“It’s been a while for me,” I admitted, unafraid to lay all my cards on the table with Reid.
“For me too,” he said.
I shifted, propping my head up on my hand. “Really? How long?”
He let out a groan. “Seriously? Does it really matter?”
“Yes. I want to know down to the very minute.”
“You’re nosy.”
“Yes, I am.”
He sighed before mirroring my posture, propping himself up on one hand as well. “It was after my divorce, if that’s what you’re wondering. I don’t like casual sex. I dated one woman for a couple of months in the summer, and that was the last time. It didn’t work out. She was looking for a commitment faster than I could give her one.”
That kind of had my gut doing a flip. Was he ready for acommitment now?Was I? This thing between Reid and me wasn’t casual. We were friends first. We’d talked about so many things from my past; he knew me better than anyone at this point. Which, granted, wasn’t that hard to do, but still.
“I don’t like casual sex either,” I said.
He ran his other hand up and down my arm. “Fair enough.”
We continued to stare in silence, the mix of need and satisfaction still swirling in my body.
“Hazel,” Reid whispered.
“Reid?”
“Just so you know, this isn’t casual. For me, at least.”
My heart pounded. Reid leaned in and kissed me on the forehead before moving to my mouth and pressing a soft kiss there, too. I let my head fall to his chest and he wrapped his arms around me.
“It’s not casual for me either,” I said as I drifted off to sleep in his arms.
I barely heard his, “I know.”
I hadn’t felt that safe in a long time.
TWENTY-FIVE
Reid
“You didn’t have to come,”Hazel said, pushing open the gate to her apartment. It got stuck on a pile of snow, but she shoved it until we could squeeze into the courtyard.
“Like I was going to let you go alone.”
After the lavish breakfast spread my mom presented us with at eight a.m., Hazel announced that she had some errands to run today. A normal person would have let her go by herself—told her to enjoy her day, and that I’d see her later.
If it had been a different snowy Saturday and Hazel wasn’t in my life, I might find myself spending the day at my computer, lost in a chat about some cold case. But that didn’t appeal to me as much today. She could have said her errand was to buy shampoo at the drugstore or wait in line at the DMV and I still would have wanted to tag along. But when she’d casually mentioned that her errand involved dropping by her apartment to grab a few things, there was no way in hell I was staying behind. Mostly because I didn’t like her hanging around there alone, given everything, but I did have an ulterior motive.
The neighbor. Mrs. Edenbury.
At this point, she was still a shaky suspect on a dwindling list of options.
I had nothing to go on except for the fact that she could have easily committed the crime. It was painfully obvious at this stage that I was an amateur chasing an amateur. My group hadn’t come up with any new theories either; we were a lot more used to working with evidence that someone else had already collected. Trying to piece everything together from scratch was hard as hell.
Hazel unlocked the door to her hallway and led us in. The entire time she fiddled with the lock on her apartment, I stared at Mrs. Edenbury’s door. Was she there? Sleeping?
“She usually does something with her church group on weekends.”
