by Jodie Bailey
He was standing so close, her elbow brushed his stomach. He was looking down at her and his eyes registered the same shock that had just jolted through her own heart.
Macey moved to step back, but she was too close to the door. There was nowhere to turn away from this man and keep him from seeing what was surely written all over her face.
She didn’t want to be his friend. For the first time in her life, she wanted to take the hand of another and see where it led them, maybe even to forever. She wanted to trust someone would stay by her side. No matter how much she wanted to look away, the force of her emotions pinned her into place.
Trey’s eyes wandered her face in a gentle way she’d never seen before, one that melted even more of her heart. Finally, his gaze drifted to her lips, then back to her eyes.
Macey tilted her chin up to him. If he was offering...
With a sigh that almost sounded tortured, he breathed her name. Then his arms were around her and he pulled her close, tipping his head toward her and—
As abruptly as he touched her, Trey jerked his head to the side and stepped back, his expression almost pained. He shook his head slowly and everything about him screamed of regret.
“Mace, that was... We shouldn’t...” He dragged his hand down his face. “This can’t happen.”
Without further explanation, he walked two steps back from her, then stopped, pulled her backpack from his shoulder and extended it to her. “I can’t explain why. I want it to happen. It just can’t.” When her fingers closed around the strap, he turned and walked away. “I’ll pick you up after work.” The words floated back to her, heavy and troubled.
With trembling fingers, Macey let herself in through the glass front doors and walked straight across the lobby to the office, away from where he could see her from where he sat in his truck. She dropped her back to the wall and hugged her backpack to her chest.
He cared the same way she did. He wanted this as much as she did. He’d come so close and then ripped her to shreds.
Ripped...
And while people can totally rip you up and wreck your trust—and usually do—God’s not like that.
Trey had used that same word when talking about God the night before. Now he was the one to rip her up and wreck her trust.
She’d known it would happen. Should have steeled herself against him. Her mother couldn’t be trusted. Trey couldn’t be trusted.
She shoved away from the wall and straightened. Whatever. If she couldn’t trust the people closest to her, how could she trust a God who was so far away?
TEN
Sitting at his desk, Trey dug his elbows into the wood and planted his palms against his temples. What had he been thinking? And what if her additional security detail had witnessed the whole thing?
He groaned and pressed his palms tighter to his head. He’d done a whole lot of foolish and impulsive stuff in his life, but almost kissing Macey Price was probably the second worst. It didn’t matter that she was likely innocent. He was an investigator. Undercover. Supposedly emotionally detached.
Well, his emotions had been anything but detached this morning. They’d been fully engaged. It had been hard enough to step back on her front porch, and he’d thought he’d succeeded in keeping his heart tucked safely out of the way. But then she’d turned and with that look of wonder or whatever it was in her eyes...
He’d fallen into that look before he even realized he was moving. It wasn’t about a kiss or a touch. That would have been easier to explain away. No. This was worse. This was about realizing in an instant that, yes, Macey Price really had become his friend. Worse, she was becoming something more. That she truly was a keeper. Why had he even said something as insane as that?
Because she brought out a peace in him, a feeling that he’d somehow been put back together again after war and divorce and stupidity had torn him into too many tiny shreds. It was a feeling that he might actually be of value to someone again. Important. Capable.
Capable? Maybe as a man but not as an investigator. If this was the real world and he was really just a soldier and Macey was really just his neighbor, this could be a real thing between them. They could explore the emotions behind that near kiss, could date, could maybe consider a future together.
He groaned and dropped his head lower. Marriage wasn’t a thing he should ever think. Because this wasn’t the real world, at least not for him. He was playacting.
And it was killing him.
“You kissed her, didn’t you?”
The male voice from Trey’s home office door jerked his hand and nearly dropped his head to the desk. Trey sat upright so fast his chair shifted a couple of inches back. “Don’t you knock?”
“Nope.” Rich walked in and dropped into a canvas camping chair Trey had once shoved into the corner. He dragged it to the desk and settled in like they had all day to run their mouths. “You need better furniture.”
“This is temporary. It’s an op. I have what I need to live for the few months I’m here.” Exactly the thing he should have been telling himself this morning when he’d decided to make all sorts of unspoken promises to Macey. He winced.
“I’m guessing it doesn’t feel so temporary right now.”
Was Rich seriously trying to have this discussion? “Let’s keep this to talking about the job, okay?” Trey planted his hands on the desktop and pushed himself up, then walked toward the door.
Rich stood, too, and stepped in front of him. His stance was loose, friendly.
But the action still felt threatening. Trey’s spine stiffened and his shoulders drew back. “This is not about to turn into a fight, is it?”
“Nope. Because you aren’t that guy anymore.”
Trey exhaled his frustration. Rich was right. He wasn’t the type to jump straight into a fight anymore, and this wasn’t about his teammate anyway. Trey sank onto the edge of his desk and crossed his arms over his chest. Maybe he shouldn’t keep this all to himself. Of all the people he knew, Rich was probably the most closely related to his situation. He’d met Dana while protecting her from an arms dealer with a vendetta against her birth parents. It wasn’t necessarily an official duty like Trey’s, but Dana had been cast out from her job with the US Marshals at the time. Somehow, they’d made it work. “This is different.”
“Different than what?” Rich took his seat in the camp chair again and waited.
“Than you and Dana.”
Exhaling loudly, Rich shifted his jaw to one side, as though thinking about what to say next. Trey was pretty sure he’d never seen someone actually “chew on their words,” as his grandmother used to say.
Finally, his teammate nodded slowly. “Yeah, you’re right. It’s different.” He looked up and pinned Trey with his gaze. “I don’t know how you undercover guys do this.”
“Neither do I.”
“Maybe you’re not cut out for undercover.”
Trey winced with a pain that shot straight up from his gut. Someone had spoken his worst fear out loud.
But it was also his truth, the one he’d circled but never allowed to come full center. There was more than a little bit of shame that someone else had to voice it first. He wasn’t sure what to do with it, either, so he simply waited for Rich to continue.
“I know I somehow got this rep for handing out wise advice or something—at least, that’s what I’ve heard.” Rich flashed a grin that faded quickly. “But when it comes to this, I’ve got nothing. I know in my case, it was tough to keep the job separate from the feelings. I’m guessing you’ve found the same problem.”
What would happen if he had? What could he do about it? Those were the main questions.
The answers all amounted to nothing. There was nothing he could do, not in his present situation or in his present job. Trey dragged his hands back across the sides of his head. “If she was her and I was me�
��the real me...” Trey tossed his hands into the air and dropped them to the desk. “If she was definitely innocent—”
“She almost definitely is.” Dana breezed into the room carrying her laptop, edged around Rich and shoved Trey to the side to settle her computer on the desk. “And I can prove it.”
Trey jumped up and turned to face Overwatch’s tech genius, who’d just become his second-favorite person in the world. “Bring it.” If Macey was innocent and they could prove it, maybe when this was all over, he could finally tell her the truth and—
“Don’t get ahead of yourself.” Rich stepped closer to look over his shoulder, seeming to know exactly what Trey was thinking.
Well, Trey didn’t want to hear it. He focused all of his attention on the laptop Dana had placed on his desk.
She pulled up a bunch of windows on her computer, where she’d installed the duplicate of the hard drive from Macey’s house. “So, the drive was partitioned, just like you thought, Trey. Good catch.” She tossed him a grin over her shoulder, then began to manipulate the trackpad. “But let’s start at the beginning. The whole alarm system is set up almost the way Macey said it was. What she didn’t know was that Olivia had a hidden master account and that Macey’s user account is essentially useless. She can toggle a couple of settings on and off, but that’s surface stuff. The gold is in Olivia’s side of things.” A few more clicks and she was in Olivia’s account. The user interface was much different from Macey’s.
Trey leaned closer, then whistled low. “So there really were pressure pads in the floor. Macey was joking about that and had no idea how true it was.”
“Pressure pads, heat sensors, motion detectors... Olivia had a state-of-the-art security system. I’m not joking when I say the Mona Lisa would probably be safer in Macey’s living room than it is in the Louvre.”
“Why?”
Rich chuckled. “We all know why. That girl was hiding something big and she wanted to know every little goings-on inside her house. Even what her roommate was doing. If Macey became suspicious and snooped, Olivia wanted to know.”
“Exactly. And just before she died,” Dana added, “she upgraded. Even the yard has motion and heat sensors. Based on her schematics, I can give you approximate locations, but I don’t know how she’s hidden them. We can look later, but all of that is really just the introduction.” She clicked back to Macey’s account. “Here’s where the fun begins. We have the email account buried under Macey’s username full of dates and bank accounts and everything you’d possibly need to put our girl away for the rest of her life in some serious maximum security lockdown.”
Trey’s heart dropped clear to his boots. “Let’s get to the innocent part.”
“Trust me.” Dana stopped everything and turned to face Trey head-on. “Macey is definitely innocent. Or, as we’ve said before, she’s an idiot. And we both know she’s not.” She laid a hand on his forearm and held his gaze long enough to let Trey know she’d picked up on the same truths about his feelings as her fiancé had.
Great.
But his humiliation was momentary. Macey was innocent and Dana could prove it.
“Now that we’ve had the dramatic buildup, let’s talk about where dear ol’ Olivia made her fatal mistake.” Always with the flair for drama, Dana skittered the mouse to the same system window Trey had explored before, the one with the unexplained large files. “Olivia installed cameras that Macey didn’t know about. Cameras that were motion activated and, oh yeah, picked up sound. And then our extremely helpful friend clearly forgot she was effectively surveilling her own self. Now, I’ve just started going through the videos, and most of them are generic household stuff, but this one here is particularly interesting. It’s from the week before Olivia died. I’ve cued it up to the best part.”
With another click, Dana opened a file, and a video player took over the screen, frozen on a shot of Olivia standing in the living room, talking to a man who sat on the sofa, his back to the camera. Dana hesitated with her finger over the trackpad. “Y’all ready for this?”
Trey was ready for this weeks ago. It was all he could do not to shove Dana to the side and press Play himself.
When Dana ran the video, Olivia’s familiar voice flowed from the speakers. “What happened to you never coming to the house?”
The man sat back on the sofa and rested his ankle on his knee as though this was a mere social call. “You wanted me to set up the NIC. I can’t do that from a distance.”
NIC—the network interface card Trey had found on the laptop. Olivia hadn’t installed it. Her mystery guest had. So who controlled it now?
Olivia’s voice droned on. “Do it quick and go. Macey thinks you’re dead. If she happened to come by for something...” Olivia reached down and gave Kito a quick pat on the head. He leaned against her leg and eyed the man as though not sure he trusted him.
Olivia chewed at her lower lip for a moment, a shadow seeming to cross her expression. “I feel a little bad about throwing her under the bus this way.” Her eyes hardened and she straightened. “But if we get found out, then we can’t go down for this. It has to be Macey. They have to believe she’s the one who’s behind this.”
“You’ve made sure to point everything to her.”
“Everything. It’s all coming together. And when the heat dies down in a few months, we’ll have everything we’ve dreamed about for so long. Even your brother won’t be able to stop it.”
The man on the couch rose and walked to Olivia, pulling her into his arms. The rest of the conversation was unintelligible murmurs, but when the man turned his face toward the camera, Trey’s entire body prepared to fight.
They had everything they needed to save Macey and to put an end to Sapphire Skull.
Jeffrey Frye was alive, and he was working hard to make sure that Macey faced the punishment for his crimes.
* * *
Macey dropped into the chair behind the reception desk and rested her hand gently on her side. It throbbed and stung, most likely from all of the work she’d done with her patients today. It was a good pain, though. She was alive and moving and out in the world. After a couple of days feeling like a victim, it felt better than amazing to have some control over her life again.
Tonya, the office manager, walked around the corner and stopped with her hands on her hips when she saw Macey. “Slacking off on the job?” She grinned and hip-checked the back of the chair as she walked by. “You’ve worked like a fiend today. Thanks for helping carry the load for Kenzie.”
“Happy to.” Not only had it kept her busy, Macey had been happy to step in for the eight-months-pregnant therapist. “How’s she doing?”
“She’s feeling better now. She said their wide-open drive to the hospital today was a trial run for the real thing. Those Braxton-Hicks contractions can be pretty convincing.” Tonya leaned back against the desk beside Macey and crossed her arms. “I’d have loved to have seen Phillip racing around trying to put everything together, though. I’m sure the panic was most definitely real.”
Macey grinned. The tall, slim army ranger was usually in full control, but when it came to his wife’s pregnancy, all of that hooah soldier stuff went right out the window. “We should have Kenzie wear a body cam on the way to the hospital when the real day comes. They could be an online sensation and earn enough money to put their baby through college someday.”
Arching an eyebrow, Tonya nodded. “Good plan.” She rose and glanced around the room. “Is everyone else gone for the day? And shouldn’t you have left early? You opened this morning, didn’t you?”
“I had a friend drive me here today. I’ve got about ten minutes before he gets here.” Macey hadn’t explained to anyone at work what had been going on. It all sounded so unreal, and she really didn’t want all of the attention or to have to rehash the story over and over again. If any one of her colleagues found out she’d been
slashed with a box cutter...
Macey shuddered and swallowed a wave of nausea. Maybe letting Trey drive her to work hadn’t been such a bad idea. Except for that one moment. She’d managed to go the whole day not thinking about what might have been a kiss. Well, not with the front of her mind. The back had been spinning it on replay until she thought she’d sink into it and never come out again. He’d walked away, and that was all she needed to know.
“You still don’t look so good. Glad tomorrow’s Saturday. You can take the weekend off and recover from whatever knocked you off your feet the past couple of days. With a full load today, you might have overdone it.”
If only recovery would come with rest. Sure, her body felt like it’d been hit by a truck, but it was going to take more than a couple of days off to heal her bruised emotions. “It was good to be back at work.” Truer words were never spoken.
Glancing at her watch, Tonya stood and pointed to her office at the rear of the building. “I’ve got some phone calls to make about some patient referrals, so I’ll be in my office. I’m looking to hire a new cleaning crew for the building since Michelle’s husband is getting transferred to Fort Rucker. The new guy is going to stop by tonight or tomorrow, so if he shows up and you’re still here, can you let him in and come get me? His name is James.”
With a thumbs-up to Tonya, Macey turned in the chair and logged on to her user account to update her last patient’s progress, more than a little relieved that she wouldn’t be totally alone in the building while she waited for Trey. Charting gave her something to do that would stop her from thinking about the pain Trey’s actions had wreaked in her chest.
Up the long hallway, Tonya’s door clicked shut.
Macey planted her elbow on the desk and her chin on her fist and stared out the front glass doors at the parking lot. If she’d been less busy today, she’d have waved Trey off and called a ride-share service.