‘Lee,’ she said and staggered back. Blaser lunged out to snatch her so that she wouldn’t collapse to the floor. ‘He’s picking off my patients. Why…? Why would…? I can’t…’
‘Take your time,’ Blaser said, guiding her back to the bed. Colt was now on her other side and Ruger was with them. It was good to have support, but through her shock she couldn’t form words or coherent thoughts.
‘Why would he do this?’
‘I don’t know,’ Colt said.
Then she remembered what he’d said in her office. ‘You know who it is,’ she said, with a burn of anger. ‘If you know… you could have stopped this. You let this happen!’
‘This isn’t his fault,’ Ruger said, jumping to his brother’s defence when not too long ago they were trying to knock each other’s teeth out.
‘No,’ Colt said. ‘She’s right. I should have watched him tonight instead of going to the club. I should have known that this was a possibility.’
He turned to leave and she went after him, wanting to know what his intentions are. ‘Where are you going?’ she asked.
‘To talk to Hoburn,’ Colt said. ‘I’m telling him everything, and we’re going to get this guy.’
‘You’re going to have him arrested?’ Lyssa asked.
‘We’re going to come up with a game plan,’ Colt said. ‘And one way or another, yeah, we’re getting him off the streets.’
Then without further explanation, or revealing the identity of his suspect, Colt disappeared from Blaser’s apartment and she knew that she’d go the rest of the night without him and with nothing but unanswered questions.
Ruger had run off after Colt, which suited her fine because someone had to make sure the big lug didn’t hurt himself just because he was peeved. Though that didn’t discount the possibility that Ruger would be the one to hurt him. For a while she’d tried to get Blaser to talk, but he’d ended up dismissing her with a grunt and retiring to his bedroom after insisting that she go to hers.
Archie was in her bedroom at home, so she took herself up to Colt’s bed and tried to rest. What she wanted was to hear from Colt and to find out that they had arrested the person responsible for hurting two of her patients. But when the phone rang the distressed voice on the other end of the line wasn’t Colt’s.
‘Suzie?’ Lyssa asked, sitting up in bed. Daylight was already penetrating the curtains, but she felt like she was ready to be going to bed, not getting up.
‘He left me,’ Suzette sniffed on the other end of the line and began to sob.
‘What? What are you talking about?’
‘Pete, he left me, he said he didn’t want to be with me.’
‘No!’ Lyssa gasped and her hand covered her mouth. Her friend had lost the man she loved because that man didn’t appreciate their friendship. Yes, there was an argument to be made that a man should accept his partner’s friends, but there was also an argument to be made that those friends shouldn’t endanger their friend’s life and liberty.
‘I’m coming over to your place. I need to talk. My whole life is a mess!’
‘No, don’t,’ Lyssa said. ‘I mean, don’t go to mine because I’m not there. I’m at Colt’s.’
‘Colt’s?’ Suzette sniffed. ‘Is he laughing at me?’
‘Why would be laugh at you?’ Lyssa asked. ‘He’s not here, he’s out with Ruger. Come over here and we’ll talk.’
‘Ok.’
Lyssa gave Suzette the address and spoke to her friend until she was sure that Suzette was in a taxi. Although she tried to hang up it was obvious to her that Suzette didn’t want to say goodbye. Either she didn’t want to engage in small talk with the driver, or she didn’t want to be alone. It was still early enough that the cab would miss the morning traffic, and late enough that it would also miss the nightlife breaking up.
The drive took about ten minutes and the women didn’t hang up until Lyssa opened the door to see a dejected Suzette at the door. ‘Oh, honey,’ Lyssa said, hanging up her phone and pulling Suzette into her arms.
The hug opened up Suzette’s tear ducts again and the sobbing recommenced at full force. Lyssa managed to manoeuvre her friend inside and to the couch, where she held her as she cried. When it seemed to be lessening, Lyssa hazarded a question.
‘What happened?’
‘We were arguing, all night, he wanted to know where I’d been, and what was going on. So I told him. I told him everything.’
‘He wasn’t happy?’
‘To say the least,’ Suzette said, she slumped back on the couch and Lyssa measured her distress level.
Her body was tense and her eyes were bloodshot, it was obvious that she hadn’t slept. ‘You need to get some rest before we try to process this.’
‘Do you think that’s it? That he’s going to dump me for good?’
‘What did he say?’
‘That he’d been working late again and he was looking forward to coming home to me, and… he was really scared when I wasn’t at home.’
‘He was worried for your safety or did he suspect you of something untoward?’ Lyssa asked.
‘I don’t know, he just seemed really… hurt.’
Taking both of her hands, Lyssa pulled Suzette up off the couch. ‘Then maybe when he calms down the two of you can talk about this properly and come to some sort of compromise. He wouldn’t have asked you to marry him if he didn’t love you, would he?’
‘Maybe I pushed him too far. I knew he wasn’t wild about me hanging out with you, and he doesn’t like the idea of Colt and his brothers.’
‘Why not?’ Lyssa asked.
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. He just thinks they’re no good.’
‘He doesn’t know them,’ Lyssa said, feeling her own defensive impulses kicking in. ‘He hasn’t met any of them, why would he think—‘
‘Maybe it’s the strip joint thing, I don’t know.’
From the way her friend sighed, Lyssa knew it would be unfair of her to pressure Suzette into revealing more about her conversations with Pete. So she walked backward, bringing Suzette forward, and she didn’t complain when they went into the bedroom.
‘Why don’t we lie down here and get some sleep?’ Lyssa said, pulling back the comforter and settling Suzette down. ‘I didn’t sleep too well myself either. When we wake up, we’ll talk it out, and by that time Pete should have calmed down. You can call him and invite him over, or we can go out.’
‘You could help us,’ Suzette yawned. ‘Use your mad psyche skills to bring us together again.’
Without wanting to raise false hope Lyssa smiled, and lay on the bed beside Suzette again to cuddle her. ‘We’ll see. Don’t give up yet. Even if this is the end of your relationship with Pete there are plenty of other men out there, men who will appreciate everything about you. But I think that Pete will miss you and he’ll realise that he overreacted. He loves you, Suze. He really does.’
‘I love him too.’
Suzette quickly settled now that she was in a safe space being soothed. Her friend didn’t need much in life, all Suzette wanted was to be accepted and it upset Lyssa that Pete, the man Suzette had chosen to trust, didn’t accept that about her. But it wasn’t her place to start shouting and pointing out all of Pete’s flaws, Suzette already felt in the middle. So stroking her friend’s hair, she closed her eyes telling herself that it would all work out in the end.
Chapter Twenty
‘Wow, that’s unfortunate. Two babes in your bed and you missed the whole show.’
Ruger’s voice made Lyssa crack open one eye to reveal him and Colt standing at the end of the bed. The sun was shining now and the noises from outside, namely Blaser’s garage, told her that the world was now awake and active.
‘Hi,’ she whispered, focusing on Colt. ‘Are you tired?’
‘I’m tired,’ Ruger said. ‘Are you going to invite me into that bed?’
‘As long as you promise not to touch anything that doesn’t belong to you,’ Lyssa said, shi
fting away from Suzette. She left her friend sleeping and crept out of the bed, taking Colt’s hand and leading him out of the bedroom.
‘Stay here,’ Colt commanded Ruger, who did actually sit on the edge of the bed to take off his boots.
Suzette would no doubt sleep for a while yet, she’d had a difficult night and a draining experience, so if Ruger wanted to lie down and close his eyes for twenty minutes she would never know any different. Ruger would never dream of violating a sleeping woman anyway so Lyssa had no worries where that was concerned.
The first thing that Lyssa did was take Colt to the couch, sit him down, and crawl into his lap. ‘You do look tired,’ she said, stroking his face and kissing him. ‘I was worried about you.’
‘I was with Hoburn.’
‘Did you tell him about your suspicions?’
‘Yes,’ Colt said. ‘We spent the night trying to put the pieces together. He shared details about last night’s crime scene and it was disturbing.’
‘What was disturbing about it?’ she asked. ‘It wasn’t the same as Bobby? It wasn’t a shot from the street?’
‘No,’ Colt said. ‘The police are going to come over here later. Hoburn is talking to his superiors as we speak and they’re going to try and persuade the DA to let them arrest the suspect.’
‘You don’t sound convinced?’
‘Last night’s murder, Lee, it was setup to look like a suicide. The perpetrator must have been in the room, in Lee’s home. But the forensic team haven’t turned up anything yet. No fibres or fingerprints. They think it happened fast.’
‘If there’s no evidence that anyone else was there, what makes you think that it wasn’t suicide?’ she asked. As his doctor she would hope to have recognised suicidal tendencies in Lee, and she hadn’t. But he had just found out that his wife was having an affair, and that could have upset him more than she realised.
‘The body was moved,’ Colt said. ‘Posed to look like suicide, the signs are subtle, but they’re there.’
‘His wife was having an affair,’ she said. ‘You’ll need to talk to her lover.’
‘I can do that off the record, but I don’t have the authority to take an official statement from anyone anymore. For now we’ll just have to hope that Hoburn can do his job.’
‘I think a part of me wants this to be a horrible coincidence,’ she confessed. ‘I hate the idea that Lee is gone, but if it was suicide then it wasn’t my fault, at least it was my fault in a different way… my fault for not recognising how distressed he was.’
‘None of this was your fault,’ he said, cupping her face and bringing their lips together. ‘Even if we’re right and both patients were killed by the person obsessed with you, that doesn’t make it your fault. You are a victim in this too and I don’t want to hear you blaming yourself.’
‘Why would he hurt my patients?’ she asked. ‘It makes no sense to me at all. I care about my patients, of course I do, but if he really wanted to hurt me then why doesn’t he go after Suzette, or you?’
‘I don’t know,’ Colt said. ‘But I’ve been thinking about the note on the flowers he left at the club. I’ve got some security gear left from the things that Pinch gave us. I set up most of it at your house, but I can put a camera on the back door of Risqué later. Blaser has spoken about doing it before, but because it’s just employees’ back there, he didn’t like the idea that they’d think he was spying on them. But we’re dealing with a different ballgame now.’
‘I don’t want anyone else to get hurt,’ she said. ‘What do you think the note means?’
‘He’s talking about me,’ Colt said. ‘He somehow thinks that by taking out Bobby, he got one up on me.’
‘That doesn’t make sense.’
‘Maybe not to us, but…,’ Colt said. ‘I think he’s trying to clean up for you. He wants to show you how resourceful he is in fixing your problems.’
‘My problems? Bobby wasn’t a problem for me.’
‘Not by your reckoning, but Hoburn and I talked it out. If he somehow knew about the fight in your office, or knew that Bobby was shouting his mouth off about you sleeping with patients. Maybe the stalker was trying to cover for you; he thought he was taking care of a person who could cause problems for you.’
‘And what about Lee? He didn’t accuse me of sleeping with patients.’
‘Not that we know of,’ Colt said. ‘But we’ll have to wait and find out what Hoburn turns up. If he finds out something about Lee, or about your connection to him, we might be enlightened as to why your stalker chose him to fixate on.’
‘Who is going to be next?’ she asked, shaking her head. ‘I have to shut down my practice until this is over. It’s too much of a risk to have contact with patients when anything they do or say about our sessions could result in them being murdered.’
‘I don’t like to give in to bullies and I don’t like to see you surrender,’ Colt said. ‘But it might make sense. I don’t have the resources to watch and protect all of your patients at all times, and Hoburn won’t be able to convince his superiors of the need to do it. I know that for sure, trust me, I’ve been there.’
‘I know that you’re doing all that you can,’ she said, finger combing his hair. ‘I’m happy that you’re back home safely.’
‘I missed you as well,’ he said, kissing the edge of her lips.
Tucking her head under his chin, she let her body loosen and appreciated just being in his arms. ‘I love you too, by the way,’ she said, with a burgeoning smile.
‘What?’
‘You said you loved me last night and I’m telling you that I love you too.’ Lifting her head, she looked him in the eye. ‘I don’t believe in withholding my emotions, so I want to be honest with you. I love you.’
‘I didn’t realise that I’d said it.’
‘I’m glad that you did,’ she said. Resting her weight forward, their mouths met again, and with a deep inhale his hands came up into her hair to cradle her head.
With everything that was going on it maybe wasn’t right that she was so aroused by his proximity and by their declaration. But there was also a part of her that wanted to recognise the value in what they shared. Lee had his life stolen from him before he had the chance to fix his relationship with the woman that he loved. Bobby’s life was taken from him before he could appreciate what it was to be loved and to accept that love without suspicion.
Sliding her hands up under her tee-shirt, she retreated enough to pull it off over her head. The only thing she wore now was her lace panties, and the sight of her nakedness had Colt glancing over the back of the couch toward the bedroom.
‘There’s not a chance I’m letting him see this,’ Colt said, encompassing her in his arms and flipping her onto her back on the couch to cover her form with his.
Their position gave him the advantage and she was reminded of this fact when he linked their fingers and pinned her hands by her head so that he could lick and suckle at her chest. Want and need swirled inside her and she couldn’t manage to keep the wanton pleasure from bubbling and sparking at the contact he made. Breathing out his name at the same time he tugged off his own tee-shirt, the warmth of his flesh landing on hers made her exhale a moan and he kissed her to conceal this mischievous union.
His regard for sanity seemed to be gone when the crackle of shredding fabric split the air, and when he stopped kissing her a length of cotton went over her mouth, which he tied in a tight knot at the side of her head.
‘You better be damn quiet,’ he said, dragging his lips over her jaw and down to her throat. ‘I don’t want any interruptions this time. I need to fuck you more than I need my next breath.’ His fingertips ran all over her body, he kissed each breast and rubbed his face against each mound, growling out his own appreciation of this form he was going to take advantage of. ‘Any objections?’ This was the first time his eyes met hers, and as soon as she shook her head, they went back to admiring her body. ‘Good, because it’s fucking time I took ow
nership of what’s mine.’
His jeans were gone in a flash then he tore the lace from her crotch and threw it over the back of the couch. The gag meant she couldn’t question him, but when his head disappeared between her thighs, she lost all desire to second guess him.
The spikes of pleasure buried deep into her with every tickle of his tongue. The pace of the tip sped up on her clit, then his fingers sunk into her, two of them and he began to fuck her with his digits. All of her wriggling in the world couldn’t shake him from his task, he was a man determined. The cascade of orgasm ripped through her with such power that the spasm clamped her gut until she thought she’d never move again.
Cries of her gratification were muffled by the gag, and she was grateful now that he’d put it in place, because she would never have managed to remain silent, he had been right about that. Pleasure still rippled over her and her head was still thrown back when the length of his shaft penetrated her core without any invitation, not that he needed one. He slid back and forth, fondling her breasts and stroking her body. Each of his murmured pleasures was accompanied by a sharp thrust that buried him deeper.
Rising up to meet his motion, they settled into a rhythm and their eyes locked. His satisfaction was so obvious that the fire of pride stoked her own yearning. He wanted her and valued her, and she returned those feelings tenfold. He was right that she was owned by him and it was what she wanted because while she was owned by him, she was safe, he’d make sure of that.
Their rhythm increased and he snatched her hips to drive in with a bruising force that made her whimper, but he was somewhere else now, his mind was gone, and gritting his teeth he hissed to hide his own climax, then shoved into her one last time.
Both of them exhaled when he pulled off her gag and he lowered onto her, switching their positions so that he could hold her on top of him without crushing her under his weight. But their bliss was short-lived, a scream came from the bedroom and it wasn’t one of desire.
‘I think Suzette just woke up,’ she whispered and kissed his chest.
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