Burning Hearts

by Marci Bolden

  “Well, someone is wearing his bossy pants this evening,” she whispered but did as he told her.

  He winked and carried the dish to the table. After serving the women, including Eva, Josh sat next to her and watched his friends dig into the last-minute dinner he’d made. Funny how something so simple made him feel so complete. He’d been an only child growing up and had always struggled to find his place in the world, but he’d certainly found it now.

  “How’s your face, Josh?” Holly asked as she grabbed a chunk of sliced bread.

  “Painful. I’m going to try really hard to never have a broken nose again.”

  Rene shook her head. “Your life is bound to be filled with disappointment if you set such high goals.”

  He chuckled and then winced. “Don’t make me laugh. Seriously. That hurts.”

  “Sorry.”

  But Rene didn’t look sorry. And he wasn’t sorry, either. As much as he knew this group had accepted him, he had never felt as much a part of HEARTS as he did after earning his own war wounds. Now when they sat around talking about scars and injuries, as they tended to do when sharing drinks at their favorite pub, he could add something like “remember when I got my nose broken on that voyeur case…” instead of his usual scientific explanations for how those injuries happened or healed that they graciously tolerated but were clearly uninterested in.

  Eva had barely taken the last bite of her noodles before sitting back. “All right. Dinner’s over. Where’s the goods?”

  Josh smiled at her, not quite as wide as before since his face hurt like hell. He liked having the power over her for once. Usually she had a leg up on him. He quite enjoyed being the one in control. He sat back, as she had done, only he crossed his arms and gave her as smug of a look as he could manage. “How about dessert? We have half a gallon of praline pecan ice cream. Anyone?”

  “Joshua,” Eva chastised.

  He loved the feisty tone of her voice. “In the sunflower oil.”

  She playfully narrowed her ice-blue eyes at him before pushing herself up. The teasing smile on his face faltered when he noticed the other women looking at him. Holly stared, barely showing emotion as always. Alexa had her brows raised and a knowing smirk on her lips. Rene’s eyes were a warning. She had to know Josh would never do anything to hurt Eva, but that would never stop her from being protective of her teammate and friend. Josh respected that.

  As Holly cleared the table, Alexa spread a towel on the surface and Rene dug into her bag. Josh sat back, watching the women work in perfect unison. By the time Eva put on her latex gloves and carried the sunflower oil to the table, they were ready to check the bottle for fingerprints. Rene dusted, her frown deepening with each stroke of her brush and latent powder.

  “This is clean,” she finally declared.

  “But the SD card isn’t,” Eva said. She twisted the bottle. It separated in the middle, and she was able to pull out the small camera. As she’d done before, she used tweezers to carefully pull the card out and put it in her laptop after bringing it to life.

  She rubbed her hands together. “All right, ladies—”

  “And gentleman,” Josh added.

  “Let’s catch us a pervert.”

  Eva clicked to start the video playing. The image was all black. Still black. And…black some more. Then grays and whites started to come into view. A hand moved from in front of the lens and revealed…a black mask, black hoodie, and black jeans.

  “What the fuck?” Eva spat.

  “Smart little criminal,” Holly muttered.

  Disappointment fell over Eva’s face. Josh rubbed his palm up and down her back but then dropped his hand after catching Alexa grinning at him. Returning his attention to the screen, he narrowed his eyes as the criminal adjusted the bottle. “Hey. That’s not Shane Tremant. It can’t be.”

  “How can you tell?” Holly asked.

  “Because when he caught me with his fob, I remember thinking his hands were big enough to crush my skull without much effort. Those are not Shane’s giant head-crushing hands.”

  Eva leaned closer, peering as if she could see through the mask if she just tried hard enough. “Holy shit.”

  “What?” Rene demanded.

  Eva paused the video and backed it up a few frames. “Look at that.”

  Rene also leaned in and squinted her dark eyes. “What?”

  Josh widened his eyes. “Boobs,” he blurted out.

  Holly flicked the back of his head, but Eva tapped the screen.

  “Boobs,” she agreed. “Our pervert has boobs. See the bulge in the hoodie right there. He’s a she.” Eva let out a half laugh as she leaned back. “Wow. I did not see that coming.”

  12

  Eva couldn’t wrap her head around what she’d seen. The voyeur was a woman. Not to sound like Josh, but statistically speaking, that simply didn’t make sense. Voyeurs tended to be middle-aged married males. Shane Tremants and Neal Prices. A woman? Damn. Eva had to rethink everything she’d put together for this case.

  The other HEARTS had barely walked out the door before she’d spread her notes over the table to scour every bit of evidence she’d gathered. What had she missed? And how the hell had she missed it?

  Staring at the bedroom ceiling, she rolled the case over in her mind for the hundredth time since crawling into bed next to Josh. She had no choice, really—even if the latest bit of information hadn’t been eating at her gut, she couldn’t possibly sleep while lying this close to Josh after realizing how deeply she felt for him. If she weren’t obsessing about the case, she’d likely have climbed on top of him by now.

  Something that was still far too tempting.

  Slipping from beneath the blankets, she headed to the dining room table, where she still had papers spread everywhere, easing the bedroom door closed behind her. Wincing as she flipped on the overhead light, she filled a glass with water and stood over the table.

  “Okay,” she whispered to the papers. “What did you miss?”

  Neal and Shane were clearly working on something together. Shane’s wife Tiffany was sleeping with Courtney. Courtney didn’t seem to like Neal or Shane…which made sense if she was sleeping with his wife. And she was hitting on Josh so blatantly. Why?

  “Oh. Oh!” As she thought of Courtney’s reactions anytime someone mentioned being in a relationship, two pieces of the puzzle clicked into place.

  “Eva,” Josh said with a sleep-thickened voice, “save it for tomorrow.”

  Glancing up, she caught her breath. Because getting a T-shirt on and off was risky business with his broken nose, he’d opted to sleep in nothing but shorts that hung low on his slender hips. Eva let her gaze sweep over the pale skin covering the muscles that were enough to be seen but not bulging like some kind of gym rat. She’d never considered how sexy it was that Joshua spent more time nurturing his mind than obsessing about building muscles. But it was sexy. It was…Josh. And Josh was sexy as hell in her mind.

  Clearing her throat, Eva gestured toward her notes. “Twice now I’ve seen Courtney react to comments about people in relationships. I didn’t get it before, but after seeing her and Tiffany together in that video, I think she wants more than just a secret rendezvous here or there. She wants a serious relationship, but Tiffany is married to Shane. Not necessarily happily married and obviously not committed to him, but she is definitely committed to his wallet. She’s not going to leave him, and Courtney has to know that.” She bit her lip and looked at her notebook again. “But what does that have to do with the voyeur? That’s what I can’t work out.”

  Nibbling at her thumbnail, she dug deeper into her mind. “You said it sounded like Neal and Shane were whispering about me knowing something?”

  “They said she. I assumed it was you. Could have been someone else.”

  She snapped her fingers as she lifted her gaze to his. “What if she is Brenda Price? What if Tiffany isn’t the only bisexual Tremant? Two things are very clear: Neal and Shane are in cahoots o
ver something, and Brenda is intensely angry about something. Maybe Neal and Shane are sleeping together, too, and Brenda figured it out.” Her excitement faded a bit. “But that doesn’t explain why she was so hostile toward me or her warning that I’m their type.” Raking her fingers through her hair, she exhaled in a show of how deep her frustration ran. “Damn it. Why isn’t this coming together?”

  “Because it is after two o’clock in the morning.”

  Dropping her hands, she offered him a slight smile. “I know. I couldn’t sleep. Sorry if I woke you. I was trying to be quiet.”

  “You were quiet. I felt you get out of bed.” Crossing the room, he moved behind her as if he were going to look at her notes, too.

  His spicy scent surrounded her moments before he put his hands on her shoulders and his heat warmed her back. He rubbed his thumbs into her shoulders, working on the knots that always seemed to gather there. Her breath caught at the feel of him touching her. Her train of thought didn’t simply fall off the tracks; her concentration nosedived off a bridge and hit several ledges before crashing into a rocky bottom, exploding on impact.

  “You need to rest, baby girl.”

  Baby girl? She smiled at the term that he’d started using the day their relationship changed from friends to more but hadn’t used since once she’d ended things between them months ago. She’d always cringed inside, hating how his words highlighted his lack of faith in her. This time, however, her heart swelled so much, she thought it might burst from her chest and sing a show tune right there on the table.

  “I can’t rest,” she said on a sigh. “Not when I have to start over.”

  Lowering his hands, he wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her against him. “You aren’t starting over. You have quite a bit to go on, actually. It’s just that there are a lot of new suspects to look at since most of the residents are women,” he said.

  Eva blinked long and slow. She heard his words, but they didn’t make sense. “Hmm?”

  “The woman who placed the camera is likely a resident, right?”

  Oh. The case. Right. “Yeah. To get access to the condos, she probably lives here.” Her words were muttered, mostly because her mind was consumed by the heat that was burning into her skin through her thin shirt. She’d barely been able to clear her head since getting home. Closing her eyes, she replayed the conversation she’d had with Alexa and Holly earlier. She’d admitted to them—and to herself—that she loved Josh. Ever since then, the rabid elephant in the room seemed to have ripped her heart open and exposed the gaping wound to the brutal emotions that love brought with it.

  Josh had already hurt her once. And here she was, tempted to ask him to do it again. She thought he’d learned his lesson. She hoped he’d learned his lesson. And she hoped that she’d learned some things, too. Like how to not always expect the worst from people. How to not always anticipate the worst.

  And how to forgive his missteps and let them go so they could move forward.

  None of those things came easy to Eva, but she finally understood she had to figure that out if she and Josh were going to really get the second chance they both seemed to want.

  “This really has you shaken,” Josh said, squeezing her, seemingly unaware of the torture he was inflicting with his close proximity.

  Sinking her teeth into her bottom lip, Eva revisited her earlier assessment.

  She loved Josh. She couldn’t imagine her life without him. Thanks to Courtney’s blatant flirting, Eva now had an inkling of what it would feel like for him to be with someone else. She found the idea unbearable. Seeing him hurt, watching the doctor set his nose and knowing he was in pain, had felt like a knife twisting in her gut. She never wanted to see him hurt again or feel the fear that she could lose him.

  “Hey,” he said, turning her to face him. “Are you okay?”

  “No,” she confessed on a whisper. “I’m not. I’m so far from being okay that I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

  He stared at her with obvious concern. “Baby, what’s wrong?”

  “This.” She gestured between them. “This thing between us. It isn’t going to go away, is it?”

  His silence felt like a million punches to her gut. She couldn’t breathe while he seemed to debate his answer. “No,” he said after what had to have been hours. Maybe days. “It isn’t going to go away. We’re connected somehow, and…and that isn’t going away.”

  She swallowed hard. Hearing him confirm what she’d already accepted terrified her. “I know I didn’t show it well, but I was so scared when you got hurt.”

  “I know you were.” He brushed his hands over her arms. “If it’s any consolation,” he said with a slight grin, “so was I.”

  She laughed for a moment before letting her smile fade. Nodding toward the table, she said, “This is what I do, Josh. This is who I am. I can’t change that. I don’t want to change that.”

  “I don’t want you to.”

  “But you do. How many times did you say—”

  “I was wrong, Eva.” Taking her hands, he stared at them as his shoulders sagged. “I was worried about you, and I didn’t show that well.” Meeting her gaze again, he said, “We both have some work to do, but I would never want you to change. You’re right, this is who you are. This is who I fell madly in love with.”

  His words were like an unexpected splash of ice water washing over her on a hot day. She gasped involuntarily, but the ensuing relief was profound. Her heart dared to acknowledge a spark of hope. Resting her palms to his cheeks, careful of his blackened eyes and broken nose, she whispered, “I don’t want you to change, either. I love your nerdy self.” She grinned as he pulled her closer to him.

  “Will you hurt me if I kiss you?”

  Getting onto her tiptoes so she could slide her arms around his neck, she whispered back, “I’ll hurt you if you don’t.”

  He smashed his mouth to hers, possessing her in a way that was usually saved for her. Josh had never been the assertive one. She didn’t remind him of that. She dug her fingers in his hair and opened her mouth to his demanding tongue. He gripped her thighs just under her ass and lifted her onto the table. She leaned back when he broke the kiss and hissed under his breath.

  “Joshie,” she breathed.

  “I’m okay.” He dove back in, kissing her hard again.

  This time, Eva pulled his hair until he put a few inches between them. “Stop.”

  “I’m sorry. I thought—”

  She clung to him so he couldn’t step away. Wrapping her legs around him, she secured his body against hers, sighing at the feel of his erection pressing against her thin shorts. She kissed him lightly then, sweetly, like he always kissed her. “We can do this without causing further injury to your face.” Running her hand down his chest, she slipped it beneath the elastic band of his pants and cupped his ass. The feel of his muscles rippling under her palm sent a thrill through her. Pulling his body to hers, she ground her sex against his. “This is all I want. You and me. Like this again.”

  Resting his forehead to hers, he exhaled slowly. “So do I. More than you know.” His next kiss was sweet, soft…pure Josh, and she nearly melted against him. “I’ll do better this time. I promise.”

  She was tempted to tease him, to make a sex joke to avoid the seriousness of his words. The sarcasm wouldn’t surface. Instead, she kissed him with all the tenderness she’d denied him for too long. Stroking her fingers through his hair, she smiled. “Me, too.”

  “I meant what I said, Eva. I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  He lifted her off the table, his hands gripping her thighs, and carried her to the bedroom. The light coming from the doorway was just enough to appreciate the sweet way he looked her body over as he eased her onto the pile of crumpled blankets. He kneeled before her, tugging her shorts over her hips and down her legs. As he eased her pants over her ankles, she arched up enough to pull her shirt off and toss it aside.

  God
, how she’d missed this—his kisses gliding up her legs, adding fuel to her fire with every inch he covered. His hands, soft and gentle, brushing over her skin in a ritual that had always made her feel cherished. Before, she hadn’t appreciated the slow burn he had a way of creating. She’d just wanted him in her, quenching her internal thirst for him. However, as he nipped at that spot just behind her knee, she bit her lip and let the sensation fill her.

  His teeth scraping across her flesh sent ripples of heat to her core, making her body want to scream for his. Instead of pulling him up, demanding he satisfy her immediately as she’d always done, she let him torment her in the best possible way—with his lips, tongue, and teeth. They put her under some kind of sexual spell that she never wanted to break. So lost in the feel of him that she actually gasped, startled, at the feel of his thumb rubbing over her center. He massaged, nipped, and kissed until she screamed out.

  “Josh,” she panted, “you’re killing me.”

  “I know.”

  Shit. She hadn’t realized how close his mouth was to her core until his breath heated the skin he’d manipulated with his hand. Fingers slid into her opening as his tongue flicked her clitoris. Grabbing fistfuls of blanket, she reminded herself not to buck into him. The man was injured enough, but damned if she didn’t want to shove his face harder between her legs. Forcing herself to restrain her movements was taking too much of her focus. “Come here,” she ordered, reaching for him.

  He licked at her several times, thrusting his fingers in time with his mouth, before whispering, “You have no idea how much I’ve missed tasting you.”

  She let a sultry laugh rip from her throat. “Not nearly as much as I’ve missed being tasted.”

  Sliding up her body, taking a moment to give her nipples the same treatment he’d given her clit, he kissed her. His fingers never stopped their skillful movements, but as he bit her bottom lip, his thumb joined them, and her body lurched. She called his name as he sent her soaring and then falling into an abyss she hoped there was no end to.