backdrop of some kind of ugly stuff in the neighborhood."

  Ryan tapped a cheap pen against his notepad. "That backdrop is the key. It has to be. You can't convince me that an interracial relationship in the middle of the busing crisis isn't going to raise a few problems for the two people involved." He chewed on the end of the pen and looked down at the image on his laptop screen. He'd have looked at anything, even autopsy photos, to not see Dan's image before his eyes anymore.

  Nick scoffed. "Okay, sure, some problems. Ma
ybe some nasty comments. This is Boston, not Birmingham. They don't kill people over that kind of thing." He squirmed.

  Ryan glared. Nick should know better. "It only takes one person to get his rage on about who's allowed to sleep with whom." He chewed on the pen again. "Townsend's sister is still alive. She lives in South Carver now. None of the notes taken by investigators at the time have any indication that anyone asked about threats or anyone hassling her or James about his relationship with Maureen. Rosa was the one who reported Maureen missing."

  Nick frowned, wrinkling his forehead. "That's just weird, man. Why wouldn't they ask her about those things?"

  "I don't know." Ryan put the pen down. If he chewed on it much more, he'd chew right through it. "Maybe she was so distraught that they didn't feel comfortable asking her a bunch questions. But you know what we can do?"

  "Head down to Carver tomorrow and ask." Nick gave him a grudging smile. "Isn't it Saturday?"

  "So? She'll be home then, and not at work." Ryan turned the page. "I found a few other people that they spoke to. We've got a couple of guys that used to date Maureen, a couple of girls that used to date James, and a handful of neighborhood toughs who just didn't want—er, black people—in that neighborhood." He cringed at the word used in the original text.

  Nick nodded slowly. "My money's on the ex-boyfriends, honestly. You were right about the flowers." He looked at the wall instead of at Ryan. "I shouldn't have flown off the handle. The flowers were a big clue. Whoever buried her in that old powder storage facility wanted her laid to rest properly, even if they killed her. I don't see random local toughs or some of Townsend's exes doing that."

  "No." Ryan had to fight off a grin. "No, I don't see that happening at all."

  "There's more, though." Nick pulled Maureen O'Neal's binder out of his briefcase. The binder was considerably thicker than it had been when Ryan left the office. "I did a little bit of poking around. The O'Neals were one of the first families to pull their kids out of the school in Southie when the judge ordered that kids get bused."

  Ryan made a face. "Okay. That's distasteful. I mean it's distasteful to me, now, looking back through the lens of forty years and the thorough eradication of disco from the national psyche. But at the time? Okay, they were early adopters. We can't make judgments about them as suspects because they did something that most other families in South Boston did." He squirmed in his seat. "They did find Townsend's body across the street from the family's shop."

  "The flowers don't have to be from an ex." Nick shuddered. He stood up and started to pace, face creased with anxiety. "I'm not going to say that I haven't seen some screwed up family stuff, you know? We see all kinds of stuff on the job, right?"

  "That's kind of my stock in trade." Ryan raised his eyebrows.

  "Yeah. I just… family's supposed to trump everything. It's the basic building block of our society." He rubbed at that back of his neck. "It bugs me when I get a case and it turns out to be a family member. Like on a level you wouldn't believe."

  Ryan grimaced. "I guess I'm a little inured to it. Still, the fact that they can't be eliminated as suspects doesn't mean that they're guilty." He stood up and put a hand on Nick's arm.

  Nick stilled immediately and turned to meet Ryan's eyes. For a second, Ryan couldn't breathe. Nick hadn't been all that nice to him, or even very professional, but right now all Ryan could think about was the heat from Nick's body and the anise scent that radiated from his pores.

  Neither of them said anything for a good minute. Then Nick stepped back. His pupils seemed to be larger in their green orbs, but Ryan might have been imagining it too. "Yeah. Yeah, we shouldn't jump to conclusions. We should make a plan to go talk to them."

  "Maybe during the week." Ryan tried to moisten his lips without being obvious about it. "I think that would be good. They've got the shop, so we know roughly where they'll be."

  "Good point." Nick backed toward the chair with his jacket. "Thanks for letting me come by and talk it out. I really appreciate it."

  He grabbed his jacket and a couple of cookies, and then he fled Ryan's condo so fast that his pants might have been on fire. He even left his notes and Maureen O'Neal's binder behind.

  Ryan turned off most of the lights and headed upstairs. Lord only knew who else might take it into their head to show up at his house uninvited. Ryan didn't mind a little company now and again, but tonight wasn't one of those times. His conversation with Nick had shaken him up; he needed time to fortify himself.

  Intellectually, he knew that part of him would never really be over Dan. Dan had been Ryan's alpha. They'd been in love, the world had been their oyster, and the only thing that had stopped Dan from claiming Ryan was the fact that they were both still in college and they didn't want to risk pregnancy.

  There wasn't a day that went by when Ryan didn't regret that hesitation. Pregnancy would have been a disaster, sure. And Ryan would have died not long after Dan, wasting away after his alpha was cut down. Still, it would have been better than living with the guilt.

  He still kept a picture of Dan on his nightstand. Tonight, as he crawled into bed, he brushed his fingertips over the glass that protected his lover's handsome face. Could Ryan work this case with any kind of objectivity, if there was even the most remote possibility that Maureen's family had killed her?

  He'd have to. He'd worked other cases where family members had hurt or killed one of their own because of their dating choices before, and there hadn't been a problem. It was only the racial component that was triggering him now. If it was family, and he had no reason to think that it had been them, he'd seen plenty of cases where race hadn't played a role in the murder at all. More often than not, the victim had been killed simply for having sex outside of marriage at all, rather than for being with someone of another race.

  Either way, there were plenty of other suspects whose motive would be solid. Tomorrow, assuming that whatever bug had crawled into Nick's ear hadn't chased him off, they would go down to Carver and talk with Rosa Townsend Acker and find out what she knew.

  He woke up to his phone buzzing the next morning at seven thirty. When he groaned and checked it, he couldn't say that he was surprised to find that the caller was Nick. "This had better be good," he growled when he answered the phone.

  "And a good morning to you too, sunshine." Nick sounded far too awake for this hour on a Saturday morning. "I spoke to Mrs. Acker. She's willing to have us come by and see her."

  Ryan sat up and rubbed at his eyes. "You're kidding. You called her at this hour? You probably woke her up. She's going to come at us with a shotgun."

  "That's not even funny."

  "I'm not even joking. I'd do it. You can't just go around waking people up or crashing their houses at all hours, Nick. You do get that while you might be some kind of weird cyborg that only needs to plug into the wall for like half an hour or whatever, the rest of us need actual sleep, right?"

  Nick chuckled. "So I guess you're not a morning person."

  "Let me guess. You're outside my house again." Ryan flopped back onto his pillow.

  "Are you mad?" Nick sounded almost cute.

  "Furious. At the same time, I don't have to travel quite so far to kick your ass." He sat up again. "I need to shower and stuff."

  "I can wait." Nick hesitated. "I brought coffee."

  Ryan hopped out of bed. Damn it. Had it really been so long that just the sound of Nick's voice could get him hard? He couldn't leave Nick out in the cold, but not even his baggy pajamas would hide this. Did he still have a bathrobe somewhere? "Awesome. I'll be right down to let you in. Just gimme a second." He hung up and scrounged until he found his bathrobe, a ratty old thing that he'd had since college. Then he scurried downstairs.

  He hoped that Nick wouldn't attribute his rush back to the shower to anything but his own morning surliness and ran back upstairs as fast as he could. Once there, he took his time in the shower, and took care of his embarrassing morning wood as well. It didn't mean
anything. It was just sexual frustration, coupled with his own grief and the misery of the case. That was all.

  Once he was done, he threw on something vaguely professional and ran back downstairs. Nick looked up at him. He'd put Maureen's binder back in his briefcase, and now he stood, ready to leave. "I don't think I've ever seen so many baking cookbooks in one place." He gestured to Ryan’s extensive collection.

  Ryan accepted Nick's proffered cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee and followed him out the door. "Everyone needs a hobby. Besides, how do you think I put myself through college?"

  Nick lifted his eyebrows in surprise. "Baking?"

  "Sure. Worked in a bakery all four years at Northeastern." He pushed the memory away. "I mean, I had scholarships and some grants too, but not a free ride."