Bump & Grind (Brewed Moon Book 1)

by J. Margot Critch

  No. There they sat in Brewed Moon, enjoying their damn fine coffee, bringing the mugs topped with thick foam to their lips, enjoying their beverages just as Peter had enjoyed his own. It could have been completely innocent. While Dylan lived in St. John’s, as far as Peter knew, Colin hadn’t left Belfast for several years, as he was busy overseeing operations on the other side of the Atlantic. He may have been in St. John’s for a vacation, to party on George Street, or maybe take in the icebergs from Signal Hill. It may have been just a harmless visit with his brother. There was a possibility that he was in town for anything but criminal activity.

  But because of everything Peter knew about the O’Connell brothers, he highly doubted that possibility. Not bloody likely.

  Peter’s curiosity had gotten the better of him. Why would the O’Connell brothers, Irish organized crime kingpins on both sides of the pond be meeting here? One thing Peter did know was that seeing the brothers here together suggested that Peter and his team just might be onto something in their investigation of the O’Connell mafia family. The intel they’d gained from the chatter they’d picked up told them that something was coming - that Dylan O’Connell was planning some huge shift in his St. John’s organization. They weren’t sure what, but Peter and his team were going to find out without a doubt.

  Before he drew any unwanted attention, Peter pushed open the door and walked casually outside, filing the men away in his mind. He crossed the street to his car, pulled open the door and got inside. He placed the tray of coffee on the seat beside him, and stared at the large front window of the café. He saw the Irish brothers again, still none the wiser that they were being watched. But it was the redhead that once again caught his attention. She was no longer behind the counter and he caught a view of her body, built for sin, as she went about her work, clearing tables and chatting with customers. He watched her throw back her head and laugh at something that a male customer said to her, and Peter felt an irrational twinge of jealousy for the man. Stop being ridiculous, he chided himself. It took him blowing out a frustrated breath to clear his head, and he pulled away from the curb.

  He completed the short drive and parked his car, and he walked into the police station. Peter smiled as he walked into the ordered chaos of the precinct. It was always a crazy environment. His colleagues, all hustling and bustling, risked their lives daily; working together to clean up the city and keep the criminal element from winning. Detectives, uniformed officers, special teams, and administrative personnel occupied the same small space, and it led to a deeper bond and camaraderie than Peter had ever experienced with anyone who wasn't blood family. These men and women were his family.

  Peter pushed through the throngs, nodding and smiling in greeting to his brothers and sisters in arms before he arrived at his destination, a small room further away from the chaos where he and his special team had bunkered down, aptly nicknamed their war room.

  When his brother Mitch had formed the team last year they had lobbied for a private room. His reasoning hadn’t amounted to much more than insisting they wouldn’t be able to perform deep undercover and surveillance operations without a discrete location where they could work uninterrupted. Nevertheless, in the short time they had been working, their results more than earned them the seclusion. This meant that they were able to work without much supervision. Not that they didn’t follow the rules that governed police officers. No, the team just believed that some of them were open to… interpretation.

  Peter looked around the inside of the war room. Computers, surveillance and investigative equipment of various forms cluttered every flat surface. Bulletin and white boards were covered with flow charts, family trees, mugshots and various terribly-scribbled notes. There was a mini fridge and a tattered couch in one corner of the room and a bank of lockers in another. In the center of the room four desks, one for each man, faced each other in a circle. Every flat surface was covered in files and stacks of papers, not to mention the take-out wrappers, boxes and empty coffee cups strewn about. They were specially trained police officers, highly skilled to deal with the pervasive criminal element which accompanied organized crime.

  Housekeepers, they were not.

  Their mission was complex and dangerous, and each man on the team was selected for the unique set of skills he brought to the table. His brother Mitch was their no-nonsense leader. He was older than Peter by three years, and always the voice of reason. That clear-headed and serious mind made him an excellent tactician, and he planned each mission down to the minutest details. Mitch was also bull-headed and stubborn, but to that extent, so was Peter, so it meant that the two brothers spent much of their time fighting and challenging each other.

  Steve Parker, their techie, was easily the smartest guy that Peter had ever met. He had the uncanny ability to dismantle and reassemble any piece of electronic equipment he came into contact with. He was also an expert computer hacker. If there was an encrypted program or website Steve couldn’t break into, he hadn’t met it.

  Joe Callahan, their close-combat specialist, was one tough son-of-a-bitch. He stood almost seven feet tall and he was a solid wall of muscle. Honestly, Peter didn’t know much about Joe. He knew that he was American, military-trained and quickly after his honorable discharge, he’d immigrated to Canada where he joined the police force, and then their team. Peter had also seen the gnarled scar tissue that stretched across the man’s back and chest, but had never asked him about it. Joe rarely spoke, and if he wanted to disclose his past, he would. All the same he didn’t seem to be much for that, so the man remained very much a mystery.

  Each man on the team had undergone extensive training in deep undercover operations, specializing in investigating and infiltrating organized crime networks, and this put them among the most elite police officers in the country. They were afforded little oversight so they could - unofficially, of course - bypass some of the rules and regulations that restricted most police officers. Their tactics, while sometimes questionable, almost always yielded positive results and led to some pretty heavy convictions. They sometimes operated in a definite moral grey area, but taking some of the country’s most dangerous criminals off the street helped them sleep at night.

  It might seem odd that their special team was based in St. John’s, Newfoundland a small city, but one no less susceptible to the threats of organized crime. Because of its geographical location, jutting into the Atlantic Ocean, St. John’s was home to many cultural groups with strong familial ties to their motherland. It was settled hundreds of years ago for its wealth of natural resources, mainly shipping them back to Europe, but modernity had replaced many of the fishing vessels with cargo ships and oil tankers and turned the island into an international shipping hub and gateway to and from North American markets. It didn’t take long for the criminal element to chase that prosperity, and for the small island it was quickly becoming a big problem. The source of the problem was largely Dylan O’Connell, and the team was intent on unseating him from his prominent throne as the head of the Irish mafia family and the king of Newfoundland organized crime.

  Peter put the coffee on the one uncluttered space he could find on a nearby table. “Gentlemen, coffee is here. They’re all black, so you’re all on your own if you need cream and sugar. If you can’t drink your coffee like a man, that is,” he joked, bringing his own cup to his lips.

  The other three men swarmed him, each taking a cup, not bothering with any extras, drinking them black, as well. Peter laughed, knowing that they all took their coffee this way, not as a testament to their manhood, of course, but knowing that adding cream and sugar often took precious seconds that they couldn’t always spare. They all drank and nodded in agreement that the coffee was indeed, damn fine.

  Peter sat at his desk, still slightly unsettled. Seeing the Irishmen at the café unnerved him. He looked at the team. “What do we know about that coffee shop downtown? Brewed Moon?” he asked Steve.

  “Brewed Moon?” Steve drew his eyebrow
s together in thought. He took a look at the label on his cup. “You mean where you got the coffee?”

  “Yeah.”

  Steve shrugged and sat back down at his computer. “Shouldn’t take too long to find out.” He cracked his knuckles and began typing.

  Less than a minute later, Steve looked up. “I got something,” he pressed a few more keys and his findings were visible on the projection screen on the wall. “Brewed Moon Café, opened three years ago,” he used his mouse to open three DMV photos of the three gorgeous women employed there. “Owned by Juliana Lark,” he scrolled his mouse to the picture of the brunette. She employs two people. Azura Grey,” he pulled up a picture of a blond woman. “She’s a local singer, I’ve seen her a few times, and Erica Hardin.” And he followed with a picture of the redhead who had given him the coffees less than an hour previous. The bland DMV picture did nothing to showcase the vivacious red of her hair, her fair skin, those curves, her saucy smile, but because he’d seen her, experienced those features in the flesh, he knew they were there, incapable of being downplayed.

  Steve then went through the tax returns of Brewed Moon, and licensing and inspection reports. There was absolutely nothing indicating that anything was amiss with the place. Pushing his dark framed glasses up his nose, Steve looked up. “There’s nothing that stands out here, man. Why did you ask about it?”

  Peter felt like an idiot. Why had he mentioned it? While it was likely that the O’Connell’s had no connection to the coffee shop or the sexy redhead, he still couldn’t dismiss the way that the O’Connell’s had plucked at his intuition. Peter shrugged. “It seems the flavor of the day there is ‘Irish Cream’,” Peter quipped before telling them about seeing the Irish brothers sitting casually at the table inside the cafe. “I mean, it could have been totally harmless, they were just there drinking their coffees, but I don’t feel like it was innocent, you know? Like, why that coffee shop? When O’Connell owns a couple of restaurants in the city, why go there? What is Colin doing here, and not monitoring the business on his own continent?” A thought occurred to him. “Do you think the cafe could be a front for the Irish mob?”

  Mitch shook his head, ever the skeptic. “Just because they were drinking cappuccinos in a café?”

  Peter appealed to his older brother. “I don’t know, but it’s just a feeling I have. Maybe they have nothing to do with the café. But it just didn’t feel right, you know?” But look at these girls,” he looked up at the photos on the projection screen. “They’re all gorgeous. Much like the women that O’Connell surrounds himself with in business and his personal life.”

  Mitch and Steve exchanged looks, and Peter knew that they were considering the possibility. Mitch nodded. “You could be right, Peter. We’ve about exhausted all of our other leads to taking this guy down. I mean, this is unlikely, but it can’t hurt for us to look at them a little more closely.”

  Steve turned back to his laptop. “I’ll do a little more digging. It shouldn’t take too long.”

  “Well, while you’re doing that, Joe and I will carry on business as usual,” Mitch said. “I honestly don’t expect a lot from this lead, but we don’t have much else, and if you have a gut feeling, we might as well pursue it.”

  “Well, this is certainly interesting,” Steve said from behind his screen.

  “What is it?” Peter and Mitch asked him at the same time.

  “Brewed Moon. It seems that Ms. Lark is leasing the space from a building owned by…” he looked around the room, “can we guess who, gentlemen?”

  “Do we need to?” Peter asked, already knowing the answer.

  “No, we do not. She’s leasing the space from Dylan O’Connell.”

  “Well, that is interesting,” Mitch muttered. He reached for the mouse and double-clicked on Erica’s picture, enlarging it on the screen. Peter bit back another confusing tug of jealousy as his brother eyed her image. “And this one, the redhead; possible she might have Irish ties,” he cocked his head to the side and smiled. “And she definitely looks like trouble.”

  Peter nodded and leaned over Steve as he worked, fingers flying over the keyboard, and then raised his head to face Mitch. He tried not to look at Erica’s photo, lest he reveal the feelings he’d had for her earlier that morning. “Yeah, I can take the lead on this if you want.”

  Mitch regarded him carefully, but he nodded. “Okay, keep me posted.”

  Chapter 2

  The man came back to Brewed Moon the next day.

  Erica had spent most the previous day, and too much of the night thinking about Mr. Blue-Eyes, all tall and muscular, broad chest and strong arms. The image of him stuck with her, imprinting itself onto her brain; and she’d tried everything she could to dislodge him. She’d gone to a burlesque lesson, in an attempt to dance him away, but it didn’t work. She had spent the entire session imagining that she was dancing for only him until she danced herself into a frenzy. She’d then gone home and watched some mindless television, baked a cake, and cleaned her bathroom. When it seemed that nothing could distract her, she had said ‘screw it’ and she poured herself a bubble bath, and grabbed a bottle of wine from the kitchen, she’d finally allowed herself to indulge a little in a memory or two of the handsome stranger.

  Last night she had thought that maybe her memory was playing tricks, exaggerating how impossibly good-looking he was. But as she watched him enter the café again she was sure that, yes, her usually over-active imagination was, in this case, completely accurate. He really was that attractive, maybe even more so than she remembered. If that was possible.

  He took a look around the store before his gaze traveled to where Erica stood behind the counter. And when he smiled, Erica felt the same dizziness that had afflicted her the previous day, so that she was forced to hold onto the counter to steady herself. Dear God, that smile.

  It took her only a second to regain her composure, and she was able to return the gesture. He approached her at the counter and placed his hands on the top. Erica looked at his hands and was horrified by her inability to remain cool. From the tips of his long fingers to the dark, soft hair that curled around his wrists. The colour soon rose in her cheeks. The images of the things that she had imagined him doing to her – with those hands - came flooding back in a wave of heat the lust that curled in her belly.

  Just when she thought that she couldn’t handle it any further, a crisp, spicy scent made its way across her nose. His cologne. “No,” she whispered to herself, unable to let herself be taken by this gorgeous man. Of course, he wore a wonderful, mouth-watering cologne… Erica cringed when she realized that he’d heard her.

  “‘No’, what?” he asked. “Is everything okay?”

  “It was nothing,” she quickly stammered, forcing herself to shake free of the trance. “Everything’s fine.” She turned away from him to start pouring his coffee. She didn’t even ask him what he wanted, because she knew and poured him a cup of Sumatra. “Back again so soon?”

  “Yeah, of course. It’s good coffee. You were right,” he told her, a definite twinkle in his eye. “Great body, like you said.”

  “Well, I know coffee,” she boasted, while she felt his stare penetrate her. Great body, great body, great body… Her mind raced in only one direction, as her own gaze fell on the obviously-well-sculpted pecs that she could see outlined beneath his t-shirt.

  “I never doubted you for a second,” he said, taking out his wallet. “But I do insist on paying today.”

  “Well, if you’re insisting,” she said, and his eyes connected with hers as she was pushing the cup towards him. In her eagerness she used just a little too much force and speed and the hot coffee splashed over the rim of the cup, soaking her hand. "Oh, shit!" she exclaimed, reaching for a blue cloth to clean up her mess.

  He reached for her hand, and a slight tremor beat through her body when he held it in his. "Oh hey, are you okay?" He turned her hand over, inspecting her burn. He ran a soft thumb near the red, inflamed flesh above her
wrist. The coffee had been hot, but his touch scorched her skin.

  Erica opened her mouth to ask him to release her, but she couldn’t seem form the words that her brain told it to. Time seemed to stop for a few seconds before she realized that she had been holding her breath, and she forced herself to exhale.

  "Yeah, I’m fine. Don’t worry," she said as she came to her senses with a shaky laugh. She reluctantly pulled away, sopping up the coffee with her cloth. "I'm used to it, happens all the time, you know? It’s not the first hot liquid I’ve spilled on my hands, and it definitely won’t be the last.”

  What did you say?!?

  Erica bowed her head and blushed at her unintentional double-entendre. “I can’t believe I said that. I mean, like, with the coffee, I spill it all the time… doesn’t even hurt, and never mind.” And now you’re rambling. She turned away from him to run cold water over her hand to soothe the heat. “Nothing injured but my pride." She smiled at him, over her shoulder, attempting to play it cool, as he continued to stare at her. It was nowhere near the worst burn she’d suffered from serving coffee, and her hand didn’t actually hurt. At least, she didn’t think it hurt. But how could she be expected to feel anything at all besides his eyes on her?

  The handsome stranger chuckled and returned her smile with a smirk of his own. He still looked dangerous as sin, but when he smiled, he looked downright wicked. "If you say so, but that must have hurt. I mean, that probably would have hurt me. And I'm a big strong man.'

  “I’m sure you are." Big, strong. She shook her head. "But, really, I’m fine.” They spent a brief moment in silence, and Erica realized that she didn’t even know the man’s name. She extended her right, unburned, hand in introduction. "I’m Erica Hardin."