Still Waters (Greenstone Security Book 1)

by Anne Malcom

  “I don’t have a good feelin’ about this,” Heath muttered from the driver seat. We were in his SUV because of his insistence not to drive “a vagina with wheels.” I didn’t even have it in me to address that. Plus, he actually did do the impossible and make himself invisible while Polly and I grabbed some plant-based bullshit she called lunch and I called a houseplant. But I ate it and enjoyed my sister’s company while listening to her talk about the band, her new ‘best friends’ and how wonderful the interview had gone.

  She was at my apartment at the moment. She didn’t seem to think she’d be long and I didn’t mind having her there. Though I did worry about Jon’s influence on her. He was as man-crazy as her and as downright crazy in general. Plus, he worked nights at a drag club and had only just gotten home when I was pulling out of the parking lot. He slept less than I did, and late afternoon was mimosa time for him.

  Polly would hopefully keep herself out of trouble. Or at least in the right kind.

  I glanced to Heath, who was looking up at the Spanish-style mansion like it was some sort of warehouse full of insurgents. “It’s a house in a gated section in a gated community. I doubt anyone is going to run out and shoot me. We’re safe. You can stay in the car.”

  “Places like these are the furthest from safe you could ever get,” he muttered. “Would prefer bullets any fuckin’ day.”

  There was something behind his words that told me there was a story there. The journalist, and the woman, in me were immensely curious, but I was too busy on this current one so I kept my focus.

  “Well you stay here and stroke your gun if that helps,” I quipped. “I’m going in. I’ll have the butler ring you if there’re any murder attempts.”

  “So, anyway, that’s what I think about his latest collection.” Ashlin rolled her eyes and drained her drink at the same time.

  Her third.

  I’d been there half an hour.

  As much as I would like to be right there with her, I needed enough lucidity to get through this day.

  So, I sipped my second.

  I said enough, not all of it.

  She squinted at me through her blonde bangs—which she managed to work the shit out of, by the way. “What was the question?”

  I smiled. “How would you describe your style?”

  She nodded erratically in a way that told me that this, in fact, was not her third drink at three o’clock on a Tuesday. It was her third drink with me.

  Though the girl had lost a friend. Weakness was a dangerous quality in Hollywood, one you doled out on in carefully portioned and timed increments. Usually when there was some sort of camera rolling.

  But you could see it. Beneath the makeup. And the thousands of dollars’ worth of clothes. And the haze of alcohol.

  “My style,” she mused, twirling her glass. “Like me, I guess. Original.” She grinned. “Fabulous.” She looked down at her cashmere jumper, mismatched with a bright gold sequined miniskirt and thigh-high Jimmy Choos. “A fucking mess,” she added, draining her glass. “But a fabulous one, don’t we think?”

  I grinned. “Completely and utterly,” I agreed. I glanced at her necklace. “You wear a lot of Criss Cross. And were known to model for Lucinda and be a friend of hers. Did she influence your style?”

  One look at the visible flinch she hid with a hand fixing her hair. It shook slightly, the sparkling of her jewels doing the same.

  “Yeah, you could say that,” she whispered. “She was a fabulous mess too, after all.”

  Her melancholy-filled smile hurt me and made me hurt for her. And I did hate myself a little for using that to get my story.

  But it didn’t stop me.

  Nothing would.

  “So apparently, Lucinda was in deep with drugs. Deep enough for her to get into debts that she couldn’t pay. Not on top of business loans and a mortgage on a house in the Hamptons and a cottage in Switzerland,” I said to Roger. We were sitting in his office and I was glancing up from the information that had poured out of Ashlin almost as easily as the martinis past her pink-smeared lips.

  Yeah. Playing on a vulnerable, grieving woman was probably the lowest I could have gone, considering I’d been that. Correction: considering I am that. But then again, I would’ve told anyone anything if I thought it meant bringing Laurie’s killer to justice.

  Luckily I didn’t have to. They met their justice. But it didn’t make it better. Didn’t make it hurt less. But it was something, knowing that justice—or in their case vengeance—had been served.

  I was doing it for the right reasons.

  Did doing a bad thing for the right reasons make me less of a bad person? Or did it remain the same?

  Debates on ethics had no place in my previous life tangled with the Sons of Templar. Neither did they have their place in journalism. Both of them tried to live separate to the law. Journalists were bound by it a little bit more, but they were created to challenge things in our society that weren’t right.

  Yeah, keep telling yourself that.

  “Not exactly a secret, Walker, her having money problems,” Roger said, leaning back in his chair and unwrapping a silver package. “Nor the drugs. In fact, it was our fuckin’ team who scooped her first stay in rehab.” He popped the lozenge into his mouth. I idly wondered if that did something to his throat, eating that many medicated candies. “And the second,” he added through the sucking noise.

  I leaned forward in my own chair. “Maybe so, but is it common knowledge that her drug problem had her so deep in debt, or that she tangled with those who dealt them? She organized to get drugs shipped via Sicily to the port here in L.A.” A drunken Ashlin told me all that.

  Maybe her demons recognized mine, and that was the reason why she told me. Or maybe she just needed somewhere to unlock her own rattling box of grief and craziness. Whatever it was, it proved me right that girlfriends, the best of them, knew everything about someone’s life.

  And Ashlin knew all about Lucinda’s.

  The sucking noise stopped and Roger’s eyes bulged. “You got proof?” he asked, excitement in his voice. I was surprised he wasn’t actually rubbing his hands together in glee.

  I snatched the manifest out of my bag. He leaned forward.

  “I’ve seen this,” he grumbled after a quick glance.

  I nodded. “I know, bear with me.”

  He stayed leaning forward.

  I guessed that meant he was bearing. “Okay, so a manifest is basically a list of products sent, packaged and received. Cargo on a ship.” I pulled out another fresher, less crumpled piece of paper from my bag, fresh off the Customs database, courtesy of Wire. I was sending him a pallet of Red Bull when I got home. I ran my hand over the paper. “This is a manifest from before Lucinda got tangled up with these men. Look carefully at the quantities and style codes.”

  Roger being Roger couldn’t just simply crane over it; he snatched it, looking at it with an investigator’s eye that I hoped to have one day. It was looking at something and seeing beyond what most other people saw. Not unlike the way Keltan looked at me.

  I banished the thought of him. It had no place in the newsroom.

  Especially since it felt distinctly like I was betraying him.

  “Okay,” Roger declared after looking it over.

  I handed him the other. “Now this is the after.”

  I knew he’d see it. It didn’t matter that it took me three days of staring at it to figure something like this out. It took him about three seconds.

  “Well, fuck me,” he muttered.

  “I know,” I agreed.

  He placed the manifests on his cluttered desk. “Sudden hike in numbers, even that much, coupled with security tapes and even the drug record isn’t strong enough for a story,” Roger said. “Your source, she willing to go on record?”

  I paused, thinking of Ashlin’s thirst for the spotlight. Then I saw the sadness behind her eyes and Lucinda’s own lifeless ones and Keltan’s warning about the dangers of this. I
was willing to put myself in danger, but no way would I ever think of doing the same to Ashlin.

  “I’d rather keep her anonymous,” I said.

  Roger frowned. “Anonymous sources do shit for credibility,” he muttered.

  I jutted my chin up. “She stays anonymous,” I repeated.

  He eyed me with a heavy dose of impatience, irritation and perhaps a sprinkling of something resembling respect.

  “Well, you’re going to have to find someone else who knows it all and is willing to go record. And proof.”

  I nodded. “There’s more.”

  “Well, fuckin’ spit it out before this world of tweets takes me into an early grave,” he ordered.

  “She was talking—ranting, if my source is to be believed, and I think she is—about stopping. Calling the authorities.”

  Roger’s cheeks pinched together. “And they found out, whoever these people are—”

  “Old Spice and Co,” I offered.

  He ignored this. “Whoever they are, they decided to off her before she could.”

  I nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking. Makes more sense than a robbery gone wrong when there was nothing actually taken. Kind of needs to happen to constitute a robbery.”

  Roger grinned. “Yes, it fucking does, and our reporter just happens to be the eyewitness to corroborate that.”

  I grinned back. “She does indeed.”

  He leaned back in his chair again. “Your source, she told the cops this?”

  I nodded. “But from what I gather, the police don’t seem to take much stock of her statement, considering who she is and perhaps her blood alcohol level during their interview,” I told him for the sake of clarity.

  He scoffed. “Fucking incompetent lot of idiots. People are the most honest when they’re wasted. That’s when I got most of my best interviews. More likely to agree to being quoted too,” he added with a wink. “We’ve got the police being useless working to our advantage. Get yourself some proof or another source.” He paused. “No, draft a story first. Skeleton, with the quotes you’ve got. Then get it to me and we’ll see what we need before we go to print,” he said, mind working.

  I nodded.

  “Now get out of my office and do your job,” he snapped.

  Keltan was waiting for me outside the coffee shop instead of a hard-faced Heath, who I’d left there after he drove us from Ashlin’s.

  He handed me a coffee and then yanked me in for a delightful kiss, arguably more delightful than the coffee in my hand.

  I sipped it. “Ah yes, I’ll keep you,” I declared.

  He chuckled. “Happy to hear. And if the only thing I have to do is keep you in coffee for the rest of our lives, then it bodes well for me,” he said, walking us to the garage.

  My stomach dipped on the “rest of our lives” part of that sentence and the easy, offhand way in which he said it.

  “Well, that and wine. It’ll work in your favor, at least,” I said with a grin as he opened the door for me. “So, what is the big boss of Greenstone Security doing here? Shouldn’t you be guarding the queen? I heard she’s in town,” I joked.

  Keltan took hold of my hand once more. Though his smile remained, his eyes scanned the parking lot in a way that told me that easy grin wasn’t entirely genuine. He was searching for a threat.

  Once he seemed happy enough he couldn’t see one, he squeezed my hand, glancing down at me as I sipped my coffee. Even in my heels he was glancing down at me. I dug that.

  “Babe, I am protecting royalty,” he murmured. He leaned in to kiss my hair as we stopped at my car. He backed me up slightly so my back pressed into the car and my front pressed into Keltan. His forehead brushed mine. “My queen,” he declared.

  Then he kissed the ever-loving shit out of me.

  I would have been hard-pressed to tell anyone what day it was or what my name was when he finally released me.

  “Missed you,” he told me.

  “Missed you too,” I admitted.

  The way we were getting into the swing of things should have been jarring. Instead it felt like slipping into a facet of life that was made specifically for this.

  For us.

  “You didn’t get into any trouble today.” It was a statement, not a question.

  I bit my lip. “No.”

  It wasn’t exactly a lie. Trouble, after all, was relative.

  “Let’s hope it stays that way. No breaks in the story?”

  I bit my lip again. “Nothing concrete. Or publishable.” Not a lie either.

  Roger had read through my story draft and I’d agreed with him when he said it needed teeth.

  Or a moustache. And the name of the man behind it. That would be ideal.

  “Let’s hope the police catch them before then and you can publish that instead,” he muttered.

  I frowned at him. “Let’s not talk in the creepy parking lot of my building,” I countered, glancing around at the shadows that weren’t at all menacing now that I had a strong hulking ex-army protector pressing into me.

  He glanced at the shadows too, and then he was no longer pressing into me.

  “Yeah, babe. Need you to get some stuff so we can bring it to my place.”

  I raised a brow. “Stuff?” I repeated.

  “Yeah,” he said. His eyes went over me and my outfit, a leather skirt with a slouchy tee tucked in and thigh high suede boots. All black, of course. Like my soul.

  “Imagine you have a lot of shit to get together for an extended stay with me.”

  I crossed my arms. “You’re telling me to get some stuff in order to come and stay with you, without structuring any of this as a question. Is that correct?”

  He crossed his own arms, his biceps flexing much more impressively than mine at the motion. “I thought you didn’t want to talk in a parking lot.”

  “I changed my mind. I’m a woman, so it’s my prerogative,” I snapped.

  He sighed. “You’re stayin’ with me because of the heavy shit you’ve got yourself involved with and my apartment has better security. You’re sleeping with me because I can count on one fuckin’ hand the times I’ve slept with you pressin’ against me, woken up to that face. Because we’ve got time to make up for. And because I’m not planning on not waking up to that face ever,” he declared. “And because your walls are thin as fuck, and I want to make you scream louder than you ever have before.”

  He made my heart tingle as well as my downstairs area. “You know how insane it is to practically try and move me in when we’ve had exactly two nights together, a collection of moments, right?” I said through the swirling amount of emotions within me.

  I didn’t think it was crazy. That was the scary thing. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world. I didn’t even want to question it.

  But I did. Because that was the reporter in me. The cynic in me, I guessed.

  He looked at me. “No, I’m not seeing how it’s insane,” he said firmly, stepping forward. “You see, I’m a selfish bastard. Because I don’t want just a few of those moments that some unlucky shmuck won’t even get to put his hands on, let alone collect in his soul.” He stepped forward so his heat engulfed my ice, melted the chips left protecting my heart. “I want all of them,” he murmured against my mouth. “I want a lifetime of moments with you. I know you want it too, whatever that delicious mouth says.”

  His hands traced down the V of my tee and danced with the top of my left breast, leaving fire in their wake. “Because I know what this says,” he said, his large palm settling on the thundering and traitorous organ below my ribs. “And it says you want a thousand of our moments too. ‘Cause, darlin’, even the worst of those are better than most fuckers get in a lifetime. And I’m selfish. So, I’m gettin’ the best.” His eyes glowed and his other hand yanked my waist so I couldn’t escape, my body pressed into the ridges of his, fitting like a jigsaw piece. “And I’m takin’ it.”

  Before I could open my mouth to protest, to lie, to sully that moment
with the dirt of protest and protect the remaining ice that was puddling in my chest, his mouth covered mine.

  I should’ve struggled. At least a little. For self-preservation if nothing else.

  But I didn’t.

  I melted.

  Completely gave in to the fire that burned me inside and out.

  For self-preservation.

  Because I feared for my life, for my sanity if he ever let me go.

  “You’re not packing enough,” Polly informed me from her position on my bed, drinking a cup of herbal tea.

  Fuck knew where that came from. Neither Jon nor I were herbal tea people.

  “No,” I argued, shoving a fourth pair of heels into my bag. “I’m packing too much. I should be packing nothing at all. I should’ve told him such a request after such a short amount of time was nothing less than insanity.”

  I didn’t stop packing, though.

  Keltan had followed me home in his truck, walked me to my door, and then informed me he had “shit to take care of” and would be back in two hours, expecting “a big-ass fuckin’ bag to lug down to his truck.”

  So, he’d driven forty minutes, likely more, in traffic in order to pick me up from work, kiss the shit out of me, inform me that I was staying with him for what sounded like indefinitely, and then follow me another thirty minutes to my place only to make sure I made it there safely.

  I didn’t know how concerned he was with my security but regardless of how over the top it was—and the answer was a lot—I liked it.

  Loved it.

  But I’d never tell him that.

  I was too stubborn for that.

  Polly rolled her eyes. “Not enough time? Two years of dancing around each other is more than time enough to get here,” she said firmly.

  “Dancing around is not cohabiting. Having a proper relationship,” I argued, putting my cosmetics in my large case.

  Another eye roll. “Simple, really. Do you love him?”

  I paused, a wand of mascara in my hand. I met my sister’s eyes. “Yeah,” I said simply.

  She smiled, wide and genuine and warm. “Well, that’s all there is to it.”