“Ah, Pretty Thing,” I murmured as I ran my fingers through his hair, about as eager to fill his beautiful mouth with my cum as I was to take him out on a date the next night.
* * *
The following dayI stayed at Ty’s condo while he was at work.
My excitement about our date helped me manage the feelings stirred by a task I’d taken on after the investigation. Sitting at the desk in Ty’s office, I had some of Spencer’s files pulled up on my laptop. I’d asked Mick to send me—unofficially and illegally—everything the IPB had stuffed into Spencer’s file. As much as the investigation had pointed to my former colleague as being the mole, I wasn’t satisfied. That might have been some of the guys I’d worked with under the organization, but it wasn’t him.
Or did I just want to believe it so badly, I was jumping through hoops, determined to prove his innocence? It wasn’t even just that Spencer wouldn’t have betrayed us, but rather why he would have put his trust in Ivan Blackmore Jr., the sort of criminal who would have ratted him out in a moment if questioned. Or double-crossed him just as he had. It was too stupid a move for Spencer, who’d had the same trust issues I did. Surely someone had set him up. But who? And why?
I continued searching his files—cause of death, similarities between his injuries and Jamie’s, pulling up his accounts and seeing the exchange of money. Everything in this investigation seemed too convenient.
Or maybe it was just hard for me to accept the truth. A truth that would have made me go back and rewrite my entire history with the man who’d saved me from destitution.
When Ty returned home, he found me in his study and slipped into my lap, hooking his arm around me.
“What were you up to today?” he asked.
“Not sure you’d want to know.”
“You can be honest with me.”
I didn’t want to burden him with it, but I said, “Looking at stuff about Spencer. I’m obsessed with it—I’m sure that’s what the guys would say—but…”
“If you have a bad feeling about it, Liam, and you really feel you knew him, then you need to keep looking into it. I understand that. If someone told me that Jesse had done something like that to me, put my fucking life at risk, I’d be doing the same thing. And I trust your judgment more than I trust some random secret government agency I didn’t know anything about until a few weeks ago.”
It meant a lot knowing I had his support.
“Anything I can do to help?” he asked oh-so-innocently.
“Maybe just getting my mind off it for tonight.”
“Your mind is clearly still on all this. You sure you want to come tonight?”
“I’ve been looking at all this stuff for too long as it is. Figure I might need a breather from it all.”
“Good. Because I would have had to lie and tell you that I didn’t want to go out with you tonight.”
I was fucking beaming…surely glowing from all Ty did for me. Only he had the power to distract me from something that weighed on me the way the Spencer shit did.
“Enough chitchat, Pretty Thing. You need to learn some ground rules—your boyfriend always needs to be greeted with a kiss.”
He grinned, offering it up freely.
We enjoyed a moment of him setting me at ease, and then we started getting ready for the date I had planned before Jesse’s award ceremony.
After Ty took a shower, we got dressed. As I put my tie on in the mirror, Ty slipped in, his bow tie draped around his neck.
“You know how to fucking tie your tie? Wow. I usually just get clip-ons.”
“What?”
“Yeah, I’m gonna have to pull up a video on my phone to do this even.”
“Oh no, you aren’t,” I insisted, taking charge, and offered up my services. When I was finished, he looked in the mirror.
“What the fuck? It would have taken me like ten tries to get the sides like this.”
“Well, once you’re a trained IPB agent, you’ll learn to do the same.”
