Internal Affair

by Samantha Cayto

  Parker swallowed her mouthful. “Why would I be? You mean you thought I might think your choosing Chinese was some kind of dig at my heritage?”

  Daire winced. “Yeah, it occurred to me about two seconds before you rang the bell.”

  She laughed, a high, bright sound. “No chance. I’ve seen racism directed toward me plenty of times and believe me, I don’t get that vibe from you at all, sir.”

  Her reassurance relaxed him, or at least it chased away his concerns. He didn’t think he could be truly relaxed in this woman’s presence. The formality of her address rankled for some reason, even though it was perfectly correct under the circumstances. Thank God Parker had the good sense to keep some kind of barrier between them. A wise man would follow her example.

  But the password for the night was “stupid” so he said, “Daire.” When she raised her eyebrows again, he clarified. “Call me Daire, remember? You’re eating at my table, so I think first names are appropriate.”

  She didn’t look convinced. Before she could say anything in response, her phone rang. The ringtone was Happy by Pharrell, which amused him and spoke volumes about his guest’s personality. “Sorry, I need to get this.” When she answered, it was in Chinese, although he couldn’t tell which dialect. Mandarin or Cantonese perhaps.

  Parker spoke with obvious fluency, and while Daire had no idea what she said, her tone and expression conveyed exasperation. He ate his food and tried to pretend he wasn’t listening. A minute or two later, she hung up.

  She rolled her eyes at him. “Sorry, that was my mother. I was getting an earful, make that another earful, for not showing up on Sunday for dinner. I thought she’d gotten the tongue lashing out of the way when I called to cancel. Apparently not.” She picked up her fork and tucked back into her meal.

  “How does she feel about your being a cop?” And why would he ask such a personal question? His cock twitched to remind him why.

  “She says she hates it, that it is a terrible career choice. But I’ve also heard her brag about her daughter the cop at her mahjong games with her friends.” She bit a crab Rangoon in half, chewed, and chased it down with a sip of soda. “I think the thing she’s most upset about is my blowing off the guy she picked out for me.”

  Wow, how had she lost so many of her brain cells so quickly? It seemed like every time she was in Daire’s presence, a few more flew out of her ears, or something. Her self-control held on by a thin thread, too, because all she could think of at the moment was to knock everything off the table and wrestle him onto it. Not even the sound of her mother’s voice, wielded by a tongue so sharp it could cut Parker in two within seconds, had made any impact on her state of arousal.

  Even though this was only her second visit to his house, she already felt at home. Sitting with him, eating a take-out meal, and bitching about her mother seemed far too much like a cozy domestic scene. Bringing up her almost-husband also made it like they were on a date. Food notwithstanding, they weren’t. This wasn’t a social call. They’d agreed to meet because of Forrester’s death. The investigation had just entered a new intense phase. She should stick to work, period. There was no room for silly romantic notions or steamy sexual ones.

  Daire, apparently, hadn’t received the memo on that. “Your mother tried to arrange your marriage?”

  Okay, may as well barrel through this inappropriate door she’d opened and be done with it. “Not exactly arranged so much as maneuvered. Evan is a really nice guy and the son of one of my mother’s oldest friends. He and I were thrown together at just about every turn. Our mothers left no doubt in either of our minds what they expected of us.”

  “I take it you both balked at some point.” Daire’s lips held her attention as he spoke. They shined a bit from the greasy food, and when his tongue swept down to lick some of it off, she tracked the movement like a hawk homing in on a rabbit. Except that, if she were visualizing them as animals, he more appropriately would be featured as the predator. There was nothing fuzzy and cute or helpless about him.

  The man exuded raw masculinity in such an understated way, she bet most people missed it. He probably didn’t even realize how much he represented the quintessential male. His outward appearance was all button-down, by-the-book. More like the man who wrapped his coat around the child pulled from the river than the man who jumped in to save the kid.

  But she’d seen more than that outward shell when he’d raced up to her that afternoon and seconds later when he’d reacted to Benson’s dressing her down. She felt ridiculously safe in his presence, as if she could just jump into the abyss of any trouble and Daire would be right there to protect her.

  She tore her gaze away from both the man and the fantasy and answered his question. “I did. Evan had been willing to placate his mother. He even said he loved me, but I knew he didn’t know me well enough to feel that strongly. I’m sure he would have made a very nice husband—kind, devoted, stable in personality and in profession.”

  “Wait, let me guess. Was he an accountant?”

  Parker sat back on a laugh. “How did you know that?”

  Daire shrugged and grinned. “I stereotyped him through your description. Sounds like you could have done worse.”

  “I know. I just wanted to do better. If I ever get married, it’s going to be to someone who possesses all of those qualities and more.” She didn’t explain further because it was still the wrong conversation for the time and place.

  Daire didn’t let her get away with it, however. Leaning into the table, he asked, “What more do you want?”

  She almost didn’t answer. The intensity of his gaze left her no choice. “Passion. I know lots of people do just fine without it. My mother would tell me that passion flares out and what matters is a long-term partnership and reliability. I don’t think that’s true. I like the idea of stability, of course. It’s just I believe a married couple should and can love and want each other their entire lives. I don’t think I’m greedy to want that.”

  Daire remained silent for a few seconds. He dropped his gaze and toyed with the food left on his plate. “I agree,” he finally said in a low voice. “My parents still held hands when they walked together even after more than twenty years of marriage. I bet they were holding hands when their killer approached.”

  The pain in his voice hit her low and hard, and it reminded her of why she was there. Pushing aside her mostly empty plate, she placed her netbook on the space she’d cleared. As she waited for it to boot up, she explained what she’d been doing after finding Forrester’s body. “I had an idea about how to approach the investigation now that our possible key witness is dead.”

  That got Daire’s attention. He sat up straighter and pushed his plate to one side, too. “Do we know yet whether it was suicide or murder? Forrester, I mean.”

  “Dr. Barnes is still putting the final touches on her report, but her preliminary finding is that it was murder.”

  Daire’s fist hit the table top. “Damn it. These people are bold.”

  “And good at covering their tracks. Dr. Barnes found small bruising around the hand with the gun that indicates there might have been a struggle. The toxicology report won’t be available for a while, of course. There was a half-drunk bottle of wine by the body, though.”

  Parker pulled up the file she’d painstakingly compiled for hours. “My boss wasn’t happy to hear the coroner’s not shutting this down as a suicide.”

  “Benson’s an ass.” As soon as the words left his mouth, Daire grimaced at her. “Sorry.”

  She couldn’t suppress a smile. “No apology necessary. It’s entirely possible I agree with your assessment. I like Barnes, though. She doesn’t buckle under pressure.”

  “I like her, too. If she says it’s murder, I’d make book on it.”

  “Well, operating under that theory, I decided to go back to the beginning.” This is where it got tricky. Either Daire would agree with her strategy or call her crazy. Plus, her strategy held the very real possib
ility of marking his father as dirty. “You might want to come over here to see the screen better.”

  She regretted her invitation the moment she made it. Had she totally lost her mind? Asking Daire to get closer was the exact opposite of what she should be trying to do. He seemed to agree with her more rational side because he hesitated before standing up on a soft sigh. When he approached her, he shoved his hands in the front pockets of his pants.

  Don’t look. Don’t look. That didn’t work. It was like telling someone to not think of the word elephant. Her gaze skittered over his fly, and yes, at least one part of him appeared to like the idea of getting closer to her. Thank God, he had more sense than she did, though. He pulled the chair next to hers away from the table so that he wouldn’t be sitting very close. She did her part by angling her netbook in his direction so that he could see the screen better.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “I created a spreadsheet of all of the cops who graduated with your father.” When she looked at him, he raised his eyebrows. “I needed to look at all of this from a fresh angle, so I decided to use your father as the centerpiece of my investigation and that meant going back to the beginning.”

  She pointed to the various columns with her forefinger. “Then I tracked them to see what happened to them over the years. I haven’t finished, but I made a good dent.” She pointed to a particular column. “Here’s where you see who’s died, who left the force, who is actively wearing the badge.”

  Daire whistled in appreciation. “That’s a lot of work for one day.”

  His praise warmed her, and she beamed back at him, feeling both stupid and proud. “I’m good with tracking down details, although like I said, I’m not finished. For those that I do have info on, I also included how the dead met their end and if any are off the force involuntarily.”

  Daire leaned in closer for a better look. The moment he did, her body temperature started to climb. A flush lit up her cheeks and her skin prickled. Pushing her netbook closer to his part of the table, she sat back to put more distance between them. She wrapped her hand around the sweaty, yet still cool, bottle of soda and took a good swig of it. If she could have gotten away with it surreptitiously, she’d have run the thing across her hot brow.

  This close, she could appreciate for the first time how muscular the man was. His suits and dress shirts had so far hidden that fact. Now, with his pants stretched tight across his thighs and a bit of chest peeking out from his open collar, she noticed the power as well as the grace in which he carried his bulk. And although the cut of the pants made it hard to see, she thought she glimpsed a scarily bulky package between his legs.

  Her breasts tingled and her pussy throbbed. She shouldn’t have been surprised. Hadn’t she just ruminated over his masculine aura? His having actual physical power was all part of the package.

  Too bad she hadn’t met him on a dating site or some other modern, yet appropriate social avenue. Not that she looked for men in those ways. Part of her was too old-fashioned and would have welcomed meeting a man through family or friends. A murder investigation didn’t count. They both needed to keep their focus on the job, especially when any doubt over the existence of a ring of bad cops and the desperate measures they’d go to had died along with Forrester.

  Parker forced her head back in the one game that counted right now. “I don’t have any stats to back this up, but it seems to me that there is an unusual number of people from your father’s graduating class who have died in, let’s say, less than natural causes.”

  Daire stared intensely at the screen. “I really have no idea if you’re right about that. Do you have a list of how these guys died?”

  “Oh.” She hit the tab to show him what she had.

  “Line of duty, car accident, suicide.” He glanced her way. “Suicide is topping the list number-wise. Police officers do have a relatively high rate of suicide, or so they say.”

  “Correlations between profession and suicide are murky.” Yes, she was a geek in her own way, always capable of pulling some weird statistic out of the back of her head. This one mattered, however. “It’s going to be hard to tell if we have a statistical anomaly here.”

  Daire sat back with a heavy sigh. “Yeah, and I’m not sure what it would mean anyway, except that this group might choose to take out malcontents and other liabilities within their own ranks.”

  “Like O’Malley.”

  He nodded. “Like O’Malley.”

  Neither of them said anything more for a few seconds. As much as she hated herself for it, she thought like your father? She didn’t voice the question, of course.

  Daire must have read it in her expression anyway. “Not like my father. He was taken out because he’d figured out what was going on and their obviously willing to do anything to keep their operation going.”

  Parker looked him square in the eye. She’d allowed him in on her investigation because he agreed to go wherever it led them. Her growing interest in him as a man couldn’t cloud her judgment, not now, not ever. Besides reminding him of the deal might just kill whatever interest he had in her as a woman. If it did, it would be for the best. That’s what she told herself, anyway. “I agree that’s one of only two possibilities, sir.”

  He scowled back at her, although whether it was her reminder that the jury was still out about his father or the fact that she had gone back to calling him sir, she couldn’t tell. A little of both probably.

  He didn’t argue her point, merely turned back to the list. “I bet some of these line of duty kills were set ups and maybe some of the accidents, too.”

  She’d already considered the possibility. “It’s going to take a lot of digging into the details of the file on each case, including the autopsies. Plus, I still have more graduates to track down. It’s going to take a lot of time. And I don’t even have the knowledge base to review the autopsies.”

  “Neither do I, but Cassidy does.” He gave Parker a pointed look.

  She held his gaze for long seconds, trying and failing to ignore the vivid blue of his eyes. They were compelling and enticing, and just for those few seconds, she really did forget why she was in this house. Without thought, she leaned closer to him, still staring into those eyes and wondering what Crayola would name this particular shade. She didn’t stop her forward movement until she felt his breath upon her face. It left his mouth in short, fast puffs. It was only when a noise came out, a kind of grunt, that she froze.

  Oh, my God, what was she doing? She threw herself back into her chair and with rapid blinks of her eyelids, looked away. “Um.” She wracked her brain for the topic of discussion to eek out some kind of suitable response. “You want to bring in other people?”

  Daire cleared his throat in an alarming way. He sounded as if he were choking on a live cat. “Yeah, that’s what I’m suggesting. We need more eyes on this, and a medical examiner would be especially helpful. Don’t you think?”

  She turned her head slowly back to him and blinked some more. Think? How could she think about anything with him so close? No amount of nightly sessions with her beloved vibrator would satisfy her with a man like Daire in her life. In that moment, she had an epiphany. More people in the room would be the perfect solution. Plus, he was right, they needed more eyes and brains working on this. “Other than Dr. Barnes, who did you have in mind?”

  Daire pushed his chair back and stood up. He paced away from her. “My brothers and my cousin, Regan, plus Caruso and Nieves, if they’re willing and my brothers don’t mind.” He gave her a rueful grin. “They’re pretty protective of the people in their lives.”

  Parker appreciated the distance he’d put between them. It gave her space to breathe, although she’d only be truly comfortable after she left the house. Getting up, she proceeded to shut down her netbook and gather her other stuff. “Okay, I’m convinced, although the more people we involve, the more notice we’ll get. Plus, I’m not sure doing my investigation this way isn’t going to land all of
us in hot water.”

  “Well, Regan’s boyfriend is a top notch litigator, so that might come in handy.”

  Parker gave him an exasperated look. “Don’t even think a joke like that.”

  “Sorry.” He didn’t look it. Instead, he gave her a mischievous smile that sent her body back into the no-fly zone. She practically raced to grab her coat off its hook. “Let’s keep this as off the radar as we can. I suggest we all meet here this Friday night.” Surely, her hormones would behave themselves in a house full of Daire’s relatives.

  “Good idea.” He’d come up behind her as she struggled to shrug on her coat while still holding her briefcase and purse. She jumped at the sound of his voice and shuddered at the feel of his hands on her shoulders. “Sorry,” he said in a low voice. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  Without looking over her shoulder, Parker said, “Startle is hardly the word. Disturb is more like it.” What a moronic thing to confess. The words were already out of her mouth, however. The only thing left to do was flee.

  Daire leaned against the door as soon as it shut behind Parker. He pressed his forehead against the cool glass of the door’s window and forced deep, even breaths into his lungs. A tremor ran through his body, testament to the strain he’d been under during Parker’s mercifully short visit. His dick throbbed painfully, and he resisted the urge to even glance at it. So long as he didn’t see it, he could pretend that Parker hadn’t either.

  After a few seconds, he calmed enough to return to the table and clear it. There was a lot of food left. The frugal part of him, honed over the years in which he’d had to squeeze every penny like a miser, insisted he pack all of it into the refrigerator to save for the next night’s dinner. Then he did the dishes, again falling back on habits developed after his parents’ deaths. It had been too easy for three young males to leave dirty dishes piled high. He’d forced them all into some rigid habits to keep the entropy at bay. Even now, when he could cut loose a bit, he kept to the behavior. The sad truth was, if he didn’t, he worried that loneliness and grief would overwhelm him. That concern was especially relevant tonight when the murders sat fresh in his mind.