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“Someone Zoey cared very much about.” A bittersweet smile tipped her lips. “Someone who left before she ever knew what she felt for him. Why?”
He shook his head. Zoey’s life and issues with her brother and cousins would have to wait until later. “The name just came up.” Pushing away from the counter, he motioned for her to follow him. “Come to the office with me. I want to show you some pictures, see if you’ve seen any of these men.”
“The men you suspect were involved in the theft?” She moved beside him, the somber look on her face as she glanced up at him clenching at his chest.
“If one of them has made contact with you, it will narrow the field down to figuring out who, if anyone, was working with Betts. The faster we capture them, the faster you’ll be safe.”
—
The faster she would be out of his life, Lyrica thought painfully as she moved into the office across the foyer, the door closing behind them.
Leading the way to the wide desk on the other side of the room, Graham seemed more distant, harder than normal, as though he were deliberately drawing away from her. And he was, she thought. Flavors weren’t lifetime commitments, she reminded herself. They were a moment out of his time—intense, a relief from whatever hunger plagued him.
She could live with that for now.
For now.
“Here.” Sitting down at the desk, he pulled a thick folder from the file drawer at the side and slapped it to the top of the table before sitting back in his chair and patting his lap with a rakish grin that erased that distance with a suddenness she found completely shocking. “You can sit here.”
On his lap?
They would not be looking at that file long, but the experience promised to be more than the frightening venture she’d imagined.
“Think that’s safe, do you?”
“I didn’t say it was safe,” he assured her with another of those crooked, far too sexy grins he used against her at the oddest times. “I said you could sit.”
“What if I can’t concentrate while I’m sitting there?” she asked then, her voice lowering. “It looks far too . . . pleasurable a seat.”
He was hard. The outline of his erection beneath his jeans had her heart pounding, need heating her thighs and the sensitive flesh between.
“Just turn around there, sweetheart, and sit,” he invited. “Let’s see if I can’t make it even more pleasurable than you imagined.”
Turning her back to him slowly, a knowing grin tugged at her lips and she sat slowly, her legs resting outside his as he pulled her back against him and arranged her position to suit him.
“Comfortable?” he asked, her back snug against his chest, the hard wedge of his shaft pressing between the cheeks of her rear and rising along her lower back.
“Or something,” she murmured.
Trying to control her breathing was all but impossible, and there was no lowering the rate of her heartbeat. It was thumping like a drum being used with a heavy hand.
“You feel good against me, Lyrica.” Lifting her hands, he placed them on the arms of the leather chair as his legs spread, parting hers farther as he leaned forward. “Now, let’s see if you know anyone here.”
As he flipped the file open, the first picture stared out at her.
Commander Jimmy Dorne. A ruffian, she thought.
A bully.
“I’m pretty certain Dorne was her lover,” Graham revealed. “He was enraged when she died.”
Barrel-chested, his blond hair thinning, the man wore an expression that was faintly cruel. And the woman who had betrayed Graham preferred that over the man currently running his fingertips along the edge of the skirt Lyrica wore?
That was not a mistake she would have made.
There were several more pictures of him, in combat gear as well as in street clothes. In each one, the cruelty she could see in his hard eyes and unsmiling expression was apparent.
“I’ve not seen him.” She shook her head. “And if I had, I would have remembered him simply to ensure I avoided him.”
