Eventually, I climb out of my truck and move up her driveway, each step bringing me more clarity but also, more conflict.
I enter her house through the garage door without knocking, and she turns to me with a bright smile.
“Panda bear,” she sings, reaching out to me from the kitchen. I cross to her in long strides and pull her into me, letting her wrap her arms around my body. I inhale her scent, that poisonous, hypnotizing blend of sweet berries flowing from her hair and skin. “You’re here early.”
“You’rehereearly,” I return, resting my cheek against the top of her head, holding on to this moment for just a little while longer until it all tumbles away from me. “What time did you guys make it back?”
She pulls away and leans back against the counter, lifting her fresh coffee to her red lips and taking a long sip before answering.
I’m keenly attuned to her this morning. On the lookout for lies and half-truths. Searching for tells in the way her lips twitch or her eyes shift. She doesn’t have many, but when her gaze snags on mine for a second too long, and she’s no longer sipping the mug in her hands but merely holding it near her mouth, I know instantly she’s trying to buy time.
She rolls her eyes away from me, setting her coffee down. “Just about an hour ago.”Lie.The tracker in her mother’s vehicle clicked back to life just in time to show her arriving home at one in the morning. “Can I make you a coffee?”
With a shake of my head, I decline her offer. “You were on the road at six then?”
She tilts her head as she assesses me, maybe wondering why I’m asking such pointed questions. Maybe feeling like a cornered animal, though she doesn’t appear frazzled or feral in the slightest.
“About six, yeah,” she eventually says. She lifts her mug into the air in my direction. “You sure? You seem…off. Have you had any caffeine yet?”
That smile. Charming and disarming. Easy. Beautiful.
I let an honest chuckle pass my lips.Offis an understatement. Fuckingnuclearis how I feel, and at the same time, so insanely cool and collected that I am scaring myself.
Vera Bryan’s car was smashed into a thousand pieces by an unmanned freight train at midnight last night. It’s seven a.m. now, and the crews are still cleaning up the wreckage. Probably will be for the next few days, if not weeks. The train tracks that the freight was traveling on divide Sunset Peak from Devil’s Peak. It’s the only route without having to go around the entire Four Peaks Highway, through North Peak and Eagle’s Peak, which would take hours.
When I pulled into Chloe’s driveway just ten minutes ago, news reports detailed that the road had been closed since the accident in the middle of the night, and likely would be—at a minimum—the remainder of the day. They encouraged people to plan their travel accordingly.
Chloe couldn’t have left Sunset Peak at six a.m. this morning and made it back already—unless she was on this side of the tracks before midnight. And why would she have been, unlessshe knewshe’d be stuck on the other side?
“I don’t need caffeine.” I move toward her at the counter, spinning her so she’s bent over the cold marble and pressing my hips to her ass. She groans, letting her head fall forward and pressing her ass against me harder as her fingertips spread under her chest.
“What do you need then, detective?” she whispers, turning her head to the side to try and get a look back at me.
I let the rough skin of my hand drag against her smooth thigh, under her dress and over the bend of her hip. Digging my fingers into her bone, I use my other hand to free my hard cock between us, stroking myself as she wiggles her hips in front of me.
“I need you,” I rasp, lowering myself over her back. In one slow movement, her underwear is pushed to the side and I’m plunging into her heat. “I missed you,” I groan, sliding in and out of her wet cunt, feeling the twitch of her inner walls around my thickness as she sighs and lifts her hips a little higher into the air.
I did miss her. And that’s just one single thread of silk in this tangled web she has me trapped in. There are a hundred other threads, maybe even more than that. But they are so tightly intertwined that I can’t tell where one ends and another begins.
I can’t tell the loud truth from the quiet secrets.
“I missed you,” she says back through a moan, and it just pisses me off.Is any of this even real?
I pound against her ass and let her high-pitched grunts and whines slink through my veins like ice. Hatred. Lust. Anger. Suspicion.Hope. Myenchantmentwith her. It’s all frustratingly convoluted inside me and building into something I already know I won’t recognize when it releases. Hell, I already feel like I barely recognize myself.
Why am Ifuckingher, when I meant to show up here and haul her ass to jail?
Brushing my lips against the edge of her ear as I thrust into her, I slide my tongue along her skin. “I need you,” I say again, and I can see the corner of her lips tug into a smirk. I flatten one hand on her ass, and my other hand slides up her neck, gripping her jaw and forcing us upright and her head back against my body.
“You have me, Colin.”
“I need you.”Thrust.“To tell me the truth.”Thrust.
And then I pull the rolled-up newspaper from my back pocket and flatten it on the counter right in front of us.
I squeeze my hand tighter around her jaw, holding her head in place against my chest, and I can only assume her gaze is straining to see it from the angle I have her in, but I do know she sees it. Her pussy flexes at my roughness. At the growl of my voice. She’s trapped between my body and the cold countertop. Trapped between my desire and hatred for her. But come to think of it, that’s where she’s always been.
“The truth,” she breathes, wrapping her soft hand around mine on her throat.
