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He grinned, couldn’t help it. “Rarely.”
They let the moment hang. She replaced her glasses and finally took a sip of her coffee. He saw the tension drop from her shoulders.
“I’m not asking you to compromise anything,” he assured her. “Not the case, not your name. I just—when this is done, when we have answers, I’d like to see if this is something worth exploring together.”
Her eyes flicked up to his. “That’s almost romantic, Chief.”
He raised his mug in a mock salute. “Don’t tell the mayor. He’ll cut my funding for sure.”
She laughed, quick and quiet, and the sound was more relief than anything.
They left it at that—both reaching for the same folder at once, then retreating, then splitting the stack down the middle to work side by side. He felt the room change, felt the static drop away, and for the first time since all this began, he believed they might actually solve this thing before the town burned down around them.
Brandon pressed his palm to the desktop, steadying himself, and then let the impulse win. He reached out, set his hand gently over Desiree’s, right where her fingers rested on the corner of a property map. Her skin was warm and soft, and he was grateful when she didn’t pull away.
Desiree looked at his hand, then up at him. Her eyes sharpened to full focus. He stood, rounded the table, and stopped at her elbow. She stood, met him in the narrow gap between chair and map-littered table.
The kiss started like a question, neither of them dared to ask out loud. But as soon as his hand cupped her jaw, as soon as her fingers bunched into the front of his shirt, the question was answered. Neither of them could deny the chemistry between them, or the way they fit together perfectly. He felt the jolt, the certainty of this happening again.
And then it was over in another breath. They stepped back, both exhaling, both a little stunned at how quickly they had gone back to their newly formed habit.
Desiree was the first to speak. “That stays off the clock.”
He nodded, his pulse still going. “Completely off the clock.”
They stood there, hands almost touching, each waiting for the other to move first. She reached for her glasses, slid them on in one practiced motion, and sat, spine straight as a fence post. He watched her pull the ledger close, saw the corner of her mouth tug up, just once, before she buried it in paperwork.
Brandon returned to his seat, the same as before, dragging his finger down a line of parcels.
Neither of them spoke for a long time, but when Desiree found a notation she wanted to show him, she didn’t pass it across the table. She just held it out, and he leaned in, close enough to see the ink, close enough to remember the way her hand felt beneath his and how her lips tasted like black coffee.
They didn’t need to say anything. The job was what mattered. But now the job wasn’t the only thing that did.
As the morning progressed, the conference room table turned into a disaster—aerial photos, property maps, witness statements, and every color of sticky note ever made. Somewhere along the way, Kimble had snuck in and left donuts on a napkin, but they were untouched; they did refill their coffee mugs two times each. Brandon saw through the mess, though, and registered it for what it was—the kind of nonsensical order you make right before you close in on breaking a case wide open.
He stood, rolling his shoulders. The last hour had passed in near-silence, broken only by the occasional cough from the crew room or the scrape of Desiree’s chair as she repositioned herself for the thousandth time. She worked with new energy, lining up case files side by side rather than in sequence, her eyes scanning the table, hands sorting, reshuffling, annotating with rapid-fire notes.
Brandon watched her more than he watched the files. She’d found her rhythm—cross-referencing the property ledger with the county fire incident log, overlaying survey maps with burn radius charts. He let her run with it, only offering a hand when a roll of tape went rogue or when she needed another set of eyes on a piece of evidence.
Finally, she stilled. “Look at this,” she requested as she pointed to the ledger at a penciled notation in the margin. “See this number? It’s not county. It’s a private surveyor.”
He rounded the table, leaning over her shoulder. She didn’t move aside, and he didn’t keep his distance. The notation was easy to miss—tiny—and clearly not from the official hand. “You ever see that before?” She asked.
Brandon squinted. “The parcel number, yeah. But not the surveyor reference.” He scanned the page, comparing it with the rest of the ledger. “County records use blue ink, not pencil.”
Desiree tapped the map. “Whoever made this notation, they did it after hours. And look at the date—three weeks before the first fire.”
He straightened, taking in the map Desiree had spread across the table. The four fire sites—warehouse, hardware store, pizzeria, cotton gin—sat at the points of a lopsided rectangle. The disputed parcel, the one with the weird survey number, was dead center. “That land’s been in a quiet title dispute for years,” Brandon said. “Nobody’s touched it.”
Desiree nodded, then pulled out the case photos. “Here’s the interesting part.” She placed the origin point overlays for each fire atop the property map. “Every fire started on a border property of the disputed parcel.”
Brandon whistled, just once. “You’re saying these were never about the actual buildings that were burned.”
She finished the thought. “They were about the land next to them. Someone wanted to erase the boundary, or reset it, so they could swoop in and take it all.”
He picked up the warehouse photo, stared at the dark crescent of the first burn. He remembered the call, the sick feeling of knowing this wasn’t just a fire, but a message. “My dad mentioned this dispute before his death. He knew the real parties involved, not just the ones that were on paper. He always thought it was going to come to blows, but never to this.”
Desiree reached for a legal pad, flipping back through her own notes. “Do you know who owns the land now?”
