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My name in his raspy early morning voice is an aphrodisiac too raw and uncut to be legal. If I wasn’t already whisker-burned in all my best places from his middle-of-the-night loving, I might consider going for round… five, I think? It might be six.Definitely not more than seven. Whatever it is, I need a break before I can take any more.
“Yes, Beckett?”
“What are you doing awake?” He flops onto his back and stares at me.
I should tell him. I should tell him right now. But I don’t want him to overreact. Not that I can blame him. These black rose stalker letters are getting out of hand. They’ve been out of hand for a long time now, actually.
I take a deep breath and give myself the best advice a girl can give:Don’t be a dumb bitch.
“I have to show you something.”
He arches his eyebrows and folds his arms behind his head. “Oh, yeah, baby. Show me something. I like it.”
I peek under the blanket at his morning wood. “Does that thing have an on/off switch? I need a minute.”
He laughs. “Fine. But I’m starting the clock. One minute.”
“Beck.”
“Fifty-four seconds.”
“Beck.”
“Fifty-one.”
Rolling my eyes, I bound over to the guest room, find the letter, and bring it back. “Twenty seconds to spare,” he informs me.
But when he sees what I’m holding out to him, his smirk dims.
“I’m sorry,” I stammer as he rips it open and reads. “I should’ve told you as soon as I found it, but I…” While getting laid is a reason he might support, I’m a little bit ashamed that it’s the reason I didn’t tell him. That I wanted those moments with him instead of being honest.
He stares at the letter. Then up at me. Then down at the letter again. When he finally speaks, it’s only a single word. “When?”
“Four or five days ago.”
His jaw ticks one notch tighter.
He’s on his feet in a flash, tossing the blankets aside and storming over to the hardline phone on the desk in the corner.
When he picks up the receiver, he speaks without bothering to dial. “We have a situation.” The person at the other end, whoever it is, doesn’t seem to need any more info than that.
It isn’t much more than a minute later that a man and his laptop walks into the bedroom. He’s dressed in tactical gear, with a lot of ominously bulging pockets on his black pants and some weapons visible on his belt. He looks like a gritty reboot of G.I. Joe.
“Sir,” he greets. “Madam.”
I’ve never seen this man in my life, but he seems intimately familiar with the house. He opens his laptop and sets it on the table. Beck materializes at his shoulder.
He explains the situation quickly. “ … and so, I need to see security footage from the last week. Let’s start with doors.”
G.I. Joe’s callused fingers fly in a blur over the keyboard. A window pops up with a camera feed on it. I watch over Beck’sshoulder as figures come and go. Me and him. His agent. His management team. A stray cat tiptoes through the yard and disappears.
No one says a word as a week’s worth of footage rolls past at high speed, slowing down whenever it senses motion. But nothing seems out of place. All is as it should be.
When it ends, I look at Beck. “Now what?”
He lays his hand on my back and his thumb strokes the spot just below my bra strap through my shirt. It’s one of those small comforts that is actually a bigger comfort than he probably realizes.
G.I. Joe speaks before Beck can. “Now, we take precautions. This note makes threats in very specific language. I’m going to run it through our computer, which will pick out key patterns in the syntactic structures. Are there others?” I don’t answer right away. The guy looks at me warily like he knows I’m full of shit. “You need to hand them over if there are, ma’am. I can use them to establish identifying traits.”
