by Paula Graves
Bolling was silent for a long moment. “Obviously, even if I were looking into any allegations about any of the Whittier family, I couldn’t discuss it with anyone outside the investigation without departmental sanction.”
Which meant they were suspicious that the Whittiers might be involved in something at the very least shady, but they were under strong pressure to keep it under wraps—and maybe even sit on the investigation completely.
“I understand,” she said. “Thanks for listening. You’ll let me know if you find out anything about the blue truck?”
“We’ll check it out and I’ll get back to you one way or the other.” Bolling sounded relieved that Lacey didn’t seem inclined to push him further on the question of the Whittier brothers.
He clearly didn’t know her very well.
After she hung up, she turned to look at Jim. “I think the DC police may be suspicious of the Whittier brothers.”
“What do you think they’re involved with?”
“Insider trading at the very least, although I wasn’t able to come up with proof of it. But their stock-market investments seemed to have thrived while other people were losing their life savings during the stock-market crash several years ago. It’s as if everything they touch turns to gold.”
“Well, that eventually came back to haunt old King Midas, didn’t it?”
“It did,” she said with a smile. The expression felt strange on her face, as if her skin was about to crack from the unfamiliar strain.
He moved closer to her, one hand lifting hesitantly to her face. When she didn’t pull away, he brought his other hand up to cradle her jaw between his palms. “Tell me what you want to do now.”
She stared up at him, surprised by the question itself, and the intensity of his gaze as he asked it. Nobody had asked her that question since Marianne and Toby had died, she realized. Not her employers, not Marianne and Toby’s attorney, not the social worker who’d helped her get custody of Katie, not even her sister’s friends who’d shown up for the funeral. They’d told her what was going to happen, how things should go, what she should do and what she shouldn’t.
But nobody had once asked her what it was that she wanted to do.
“I want to find out who did this heinous thing,” she answered bluntly. “I want to make them pay. I want them in jail or dead and posing no more danger to me or Katie. That’s what I want.”
His lips curved in a whisper of a smile. “Then let’s make that happen.”
For a long moment, he gazed down at her, his expression a promise she wanted to grasp with both hands and hold on to for dear life. She hadn’t realized how much she’d needed someone to listen to her, to believe she could find justice for Marianne and Toby, instead of telling her to keep her head down and let the professionals do the job for her.
She was a professional, damn it. She might not be trained in law-enforcement procedures, but she knew about ferreting out hidden truths in desperately dangerous places. She had an advantage the police didn’t. She was the intended victim, and she knew herself and her history better than anyone else in the world.
His gaze shifted, drifting down to her lips. Heat flooded her body, head to toe, as she let her own gaze dip to his mouth. She imagined his lips moving over hers, teasing her with whisper-soft kisses, coaxing a response she knew she wouldn’t be able to resist.
She waited for him to realize just what sort of tense heat was building between them. Surely he would move away, murmur some soft excuse or maybe make a little joke to snap the tension.
But he moved closer instead, his breath hot on her lips. She told herself to be the one to back away, to act with good sense, to make the tension-breaking joke.
Instead, she stepped closer, closing the heated space between them, lifting to her toes as he threaded his fingers through the hair at the back of her head and tugged her into his arms.
He brushed his lips against hers, the faintest of caresses that left her aching for more. He teased her with another soft kiss, a little nip at her bottom lip with his mouth that promised amazing things.
She curled her fingers into the hard steel of his shoulder muscles and pulled him closer, needing to feel the slide of his body against hers. He wrapped one long arm around her waist, guiding her closer as he took her mouth in a long, thorough kiss.
She was drowning in him, in his kiss, in the way his hard body moved with sensual intent against hers. She felt something press hard into her buttocks and realized he’d edged her back against the desk.
The desk where her dead brother-in-law’s computer held a disk detailing his gruesome death, along with her sister’s.
Cold rushed in, as if someone had opened a floodgate to let in a torrent of icy water. She stiffened against Jim’s body, and he let her go, taking a step back from her.
She gazed at him, pushing one shaky hand through her hair. She tried to think of something to say, maybe that awkward joke she’d been planning before they’d acted on the fierce heat roiling between them.
But she could come up with nothing.
“Not the right time, huh?” Jim managed a smile that looked as uncertain as she felt.
“No.”
“I should check on Katie. She should be waking up from her nap soon.”
Lacey nodded, afraid to move for fear her wobbly knees would betray her. “Okay. I’ll take these disks up to my office and finish watching there, so Katie doesn’t see or hear anything...” She let her words trail off, pain throbbing in her throat.
“Okay.” Jim started to leave, but he stopped and turned back to face her. “I should probably apologize for what just happened and promise never to let it happen again. But I’m not sure I’d mean it.”
She didn’t know what to say in response. She could hardly disagree, because she didn’t feel very sorry about it herself. Nor could she promise she’d never give in to her desires again.
His lips curving slightly at the corners, he left the room, taking all the air with him.
Lacey gripped the edge of the desk until her trembling limbs could hold her, then she grabbed the disks, including the one in the computer, and headed upstairs to the locked room on the second floor.
She wasn’t sure which images were going to haunt her more, the merciless videos of the aftermath of the car bomb or the gentle, tender way Jim had soothed away some of the pain with his tempting kisses.
She stopped at the locked door, looking down at the disks she held in her hand. She’d seen terrible things in her life, in her career as a reporter. Aftermaths of deaths just as brutal as the ones that had claimed her sister and brother-in-law.
She could handle this. For Katie’s sake, for Marianne’s and Toby’s, she would handle it. The truth about what had really happened that night, and at whose hands it had come to pass, might be there in those videos, waiting for the right person to see the right thing and make the right connection.
She would be that person. She had to.
Jim had told her she could do it. He’d made her believe it.
Pulling her key from her pocket, she inserted it into the dead-bolt lock and gave it a turn. It seemed to stick for a second before the lock disengaged. She then inserted a thin piece of metal into the small hole in the doorknob to disengage the knob’s lock, feeling a little silly as she did so. If the dead bolt wasn’t enough to keep someone from getting into the room, the doorknob lock certainly wouldn’t.
Closing the door behind her, she stood still a moment in front of the doorway, taking in the whiteboard and the words printed across its surface.
Nothing seemed out of place, but she had a strange feeling that something in the room was different.
She walked slowly to the desk, where her laptop sat closed on its dented, well-worn surface. Setting the DVDs next to the computer, she lifted the lid of th
e laptop and looked at the screen. It was the same lock screen as usual. Nothing different.
Except...
It was a faint scent she could smell over the general mustiness of the room, she realized. Crisp soap. Heady musk. Clean and masculine.
It smelled like Jim.
Chapter Ten
Katie was restless and fussy after her nap, refusing the peanut-butter crackers Jim offered her and throwing her sliced carrot pieces onto the floor with her cup of milk. He gave up on trying to coax her to eat, recognizing her mood for what it was—a child’s uncanny ability to sense tension in the adults around her.
Instead, he took her back into the parlor and sat in the old rocking chair with her on his lap, humming an old Marine Corps marching cadence under his breath until she’d stopped fussing and settled down for a cuddle.
He had worse luck trying to calm his own restless nerves. What the hell had he been thinking, kissing Lacey that way? He had been behaving like a teenage boy who didn’t have a clue how to control his raging hormones. She was his boss, for Pete’s sake!
And he was supposed to be protecting her and Katie, not trying to charm his way into Lacey’s bed. He was damn fortunate she hadn’t fired him on the spot.
She wanted you, too, a rebellious voice whispered in his ear.
Maybe so, but she, at least, had been wise enough to get her desires under control and put a stop to what was happening.
Between his growing guilt about his own lies of omission, Lacey’s ongoing grief and anxiety, and whatever emotions and desires had fueled their make-out session in the office a little while earlier, there were a whole lot of conflicted vibes for poor Katie to pick up on these days. Maybe he should try to get her out of the house for a while. They could play in the park in Cherry Grove for an hour or so, then maybe grab takeout at the diner to bring home for dinner.
Lacey came down the stairs, pausing at the landing to look at him cuddling Katie, one golden eyebrow lifted. “I thought she just got up from her nap?”
“We’re just de-stressing,” he said lightly. “In fact, I was thinking I could take her into town, to the park. There are some swings there, and places for her to run and play. What do you say? I could grab us something to eat for dinner when we’re done.”
The look of relief on Lacey’s face made his gut clench. Clearly, she was happy to get rid of him for a while. Was she working up to firing him altogether?
“That’s a good idea. I need to do a little research, and I can probably get more done by myself. Be sure to bundle her up—it’s cold out there.”
“Will do,” he said with a smile that made his face feel as if it were about to crack.
The day had warmed enough for the remaining patches of snow to melt, but the higher temperatures would be long gone by dark. If the local weather forecasters were right, they’d see more snow before the end of the week. Jim liked a good snowball fight as much as the next kid from western North Carolina, but snowfall made his job protecting Lacey and Katie a little harder, especially if it managed to knock out the power.
He took the opportunity to call Alexander Quinn from the car, catching him up on what he’d learned while watching the crime-scene video with Lacey, leaving out the part about the kiss, of course.
“The insider-trading allegations are probably true,” Quinn said bluntly. “But I’m guessing there’s no way to prove it, and the Whittiers know it.”
“So you don’t think they’re likely suspects.”
“Well, they’re not obvious suspects. Let’s put it that way.”
“Most of the tabloid trash about them may or may not be true, but surely none of it is enough to inspire murder.”
“No, but I’ve just gotten my hands on a raw copy of footage from a report Lacey Miles was working on a couple of months ago.”
“Was working on?”
“My sources say that the Whittiers sicced their lawyers on the network and the report got nixed.”
“With no respect to whether the report was true or not?”
“Apparently the Whittiers weren’t the only people applying pressure. I’ll upload the video to the company cloud storage and email you the link. It’ll give you a better idea why Ms. Miles considers the Whittiers as possible suspects.”
Jim glanced in the rearview mirror. Katie was quiet in her car seat, her gaze directed out the window. Jim was using his Bluetooth headset to keep her from hearing Quinn’s side of the conversation, but she’d proved sensitive to tension, and right now, Jim’s car was chock-full of volatile emotions.
“Any chatter from al Adar around the time of the bombing?” he asked Quinn.
“No, but al Adar has learned from the mistakes of their terrorist predecessors. There was very little communication between known cells at all around the time of the bombing. Which may mean everything or nothing. We just don’t know yet.”
Jim thought about the third suspect he’d seen on Lacey’s whiteboard. “And what about J.T. Swain?”
“I’ve arranged a meeting between you and a couple of people who should be able to answer a lot of your questions about Swain. They’re going to be up in Washington on business later in the week. I’ll text you their number so you can set up the meeting. Their names are Ben and Isabel Scanlon. Ben knew J.T. Swain when they were boys, and he also spent almost a year undercover among the Swain clan, trying to bring down their criminal enterprise from the inside.”
“And lived to tell?”
“Well, he had some help from his partner in the FBI. Who happens to be his wife now.”
“Okay. I’ll give them a call.”
“You sound...strange.”
Jim grimaced. Of course a man like Quinn would pick up on even the tiniest hint of turmoil in his voice. “It’s just proving hard to keep secrets, you know?”
“You mean your real reason for taking the nanny job.”
“Yeah.”
“Is she suspicious?”
“I don’t think so.” He thought about the way Lacey had been behaving when she came back downstairs from the locked room. He had assumed her slight reserve had been about the kiss they’d shared earlier, but what if he was wrong? What if she’d somehow figured out that he’d been in her room earlier that morning?
He’d taken care to leave everything as he’d found it, and he was pretty sure she wouldn’t have been able to find a single piece of paper out of place. But even the most seasoned of operatives could make a mistake, and Jim was pretty new to the job.
Had she found something in the room that had given away his earlier presence? Was that why she was so eager to get him out of the house?
“Jim?”
“I’m here,” he said quickly. “I’m nearly at the park, so I’ll have to talk to you later.”
“Okay. Keep me apprised of everything you find out.” Quinn’s words sounded a lot like a warning.
“Will do.” Jim hung up the phone and parked in one of the slots at the edge of the green park, just a few yards away from the swings. He eased Katie from her car seat and held her hand as they walked down the gravel walkway to the swings.
“Wings!” Katie exclaimed, raising a joyous face to Jim. “Wings?”
“Yes, ma’am. We’re going to play on the swings.”
Katie tugged her hand away as they reached the swings, stopping in front of the one swing on the set that was made for toddlers, complete with a high-backed bucket seat. She lifted her arms to him and he put her in the seat and gave it a push.
“Wing!” Katie exclaimed, wriggling insistently. He took it as a plea to let her swing higher.
He gave her a little sturdier push, and the swing flew a little higher, making Katie laugh with delight.
Jim tried to relax, tried to push away the cares of his world and just enjoy this sweet, m
agic moment when he’d made a little girl laugh with simple joy.
He would find a way to protect Katie and her mercurial, fascinating aunt. Whatever it took.
* * *
SHE HAD CHASED violent warlords up the mountains of Kaziristan to obtain an interview. She had braved the icy disdain of the Connecticut neighbors while trying to gain access to Justin and Carson Whittier in hopes of getting their side of the scandalous rumors swirling around their family. She’d faced down the barely leashed violence of the ragtag remains of what had once been a brutal family of drug dealers and gunrunners.
So why was it so hard to open the door to the room she’d given Jim to use and find out what he was hiding?
She tried his door handle. It gave easily, the door creaking partially open. Lacey pressed her forehead against the door frame, debating her next move. His door wasn’t locked. He wasn’t trying to keep anyone out.
Surely that meant he didn’t have anything to hide.
Just go in there and take a look around. You’re an investigative reporter. Investigate.
She gave the door a push. It swung all the way inward, bumping lightly against the doorstop attached to the baseboard of the bedroom wall.
Inside, she found a neatly made bed—military neat, she thought. No clutter on the bedside table, just a small alarm clock next to the lamp.
She opened the top drawer of the nightstand. Drugstore-brand lip balm. A nearly full pack of breath mints. A slightly dog-eared paperback novel with a cover and title that screamed action thriller.
Nothing unexpected. Until she opened the next drawer down. Inside was a large black box that nearly filled the whole drawer. She didn’t need to open it to know what it was.
A handgun case.
It was locked, of course. A former Marine wouldn’t leave his firearm unsecured.
She didn’t find any ammunition in the nightstand drawers. But she came across several boxes of .40-caliber rounds in the middle drawer of the dresser at the foot of his bed.
Sinking onto the edge of the bed, she stared at the boxes of ammo and tried to think clearly. He was a former Marine, so of course he’d probably have a personal weapon. Probably had a concealed-carry license, as well.