Up in Smoke (Kisses and Crimes Book 2)

by Natalie E. Wrye

  Jeff glanced at me. “Going somewhere?”

  I turned towards him.

  “Yeah, matter of fact, I am.” I nodded as grimly as I felt. “I think I need to make a date with a girl…”

  HOLY SMOKES

  PENELOPE

  I slammed the door in his face, hoping it’d broken his nose.

  He blindsided me. It was only right that I returned the favor. But I hadn’t.

  He was still hot on my heels, his breath a puff of smoke at my back as we walked into the frigid, D.C. air. Our footsteps crunched underfoot as I crossed the street, over snow, with no real direction in mind.

  I just… needed to run away. But to where I was running… I had no fucking clue. I just hoped that he would give up the chase but no such luck.

  My best friend, Bishop, wasn’t giving up that damn easy. He touched my arm, his voice a plea.

  “Pea…” he called.

  “If you want to keep this friendship, Bishop, you’ll stop talking. You’ll stop talking right now.”

  “What else could I do?” he demanded over my shoulder.

  “Anything,” I said, not turning. “Anything but what you did.”

  “There was no other way. You said it yourself. He’s the fucking best.”

  “At what? Plucking my last fucking nerve?”

  He reached for me again. I shrugged him off. I kept walking.

  “When are you two going to let this shit go?” he asked. Irritation and bitter cold had made his voice husky.

  “It’s not about… ‘me and him’.”

  “The hell it isn’t.” Bishop hesitated at the intersection as I waited for the crosswalk signal to turn green. “You going to tell me that you’re not going to take Jackson’s help—the help of the best agent I’ve ever fucking known—because of some silly high school feud?”

  I said nothing, stewing in the heat of my own anger. An anger that made the weather seem warmer than it really was.

  Bishop’s words must have reminded my body of the thirty-degree weather. I felt a chill when he said Jackson’s name.

  “If you want to get serious about solving this Jordan Chambers case, if you want to help your client out…” Bishop growled, his gold eyes burning a hole in my back. “Then we need Jackson.”

  His comments set me off. I whirled on him, clutching my jacket-front.

  “That’s the fucking problem, Bishop! He’s not my damn client. He’s the plaintiff suing my client.” I zipped my jacket. “And I’m the sap-ass stupid enough to help him.” I sighed. “I should have stopped this from the beginning. Emotion has no role to play in this business.”

  “But you didn’t stop it, Pea… because you know what’s right,” Bishop stepped forward. “That you’re right.” I shook my head but Bishop didn’t stop. “They’re going to murder him. Kill him for being a whistleblower.” The statement pulled my eyes to his. “If we don’t help him… Another innocent man will be killed. Another father taken away from his son.”

  He inched closer, as I stood there, frozen.

  “Imagine someone had done the same for us… Saved our parents?”

  Tears, cold and threatening to thicken, formed in my eyes as I faced Bishop.

  “I know you were hired to work the case for the Senator’s office. I know it’s a conflict of interest, and I know you can be disbarred. But this man was wrongfully terminated from his position as a staffer in that office. And because he doesn’t want to stay silent about the corruption in that damn office, they’re going to silence him for it—ruin him. You know they will. You can be his voice… Isn’t that why you came to me? To help you stop it?”

  He squinted, his eyes turning to slants as the wind picked up, slashing snow across our faces.

  “Tell me now if you’re not ready. I’ll call Jackson. And we can call this thing quits if you’re not ready to take that leap. Because we fucking need him, Pea… and there’s no getting around it.”

  I exhaled from nearly frozen nostrils. The slowly rising snowstorm outside was no match for the one inside me, and the thought of going back to my apartment, back to where I knew Jackson was still waiting, filled me with a palpable fear.

  Was I afraid of Jackson? Or was I simply afraid of my reaction to him?

  My resolve was icier than Jax’s blue eyes.

  “Okay…” I relented. “I trust you… We need fucking Jackson.”

  My head popped up off my desk.

  I was still at work, still in my office… and still dealing with nightmares I couldn’t escape.

  My hand was cramped, the pen I’d been writing with still in my hand. Somewhere between being asleep and awake, I noticed that my inscriptions had transformed. The notes I’d been making had become something entirely different than what I intended them to be.

  I’d been writing Jordan Chambers name.

  It was in chicken scratch, scribbles that were scrawled all over the notebooks and pads across my desk. Maybe I’d been asleep when I’d written them.

  Maybe not.

  I hadn’t taken a break since Jackson left my apartment that morning.

  I knew if I did, I would find myself thinking about him, dreaming about him… wondering about him. That was the last fucking thing I needed.

  Especially after what he had done.

  It was all on purpose.

  He’d stolen the Jordan Chambers file right out from under me, knowing it was the thing I wanted most… knowing that I was there to lift it.

  And what the hell did he want with it anyway?

  Maybe he had followed me to get the file, for all I knew.

  Well, so fucking what? So, he wanted me gone… That wasn’t new. We’d both agreed years ago that our relationship was a “complication,” an unnecessary nuisance to the professional lives we both led.

  Neither of us had time for romance. And the brief one we shared fifteen years ago was but a prelude of things to come.

  As ugly as our first break-up was, the aftermath was even more sour.

  Jackson and I were too much alike, too headstrong—too busy following the beat of our own drums to dance by anybody else’s.

  And that was fine. But if he wanted to scare me out of the city, he didn’t have to try to seduce me to do it. I’d already fucked myself enough for a lifetime; I didn’t need Jackson to do it… despite what I’d almost let him do in my kitchen that morning.

  God, I wanted to strangle his ass.

  He played me. Played me like a freaking fiddle. Dropped his little bombshell in my kitchen, grabbed his jacket, and left.

  I had no choice but to turn back to my stove and eggs, to try to act like it didn’t bother me when sixteen-year old me wanted to cry enough tears to put out the fire on the stove, twenty-seven year old me still wanted to fuck him right there on the stove, and thirty-one year old me was mad enough to set him on fire with the stove.

  I’d considered all of my options before finally cooking the eggs completely through… and dumping them in the trash just as soon as they were done.

  And now I was back at the office, struggling to concentrate. I’d barely made it out of Friday morning Manhattan traffic alive. I almost missed my 7:53 train, nearly spilled coffee down the front of my shirt, and partially tripped over a homeless man as I stepped out of the subway.

  All in all?

  It was turning out to be one of the shittiest Fridays I’d had in a long time. And the sad part was that it wasn’t even over yet.

  Dragging my overworked ass to the break room, I heated up a lukewarm cup of coffee in the microwave. Clutching it carefully all the way back to my office, I sipped gingerly from my nearly overflowing coffee mug, realizing that I needed a drink—a real one—more than I needed the goddamned coffee.

  I almost burned my tongue as I was interrupted by a knock on my office door. I managed to call out despite the tingling of my tongue.

  “Come in!” I yelled.

  The door swung open.

  I was still nursing my overheated mouth, sti
ll attempting to cool my fiery tongue when I heard my name come off of someone else’s. A man’s. I looked up, expecting to be met with icy blue eyes. Instead I found green ones gazing back at me.

  They belonged to a junior partner named Chip.

  He smiled at me.

  “Penny, you’re going to work yourself into an early grave. You need some downtime. All work, no play? You’ll be a fucking zombie by the age of thirty.”

  I grinned back at him, hiding the documents littered with Jordan Chambers’ name. I plastered on the biggest smile.

  “Too late, Chip,” I mumbled. “I’m already a zombie… and I’m actually thirty-one.” I stopped. “…which in some Manhattan circles means the same thing.”

  He chuckled, the fine lines around the edges of his eyes folding upwards and almost into his thick brown hair.

  He couldn’t have been a day over thirty-five, but unlike me, around this firm, a thirty-five year old man with no kids wasn’t a zombie; he was more like a prize.

  Add to that the fact that he was single, newly divorced and, moreover, built in ways that should’ve been illegal, and you weren’t talking about a prize anymore.

  You were talking about the Holy Grail.

  And frankly, I didn’t have the interest or time to join the ranks of the other “quest seekers.” I liked my own quests just fine.

  But… Chip was nice.

  He had invited me to the gym on several separate occasions but my work consumed me. We rarely had time to talk at the office, and when we did, it was always over some brief or deposition.

  Anything that wasn’t work or my sister, Delilah, and her adorable daughter Melanie was a distraction to me, and if I were really being honest with myself… I’d admit that I’d just had another man on my mind all the time.

  In fact, I hadn’t given Chip a second thought since I’d worked here. At least, I hadn’t thought to look at him until now.

  Right now, any distraction was a welcome one to keep my mind off of Jackson and this whole Jordan Chambers debacle.

  I surprised myself when I invited Chip all the way inside. He stepped further into my office. He closed the heavy door, motioning over his shoulder with a laugh.

  “Vacuums gettin’ a little noisy, huh? Janitors always come at the worst times.”

  “Yeah.” I rearranged the papers on my desk. “Like when I’m stuck in here for the night and trying to get some real sleep.”

  “Been doing that a lot lately, huh?”

  “Yep,” I grimaced. “I’m at an ‘amateur nap’ level.” I took another sip of the scalding hot java. “Hoping to hit ‘Olympics’ level any day now.”

  Chip tilted his head, grinning.

  “You should let coffee do the heavy lifting…”

  “Mmhm,” I agreed with a mouthful.

  “Coffee is a life savior, I hear.”

  “To most of the people in this office.”

  Chip shifted on his feet. “I think you should get to know coffee a little bit better.”

  I nodded, not fully understanding until, amidst my sipping and slurping, Chip cleared his throat softly. He took a silent step forward.

  “You never know…” he continued. “Coffee just might be good for you. You see…” He stuck his hands in his pockets, and I swallowed. “…coffee’s been wanting to get to know you for quite some time, and I guess… well, it was just too scared. Too afraid to say anything because you’re, uh… beautiful and…” He snorted on a laugh, shaking his head. “Intimidating as hell.”

  But then he stopped. “I’m not going to lie… Coffee is kind of into the fact that you are. And maybe, if you’re into coffee, you could give it a chance…”

  He raised his eyebrows, and with them, went my guard.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t find coffee… appealing. It was just that, after all was said and done, I had a certain “acquired” taste. And poor coffee was just never going to satisfy it.

  The realization almost made me mad. I lowered my cup. And as I did, a knock on the door made me jump.

  It was fantastic fucking timing. It was my “acquired taste,” a huge unexpected, gigantic shot of Jack, to wake me back up. And he was barging right in as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

  As usual.

  He looked at my face.

  “Cleaning crew was loud,” he commented dryly. “Didn’t know if you’d hear my knock or not. Am I interrupting?”

  Chip started to speak.

  “No,” I surprised myself, rising to my feet. “We were just talking about… coffee.” I glanced down at my desk. “I actually have quite a lot to finish up tonight, so Chip…?” My eyes flitted in his direction. “We’ll, um… talk about those drinks later?”

  My coworker cautiously nodded at my dismissal. He gave an awkward wave, but on his way out, he glanced back at me. Or, rather, he glanced back at Jackson, and as he did, I saw the underlying envy in his eyes.

  Jackson, on the other hand, never moved a muscle. He stood there for a few seconds before hanging his hands on his hips.

  He cocked an eyebrow at me.

  “Chip, huh?” His tone was wry. “I’m guessing the names Scooter or Skipper were taken?”

  “Jax, stop…”

  “Why? Charles more interesting to talk to?”

  “Jax,” I snapped, grabbing my papers. “I don’t want to talk about Chip.” I folded my files neatly into a pile. “In fact...” I peeped at his face. “I don’t want to talk at all.”

  I turned my back on him, placing my documents into my briefcase.

  “I’m on my way out.”

  Jax inclined his head. “To Chase’s?”

  I froze, my eyes turning into slits. “If I was… it’d be none of your fucking business. You wanted me gone, remember?”

  “Still do.” Jackson blinked. “It’s business, Pea. Nothing personal. You set the rules years ago… I’m just following your lead.”

  I scoffed, staring blankly. I wanted to shove that suitcase down his throat and make him eat it.

  “Well, you’re doing a hell of a job at it,” I snorted. “It’s not like I’ve forgotten, Jackson... I made you promise that our relationship would remain professional from here on out. And you told me to stay away from you so that it would. So, why don’t you do us both a big favor and just leave. You can pretend we kept our arrangement.”

  I grabbed my briefcase, slinging it over my shoulder. I passed Jackson, heading on my way out. I reached for the door.

  “I can’t ‘cause my business deals with that Jordan Chambers file.” He stared pointedly. “Same as yours… because I know you’re still trying to solve that case. And I won’t have to pretend anything really soon. Not with Senator Fletcher wanting us both dead…”

  My feet froze. My hand was stuck to the doorknob, and no matter how badly I just wanted to turn it, I couldn’t. I had grown roots into the floor, and at that moment, my heart was pumping so hard that I thought it might burst through my chest.

  My ears were clear… but my head? My head was swimming in a fog of confusion and frustration. I twisted my head towards my shoulder, speaking.

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying a lot of things…” I listened to Jackson step forward behind me. “The thing I’m saying loudest is that I’m coming with you.”

  I twisted completely around this time, spinning on both feet. I wanted to yell at him, but when I saw the look on his face, that stare of cold, hard defiance, I knew he wasn’t joking around—even though that’s what he did best.

  I pursed my lips, feeling the shaking of my teeth beneath. I bit down as hard as I could.

  “No, you’re not coming.”

  “Yes…” he said, putting one foot in front of the other. “I am. We need to talk. About Jordan Chambers. About what was in that damn file at the senator’s. About why he wants to kill us for it.”

  His skin seemed darker underneath the blond strands at his temples. His face was rigid—pure stone, and when I look
ed close enough, I could see the slight pulsing of his hard-edged jaw.

  I crossed my arms.

  “What do you want with that file, Jackson?”

  “What do you?” he countered. “Jordan Chambers is dead. You can’t use his secrets to build a case against the senator, anymore, because those secrets died with him.”

  “But Bishop didn’t die.” I leaned in viciously. “The senator still wants his head, and the Jordan Chambers case isn’t dead until I say it’s dead,” I fired back. “There’s at least one person alive still willing to try the case, and if that person is me, then so be it… I’m a lawyer. That’s my job. That’s what I do.”

  “And this is my job. I’m investigating that file, and you can help me or…” he hesitated, his voice dropping an octave. “You can stand in my way. It’s up to you, Pea…”

  Jackson was as tense as I was. His skin was humming with anxiety. And in his blue eyes was a fervor I’d never seen.

  I swallowed a lump the size of a Dakota. And Jackson kept right on talking.

  “Okay, look, this only has to be temporary. We’ll keep it strictly business. Just like four years ago. And yeah, we fucked up, then. You got disbarred, and I got fired from the Feds, but we’re better at this now. We know not to let our emotions fuck with business… and that’s exactly how we’re going to keep it.”

  His voice was rough and uneven.

  “But to do that, we’ve got to play the senator’s game… because he’s been playing us for four. fucking. years.”

  He ran his fingers through his unruly hair. “Senator Fletcher stacked the deck against us back in D.C., and then he upped the stakes two months ago when he forced Bishop to go on the run. Now? The odds are against us more than ever… And he’s still holding all the cards.”

  He sighed, hanging his head.

  “You can’t stop me from coming. And you can’t stop him from coming. He’ll come for us… until both of our hearts stop beating.”

  I took a deep breath, feeling the weight of the air in my lungs and the world on my shoulders. I stared at Jackson, fixing him with a glare that was more confident than I felt. I raised my chin.