by Amber Malloy
“Oh. Well, I—”
“So, if I were you”—Walker used his body to push Tom out of the yard—“I would just come to the front door from now on. I mean, I’d hate to flash you a shot of my Johnson. At your age, it could do some real damage.” Once he’d gotten Tom appropriately on the other side of the wood gate, Walker shut it in his face. Fixing that stupid latch made the top of his list.
Still stewing over Tom’s skeevy ways, Walker headed into the house.
“You’re wet. Here.” Ashe tossed him a towel she’d grabbed out of the laundry room. He dried his face and tried to focus on the groceries. The sight of Ashe in a jean dress that barely covered her sweet thighs distracted the hell out of him.
At that point he became resigned to lusting after her from afar. Of course, a better distance would be New York, but he continued to be a sucker for punishment.
“Whoa, you think that’s safe?” He questioned her mental state as she headed toward the sound of the complaining feline. Ignoring him, she opened the downstairs bathroom door.
“Morty is a sweetheart, but be cool. He can smell fear.” She let the beast out of the bathroom. Bigger than he initially thought, the cat circled around Ashe’s ankles with a purr. “I found him a couple of days ago in the backyard.”
“Are you sure he didn’t maul his owner? He’s probably on the hunt for a fresh kill.”
“How dare you?” Ashe patted her thigh. The furry thing jumped into her arms.
Walker shook his head and unpacked the groceries. He tried fighting back a smile but lost to the cuteness overload.
“Don’t worry. I put out flyers. Morty here shouldn’t be around much longer.”
Every once in a while he forgot what the gorgeous woman did for a living. Walker chuckled at the tight-rope act Ashe had obviously perfected. “Oh, you mean the lost cat posters that read ‘Don’t worry. He’s being well taken care of, and don’t call because we’re cool now’?”
“Shit, you saw those?”
“The manager down at Shaw’s grocery store would like to have a word with you, counselor.”
“Outside is public property,” she muttered before nuzzling the cat’s enormous head with her cheek. “All kidding aside, I put out a few ticklers and no one knows him. I even took him to the Humane Society and he’s not chipped.”
“Well, that settles it. You covered all of your bases,” he muttered, distracted by the mountain of ingredients on the counter. Walker scanned the steak, onion, pasta and squash without the foggiest idea what to do with any of it.
“Do you mind if Morty hangs for a bit? It was completely rude for me not to ask.”
He looked away from the train wreck on the counter. Even if he wanted to say no to her sweet request, he couldn’t. “Any cat that does his business on the john is okay in my book.”
“He can flush, too,” she admitted with a smile. “I mean, that’s just amazing.” Pushing aside the vicious stink-eye the cat threw him, he had to admit the woman cuddling him turned out to be the impressive one.
Ashe noticed the way his eyebrows drew together in stern concentration. In less than a minute she figured out Walker had no idea how to cook.
“Need help?” She put Morty down and moved to the sink to wash her hands. The hodgepodge of ingredients he’d bought made no sense. “Has C.T.’s body been found?” She grabbed food from the fridge.
“Uh, no,” he replied.
As Walker chopped the onions, she turned on the stove to melt butter in the frying pan.
“A missing person report has been filed by her family, but other than that, nothing.”
“Don’t you think it’s strange that no one is looking for us?” Directness always made it to the top of her list of flaws, but she wanted to pick his brain to see how close he was to the truth.
“Are you referring to your firm?” he asked. “I kept tabs for any mention of two missing lawyers in the media. It barely made a blip in the news cycle. If they hadn’t given you guys those phones, I would think there was more to this.”
“It was just given to me.” She turned to grab the onions from him.
“What?” He glanced away from the food to look at her.
“The phone.” She tried to buy herself some time. Tossing in the squash, she thought quick on her feet. Ashe didn’t want to give too much away. “As far as I know, C.T. didn’t get one.” Before she could toss the onions into the pan, she sprinkled in a bit of salt.
“Why did the partners give you a phone and not give one to C.T.?”
“I was lead on our UN case.” She shrugged, waiting for the onions to soften before she added diced garlic. “Do you think it means something significant?”
“Not sure,” he told her. “Going to need more information, and so far, there’s not much.”
Ashe had thought the same thing. She doubted C.T.’s murder had anything to do with the UN speech. Everyone knew Ashe had taken lead on that case. Apparently, her partner’s murder had yielded not one single clue for them. If she allowed circumstances to overwhelm her, she would spiral into a funk. Ashe decided not to dwell on it.
They prepared the rest of the meal in comfortable silence. Positive Walker worked with other clients, Ashe imagined his treks to Cape Cod would take a toll on him. They were no closer to finding C.T.’s killer than they had been weeks ago.
“Wow, I’m impressed. I couldn’t figure out what to do with half of this stuff,” he said as she set down a plate covered with garlic herb pasta and steak.
Joining him at the chef’s island, she choked back a chuckle. “Really? I couldn’t tell.” Obviously, he lacked skills in the kitchen, otherwise she wouldn’t be cooking. Walker laughed with her.
“You’ve cooked twice for me now. I feel guilty.” He took a bite of the steak and gave a deep sigh.
“I know how you can make it up to me.”
His left eyebrow rising slightly was the only indication that he even heard her over his food porn moans. “We’ll have leftovers, and Tom probably could use—”
“Why?” he groaned.
“Because he’s a lonely old man. Come on, Walker. He looks up to you. He thinks you’re a hero.”
“A nosey old stalker is what he is.” Worse than a petulant child forced to do chores, Walker bowed his head with a few choice expletives. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll do it, but I won’t like it.”
Ashe didn’t want any bad blood between the neighbors. Tom might be a bit of a pervert, but he wasn’t a bad person.
Amused by the sexy man in front of her, she reached for her glass of red wine and took a sip to hide her smile.
Chapter Eight
Walker had left Cape Cod only three days before and couldn’t wait to get back. Facts about Ashe’s case swirled in his head with no link that made sense. Forced into another meeting, he sat in the conference room with his partners. They blathered on about something. Ignoring them, he tried to piece together Ashe’s mystery.
“We’re going to need you at more functions.”
“Like what?” he asked. Not that it mattered. He would shoot all their choices down. Instead, he continued to type.
“Charity galas, alumni crap—and what was the other thing, Chad? You know, the one at the museum?” Dan asked.
Walker glanced up from his screen at the husky blond idiot who sat across from him. At one time Dan had been in shape, but his beer-belly paunch now crossed the finish line first. Chad sat next to him, clocking in at only a couple of inches taller—which meant he could hide his fat better. Other than the slightly darker hue of his hair, the men were basically the same person.
More than ever, Walker understood why Tank never bothered to differentiate between the two of them.
“Look… I need to catch a plane.” He gathered his belongings.
“You’ve been spending a lot of time away. Where have you been going?”
Their curiosity set off alarm bells in his head. Neither partner had shown the slightest bit of concern for his pers
onal life in the past. “If I’m not mistaken, I do the running, jumping and protecting. You two bring in the clients. What happened to that business strategy?”
“We’ve been going over the numbers and we feel the firm can bring in more revenue if you attend with us.”
“For his dashing good looks, of course,” Tank interrupted.
Walker turned toward the big dude, who was leaning against the wall. He hadn’t even heard him enter the room, but Walker could tell Tank wanted to pounce on them.
“This is a private meeting, if you don’t mind.” Dan waved him off dismissively.
“Then you won’t learn what’s in Cape Cod,” Tank offered.
Eager to hear, Walker stopped gathering his stuff. His mad dash to the airport could wait a few more minutes.
“Our boy here has a fiancée.”
“What?”
“Are you kidding? You don’t even date,” Chad said.
Walker chuckled, positive Tank had something up his sleeve. Since he’d already filled him in about Ashe, he waited for Tank to lay out his plan. If he wanted to beat J8’s timeline for her return, he would need his friend’s help.
“Yeah, her name is Ashe,” Walker said.
“It was a sudden thing. Right, boss?”
“Sure.” He threw his computer bag over his shoulder. “Love at first sight.”
“Congratulations, I guess.” Chad openly pouted. “Were you even going to invite us to meet her?”
“Yeah, once we got settled.” Not bothering to say good-bye, he stepped out of the conference room with Tank beside him. “Going to clue me in?”
They made their way to the open elevator. Tank hit the lobby button and waited for the doors to close.
“Her condo was clean.”
“She seems a bit OCD. I’m not totally surprised.”
“No, I mean everything was gone. No one knows if she’s dead or alive except for the people who put the hit on her.”
“What about family?” They got out of the elevator. The late-lunch crowded the street. Walker hoped to leave the city before traffic got any worse.
“None. Her background is hella murky,” Tank mumbled. “Maybe you should ask your fiancée about her family.”
“Still…” He jerked his thumb toward the building where he’d left the Chads. “What the hell was that?”
“Oh yeah, I hate them.”
“No shit.” Walker chuckled.
“Seriously, though, Dumb and Dumber put in a bid with Ashe’s firm for a conference. They’re just banging out the details.”
“Now that’s interesting,” Walker admitted. “Do you think they have anything to do with—”
“Seems too obvious, even for them, but I’ll check it out.”
Walker agreed with Tank. “Now what? You think outing my fake engagement with Ashe will draw out their plan?”
“Not sure, but I knew they would hate the thought of you not being available at all hours. Her law firm is going to be our best lead to flush things out.”
Walker’s car service pulled up to the curb.
“How far do you want me to go with this?” Tank asked before he turned his head to track the movements of a group of models who went by.
“Hey, man, remember I wanted to work a contract with just us?” Walker said. “If you would have agreed, you wouldn’t have such a raging hard-on for the doofuses.”
“At the time I wasn’t ready, but look at all of the fun we’re having with Chad and Chad.”
Honestly, Walker figured they had probably been better off. At the time he hadn’t been able to concentrate on anything but Raven, so the business side may have suffered.
“Invite the morons to the Cape,” Tank told him. “They’re up to something. I just haven’t figured it out yet.”
He opened the sedan’s door and got in. “Shit, their wives are worse than Walmart.”
“Nothing is worse than Walmart.”
“Exactly.” Superficial didn’t even begin to cover it with his business partners’ significant others.
* * * *
Playing along the shoreline, Ashe teased Morty with yarn tied to string. For a fancy cat, he went gaga over such an unsophisticated toy.
A soft breeze caressed her skin and blew her flimsy silk robe away from her thighs. Too restless to sleep, she’d grabbed an easy slip-on and taken Morty out to the beach. They played up and down the coast until he’d grown tired. From her muddy calculations, they’d traveled close to a mile.
She walked the back path to the house and caught sight of Walker through the garage-door window. Ashe couldn’t help but stare at the outline of his muscles underneath his white tank. It was close to midnight and she wondered why he’d come.
She opened the garage door. “Didn’t expect to see you.” Stepping past the threshold into his grandmother’s colorful work space, she matched his smile with one of her own.
“No leash.” He grunted at Morty who slinked his way over Walker’s feet. “And he doesn’t run away?”
He moved a box off his grandmother’s work bench. The garage had been turned into a shrine with neon lights and flashing diner signs. Leighann Knight, a perfect Twilight Zone-type Norman Rockwell knockoff, had become a local folk hero—the closest thing to a female John Walters. Cape Cod hid an iconic 1960s modern artist.
“Who would feed him? Morty’s too uppity to hunt for his own food.”
He opened the door to the house for the cat to enter.
“Something on your mind?” she asked. Walker had avoided eye contact with her since she’d walked through the door.
“We’re not making a whole lot of headway on your case.” He dumped paintbrushes and tools into another box.
“It’s early yet,” she offered, detecting a strange vibe in the air.
“J8 has the resources to help you. Unfortunately, it comes with strings.”
“Such as?” She drew her hand along the glass tabletop the famous woman had created. Ashe wondered why Walker had waited this long to put away her stuff.
“You will have to claim a new identity, with no guarantee you’ll ever get the old one back.” He shifted the last box off the table, revealing rock-and-roll legends constructed from vintage pop bottle tops. The images of Jimmy Hendrix, the Beatles and Janis Joplin decorated half of the surface.
“Doesn’t sound appealing.” Ashe admired the brilliant colors of his grandmother’s unfinished piece of work. A strong blue void covered the left side of the table closest to her.
“The thing is… I can’t protect you anymore.”
Surprised by the sudden turn in conversation, she glanced up at his unreadable face. He was sexy and chiseled. For the life of her, she couldn’t figure out what went through his head.
“There’s a level of danger to your case that I’m not entirely comfortable with,” he continued.
A hard thud of panic dropped in her stomach. She might have foreseen this outcome but hadn’t expected him to bail this soon. The quiet shelter of the Cape had helped her to work out her problems, to keep her anxiety controlled, not to mention put her closer to him. “Isn’t this what you do for a living?”
“This isn’t exactly the same thing.”
“How so?” she pressed, not willing to let him off the hook.
“There’s a conflict of interest,” Walker admitted.
“Such as?”
He pushed his hair back with his fingers and blew out a ragged breath. “The thing is, I haven’t been back to this place in twenty years.”
“So you don’t like the Cape? Hell, no one under the age of dead does. Still, that’s not a good enough reason to leave me in the lurch. Besides—”
“In the span of a month, I’ve been back here four times and I hate leaving. This isn’t about security or trying to figure out why someone would want to kill two lawyers, but it does have everything to do with you.”
Unsure if she followed his line of thinking, she shook her head. “But you were hired by the agency
—”
“No, I was actually strong-armed into retrieving you by the woman who runs it. The only reason I didn’t hand you over to J8 that night wasn’t because of your case. It was because I knew I wouldn’t see you again.”
Grateful, Ashe released a sigh of relief. “Oh.” She laughed. “I thought it was serious.”
Chapter Nine
After his failed meeting with the Chads, Walker had grabbed a late flight to the Cape. But before leaving, he’d taken a detour to his loft to check out the firm’s financials. He’d known something was going on with the Chads but had stayed in his lane in the business and concentrated on the ‘hands-on’ security side, not getting involved with administration and bookkeeping before. But it was time to figure out what was happening.
It had taken a few hours to reveal the whole scheme, but with the help of a ghost program Tank had created, he’d gone over WLK’s bank records. The Chads probably believed they were criminal masterminds. However, within twenty minutes, he’d found the first discrepancy. Once he’d uncovered enough evidence to bury them in the court system for years, he’d taken off for the airport. If he’d stayed in the city much longer, he would undoubtedly have hunted the Chads down and killed them with his bare hands.
A little past midnight, Walker had arrived at the house. Expecting Ashe to be asleep, he’d headed to the garage. He would have made it for dinner, but he’d had his homework to do, thanks to his partners. Instantly restless, he’d gone to his grandmother’s studio. Frozen archives of her life littered the room. Old art projects and supplies ate up the space. Unable to shake the negative energy around him, he’d grabbed a box and gone to work. He should have done it years ago, but he’d come up with one excuse after another to avoid immersing himself in her space.
The hour he’d spent categorizing her art had allowed memories to surface he’d thought he’d buried with her.
Since pure, unadulterated lust was clouding his judgment, he concluded that he could no longer protect Ashe. By the time he’d made up his mind about her case, she’d walked into the house.