by Pamela Clare
Which is probably why they call it the morning-after pill.
She read the directions, then walked out to the kitchen to get a glass of water, pill pack in hand, the grinding beat of Nine Inch Nails drifting up from the basement where Hunt was lifting weights. She searched the cupboards till she found a drinking glass, filled it with water, and popped the first pill from the packet into her hand. The drug wasn’t foolproof, but it was her only option now that…
I always wanted…to be a father…to have a family.
She brought the pill to her lips, then hesitated, Hunt’s words coming back to her. Once the police caught him—and it could happen at any moment—it would be over. He would never have another chance to do what they’d done last night. He would never again have the chance to make love, to lose himself inside a woman, to make her pregnant. He would never have another chance to be father, and she would never have another chance to…
Have Hunt’s baby?
God, she could not be thinking what she was thinking!
The pounding of her pulse, the little wave of dizziness told her that she was.
But she couldn’t have a baby now. Her entire life was a mess. Bad guys, good guys, heroin, prison, guns—all that stuff. If she lost her job, if she lost her career, she wouldn’t even have the means to support a child. And if she was exonerated and got her job back, how would she handle working at the paper with a newborn? If she went to prison…
She stared at the pill where it lay, bright white, in her palm.
What if right now egg and little spermy were on a collision course? What if they were about to merge? What if she was only hours away from becoming pregnant?
This pill could stop it all.
That’s what she wanted, wasn’t it? Of course, it was!
No way had she gone to college to wind up being some man’s babymama, even if that man were Hunt. Hadn’t she thought through this the other night at the grocery store? Yes, she had—although pregnancy had been part of a little fantasy then, not a real possibility.
Sophie put her hand on her belly, imagined it getting big and round like Tessa’s, Hunt’s baby growing inside her. Her womb clenched, signaling its approval, a shiver of something like desire pulsing through her pelvis. Obviously, her biological self was into the idea.
But what about the baby? He or she would grow up without a father, either because daddy was living in Mexico or rotting in prison…or worse. Sophie had witnessed firsthand the shame that children of inmates carried with them—the stigma, the anger, the isolation. It wouldn’t be fair to bring a baby into this mess.
There’s no “happily ever after” for us, sprite. There’s now. Only now.
She raised her hand to her mouth, dropped the pill onto her tongue, took a mouthful of water…and spat it in the sink.
The pill slid into the garbage disposal and was irretrievably gone.
Quickly, as if afraid she might change her mind, Sophie popped the second pill from the packet and dropped it into the sink, too. Then she turned on the faucet.
Heart pounding, she shut off the water, turned away from the sink, and leaned back against the counter, trying to catch her breath and wondering if she was crazy.
God, what had she just done?
COVERED WITH SWEAT, still feeling the burn in his muscles, Marc headed upstairs to the kitchen and found Sophie in journalist mode, arranging manila folders, newspaper clippings, and documents on the dining room table, a determined look on her face. His old T-shirt was baggy on her, but she was wearing the hell out of his boxers, the curves of her ass putting a stretch on that cotton that knocked the breath from his lungs. Jesus!
He walked over to the sink, filled a glass with cold water, and guzzled, trying to get his mind back where he needed it to be. He’d have thought that making love with her last night would have taken some of the edge off his raging libido. Instead, it seemed to have made that edge sharper, his senses fine-tuned to her—her scent, her mood, every move she made. He was more sexually revved than he’d ever been, as if finally tasting sex after six years had sent his balls into testosterone overload.
Bullshit, Hunter. This is about Sophie. You’re in love with her.
Okay, he could knock that shit off right now. Even if it were true, Sophie would never feel the same thing for him—a convict with a life sentence. She wasn’t stupid. The last thing she needed was some loser hanging on her. And no matter what he felt for her, he hadn’t broken out of prison to find romance. He was supposed to be finding Megan and Emily.
Get your priorities straight.
That’s obviously what Sophie was doing. She looked up from her work and gave him a little smile. “Hey.”
“Hey.” Marc filled his glass again, his gaze drawn to her ass, heat skimming through his belly. “Looks like you’re getting organized.”
She nodded. “I’m trying, anyway. I’m just hoping I brought everything with me. I was so upset when I left the paper that I couldn’t think straight.”
Marc leaned back against the counter and drank, listening as she worried out loud about the files she wished she’d downloaded from her computer. When he sat the glass down, his hand brushed over something. He glanced down and saw a torn purple and green packet.
It looked vaguely familiar, so he picked it up, turning it over in his fingers, reading the label: Plan B Levonorgestrel Emergency Contraceptive.
She must have brought it from home. Except that she hadn’t been home.
Shit.
He held it up, cut off whatever she was saying. “Please tell me you didn’t buy this at the drugstore this morning.”
She glanced over, then her eyes went wide. She looked toward the sink, then away. “Of course, I did. It was my only option—”
“God, I wish you’d asked me first!”
Her gaze snapped back to his. “Asked you? I hardly think I need your permission.”
She didn’t get it. She didn’t understand.
Marc took a deep breath. “That’s not what I mean. God knows, I wouldn’t blame you for doing everything possible to prevent yourself from having a baby by me. In fact, I owe you an apology. I should have used a condom last night, and I’m sorry I failed you, Sophie.”
She hugged her arms across her chest, as if to soothe herself. “You’re not the only one to blame. I should have—”
“No, condoms are the man’s responsibility.”
She blinked, turned pinker. “Well, I, um…I bought some of those, too.”
He groaned, wishing to God he’d thought to warn her. He walked over to her, put his hands on her shoulders. “Do you realize that your friend Julian now knows you’re with a man?”
Her eyes went wide again, and she paled. “What?”
“The surveillance tapes. The pharmacist.” Marc watched understanding dawn on her face. “If Julian viewed the tapes or had his men question the staff, and I’m certain he did, he knows what you bought. He knows you’re with a man, and I’ll bet my ass he suspects it’s me.”
She dropped her forehead against his sweaty chest. “God, I’m an idiot!”
He stroked her hair, kissed it, the feminine scent of her shampoo sending another pulse of heat through him. “No, you’re not. This is just different than anything you’ve done before. All you had to do was ask, and I’d have gone out last night or early this morning to get whatever you needed. This isn’t about me controlling you; it’s about staying safe. If they find us together, I’ve got no choice now but to play out the hostage scenario. I won’t let them punish you for this.”
“And I won’t hide behind you.”
“I knew you were going to say something stupid like that. But, sweetheart, here’s the thing about hostages: they don’t get a choice.”
“I THINK THAT’S everything.” Sophie studied the time line she and Hunt had put together on a sheet of poster board she’d found in the basement. “Chronology is our friend.”
Hunt sat at the dining table beside her, wearing nothing b
ut a pair of faded, low-slung jeans and aftershave, his hair tousled from his shower. He read through the time line, a thoughtful frown on his clean-shaven face, while she tried hard not to ogle him. “What’s next?”
“Now we go through each event, listing questions, observations, and ideas and see if anything connects. After that, we ought to know which leads we want to follow first.”
“Okay.” He nodded, an almost amused look on his face. As a former agent, he was indulging her, she knew. He was letting her show him how she handled an investigation.
Sophie fought to keep her mind on their work. “The first thing that pops for me is the whole cocaine-in-the-crawl-space thing. The police searched your home the day you killed Cross, didn’t they?”
He leaned back and stretched one powerful arm across the chair to his right, exposing his army crest tattoo and revealing his chest and six-pack in their full, heart-stopping glory. Did he know what he was doing to her, or was he as oblivious as he seemed? “Yes, they searched it. The first time they found nothing, but they didn’t enter the crawl space, and they didn’t use dogs. That’s how they managed to convince the jury it had been there all along.”
Sophie stood, walked into the kitchen as much to make herself another cup of tea as to escape the shimmering cloud of sexual heat that seemed to surround him. “So someone planted it there after the shooting and then orchestrated a second search with dogs—maybe called in a tip or pretended to have new evidence against you.”
“That’s what I’ve always assumed.”
She filled the tea kettle, put it on the stove, then turned to face him, leaning back against the counter, waiting for the water to boil. “Two kilos of coke is a lot of coke. That has to be worth—”
“About five hundred grand on the streets. The shit was uncut.”
“Wow! Geez!” She couldn’t even imagine that much cash. Okay, so maybe she could imagine it. “So someone stole it from the evidence room and planted it on you to make it seem you had a motive and a reason to premeditate murder.”
Hunt nodded. “Something like that.”
“That seems like a lot of work and a lot of risk. Why not just kill you?”
“That’s easy. Think about it. If I’m caught with drugs, Cross’s death makes sense. I shot him because he discovered I was crooked, and I go to prison. Crime solved. But if I’m found with a bullet in my head—”
She understood. “Then the cops have another crime to solve and lots of loose ends.”
He grinned. “Exactly. The cops start digging, asking questions about Cross, about me. They find Megan. The whole thing blows up in this guy’s face. By making sure I went down, this bastard covered his own ass. He made sure the buck stopped with me.”
“So the man we’re looking for had to have access to the evidence room. That means he had to be DEA or a police officer back then, right?”
He shook his head. “Not necessarily. The stuff they found on me was an exact chemical match for some shit Cross and I had brought in a couple of weeks prior to the shooting—eighteen bricks of uncut Colombian. That’s why it was so incriminating. I’m guessing Cross lifted some of it himself when he and I drove it to the incinerator.”
Sophie mulled over this information, got nowhere, moved on to something else. “Here’s something I don’t understand. Whoever planted the heroin on Megan had to have access to New Horizons. Would a guard from Denver County Jail be able to come and go from a halfway house at will?”
Hunt seemed to consider this. “Only if he were transporting someone that day. Otherwise, probably not.”
“Would New Horizons have video surveillance?”
“They might, though not in residents’ rooms. Still, we might be able to see who entered her room if they have cameras in the halls. If it happens to be a guard from Denver County, we’ll know we have him.”
“The place was swarming with cops that morning. There were five squad cars there.” Sophie remembered how stunned she’d been to realize the police were there because of Megan. “I’m sure lots of people entered her room.”
“You know, that’s the thing.” He leaned forward, rested his arms on his knees. “I’ve always figured Cross’s accomplice for a cop. Whoever he is, he was able to stash the drugs like a pro and arrange for a second search of my house.”
“Who’s to say he isn’t? Maybe the guard thing was totally random—” And then it hit her. “Or maybe Cross had more than one accomplice. You told me that Megan said ‘they’ would come after her, right? Maybe she wasn’t as drugged out as she seemed. Maybe she wasn’t referring to Cross. Maybe she really meant ‘they.’”
Hunt stared at her. Then he squeezed his eyes shut and buried his face in his hands, and she knew he was thinking of his sister. “God! Gang raped? Gang raped, Sophie?”
It was a horrifying, sickening thought.
Then he looked up at her, his gaze seeming to measure her. “You’d make a good agent.”
Behind her, the kettle whistled.
“Obviously not, or I wouldn’t have screwed up today at the drugstore.” Sophie turned back to the stove, filled her mug with steaming hot water, then set the kettle aside.
It all seemed so obvious in hindsight. Women who were hiding alone in hotels didn’t need pills or condoms, therefore she shouldn’t have been seen buying any. Why hadn’t she realized that herself?
“Hey, I told you—this is new for you.” He walked up behind her, slid one arm around her waist, nuzzled the side of her throat, planting little kisses that made her insides melt and her knees go wobbly. “Quit beating yourself up.”
“It’s not a small mistake, Hunt. I endangered both of us.” She took her tea, pushed past him, and walked back to the table. “So, is there anything that stands out for you?”
He opened the fridge, grabbed a Murphy’s, popped the top. “The smack I found in your apartment looked like it was laced with fentanyl.”
“So did the stuff they found in my rental car.”
“And wouldn’t you know it, the stuff they found in Megan’s room tested positive for fentanyl, too. I think you ought to ask the paper or your attorney to demand the lab results on all of it. If we can find out where it came from, we might be able to find our perp.”
“I guess fentanyl is the hot thing these days.” She took a sip of her tea. “There’ve been two overdoses in the past couple weeks—one involving a young prostitute and the other a female inmate at the Denver County…Jail.”
She heard her own words, looked up at Hunt, chills skittering down her spine.
He crossed the room until he stood over her, the look on his face dead serious. “Two ODs? Both young women and both involving fentanyl? That’s damned strange.”
“The one at Denver County was found dead in her cell, a ruptured balloon in her stomach. I covered it.” And she’d been so distracted by Hunt that she’d barely paid attention to the details of the article. She couldn’t even remember the victim’s name.
“Jesus!” He set his beer on the table. “I want to know everything there is to know about both victims.”
“Couldn’t it just be coincidence?”
“If drop dead were on the streets, there wouldn’t be two ODs. There would be fifty or a hundred. Injection drug users would be dropping like flies all over Denver, and the ERs would be packed with addicts on respirators.”
“So you’re saying the drug isn’t on the streets. How would they get it?”
“Maybe it is just coincidence, but we know that Cross and company brutalized other girls besides Megan.” Hunt sat down, met her gaze, his face hard. “What better way to get rid of someone you want to silence, particularly someone with a history of addiction, than to give her a deadly drug she can’t resist?”
CHAPTER 21
SOPHIE LOGGED OFF the Internet, wishing there were more she could do tonight. She’d sent e-mails to her attorney and to Tom, asking for the information she needed and telling them as much as she safely could about her situation. She�
�d asked Hunt to read the e-mails before she sent them, just to make certain she didn’t inadvertently screw up again.
“I’m Marc Hunter, and I approved this message,” he’d joked, kissing her cheek.
Not surprisingly, Tom had written back almost immediately. The man lived at his desk and was never far from his e-mail. He’d told her he’d already planned to follow up with DOC on her open-records request on Monday morning and assured her the paper would not let it drop. He’d also promised to get a hold of the test results on all of the heroin and to order CBI background checks on both overdose victims. Then he’d warned her to keep her head down.
“Your desk is waiting for you,” he’d written.
Since when did an e-mail from Tom leave her feeling choked up?
Since your life went to hell, Alton.
Oh, yeah. Well, okay. As long as there was a reason.
John Kirschner had replied in short, staccato sentences, letting her know that he’d already filed a formal complaint with the jail and would be more than happy to subpoena New Horizons’s surveillance tapes—if any such tapes existed. Then he’d reminded her not to miss her arraignment on Thursday morning and asked her to schedule an appointment sometime in the next couple of weeks to go over her case in detail.
Sophie shut down Hunt’s laptop and walked out of the bedroom to the laundry room, where she retrieved her clothes from the dryer and changed into them. Then she followed her nose toward the incredible smells that seemed to be coming from the kitchen. Had Hunt made dinner? God, she hoped so, because she was suddenly starving. The last time she’d eaten a real meal had been lunch. And that had been yesterday.
She turned the corner but found the kitchen empty, pots on the stove and dishes piled in the sink. Then she heard the unmistakable pop of a champagne cork coming from the living room. She walked down the hallway, stepped through the doorway, and froze.