Page 95 of Direct Action

Not the preamble to more.

Not foreplay.

Not the means to an end.

Just a kiss.

The slow glide of tongues. Savoring. Tasting. Building a connection—not a physical one, an emotional joining.

It was the best kiss of my life. Bar none.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Ryan’s bedroom door slowly opened. He thought I was asleep, so he was being quiet. I rolled to face the door, my gaze catching on the clock before moving to the man coming into his room.

A quarter to midnight.

He was home earlier than I thought he’d be, seeing as he was meeting with some guy named Mr. Mercer to handle his membership. It was weird to think I worked there and had never heard that name, and I knew Poppy hadn’t either. After they had that taken care of, he and Pete were going to stick around for a few drinks.

“Everything go okay?” I asked.

“Yeah, baby.”

He closed the door, and in the sliver of light coming from the crack under the bathroom door, I watched him pull off his clothes and toss them in the general vicinity of an overflowing hamper. The blankets lifted, and the mattress dipped next to me. Then he was in bed next to me, and suddenly all of my careful plotting I spent the last hour devising went out the window.

Plotting that I knew without a shadow of a doubt would make his head explode and cause a fight.

“Was Beck there tonight with Sterling?” I asked, trying to find the will to talk to Ryan about the plan I’d come up with, but with his big, warm body next to mine, other thoughts had started to intrude.

“Yeah, with Len and Chantilly. They shared a few rounds, then Blackwell and Beck left. From what I could see from across the room, Naomi was using you not being on shift to her advantage and lingering at the table every chance she got.”

Before Pete had come by to pick up Ryan, I’d called Poppy and asked for Naomi’s last name. A quick Instagram search, and her whole life popped up in a parade of pictures that proved she had zero awareness for her safety and she was vain beyond belief. Images of everything from where she went out to dinner and what she ordered to selfies in her bathroom and at the gym to her making a kissy face (read: duck lips and not attractive) in front of her apartment, with the name of the complex mounted on the stucco wall clearly visible—the caption: when the light’s just right. Thus, Ryan knew what she looked like, and I’d watched his lip curl in disgust when he scrolled past the pictures of her in a microbikini that barely covered the parts that needing covering, seeing as she was on a public beach with kids in the background. She was also stick-skinny, and not in a healthy way. Plus, not to be a sister-hating bitch, but her fake boobs looked ridiculous on her emaciated frame.

“Not sure how she got it in her head she was up for an invite to his feast, but Blackwell barely looked at her.”

This was the perfect segue, but before I could get in there and present my plan, Ryan continued, “Talked with Gavin before I came to bed. He said you two ran all the names.”

We had. In the beginning it was fun, then after the first ten names it became mind-numbingly boring when nothing was poppin’, as Gavin called it. When I told Gavin how unexciting his job was, he laughed and told me TV and movies made investigations look sexy when in reality it was a lot of digging through boring shit and watching people do boring shit.

I didn’t think that was totally accurate, but I didn’t call him on it. I just continued to run the background checks while Gavin read through the reports I printed. The only high point of the evening was when Aiden called.

“Did Gavin tell you Aiden found the money?” I asked.

Ryan shoved his arm under my pillow and rolled me closer. This maneuver took me further away from the chat I wanted to have with him. Sterling, his feast, background checks, and money were the last things on my mind when all I could see was his handsome face. All I could smell was his woodsy cologne. All I could feel was the warmth coming from his body in conjunction with his legs tangling with mine.

“Yeah, he told me. Five bundles of ten K each and an envelope with five grand labeled ‘sister bonding’ in a safe. Cynthia either attended more than four of Blackwell’s parties or the money’s in the tips.”

There was something in the way Ryan said ‘tips.’ It was the same way Gavin had said it after Aiden had called him. Disbelieving, skeptical, but more, he sounded incredulous.

“You don’t think that’s tip money,” I noted.

“No, Chloe, I don’t think that’s tip money,” he told me, then shocked the hell out of me when he gave me more. “With Blackwell recruiting from the porn scene, I’m thinking he has a menu of services. And with that money Aiden found, I’m thinking Cynthia provided more than hostessing at the parties.”

My stomach knotted uncomfortably. “Do you think she was . . . that they . . .” God, I couldn’t even get the word out without tasting bile.

Mercifully Ryan understood without me having to finish. “No easy way to say this baby, but women who are raped don’t tend to get paid. That doesn’t mean she wasn’t coerced in some way. Money is a great motivator to get people to do shit they normally wouldn’t do. That being said, we haven’t found anything that suggests Cynthia was in financial trouble, nor is her sister. It could be, she was presented with the opportunity for a fuck ton of fast cash and she had no issue with the way she was making it.”

That made me feel marginally better, but only slightly, because even if she’d earned that money of her own free will, she was still missing.