Page 4 of Playing With Love

Liza Monroe—the only woman I’d ever loved. The one who time and circumstance had stolen from me.

There she was in the flesh. More beautiful than the last time I’d seen her. I’d had hours to prepare for this meeting but, seeing her normally warm, inviting hazel eyes ice cold wasn’t the welcome I’d been expecting. There had never been anything cold about Liza, she was fire and explosive chemistry.

I could lie to myself and chalk it up to shock but I wasn’t a man prone to bullshit. The last time I saw her was in a bar in Tucson. Her divorce had just been finalized, I’d just closed a case after being undercover for too fucking long. The timing was shit but that didn’t mean it wasn’t finally time to come clean. Losing her to her husband had been a wake-up call but mostly I was done playing games. The time had come to step up and claim what had been mine for the better part of a decade. At the end of the night I walked her to her room and declined her invitation to join her.

One of my biggest regrets was walking away from her that night.

That one decision had altered the direction of my life.

And by the looks of it, years later she was holding a grudge that wasn’t hers to hold. It was me who should’ve been pissed she bailed without talking to me first.

“Allyson, this is Tucker Mitchell.” Detective Wilder’s introduction pulled me from my thoughts. “Jessica, I believe you already know Tucker.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Liza’s brows pull together before she caught herself and schooled her features.

“Tucker, this is Special Agent Monroe.”

“Thanks, Wilder, sorry I’m late. Allyson, nice to meet you.”

I chanced a second look at Liza, this one was no less frosty.

“Agent Monroe,” I greeted and pulled the extra chair from the corner of the room to the table.

Why Wilder put a potential informant into an interrogation room I couldn’t fathom. At least the air con was on and he wasn’t sweating her out in here. Liza’s team needed Allyson to talk, and to get her to do that she needed to be comfortable.

“Tucker.”

If Liza meant for her acknowledgment to be friendly she failed—miserably. At least by my standards, I knew this woman both personally and professionally. She was using her all-business, no-nonsense voice.

The fuck of it was that husky, cold, detached tone was a turn-on. It was the tone she used when she interrogated a suspect. A reminder of how capable and strong she was. On the job, Liza was a force of nature; skilled, accomplished, wicked smart—three things that made watching her work over a suspect insanely attractive. But in the bedroom—now there, she was soft and yielding. One night with her had me rethinking my life. Not that I’d had the balls to admit that to myself or to her. By the time I got my head out of my ass, I was too late. She’d married some jackass prosecutor who won as many cases as he bedded women who were not his wife. The first time the name Special Agent Liza Boyer came out of my mouth had cut deep.

At least she’d gone back to using her maiden name.

I sat at the end of the table—Liza to my right, Allyson directly across from me—and did my best to ignore the daggers Liza’s eyes were shooting at me.

“Special Agent?” Allyson whispered.

Liza had likely left out that part when she’d introduced herself to make herself appear non-threatening, and Wilder had blown it.

“Yes, I work for the ATF.”

“I don’t get it,” Allyson murmured as her eyes darted between me and Liza before settling on her sister.

“We’ve heard talk and what’s being said is concerning,” Liza told her.

“Talk?” Allyson asked.

“Yes, rumors Mackenzie Archer is manufacturing weapons on the compound.”

All the color bleached from Allyson’s face. Her sister hadn’t fared much better but hers had turned red. In my previous meeting with Jessica she’d mentioned Allyson was concerned there were some members, including Mackenzie herself, who were selling drugs. She hadn’t mentioned guns being present. Though the two went hand-in-hand, manufacturing was a far jump from procuring illegal firearms.

Allyson’s shoulders bunched, followed by a few quick shakes of her head. “I…I, um, don’t know anything about that. I only saw…” She paused, her gaze going to her sister, then back to Liza.

When it didn’t look like Allyson was going to continue, Liza softened her tone and her posture when she gently reminded the scared woman, “Something heavy, something that has you so worried it drove you to tell your sister your concerns and come a long way to report them. It’d help me out if you could explain what you saw.”

On an exhale Allyson restarted. “I was out for a walk. It was late. The lights were on in the meditation center. Not all of them, just a few, but they’re never left on. The rule is when you leave a room, the lights are turned off. No wasted electricity. No exceptions. We don’t even have porch lights. The lights shouldn’t’ve been on.”

“So you went to check it out?” Liza asked, her tone with Allyson much friendlier than her clipped greeting to me. “What did you see?”