Oh, I plan to.
He sucks his teeth obnoxiously and gazes up Chloe’s driveway.
I peek out from behind my car door, giving him the first excuse that comes to mind to get him the fuck out of here. “She left town for the weekend. There won’t be anything to see here until Monday.”
He gives me a dejected look, but reluctantly retreats to his vehicle and starts readying to leave.
I glance up and down the empty cul-de-sac once he’s gone, making sure there aren’t any lingering fans. I grab the bag in the backseat of my truck, hustling up the driveway and around the back of her house.
I’ve snooped around her place enough that I know she doesn’t appear to have cameras, so I don’t risk alerting her to my presence at all.
At the back of her house, I turn my back on the eerie, turquoise glow of the lit-up pool and face the French doors. The reflection of the water shimmers against her house and through the windows that stretch toward the roof.
I shove the lock-pick into the deadbolt and jimmy it just the way Micah told me to. I fuck with the sharp, pointy piece of metal as I try to keep myself from thinking about why Micah knows so much about illegal, inconspicuous surveillance. And lock picks. And key molds.
I trust him, and he works for the department, so I’m sure it’s all just knowledge he’s gathered along the way.
When I feel a catch inside the tiny hole, I slide the deadbolt out of place, slipping into the house and clicking it closed behind me.
It didn’t occur to me until just now that I’ve never actually been inside Chloe’s house.
I’ve followed her to every coffee shop and running track in a twenty-mile radius of this town. Her poisonous lips have been within mere centimeters of mine, yet I’ve never been in this mysterious sanctuary of hers.
I wasn’t a detective yet when Caroline’s first two husbands died. While I led the investigation on the third one, there wasn’t much of a crime scene. By the time the ME alerted our unit to the suspicious nature of his death, the Starks had already lawyered up and a judge wouldn’t sign off on a search warrant.Lack of sufficient evidencewas the judge’s reasoning, which frustrated the hell out of me becausesufficient evidenceis exactly what I’d been hoping to find after Caroline’s canned confession.
My dress shoes move silently across the tiled floors, my shadow slinking slowly around me as I move through the dark house lit only by the full moon and the pool light outside the paneled windows that travel all the way up the vaulted ceilings.
From the outside, the home she once shared with her mother looks like a massive, modern mausoleum. That’s the only word I’ve ever been able to use to describe it, especially knowing the lives that have been taken by the people residing inside these stiff walls.
Her home feels surprisingly more lived in—by an actual human and not a psychopathic murderer from hell, though I don’t let that distract from the fact that that’s exactly who she is.
I head left into the kitchen, noting the seasoning containers scattered on the granite countertops and the stainless-steel pans in the sink from what must have been last night’s dinner. I lift a container labeledgarlic powderto my nose, sniffing it on the off chance I’d be able to detect some sort of poison she might have sprinkled over a dinner guest’s meal.
I set my bag down on the kitchen floor, looking around for the perfect spot for the first camera. I spot one in the fake bushes perched on top of the cabinets, and I pull one out from the bag, reaching up toward the bushes and setting the tiny black square in between a couple of leaves. Taking a step back, I check the visibility of the camera from multiple angles, ensuring no one will spot it. I pull my phone out and the camera monitoring app up, waving at the camera a few times and watching myself on the receiver. Perfect. Not fuzzy at all.
I tuck my phone into my pocket and lift my bag from the ground, continuing through the house. Stepping into the living room, I pause, studying the expanse for the next spot. A white, fluffy sectional sits in a conversation pit facing a big screen TV mounted to the wall. On the entertainment center below the TV is a gaming system. I take the two steps into the pit and walk toward the system. Crouching in front of it, I noticethe thick layer of dust on the controller sitting next to it. I never pictured Chloe as a gamer. To be honest, I never picture Chloe doing anything a normal person would do, because all I see when I look at her is a dangerous criminal.
Well, that’s mostly all I see. That’s what I force myself to focus on, at least. It’s hard to when she looks so goddamn good all the time. Uninvited images of her lips on mine filter through my brain, stealing my attention for far too long. I shake the phantom sensation free from my mind, refocusing on the system in front of me. If she’s not a gamer, maybe she’ll never notice the little black camera in its vicinity. Then again, if she’s not a gamer, why does she have this expensive ass console in her living room?
I remove the little black square from my bag and attach an adhesive that Micah sent me with, ‘just in case.’ I stick the peeping eye to the back of the entertainment center.
The sound of a car driving by forces me out of the pit and toward the front of the house, peeking out the white shutters. Her driveway remains empty, and her neighbor’s garage door lowering across the cul-de-sac puts me at ease. Slightly. I still need to quit fucking around and get out of here. I pull out the tracking app and confirm Chloe’s Bug is still stationary in the parking lot at Mickey’s.
No more losing time thinking about Chloe’s lips. Or the way her tongue might feel in my mouth. Or around my dick.
Fuck.
I retreat from the window and swoop my bag off the ground, climbing her wide, sweeping staircase two at a time to the second level. There’s another area of the house I’m very interested in having eyes on, but I want to make sure my original bases are covered. I push into the bedroom I only assume is hers, based on the number of times I’ve seen her staring out her window from the front of her house.
I’m assaulted by the scent of her immediately. The scent that haunts me. The scent that drove me away a year ago. I couldn’t get away from it, and I needed to, or I was going to lose myself entirely.
I make a half-ass attempt at pulling my undershirt over my nose, but it barely helps. The faint scent of vanilla with a hint of berries seeps through the tiny holes of my t-shirt. I try to remind myself that the berries are probablypoisonous, and I let that thought drive me across the room to where her large white dresser sits across from her bed.
My gaze sticks on the four-post bed frame, the luxurious, cushy looking duvet and plush white pillows and—oh my God, is that a vibrator? I ignore the twitch in my dick and force my feet to remain glued in place instead of crossing to that purple dildo and running my tongue against her dried come that’s likely on it.
Instead, I refocus on everything else about the room; the sheer curtains framing the windows, the string of twinkling lights littering her headboard, the fact that there’s an actual tiara on top of her lampshade on the nightstand by her bed.
God, she’s like a princess. An evil princess with a murder-complex. I don’t let my thoughts wander any further than that, and trust me, they try to. I turn away from the bed before I imagine what she looks like when she’s sleeping in it. Or being fucked on all fours, knees sinking into the mattress and head turned back slightly to watch the cock enter her over and over again.
