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“You should stop that,” Mika said as she curled up on the couch directly across from the desk and pulled down the blanket draped across the couch’s back. “You’re going to get arthritis.”
I
t took a second for her words to compute. He looked down at his hands. “Old habits.”
After shooting Ivy, the snap, crackle, pop of abusing his knuckles had eased the pressure of knowing he’d curled his finger around the trigger and taken her life. He hadn’t had a choice, but shooting the woman you loved—even when she was a stone-cold killer—took a toll.
“You do it when you’re thinking too hard.” Mika snuggled underneath the silver blanket.
Just to be contradictory, he popped the knuckles on his left hand. “Is that so?”
Mika shook her head and closed her eyes. “You just need to relax and trust your instincts.”
Had he ever been that naive, that impulsive…that optimistic? An image of Ivy handing him a glass of poisoned Red Bull flashed in his mind. Yeah, he had, and two people had nearly died. “I’d rather go by logic.”
Mika didn’t respond. Her breathing had turned steady. No doubt the adrenaline had drained out of her system and she was crashing. Sleep was the best thing for her. Now he could put in his headphones and get to work.
Two hours later and he was reading the preliminary report from the Harbor City crime lab, what little there was of it. The vestment had been logged in.
Rush Case: Yes
Color: Purple With Silver Thread
Length: One Yard
Weight: Three pounds
Notes: Light scent of mothballs. Material has little give, stiff to the touch.
He dragged his thumb across the middle knuckle of his pointer finger as he contemplated the scant information. Something was off. The weight seemed excessive, and the tidbit about the mothballs scratched at a deeply buried factoid. Right as he applied pressure to the finger joint, Mika mumbled in her sleep, yanking his attention toward her.
Damn it. She’d been right. He was popping his knuckles a lot lately. He flexed his fingers instead and rolled his neck from side to side before searching for more information on the crime lab’s network and coming up with nada.
His stomach rumbled. What he wouldn’t do for a tray of his mom’s enchiladas right about now. Or a chorizo on a hot-dog bun—a combination that made her turn up her nose in disgust. His mother had immigrated to Harbor City when she was three, but you’d never guess it by the way she clung to her Castillo Mexican roots. At his cousin Gabe’s wedding to Keisha a few months ago, his mother had cornered him and told him in no uncertain terms that she was too fabulous not be an abuela, so he needed to get moving on that pronto.
Not for the first time in his life, he was glad his cousin was a billionaire, because the custom fireworks show over the Harbor City Bay that had boomed to life at that exact moment had provided the perfect interruption, freeing him from having to explain to his mother for the fiftieth time since he’d shot Ivy that he wasn’t the marrying kind. That part of him had died when he’d fired that bullet.
Grabbing ahold of his focus with both hands before it spiraled into the darkness, he exited out of the crime lab’s network, careful to cover his virtual tracks. There’d be more tomorrow. Crime labs weren’t as fast as they showed on television, but the fact that Reggie had gotten a rush label put on the case meant preliminary results would be in sometime tomorrow. They wouldn’t be specific enough to take to court, but they’d steer the detectives—and Carlos—in the right direction.
His gaze wandered away from the screen, landing on Mika on the couch. She’d undone her thick braid, and her long brown hair tangled around her face. The blanket covering her moved up and down in a steady rhythm, and her face had relaxed into deep sleep. Like this, in the moonlight’s soft glow, she looked less like temptation personified and more like a dream—one he couldn’t let himself fall into.
Without thinking, he clicked the laptop’s touchpad mouse. Mika’s Internet history popped up on the screen. He gulped. There was plenty of what he’d expected—fashion blogs, design associations, LARP news—and then there was the porn. He shouldn’t click, but he did anyway.
He’d heard of female-friendly porn. He didn’t know if this was it, but the woman in the camera’s focus sure was enjoying herself. The man with his face buried between her legs was making her thighs tremble while the man playing with her tits narrated the experience, whispering exactly what was going on into the moaning woman’s ear. By the time she came, Carlos was ready to follow her lead.
Movement off-screen caught his attention. Mika had rolled so her back was to him. The move had drawn the blanket partially off her and the oversize T-shirt so he could see the dark green panties hugging her round ass. It was too much and too little at the same damn time—not that it mattered. She was off-limits. Even if she wasn’t the client, there was something about Mika that snuck through the chinks in his armor and got to his soft center. He’d sworn he’d never again be the sucker he’d been with Ivy, and he wouldn’t be.
Carlos exited out of the porn video, adjusted her Internet browser history so it didn’t look like he’d ever accessed it, and pulled the headphones from his ears. Time for sleep. The hard floor wouldn’t feel good, but it was probably what he needed.
He stripped off his jeans, dropped them by the pile created by his shoes and T-shirt, then got into the sleeping bag. Closing his eyes, he tried to think of what would explain the vestment’s mothball smell but came up with zilch. Especially not when images of Mika with her legs spread wide before him crowded out any other thoughts. He could feel the smooth silk of her legs, smell her desire, and see the evidence of how much she wanted him in the way her slick folds were dewy and plump.
His dick bypassed iron and went straight to a call-your-doctor level of hardness, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. No matter how tempting, he couldn’t jerk off with Mika only a few feet away. Gritting his teeth, he resigned himself to the fact that it was going to be a long and miserable night.
“Hey Carlos.” Mika’s sultry voice floated across the space between them. “Did you like what you saw on my computer?”
His eyes snapped open. That’s when he noticed the large mirror on the wall right behind the computer desk.
Fuck.
