by Pam Godwin
Tomas didn’t trust him. But he’d contacted him anyway, because he was the best at digging up secrets. If Rylee was hiding skeletons, Cole would find them along with every dirty person connected to her.
Eyes locked, she watched Tomas as he watched her. He hated that she knew all of his secrets. His skeletons, regrets, desires, every thought in his head. She also knew that Cole’s presence in Texas meant they’d already learned some things about her.
“You were in the desert with me?” Her gaze lost focus, her momentary spurt of awareness dwindling by the second. “I never heard the truck.”
He’d parked it out of hearing range and hiked in close enough to watch her through the scope of his rifle. Only once, he’d left her unattended to return to the house and call Cole. That was when he found Paul Kissinger on his property.
“Fine. Don’t answer me.” She weakly flexed her hand. “That man…Paul. He must be connected to you and your friends somehow. But you don’t believe that, so you put him in the desert to spy on our conversation.”
Cole leaned against the jamb of the doorway and squinted at Tomas. “What did you learn?”
She was fucking her neighbor. On the back porch, in her car, on every surface in her house.
Seeing a woman take it in the ass does something to a man.
His stomach hardened against the stirring images. “Paul monitored her for six months. She didn’t know him.”
“Didn’t?” A muscle flexed in Cole’s jaw, twitching his beard. “You killed him?”
“Like I said, he attacked her.”
Pulling the trigger hadn’t been planned. It just happened. They’d needed the son of a bitch alive to get answers. Oddly, the only regret he had about his impulsiveness was the looming task of driving back and dealing with the body.
“We could’ve pulled information from him.” Cole gripped his nape, his expression etched in frustration. “Now we don’t know who he was working for, why he was following her, or how it’s connected to us.”
“She’ll tell me.” Tomas met her eyes.
“She doesn’t know anything.” Her jaw set. She didn’t look away, fidget, or show any signs of dishonesty.
Maybe she was good at lying.
“Did you find anything on the ex-husband?” Tomas asked Cole without breaking eye contact with her.
“He’s clean. Except one thing. She has a restraining order against him.”
“Ex-husband.” Her eyelids hooded over silver pools of fatigue and anger.
There was no surprise in her expression. She’d anticipated them investigating the people in her life once they learned who she was. That was why she’d shown up without identification.
“Tell me about Mason Sutton,” Tomas said.
“He’s a jealous nuisance. Way too jealous to hire another man to watch me. Where are the keys to my truck?” She touched the catheter in her arm, likely debating the best way to yank it out.
“You’re not leaving.” He caught her probing hand, stopping her.
“You’re not keeping me here for three weeks without food.”
“What is she talking about?” Cole straightened.
“Give us a minute.” His head throbbed, magnified by exhaustion.
“No.” She twisted her wrist out of his grip. “You had your minute. You had two days, you heartless cunt.”
He’d prepared an intravenous sedative, just in case. If he restrained her to the bed, she would struggle and risk dislodging the IV.
Mostly, he just needed her to sleep so he could close his eyes for the first time in two days. He was operating on three-percent battery life and rapidly draining.
He reached toward the dangling IV bags and began the flow of the sedation drug, titrating the dose to give her just enough to relax her back into dreamland.
“What are you doing?” Her eyes widened, glazed and unfocused, trying to follow his movements.
“Who are your enemies?”
“The only enemies I’ve made are in this room. What did you do to the IV? What are you giving me?”
“I know who you are, Rylee Sutton.”
She glanced at Cole and back to him. “You should’ve talked to me instead of starving me in the desert. It would’ve saved you the trouble of calling in your friend. So what have you learned? That I’m a stupid woman, who waltzed in here alone thinking I could do some good and instead, ended up getting myself hurt? Go, Rylee. Another failure.” She exhaled a tired breath. “Look, Tommy, I’ve learned my lesson, okay? Believe me when I say I’m done. I don’t want any part of this or you. I just want to go home.”
“It’s too late for that.” He leaned over her, bracing an elbow on his knee. “You wanted me. Now you’re stuck with me.”
Tomas had reached a level of worn-out that hurt. Every muscle wanted to surrender to gravity. What he needed was sleep. Any horizontal surface would do.
But there was a corpse rotting in the desert. An unfinished conversation with Cole. An IV drip that required monitoring. An unwashed, blood-splattered woman in his bed. And too many unanswered questions.
“I’ll ask again.” He put his face in hers. “Who are your enemies?”
Her teeth ground together. “I already told you—”
“We know you’re a criminal psychologist, Rylee.” Cole gripped the upper frame of the doorway, leaning into the small bedroom. “You aid in apprehending scoundrels and testify against them in court. I’d say you make more enemies than we do.”
“Since you know my occupation, you also know that I contract for small-town law enforcement.” More teeth grinding. “I deal with petty thieves and potheads. Tracking devices are a part of your world, not mine.”
“You must be bored out of your mind.” Tomas scrutinized her bleary eyes, willing the sedative to kick in faster. “So you show up here with your fancy, underutilized degree, hoping to dissect a real criminal mind.”
Her mouth stopped grinding, her jaw falling slack. Her head lolled to the side, losing strength. Then she snapped it back, her tone deadened. “You’re the reason I chose that field of study.”
“Excuse me?”
“I went to school for criminal justice, but as I got to know you…” Her words slurred, fighting the sedation. “Your emails…changed my major.” A long, lethargic blink. “I don’t…feel…right. You…drugged…”
Next thing from her mouth was an angry, muttering exhale. Her lashes drooped over her cheekbones, and the tension visibly left her body. She was out.
Finally.
He turned off the drip of the narcotic and swapped the sodium chloride with a new bag.
“She’s taken a lot of interest in you.” Cole approached the bed.
“That’s her problem.”
“She’s making it your problem. Seems she’s in the habit of getting mixed up with the wrong men. Nine months ago, she filed a protective order against Mason Sutton. Three months later, Paul Kissinger started watching her.”
“You think Mason and Paul are connected?”
“Maybe.”
“We need eyes and ears on Mason. Find out what he knows about us.”
“I’m on it. He’s an orthopedic surgeon. Runs a booming practice. On the surface, he seems too busy to get involved with a troublesome ex-wife. What would be his motivation?”
“Jealousy. Obsession. He never remarried and has more than enough money to hire people to monitor the object of his obsession. Especially since she lives five hours away from him.” He let the weight of his head hang, fighting exhaustion. “She’s sexually involved with one of her neighbors.”
“Evan Phillips?”
“Who?”
“The single guy who lives next door to her. Divorced. Forty-something. Good-looking. Works construction. He’s collecting her mail and looking after her house while she’s on sabbatical. I’ll dig deeper, see what I can find on him.” Cole narrowed his eyes. “You look like shit. When was the last time you slept?”
“I need to deal with the stiff
in the desert.” Sleep closed in, heavy and persistent. He slumped onto his side in the narrow space next to Rylee. “In a minute.”
“The stiff can wait.” Cole rubbed his whiskers and stared at Rylee’s unconscious form. “Go grab a few hours of sleep in the other bedroom. I’ll clean her up.”
“You’re not touching her.” Christ, that came out sharper than he’d intended. He softened his voice. “This is my mess. I got it.”
“Yeah, I see that. Suit yourself.” With a grunt, Cole left the room and shut off the light. “Stubborn fuck.”
Within seconds, Tomas passed out.
He slept hard and deep, but not long. An hour maybe?
When he woke in the dark, he registered Rylee’s body pressed against the front of his. With his arm around her tiny waist and her head tucked beneath his chin, he didn’t move.
Had she rolled into him? Or had he subconsciously grabbed her to keep her from escaping?
His eyes slowly adjusted to the dimness, bringing the room into focus. A new bag hung from the IV pole. Cole must’ve slipped in and swapped out her fluids. Her boots were off her feet. Cole must’ve done that, too.
She still wore her grimy clothes and reeked of sweat and desert dirt. Or maybe the odor was coming from him.
He removed the phone from his pocket and stared at the locked screen, stunned. He’d slept three hours? Jesus.
Without waking her, he untangled himself from her soft, small body. Then he checked her vitals and headed to the bathroom.
After a quick shower, he set out bottles of water and apple juice on the nightstand, checked her breathing, and left her sleeping to go deal with his other unwanted visitor.
Cole perched on the couch in the front room, eyes glued to a laptop.
“Feeling better, princess?” The man idly flipped a black coin-sized disk back and forth between his fingers, his gaze never leaving the computer screen. “You two looked so cozy in there I didn’t want to disturb you.”
Tomas didn’t acknowledge the dig as he lowered into the armchair. “Any updates?”
“The guy she’s banging, Evan Phillips, walked through her house an hour ago. In and out in ten minutes. No other movement.”
“You think he knows something?”
“I think we can’t rule out pillow talk. If they’re fucking on the regular, she’s telling him things, sharing secrets, like how she’s been reading the incriminating ramblings of a dumbass vigilante for ten years.”
Pounding heat flared beneath his skin, his system flooding with the ire he’d been holding back for days.
“You have something to say to me, fucking say it.” He shot from the chair and stood over Cole, hands clenching. “Better yet, use your fists. You’re the one who taught me how to fight. We both know you can kick my ass. If you’re going to do it, fucking do it already!”
Cole slowly shifted his gaze from the computer screen, moved it over Tomas’ rigid stance, and stopped on his eyes.
The air thinned, and the tension in Cole’s lethal glare grew taut. Then he blinked.
“Nah.” He returned to the laptop. “You’re beating yourself up enough for the both of us.”
Irritation twitched through Tomas’ muscles. He spun away and paced the room, noticing the lack of dust on the surfaces. Cole had kept himself busy for the past few hours.
Everything that once filled these rooms had been replaced with new furnishings. Nothing remained from his childhood. No photos. No keepsakes. He’d moved it all to the Milton house and burned it.
His mother’s home and the land it sat on was the only tether he allowed himself to keep.
“I was seventeen when I sent the first email.” Tomas paused at the kitchen table and rubbed his brow. “It started out harmless. Just the words of a boy who missed his dead girlfriend.”
After his mother died, he’d spent two weeks alone in this house. That time in his life left a black hole in his memory, the grief more than he could bear. The only thing he could recall was his urgency to leave, to go somewhere, to be anywhere but here. So he’d left.
“Two weeks after my mother was put in the ground, I drove east. Ended up in Austin.” He laughed hollowly. “A small-town kid in a big city. I’d never seen anything like it. So many tall buildings, flashing lights, loud noises, and the people… Christ, they were everywhere, packed together on the streets in every size, color, and creed. I was so fucking out of my element. It’s no wonder I didn’t last a week.”
“That’s when Van captured you?”
“I was easy prey. A young, naive boy with a decent physique and no sense of danger, wandering the streets, utterly lost.” Lost in life. “I walked right up to Van’s car and asked for directions. Next thing I knew, I was chained in his attic.”
“No one blames you for continuing the emails after your captivity. If writing to her was therapeutic…”
“She was the only one I could talk to. A dead girl. I know that’s fucked up. I knew it then, too. But it kept me sane.” He released a slow breath and turned to face Cole. “I fucked up when I started writing about you and the team. As much as I covered my tracks and meticulously monitored the account, it was still reckless. Fucking careless. And I’m paying for it now.”
“Maybe it’s not as bad as it seems.” Cole typed something on his laptop. “I hacked into the neighbor’s home network. Look at this.”
He joined Cole on the couch as the image of a shockingly gorgeous woman filled the screen.
His heart stopped, and his breath fell on a gobsmacked groan. “Holy fuck.”
“Yeah. There’s more.” Cole flipped from one photo to the next, each candid snapshot of Rylee Sutton more intoxicating than the last. “She’s not on social media. These photos are from Evan Phillips’ personal computer. All of them. We’re talking hundreds of pictures just of her.”
Completely enraptured, Tomas couldn’t look away from the screen, his gaze greedily feasting on her flawless features, the glossy shine of her brown hair, those sexy full lips, gleaming silver eyes, the healthy glow of her porcelain skin, and the curves of her exquisitely toned body in a glittery dress, a tiny swimsuit, obscenely short shorts—
Cole snapped the lid of the laptop closed, breaking the trance.
“Christ.” Tomas cleared his throat, trying not to imagine her naked and failing miserably.
“That battered woman in your bedroom is undeniably attractive. But when she’s healthy?” Cole made a whistling sound. “She’s the kind of beautiful that makes a man do crazy, desperate shit.”
No shit. The last time Tomas had such a gripping, ravenous reaction to a woman was…never.
And he wasn’t the only one. Paul Kissinger should’ve used the last of his energy to find water and survive the desert. Instead, he’d circled back and forced himself on her. A stupid fucking move but at the same time, sickeningly understandable for a guy who’d been ogling her through his binoculars for six months.
“Maybe,” Cole said, “we’re dealing with something as simple as an infatuated lover. Could be the ex-husband or the neighbor or some random hookup who’s feeling extra possessive of a beautiful woman.”
That didn’t sit well with him. He’d rather Rylee be a person to blame, not a victim. “Does the neighbor have pictures of other women?”
“No.”
“Did you come across compromising photos of Rylee?”
“None. No sex tapes or anything that implies that Evan is creeping on her without her permission.”
“He has a private photo collection of her.” An uneasy sensation coiled in his stomach. “I don’t like it.”
“I agree. It looks suspicious.” Cole turned to him, his gaze probing. “Maybe he loves her. Or maybe he just appreciates her beauty. I mean, if you were fucking a woman who looks like that, wouldn’t you keep photos of her?”
No question, he would keep them. And stare at them. Hell, he was never going to fuck his hand again without a visual of her in his head.
“Collecting
photos is one thing.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, thinking. “But we’re dealing with someone who hired a man to watch her. Someone who is obsessed with every detail of her life. What she eats, where she goes, who she talks to, and most of all, who she’s banging. Those were Paul’s exact words.”
“Sounds like a domestic issue. I should be able to determine who hired Paul within the next few days. Once we know that, we’ll know if it’s connected to us.” Cole drummed his fingers on his knee. “Best case, she has a creepy admirer and hasn’t told anyone about your emails.”
“Then we clean up and go home.”
“Yep.”
He wanted to spank the ever-loving shit out of her and leave a permanent reminder on her ass. But a few threatening words against her loved ones would be sufficient in keeping her quiet when he vanished from her life.
“The worst-case scenario…” Cole rolled that small plastic disk between his fingers again. “She’s planning to do something with the evidence she has against us, and she’s not working alone.”
“She didn’t know Paul Kissinger.”
“No, but she’s somehow connected to whoever hired him. Think about it. We send our people on missions all the time with tracking devices. We bug their cars, their clothes, their bodies.” Cole’s lips twitched. “I heard Camila once wore a GPS chip in her tooth.”
“Yeah.” He grinned. “She’s fucking crazy.”
He missed her. He missed his whole damn team and longed to return to them.
If Rylee was working with someone, it made sense that they wanted to track her whereabouts and jump in when needed. That would explain Paul. She disappeared in the desert, and he showed up to find out what happened.
The device on her truck was the only one Tomas found. He’d scoured her belongings but… “I didn’t check her body for chips.”
“I have a reliable detector.” Cole nodded at his bag on the table. “She’s clean.”
“And you verified her occupation.”
“Yes, but it could be a front. Especially if a three-letter agency is involved.” The disk in Cole’s hand stopped moving. He looked up and tossed it to Tomas.