“Nothing you can share.” I gently extricated my hand. “This is a threat to my business.”
“Cami, I’m sorry.”
“I have to go back to work,” I told him. “As soon as possible. Maybe today.”
“Please.” His urgent tone caught my attention. “Give us a few more days, at least through the weekend. If my team and I haven’t resolved this by Monday, I’ll figure out a way to make the clinic safe enough for you to go back to work.”
An image flashed into my mind of Kyle and his friends, armed and patrolling the premises. That would put the final nail in the clinic’s coffin. But he’d asked for a few more days, so I’d give him that and hope we could come up with a better solution.
“A few more days,” I agreed. “In the meantime, I knowit’ll be difficult since we’re under the same roof, but let’s keep some distance from each other.”
“Cami...”
“Kyle, please. I need some time alone.”
That’s what I always needed when my life went to hell. To be alone. To sit with my own thoughts. To figure out how to solve my problems for myself because, although I’d forgotten it for a minute there, the reality was that no one else was coming to save me.
17
KYLE
As she’d requested, I gave Cami her space. We came together for lunch and dinner, and we even managed to make conversation. But nothing was the same as it had been hours earlier, while we’d been in our happy, sex-fueled bubble with no HEAT team, no FBI leaking that bullshit story to try to flush out leads, no fucked-up investigation. The bubble had burst, but I couldn’t stand to go back to the way things had been before last night, going to bed early and alone.
I might not have any choice in the second one, but at least I hoped to talk Cami into spending some time with me. No sex, no pressure, no conversation if she didn’t want it. But I needed to feel close to her again on some level.
I wanted to take her on a date, something intimate and romantic. Or maybe a meet-up with good friends, over cold beers and bar trivia. But for now, until this investigation was over and she and Bella were safe, I needed to figure out a way to date her here, to woo her, to win her back.
“Would you be up for a movie?” I asked while I stacked plates into the dishwasher, “Here, I mean, not going out.”
“Um.” She shrugged. A crack in the armor she’d donned to protect herself from me. “Will there be popcorn?”
I grinned. “There will be now. I’ll make it while you choose something to watch.”
“Wow, I get popcorn and the remote. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you’re trying to impress me.”
“Always,” I said seriously.
She sat on the sofa and Bella snuggled into the dog bed on the living room floor, one of three she now had at various spots throughout the house. With Cami melting ever so slightly, I could pretend we were a happy little family. Shit, was that what this was? Last night, I’d admitted to myself that I was falling for this woman, but a happy little family? Meanwhile, she was barely speaking to me. When the hell had I become such a masochist?
Ten minutes later, I set a large bowl of popcorn, a bottle of whisky, and two tumblers on the coffee table. I sat down beside her, leaving a space between us that was about the width of person. A very small person. She didn’t protest or shrink away. I took it as another win. By the end of the night, she might even let me touch her again. But I wouldn’t push it.
Halfway through the movie and the whole way through the popcorn, we’d inched closer to each other. Our shoulders were touching, and I was calculating the risk/benefit of putting my arm around her, like a stupid teenager on a first date, when the security system alarm beeped four times in rapid succession.
Cami jumped to her feet. Bella whined and tried to crawl behind the sofa. I palmed my phone and checked the security feeds. A vehicle, an SUV by the looks of it, with no lights on had turned into the driveway and stopped at the top of it. If they were smart, they were doingelectronic and heat signature surveillance to do a very different kind of risk/benefit analysis than I’d been doing a second earlier.
“Cami,” I said calmly so neither of them would freak out, “take Bella to my room and lock yourselves in.”
I ran to the armoire and pulled a comms unit out of the top drawer, tapping it to life as I shoved it into my ear.
“This is Rogers reporting an emergency incident at my residence. Who’s on the line?”
“You got routed to me,” Pasco said. “I’ve alerted the state and local police and notified the team.”
I reached behind the armoire and punched a code into the keypad, then pulled on the front of the cabinet to reveal the floor-to-top-of-the-armoire weapons safe behind it.
When Cami gasped, I realized two important things: one, I’d freaked her out again and, two, she hadn’t moved.
“Cami, did you hear me? Take Bella to the bedroom.”
