“Sorry,” I said, making a move to get off the bed. “I should go.”
“Stay,” he said, his hand going to mine. I laced my fingers through his and let him drag me back onto the bed. I didn’t say anything as I let him guide me down to where he laid. He cradled me in his arms, rolling me to face him. I wrapped my arm around his waist, and for the first time in a long time, I felt completely safe.
I looked up at his eyes, and he smoothed a piece of errant hair behind my ear.
“Why couldn’t I have met you back then?” I asked, not expecting a response. His lips found mine, and he kissed me softly, his tongue playing with mine, teasing me with what it could feel like to take it slow. I felt, for the first time, that Iwanted to stay.I wanted him to show me what it would feel like to be normal for one night. I moved my hand up to cup his face as I deepened the kiss, needing to be close to him.
Kane Garrick was going to make it all better, for tonight anyway. After the sun came up, I’d resume my evil and twisted ways, but for now, I’d be simply the woman starved of love and affection.
Chapter Ten
Kane
Petra was sitting ather desk, crumpled fast food wrappers all over the top and in her wastebasket. You wouldn’t know it to look at her, but she was in her late thirties, dressed like she was seventeen. Her wild green and blue hair was pinned up in a messy bun, two pencils stuck through it as if she was going to need to write something at any point and didn’t want to be caught out. She had her wireless earbuds in and was listening to something I could hear the deep bass of from the doorway. The other techs in this room were all doing something similar. I sat on the side of her desk, the one spot that wasn’t soiled from fast food. She yanked her earbuds out and smiled up at me.
“Detective.”
“You know you can call me Garrick,” I told her.
“I know,” she said. “What can I do for you?”
“I need to know if you’ve been able to track her.”
“Since she left town a few weeks ago?” she asked, turning back to her computer and tapping on the keys a few times. Screens moved about her four screens quickly, enough to make me dizzy just looking at it. There was no way she could read the information on the screens before they were replaced with new ones.
“She’s been picked up on airport surveillance,” she said, pointing to one screen and zooming in. The image was unmistakably Maurelle, traveling with a small overnight bag over her shoulder, large black sunglasses and her hair slicked back in a ponytail. “Looks like she’s back. I can’t imagine why.”
“Can you tell where she came from?”
“No, she’s obviously got an alias she traveled under because none of the names you gave me are popping.”
It didn’t surprise me that she would burn through the names she’d already used. She knew I wouldn’t stop. After she left me alone in bed a few weeks ago after we’d tumbled around a few times through the night, I thought things were different, that I could get through to her, but now I knew she wasn’t going to stop.
I had to do my job.
I had to arrest her and bring her to justice.
If I lost faith in the justice system, I lost who I was as a man and I couldn’t risk that.
Not now.
“Can you get me the manifest of all flights that arrived around that time and I’ll see if I can figure it out?”
“Got it, I’ll email you,” she said, tapping away at her computer when I left the room. My phone dinged with the email before I’d even gotten to my floor. That woman was good.
I scrolled through the names on the manifests and found one that I had a feeling might be the way to go.
Mireille Picton.
I looked up the ID for her and saw her face smiling back at me on her driver’s license. How many identities did she have?”
The floor was abuzz, as I looked over at the Captain heading my way.
“New case,” he said. “I’ll have the details sent to your phone. Tommy’s busy so this is your case, okay?”
I nodded. “What do we know?”
“Politician was poisoned,” he said with little care. It was no secret O’Leary couldn’t stand the politics of the job, and that meant the local politicians. “Looks to be a bad hookup, but the wife is a friend of the brass, so we need to treat it carefully.”
