GUILTY OR HOT

by Carson, Mia

  “Oh, I’m sure she does,” Tim mused and slipped into his office, closing the glass door behind him.

  He trudged to his desk and sat down, setting his cold mug aside as he logged into the system and worked on retrieving digital copies of the files, but his credentials were denied. He leaned back in his chair, annoyed, the leather creaking as he rocked. They’d blocked him immediately from the system, which he hadn’t expected. His gaze slipped to Nick as his assistant almost skipped across the floor, moving towards the elevator and down to the records room where he had an ongoing flirting conversation with Tabatha, the young woman who worked there. Those two had been going at it over the past few months. Tim used to find that sort of thing charming to watch, young love budding over time. Lately, though, watching the flirting and hearing about Tabatha and Nick dating only reminded him of the emptiness in his life. Maya had fill the void for a few weeks, but his relationship with her ended as abruptly as all the others had and the loneliness returned tenfold.

  When he’d graduated college and had the last bit of money left over from his parents’ hard-earned fortune, he focused solely on his company, building it from the ground up and making a successful name amongst the other investment giants. He hadn’t made time for a relationship or dating. He took that route in college and found a few women he liked to spend his time with, but none of them ever stuck around long enough for him to really get to know them. Now he was a major partner in this firm, his personal life took a back seat. Maya was on a long list of women who turned out to be the same, wanting things from him he wasn’t willing to give. He doubted he would ever find time to find the special woman who completed his life, a woman who wanted to be with him because of who he was, not the money that came with him or the name becoming a legacy. The loneliness would never go away. Perhaps it was a good thing. His anger problems were still alive and kicking.

  Then there was the other side of him Tim did his level best to keep hidden from anyone who knew him. If Nick knew what Tim did in the evening, watching those cheesy romance movies to simply feel something, anything besides loneliness and anger. Ending up alone was not how he wanted to spend the rest of his days.

  Well, on the bright side, if you lose your place in the company, you’ll have all the time in the world to date…and be broke.

  He spun around in his chair and stared out the windows overlooking the city, scratching absently at his beard. Just when everything in his life was looking up, his world threatened to crash down around him. He rubbed his bruised knuckles, imagining his chance to get a few more licks in on Sal’s face. He had an old punching bag back at his townhouse. Dusting off the gloves and going a few rounds later tonight sounded like a good idea.

  Chapter 2

  The hair on the back of her neck stood on end. Something was wrong. No, not something—everything about this situation was wrong. She looked up and down the street, searching for their suspect. He was close, she knew it. And Jeff… where was her damn partner?

  Her radio screamed at her hip and she cursed, her hand falling to turn it off when shots rang out from the alley. Chris sprinted down the empty sidewalk, her Glock ready, and turned the corner to find Jeff on the ground, blood pooling around his body, and a man in a grey leather jacket sprinting away. She chased after him, but he quickly jumped a fence. She fell to her knees beside her partner as he gasped for air. She grabbed for her radio, calling it in as tears burned her eyes. Jeff’s hand reached for hers as words struggled to break free from his lips, but the blood gurgling in his throat stopped them.

  “No,” she yelled, grabbing his shoulders hard. “No! You stay with me, damn it. You stay here.”

  “Chris,” he whispered, coughing and gagging.

  She pressed her free hand to his chest, trying to stem the blood, but it kept coming, flowing out of him in a never-ending stream. “No, you can’t leave me, you understand? You can’t leave me.”

  Jeff’s body shuddered and his eyes glazed over as his hand slipped from hers. Chris shook her head in disbelief, her scream bouncing off the brick walls of the alleyway. Her partner’s blood covered her front, and she held his body, willing him to open his eyes.

  Willing him to come back to her, but only her screams…

  ***

  Chris jerked in her chair, rubbing her tired eyes and glancing around to see if anyone had noticed her momentary doze in the middle of the day. When was the last time she’d succumbed to her sudden and random bursts of exhaustion? She’d prayed those days were over, but apparently not. At least she no longer heard her own screams bouncing back at her. If she had screamed aloud, half the people around her would be at her desk, their days interrupted as if she hadn’t just dreamt of Jeff’s death for the umpteenth time.

  The only sound Chris heard as her mind wandered back to that horrid day was the tapping of her pen on the pad of paper by her desk phone. Each tap sounded louder than the last as she glared across the bullpen, the familiar ache rising in her chest as the date loomed before her. May 23rd. Every year that passed only increased the pain. There was no moving on, no getting over it. No matter what she did, the pain remained.

  “Detective Harrison,” her sergeant, Rick Merriweather, said behind her in his gravelly voice, “I have a new case for you. I need you to go to the Jones Investment building in a few hours.”

  “Hmm,” she replied, not bothering to turn and look at the man.

  “Detective Harrison? Chris?” he snapped, and she tipped her chair forward so hard she slammed into the front of her desk with a grunt of pain when the hard edge bit into her ribs. “You’re doing it again.”

  “What? I’m not doing anything,” she muttered, shoved the pen into its holder, and shuffled the folders on her desk into a neater stack, trying to keep them from view. “You said a new case?” She held out her hand for the folder, but he held it out of reach, tapping the binder of it against his other hand, his dark-toned face giving nothing away. Those eyes, though… she saw annoyance in them and the same hurt filling her since she woke up. “Sarge?”

  “Hand them over,” he ordered and held out his empty hand.

  Chris bristled. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “The files on that day. Hand them over, Chris.” He snapped his fingers and nodded to the files she was trying to hide.

  “I was just glancing through them,” she said, hoping he would let it go.

  “Glancing through them as you do every year, and every year, you drag out the case and tear yourself apart trying to figure out what went wrong.” He sighed and sat down on the corner of her desk. “We all lost someone that day.”

  Chris drummed her fingers on her desk, staring at the empty one across from her. “Four years, Sarge, and nothing. No leads on Dowell, nothing to go on. He just disappeared into thin air.”

  “It’s not for you to worry about. I moved you out of homicide so you would stop torturing yourself over his death, and you’re still doing it.” He glanced over his shoulder at the empty desk, too, and his brow furrowed, deep grooves growing worse with each passing year. “You and Jeff made one hell of a team.”

  At the sound of her old partner’s name, Chris stiffened and her hands paused their incessant twitching. Jeff Carson had been her friend through high school and they’d joined the academy together, becoming street cops. Afterwards, both passed the test to become homicide detectives, the youngest in their class. Their careers were promising, but their relationship went beyond their time at the station together. No one there knew, officially, she and Jeff were an item outside working hours. They practically lived at each other’s apartments and spent their nights off-duty tangled up in each other’s arms and the sheets. She’d never told him, but she loved him and sensed every day they were together he felt the same.

  Neither had said the words they should have, and then it was too late. For years, they clung to each other during the hard times and the good times, celebrating each other’s successes and taking more than a handful
of bad guys to jail to rot. Then he was shot and she was unable to save him. To this day, the guilt and rage at not being able to track down the man responsible gnawed at her until she was overcome with grief and usually destroyed an item or two in her apartment. She’d stopped buying replacement furniture. It was too expensive after the first two years.

  Chris waited for Merriweather to hand her the new case, but he appeared lost in memories. She followed his intense gaze to the board across the room near homicide where the murder of Jeff Carson and the manhunt for his killer remained out in full view. Chris wasn’t the only one to take his death hard. Jeff was loved by all those who worked with him, but his death hadn’t affected them as it had Chris. She couldn’t even tell them why.

  “Sarge? You all right?” she asked.

  The large man cleared his throat and harrumphed as he stood. “Yes, course I am. Hand over those files and I do not want to see them on your desk again.” Chris opened her mouth to argue, but he beat her to it. “That’s an order, Detective Harrison. You knew Jeff better than anyone here. Do you think he’d want you falling into that dark depression again?”

  That had not been a fun time for anyone at the station. Chris was difficult to be around on a normal basis most of the time. After Jeff? She was damn near impossible.

  “No,” she grumbled and sulking, drew out the files and handed them to Merriweather.

  “Good. I’m not in the mood to pick you up from the bar at all hours of the night.”

  “One time,” she corrected until one of his brows arched. “Fine, three times, but I got over it.”

  “Sure you did. You can fool everyone else, but you sure as hell can’t fool me. Cheryl and the girls want to know when you’re coming over for dinner again.”

  “She worrying about me still?”

  Merriweather grinned, but it was sad more than happy. “She always worries about you.”

  “She doesn’t have to. I’m fine, really,” she lied and knew by the way Merriweather’s smile turned into a frown he did not believe her. “New case?”

  He handed the file to her and tucked the ones on Jeff Carson’s death securely under his arm. “Fraud, potential theft. Should be easy enough for you. I said you’d be over there by this evening to interview the main partner suspected of being behind the embezzlement.”

  “Of course you did,” she mumbled, flipping open the file. “That’s a nice chunk of change.”

  “Yes, it is.” His hand settled on the file pages, and Chris glanced up, meeting his gaze. “Stick to the case and what’s in this folder. Don’t go looking for ghosts, Chris. Promise me.”

  “You got it, Sarge,” she promised, trying to sound sincere.

  He huffed again but backed away from her desk and stomped across the bullpen. Chris watched him go, speaking with a few other detectives along the way before she returned her gaze to the file on her desk. She had a few hours to get caught up on the cases called in that morning and needed a caffeine boost to get her through the humdrum of a boring fraud case involving another rich man and his company’s fortune.

  Chris rolled back in her creaky chair and, keeping a wide berth from Jeff’s desk, slipped into the breakroom for a cup of crappy station coffee. She poured three sugars into it followed by one creamer and stirred it absently as she watched the bullpen through the window. So many familiar faces she smiled at every day, or tried to. The one face she wanted to see walk through those doors—laughing at some corny joke or other, dragging in a bad guy ready for booking—she would never see again. Her chest ached, and she rubbed her breastbone, missing his warm kisses and the way he could bring her out of any bad mood with a simple touch. Sipping on her coffee, she pushed the painful memories aside and diverted her eyes from looking at the board on the far side of the room.

  “All right, Mr. Jones,” she whispered to herself, typing his name into her computer, “let’s see who you are.”

  Timothy Jones had no record, and most of the information that popped up on him were articles about how he built his company from the ground up using his inheritance from his deceased parents. From the outset, he didn’t appear to be the type of man who would sabotage himself or his hard-built company. Granted, it was a lot of money, but nowhere in his past did she see a trend for taking the easy way out. The guy had three degrees in finance and business. She read an article about his failures before he’d managed to start the successful branch of his company—legally, from what she could tell. Timothy Jones was a no-nonsense, no-shortcut kind of man.

  Chris drained her coffee as she checked out the other partners who’d made the call to the police that morning. None of them appeared to have records either, though the man named Salvador Ginghum caught her eye. There was very little information on him until he appeared as a partner at Jones International Investments. His picture niggled at some memory or other in the back of Chris’ mind, but she couldn’t place it. Jones’ company had been in the news quite often, and she chalked it up to why he seemed familiar, until she learned more. Besides, her main focus, based on where all the evidence pointed, was Timothy Jones.

  Chris pulled up his picture again on the company website. He was unlike many of the other billionaires she’d dealt with since Merriweather had thrown her into this department. Mr. Jones was tall and lean with blond hair and a beard to match. His blue eyes smiled at the camera, and Chris tilted her head, admiring his strong jaw and easy grin. He was attractive, she couldn’t deny it, but looks didn’t count for everything. Too many guys she’d dated, or attempted to, after Jeff always looked hotter than hell, but the second they opened their mouths, she fought the urge to deck them. Perverts, the lot of them. The rest questioned how hard it was for her to be a female detective. Immature assholes.

  Around half past five, she took what she needed from her desk, tucked her Glock in its holster, clipped her badge on her belt, and shoved her jaw-length black hair behind her ears. Thunder rumbled outside as she pulled on her black leather jacket and zipped it up. She would ride her bike today when there was a storm on the horizon.

  Lastly, she grabbed her helmet off the empty chair by her desk, slung her black messenger bag over her body, and trudged for the stairs. Rain pattered down on her as she left the garage on her bike and drove through the storm towards downtown and her next case. Hopefully, this one would give her the distraction she needed from dwelling on the one case she was never able to solve.

  Chapter 3

  Tim waited impatiently for the detective to arrive. He shook his watch out from beneath his jacket sleeve and blew out an aggravated breath. “Ten to six. How late is he supposed to get here?”

  When he glanced over his shoulder out the door, he spotted the stack of files sitting on his desk. They contained everything Nick could find on the accounts affected by the theft. He’d started going through them, but worry over what this could mean for him and his company distracted him too much to focus on what connection that number of clients might have. He wanted to look for the money himself, but his access to all accounts, including transactions made over the past few weeks, was blocked. All he could do was twiddle his thumbs and work through the papers. Something might jump out at him—a missed note somewhere, a name, anything.

  “Tim?” Nick said as he knocked on his boss’ door.

  “You headed out?” Tim asked, not turning around.

  “Yeah. Want me to order you some takeout first?”

  “No, the detective should be here soon, and after he leaves, I’m going straight home and having a fifth of Jack,” he announced with a grimace at non-typical Tuesday. He turned to face Nick. “Thanks for snagging these today.”

  Nick’s face lit up. “All in a day’s work, and a date this weekend.”

  “Night, lover boy,” Tim teased him. Nick’s cheeks reddened as he stepped back to his desk, gathered his things, and strode to the elevators. His assistant reminded him of himself back in the day, before he’d lost his parents and his world was turned on its head.

&
nbsp; The same dull ache started again in Tim’s chest, and he rubbed at it furiously. Now was not the time to feel the annoying pang of loneliness. He had his reputation and his company to save, both of which depended on him convincing this detective he was innocent. He’d never had dealings with the cops before. He pictured a tall, burly man with a grizzled beard and a notepad strolling into his office, looking pissed off without having said a word to Tim. He might have a temper, but most of the time, he started out as a good-natured man, easy to get on with. He wasn’t sure how he would do under the intense gaze of a man who could very easily throw him behind bars once enough evidence was found. The amount was staggering enough. Catherine was the only reason he probably wasn’t in handcuffs yet. She was willing to give him a chance. Sal, on the other hand, wanted to throw him to the wolves.

  Tim shrugged out of his jacket and slung it over the back of his chair. Running his hands over his beard, he turned to stare out the windows overlooking the city. Had there been a way to stop this mess from happening? Probably. His dad would have seen it, but Tim missed it, like he apparently missed so many other things in his life. He felt that pang again. He reached up to rub it when someone cleared a throat behind him. Tim spun around, expecting to see the detective, but a woman stood in his doorway.

  Her chin-length black hair appeared shorter in the back when she turned her head to the side, glancing at the nameplate on the doorway. Tim swallowed hard, the words stuck in his throat when she turned her icy grey gaze back to him. Her pale skin appeared soft, and the gentle curve of her face made her seem much younger than she probably was.

  “You Timothy Jones?” she asked, her voice rough from either years of smoking, or she’d been screaming a lot today.

  “Yes,” Tim managed to say and hastened forward, holding out his hand. “And you are?”