I strolled into the station with a spring in my step and a dozen chocolate éclairs. Piper trotted along next to me, her new favorite toy—one of Lina’s socks—clamped in her teeth.
I had my own souvenirs. Shallow scratch marks lined my back like tiger stripes. And there was the tiny, purple love bite that was mostly hidden by the collar of my shirt.
“Mornin’…Chief?” Bertle’s greeting sounded more like a question.
“Mornin’,” I returned. I slid the bakery box onto the counter next to the coffee maker.
Piper started her customary sniffing lap around the bullpen.
“Did you do something with your…face?” Tashi asked, looking concerned.
I ran a hand over my now smooth jaw. “I shaved. Why?”
“You look different.”
“Different good or different ‘dear God, please grow the hair back to cover up the ugly’?”
She looked at me as if I’d rode in on a unicorn preceded by a marching band of leprechauns.
“You’re not makin’ me feel good about my grooming, Bannerjee.”
“Different good,” she said quickly.
Grave wasted no time in breaking into the box of éclairs.
“How’d it go with our overnight guests?” I asked him.
“They bitched and moaned until Dilton’s wife showed up and posted bail,” Grave reported. “You pressin’ charges?”
“If Dilton doesn’t go quietly, I will.”
Grave nodded. “We’ve got him dead to rights on three cases and we’ve only gone back eight weeks. Affidavits are on your desk. If he don’t go quietly, he’s a bigger idiot than we gave him credit for.”
I was both glad to have the proof we needed to build our case and pissed off that I’d given him the opportunity to abuse his power. There was no telling what kind of damage he’d already done behind the badge. But it ended here.
Grave gave me a closer look. “Why’s your face look like you got laid? Is that a hickey on your neck?”
“Shut up and eat your éclair.”
I spent an hour buzzing through paperwork, including the incident report from the night before and the three affidavits from Dilton’s victims. His presence on the force was only a formality at this point. He was never going to wear a badge again. I’d see to that.
I topped off my coffee, took a lap around the bullpen, and then scratched out a quick letter to my dad.
When I got back to my office, I found Piper passed out cold in the dog bed under my desk. I reached for my phone and snapped a picture of her, then opened my text messages.
There was nothing from Lina, which I’d expected.
I’d taken advantage of her sated, walls-down state to get what I wanted. A commitment. At least a temporary one. Now that I’d had her, all of her, I wasn’t letting go. I just had to hang on tight and wait for her to catch up.
I fired off the picture of Piper and followed it up with a text.
Me: Still freaking out? Or are you still in bed too exhausted from orgasms to move?
I held my breath, then blew it out when those three telltale dots appeared below my message.
Lina: What did you do to me? I tried to go for a run and my legs wouldn’t work.
I grinned, my anxious ego immediately soothed.
Me: Hopper just told me my face looks like I got laid.
Lina: Justice said I was glowing and Stef asked me if I got one of those placenta facials.
Me: Hope you weren’t planning on keeping this a secret.
Lina: Is that even possible in this town?
Me: Nope. Which is why I’m taking you out to dinner tonight.
If I asked, it would give her too much time to think. The more she felt and the less she thought, the better.
Lina: “Out to dinner” as in no nudity and orgasms?
Me: Yes. Unless you’re planning to get us arrested on our first date.
Lina: *sigh* How quickly the thrill fades. What next? Game night?
My exhausted cock flexed behind my zipper. Twelve hours ago, my main concern had been whether I could perform at all. Now I had to worry about overuse.
Me: I can think of a few games I’d like to play with you.
Lina: Since you’re taking me to dinner instead of fucking me senseless, I can only assume you mean charades or checkers.
Me: Be ready at 7. Wear something that makes it hard for me to stop thinking about what you’ve got on underneath.
With that business taken care of, I moved on to the next item on my list.
“I knew it!”
Busted. Sloane stood in the doorway of the library break room, arms crossed and a triumphant grin on her pretty face. She was wearing a different pair of glasses today. These had bright blue tortoise-shell frames.
Piper retreated behind my back, unsure of what to do with the gloating woman blocking the exit.
“Knew what?” I asked, giving the sage-green paint a stir. The dent in the wall was going to need more than a coat of paint, but until I patched the drywall, paint would at least make it less noticeable.
“You, Chief Morgan, scuffed my wall with table sex!”
I shot her an irritated look. “Jesus, Sloane. Keep your voice down. This is a library.”
She closed the door and then regained her victorious stance. “I knew there was something up with you two last night. My sex radar never fails!”
“Lina didn’t…mention anything?” I asked casually.
Sloane took pity on me. “Didn’t have to. She left here walking funny and looking all dazed and feverish. Even without my glasses, I could tell.”
I turned my attention back to the gouge in the wall so she wouldn’t see my manly pride on display. “Maybe she had a stomach bug.”
“You think I don’t know the difference between a woman leveled by an orgasm and one trying to keep her dinner down? I know what I saw. Then you tore out of here not thirty seconds later looking all sweaty and hungry—and not in the food way, mind you. You looked like you were about to devour something…or someone.”
“Maybe I had the stomach bug too.”
“I say this with love. Bullshit.”
“I had official police business.”
Sloane tapped a finger to her chin. “Hmm. Since when is getting naked considered official police business?”
I jabbed the brush into the paint, then slapped it against the wall. Maybe if I ignored her, she’d go away.
“You rattle her,” Sloane said behind me.
I stopped painting and turned to look at her. “What?”
“Lina. You rattle her. It takes a lot to do that.”
“Yeah, well, the feeling’s mutual.”
Her smile was bright and smug. “I can see that.”
Hoping the conversation was over, I turned my attention back to the wall.
“It’s good to have you back, Nash,” Sloane said softly.
On a sigh, I dropped the brush. “Now what’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know what it means. I’m glad to see you returning to the land of the living. I was worried. I think we all were.”
“Yeah, well, I guess it takes some of us longer to bounce back. So what’s with you and Lucian?” I asked, changing the subject and stabbing the brush into the deepest part of the gouge.
“Don’t you mean Nolan? Who, by the way, is currently sitting in my office eating all my candy.”
“No, I mean Lucian. You and Nolan might be havin’ a few laughs, but he’s not Lucian.”
She was too quiet. I looked up and saw she’d carefully rearranged her face into a mask.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“You’re not supposed to lie to a cop,” I reminded her.
“Is this an official interrogation? Should I get a lawyer?”
“You know my secret,” I said, nodding toward the wall.
The tension went out of her shoulders and she rolled her eyes. “It happened a long time ago. Water under the bridge,” she insisted.
Piper tiptoed around me to sniff tentatively at Sloane’s sneakers. The librarian crouched down and offered her hand to the dog.
I went back to the wall. “You know what I remember from back in the day?”
“What?”
“I remember you and Lucy sharing these long, meaningful looks in the hall between classes. I remember him ripping the helmet off Jonah Bluth and putting him on his ass during football practice because Jonah said something about your body that I as an adult man with great respect for women won’t repeat.”
“It was about my boobs, wasn’t it?” Sloane quipped. “The price you pay for developing early.”
I gave her a long, steady look until she flinched.
“Did Lucian really do that?” she asked finally.
I nodded once. “He did. I also remember driving home after curfew from some particularly heavy making out with Millie Washington and seeing someone who looked a hell of a lot like Lucian climbing the tree outside your bedroom window.”
Sloane had been a sophomore and next-door neighbor Lucian a senior. They’d been as much opposites then as they were now. The broody bad boy and the pretty, peppy nerd. And as far as I knew, neither had ever officially acknowledged the other beyond “hey” in the hallowed halls of Knockemout High School.
But outside those halls was another story. One neither of them had ever shared.
Sloane focused on coaxing Piper closer to her hand. “You never said anything.”
“Neither of you seemed to want to talk about it so I left it alone. Figured it was your business,” I said pointedly.
She cleared her throat. The noise sent the dog scampering back to the safety of my reach. “Yeah, well, like I said, that was a long time ago,” she said, standing back up.
“Doesn’t feel good to have people shoving their noses in your business, does it?”
She gave me a chilly librarian glare and crossed her arms. “If I stick my nose someplace, it’s because someone isn’t doing what they need to be.”
“Yeah? Well, from where I sit, this animosity between you and Luce isn’t healthy. So maybe I should start inserting myself into that situation. Help you two come to a resolution.”
She blew out a breath through her nostrils like a bull facing off against a red flag. The stud in her nose twinkled. The standoff lasted all of thirty seconds. “Ugh, fine. I’ll stay out of your business and you stay out of mine,” she said.
“How about this?” I countered. “I respect your privacy and you respect mine.”
“Sounds like semantics to me.”
“Might sound that way, Sloaney Baloney. But we’re friends. Have been for years. Far as I can tell, our lives are gonna stay tangled up. So maybe instead of butting in and being nosy, we focus more on bein’ there for each other when needed.”
“I don’t need anyone to be there,” she said stubbornly.
“All right. But I might need a friend if I can’t convince Lina to take a chance on what we’ve got.” She opened her mouth, but I held up a hand. “I probably won’t want to talk much about it if I lose, but I sure as hell am gonna need a friend to help keep me from disappearing again.”
Sloane’s face softened. “I’ll be there.”
“And I’ll be there for you if and when you need me.”
“Thanks for fixin’ my wall, Nash.”
“Thanks for bein’ you, Sloaney.”
I was just closing up the paint can when dispatch called for me over my radio. “You out and about, Chief?”
“I am.”
“Bacon Stables has a horse on the loose again. Had a couple of reports of a big, black stallion galloping its ass southbound on Route 317.”
“On my way,” I said on a sigh.
“I can’t believe you won him over with a damn carrot,” I said as Tashi Bannerjee handed the reins of the big-ass Heathcliff to Doris Bacon, who was holding an ice pack to her ass.
We were standing in waist-deep weeds in the east pasture of the foreclosed Red Dog Farm, a fifty-acre horse property that had sat empty for going on two years since its owner’s multi-level marketing skincare business went belly-up.
Heathcliff the stallion had decided he didn’t feel like riding around the ring today and had bucked Doris off on her ass before heading south.
The seventeen-hundred-pound son of a bitch had kicked the passenger door of my SUV and tried to take a bite out of my shoulder before Tashi had distracted him with a carrot and snagged his reins.
“You handle the snakes, Chief, and I’ll take the horses.”
“I seem to recall you riding one of Heathcliff’s relatives through a drive-thru your senior year,” I teased.
She grinned. “And look how that paid off.”
I kept my distance as Tashi and Doris coaxed the humongous horse up the trailer ramp.
Something tickled between my shoulder blades and I turned around. Two deer jolted, then disappeared into the woods. There was nothing else out there. Just weeds and trees and broken fences, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling that something or someone was watching us.
Doris slammed the gate shut on the trailer. The sound of hoof meeting metal rang out. “Quit acting up, you big ninny.”
“Maybe it’s time to sell Heathcliff to a farm with higher fences,” I suggested.
She shook her head as she limped around to the driver’s side door. “I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks for your help, Chief, Officer Bannerjee.”
We waved her off as she maneuvered the truck and trailer onto the property’s driveway and headed for the road.
The stallion let out an earsplitting whinny.
“I think he just put a curse on you,” Tashi teased as we headed for my dented vehicle.
“Like to see him try.”
My phone buzzed in my pocket and I pulled it out.
Lina: You won’t believe what the town grapevine is reporting now. According to a not-so-reliable source you spent your afternoon herding a horse around town with your SUV.
Me: It wasn’t just any horse. It was Heathcliff the Horrible.
I attached a picture of the horse in question and another one of my dented door.
Lina: You better not smell like horse when you pick me up for dinner.
Me: I’ll see if I can squeeze in a shower between now and then. Have you picked out what dress you’re gonna torture me with?
