“We better hurry,” he said with a deep-grooved grin that was unbearably beautiful, and they were like fumbling teenagers as he tried to help her with her dress. He snatched his T-shirt from the ground, wrapping it around the folder to keep it dry, then grabbed her hand and pulled her along behind him. They laughed as they ran to the car, soaked to the bone. He pulled a few beach towels that he kept in the back of the Range Rover out for them to use to dry off as much as they could, before slipping his shirt back on. Then she grabbed two extra towels to place on his seats so that they didn’t destroy the beautiful leather.
Using the brush she had in her purse to work out the tangles in her wet hair, Brit leaned toward the vents he’d set on a low heat to chase off her chill, a goofy grin on her face as she thought about how much fun they’d had. She hated that the weekend was already over, but refused to ask him to stay longer, knowing he had responsibilities he needed to get back to. And as hard as she’d tried not to think about it while they’d been enjoying themselves, there was still the Clay Shepherd issue that they had to deal with. From what Alex had told her on their way over, she knew Clay was still in hiding. He hadn’t returned to his dorm room since trying to kidnap her on Wednesday night, and although the Volkswagen that was registered in his name was still parked at the university, the sheriff’s department suspected that he’d purchased another vehicle secondhand, since bank records showed that a large sum of money had been withdrawn from his savings account on Wednesday morning.
Was he living in whatever car he might have bought? Had he hurt anyone else? Had he harmed himself? Her head ached as the troubling questions pressed in on her, and she shoved them from her mind, knowing there would be time enough to worry when they were back in Moss Beach. Right now, she just wanted to enjoy the simple pleasure of having Alex sitting beside her, a sexy grin on his lips whenever he took his attention off the road to glance her way. Which he was doing often enough to make her blush like a schoolgirl. Gah! It was embarrassing, and she knew Ben would have been teasing the hell out of her if he could see her like this, but she was too freaking happy at the moment to care.
They grabbed some lunch to go from a nearby Miami Subs, chatting easily about simple things like movies and their favorite beaches while they ate in the car, the rain now little more than a light patter against the windows, the air flowing through the vents set to cool as the inside of the cab heated from the sun. She had thought the plan was to head straight to the highway and home once they were finished with lunch, but was surprised when she realized he was driving toward Ben’s old precinct.
Confusion creased her brow. “What are we doing here?” she asked, as he parked the Range Rover in a visitor’s space near the wide front steps that led up to the modern, glass-fronted building.
“I told Ben I’d take care of something for him,” he replied, leaving the car running as he opened his door.
“For Ben?” she asked when he turned her way after climbing out. There was a wary note of suspicion in her voice that she knew he was purposely ignoring, which just made her even more apprehensive over what he was doing here.
“Won’t take a second,” he told her with a quick smile. “Just wait for me here.”
He shut the door before she could get another word out, and Brit watched through narrowed eyes as his long legs made short work of the steps before he disappeared inside the building. She knew he wouldn’t have any trouble getting past the department’s security, given that everyone there knew him as Ben’s brother, which only heightened her nerves. He had friends in this place, which meant he could get away with a hell of a lot, and her imagination ran wild.
Needing to see for herself that everything was okay, she started to open her door, then stopped, half convinced that she was being ridiculous. Yeah, the stop by the precinct was unexpected, but that didn’t mean Alex hadn’t spoken to Ben before they left Moss Beach and was actually here to do a favor for his brother. Just because she and Alex hadn’t talked about it didn’t mean the brothers hadn’t spoken. And, really, wasn’t she being a bit presumptuous to think that Alex would go out of his way to confront one of her exes? Wouldn’t that imply that he felt something more for her than mere lust?
Before she could make heads or tails of her jumbled thoughts, Alex came back through one of the two sets of double doors at the building’s entrance, and her eyes shot wide with shock when she saw him shaking out his right hand. No! It wasn’t possible . . . Was it?
“What the hell did you do?” she demanded the instant he opened his door.
He flashed her a sharp smile, but didn’t answer the question as he climbed in and shut the door, then put on his seat belt.
“Alex Hudson, you didn’t,” she wheezed, her lungs locking down on her when he curled his right hand over the steering wheel and she saw the blood smeared across his knuckles.
“Didn’t what?” he asked, acting as if nothing was wrong as he reversed out of the space. He’d just put the Range Rover into drive when the far set of double doors were flung open and Jason came charging out of the building, blood dripping down the lower half of his face from his swollen nose.
“Holy shit!” she squeaked, gripping her seat belt so tightly she was surprised she hadn’t wrenched it loose. Jason’s furious gaze landed on the idling Rover, and he took one stunned look at her sitting in the passenger’s seat, stumbling to a stop at the top of the steps, before his dark eyes cut sharply toward Alex.
“Come on, you son of a bitch,” Alex muttered under his breath, and she knew he was ready to get out and give Jason the fight he’d come looking for. “You want more?”
Jason licked his lips as he looked from Alex to her and then back to Alex again. He was still lean and in good shape, though she was happy to see that he didn’t strike her as being as handsome as he once had. But then, he didn’t look too great with blood dripping from his nose. In fact, he looked pissed . . . and, if she wasn’t mistaken, more than a little scared. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat, and then he suddenly turned around and headed back inside, running like a dog with his tail between his legs, and she knew why. He’d finally realized that Alex’s attack hadn’t been unprovoked. It’d been for her. Because of what he’d done to her.
“I know you asked me not to mess with him,” Alex murmured in a low voice, sliding her a worried look. “But I needed to do that, Doc. Diaz knows him and was able to tell me where and when I could find him. He even had a few of the other detectives making sure the jackass didn’t leave before we got here, because he understood why I needed to do it.” He kept his gaze locked on hers. “You forgive me?”
“Of course. There’s actually nothing to forgive. But . . .”
He worked his jaw. “But what?”
“It’s just that . . . I can’t help thinking that you got in trouble for doing something like this before.” A worried frown tightened her expression as she rubbed her palms over her thighs. “After the thing with your ex, you went and got in a fight at the precinct. It’s the same thing all over again.”
She doubted he would have been able to convince her otherwise with nothing but words. But he gave her more than that, the warmth in his eyes and the lopsided grin on his beautiful mouth beginning to loosen the knots in her stomach before he even started to explain. “You’re wrong,” he said with firm conviction. “I get how you might think that, but you can’t compare the two, Doc. What happened five years ago—that was for me. For my . . . Hell, honey, it was for all the wrong reasons. But this was right, Brit. I wish it hadn’t been necessary, but it was, and there’s no way in hell I’m ever gonna regret it.”
Her lips trembled with a wobbly, emotional smile and she nodded, letting him know she understood. Neither of them said anything more as he finally gave the car some gas and they pulled out of the parking lot, heading back to the highway. She leaned her head back against the headrest and closed her eyes, fighting a sudden rush of tears
that had nothing to do with being upset. No, they were the vibrant, happy kind that came when something that felt unbelievably good or satisfying happened. It might have been a completely caveman kind of move that Alex had just pulled, but she’d have been lying through her teeth if she said she hadn’t enjoyed it. What was that saying? If there’s one thing a bully understands, it’s a bigger bully. It was true, even though she knew that wasn’t where Alex had been coming from.
He hadn’t gone after Jason as a bully. He’d gone after him as a man who wasn’t willing to stand by while another man treated women like shit, and it made him all the more incredible in her eyes. Maybe that was mercenary of her, but she didn’t care.
What she did care about was Alex. And she was going to keep on caring, till the bitter end.
Was it going to hurt when he walked away? Of course it would. After the time that she’d spent with him this weekend, it was going to hurt like a freaking bitch.
But would it have been worth it?
All she could say was that in the end, whatever happened, whatever pain she might have to learn to deal with, she would have no regrets for taking a chance on him.
No matter how things turned out between them, Brit was going to remember this trip as one of the best she’d ever had.
11
WHILE A PART OF BEN HUDSON WAS GLAD TO BE HOME, SO THAT HE could do his part in making sure that Clay Shepherd was apprehended and put behind bars, there was a big part of him that missed having his beautiful wife all to himself on the secluded beach where they’d vacationed. They weren’t meant to have come home until Monday night, but both he and Reese had felt that heading back early was the right thing to do, given the circumstances.
Not just because Ben was the sheriff. No, their decision had more to do with the fact that Brit Cramer was their friend and they both cared about her well-being.
Scott Ryder had the investigation well under way, and even though it was proving to be a frustrating one, the deputy was doing a great job, just as Ben had known he would. Alex might be bitching about their progress, but Ben knew Ryder was doing everything that could be done. The former special ops soldier could have easily gone into business for himself, providing exceptional personal and technical security to the wealthy elite, but he’d chosen to remain a deputy in the sleepy little beach town where he wanted to raise a family with his wife. Ben was thankful as hell to have him, and he understood where Ryder was coming from. When a man had the right woman by his side, a meaningful future, and a job that let him go to bed each night knowing he’d made a difference, nothing else mattered.
He and Ryder were currently sitting in Ben’s home office, waiting to hear back from the department’s tech guys, who were working on a phone trace for a call that had come through on Brit’s office number just that morning. A rambling, ugly message had been left with the McNamara Clinic’s answering service, which Ryder was already monitoring. A possible sighting had also been made at one of the local campgrounds, confirming their suspicions that Shepherd was either living rough or in a vehicle. Although an initial search of the site hadn’t landed them Shepherd, they were hoping they could place him at the campsite through its pay phone once the trace came through.
Sitting with his hip perched on the edge of his desk and his arms crossed over his chest, Ben shook his head as he looked at Ryder. “I still can’t believe Alex dragged her off to Miami.”
“It makes sense, him wanting to get her out of town. We both know he’s had a thing for her for a long time,” Ryder drawled, lacing his fingers behind his dark head as he sprawled against the back of his chair. “Yeah, he’s been fighting it, but we knew it was there.” Lifting his brows, he added, “What you can’t believe is that she willingly went along with him.”
A wry smile tugged at the corner of Ben’s mouth. “True.”
“He really turned down your offer to put some personal security on her?” Ryder murmured, sounding intrigued.
“Oh, yeah. He was adamant about it.” Which still made Ben want to shake his head in confusion. After he’d finished that call with Alex and Mike on Thursday morning, he’d wondered if maybe all the hours he’d spent down on that Caribbean beach, baking beneath the tropical sun while he fucked his beautiful wife’s brains out had fucked his brains out as well, because he couldn’t think of a single reason why Alex would purposefully put himself in this situation. Yeah, he knew that Alex had been secretly hung up on Brit, like Ryder had just said, for a long time now. But insisting she stay at his condo with him? Then taking her away to Miami for a weekend getaway?
Who was that guy and what the hell had he done to his brother?
The entire situation was surreal, and despite Reese’s optimism that things were finally going to work out for their friend and his brother, Ben couldn’t help but have his doubts. He loved the guy, but he cared too much for Brit to just stand by and let Alex use her to get his rocks off. And as much as he hated it, he knew there was a good chance that’s exactly what this would turn out to be.
Ben had first noticed Alex’s interest in Brit last summer, when all that shit had gone down with Reese and her psycho stalker. He’d been ready to step in if he’d needed to, worried Alex would do something stupid, like fuck her one night and then dump her. But nothing had ever happened. Alex had continued to watch Brit with that hungry, feral gleam in his eyes whenever she wasn’t looking at him—but the guy never made a move. All he did was snarl and snipe at her. And that was when Ben finally started to see the light. Well, he might have had a little nudge from Reese, who helped him put it all together. But he gave himself credit for falling in love and claiming such an incredible, insightful woman. And the point was that they both understood what was happening. That Alex did his best to push Brit away because she wasn’t just some woman he wanted to fuck.
No. She was a woman he wanted to fuck . . . and then do it again. She wasn’t a toss aside, and since his brother was scared shitless of taking another chance on a relationship, after his marriage had crashed and burned so spectacularly, he’d taken to doing everything he could to make Brit think he was a jackass. It was a reflexive, knee-jerk reaction, and Ben understood exactly why Alex acted that way.
While growing up, he and his brothers had been witness to their mother’s endless affairs, and their father’s depression every time he took her back, and they’d each dealt with the fallout in their own way. Mike had become the serial womanizer, but with a good heart and a ready smile, and Ben had spent years shying away from commitment, until he’d finally found Reese. Alex was the only one of the three who had had the guts to take a chance early on—but it’d been on the wrong woman. When it blew up in his face, he’d retreated and dug in, and almost died trying to drown his failure at the bottom of a bottle, just like their father had so often done.
As badly as he wanted this thing between Brit and Alex to work out, Ben was worried his brother wouldn’t be able to shake off his past and move forward. But that was something that would have to be faced later, after they’d dealt with Clay Shepherd and the havoc he was wreaking on Brit’s life.
When the phone on Ben’s desk started to ring, he and Ryder shared a look, both of them hoping like hell this would be the break that they needed.
“What’d you find?” Ben demanded, after hitting the speaker function on the phone so that Ryder could listen, as well.
“We’ve got the trace,” Toby, his head IT guy, said over the line. “Instead of a burn phone, he used a campsite pay phone this time.”
“The site over by North Beach?” Ben asked, referring to the campground where the possible sighting of Shepherd had been reported.
“No, if he was ever there, he’s moved on. The call came from the Sunset Shores campsite, located south of us, at the edge of the county line.”
“Got it. Thanks, Toby.”
“No problem.”
Ben ended the call, then looked a
t Ryder. “We’re going to need as many bodies down there as we can get to canvass the area. Even if the bastard has moved on, someone had to have seen something.”
Ryder nodded his agreement as he leaned forward in his chair, elbows on his knees. “I’ll put in calls to our neighboring counties. See if they can send us some help.”
“Good idea,” Ben said, reaching for his cell phone. “I’m going to call Mike and see if he can round up some of his DEA buddies to help us.”
“No answer?” Ryder asked a moment later, when Ben set the phone back down on his desk.
Shaking his head, he said, “Went to voice mail.”
“I saw his truck in front of his place on my way over,” Ryder told him with a frown. “Maybe he’s sleeping.”
Ben snorted. “More like fucking some beach-bunny and completely ignoring the rest of the world.” Irritation roughened his tone. “I told him to stay in touch in case we needed him.”
“Everything okay? Who are you having trouble getting in touch with?”
At the sound of his wife’s voice asking those questions, Ben turned his head and found her standing in the doorway to his office, her beautiful gaze worried as she waited for his reply.
“We’ve finally got a good lead on Shepherd, but we need everyone we can find to help out. Mike is home, but not answering his phone.”
Reese’s shoulders sagged with relief, her worried frown curving into a knowing grin. “He probably just hasn’t heard his phone because his headboard is banging against the wall too loudly.”
Ryder laughed as he moved to his feet. “That’s exactly what your husband was just saying.”
“Great minds think alike,” she teased, winking at Ben. “If it would help,” she added, “I can head over to his place to let him know he’s needed while you guys get over to the station.”
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