I was still hard after, my dick still throbbing away inside him as I reached down to pull him off in long, slow strokes. The unhurried approach made him squirm around, desperate, and I winced as he clenched down hard on my tender dick. He came looking into my eyes, and I watched it all, unwilling to miss a single second of it.
This was the memory I’d take into death with me, if I saw that bullet coming.
We cleaned up with that giggly, high-as-fuck energy that comes after great sex, and then I folded him up in my arms when we got into bed.
“Your Boss is wrong, JJ,” he murmured.
“Wrong? About what?”
“You do therightthing, not the convenient thing. Maybe that’s what he thinks is bad judgment, butIthink it’s what makes you strong.”
The Boss would call what I was doing with Miller Beaumont one more example of my bad judgment. A week ago, I would have called it a mistake myself. But now?
I’d never been so damn certain that something was meant to be.
CHAPTER40
MILLER
I woke up before Jack,but I let him sleep on for another thirty minutes while I enjoyed the feeling of his body curled around mine, and ignored the building need to go to the bathroom. Eventually, though, I had to sneak out from under the covers, and when I came back, he was sitting up on the side of the bed, hair flat on one side and standing up on the other, rubbing his hands vigorously all over his face.
“Morning,” he yawned, and checked his knuckles, probing at them over the Band-Aids with the thumb of his other hand.
“Morning,” I said, and came over to drop a kiss on his forehead. He grabbed me by the waist as I tried to move away, catching me by surprise, and pulled me into his lap.
“How did you sleep?” he asked.
“Better than you. You had a bunch of dreams. You were kicking and muttering… It wascute,” I added, as he made a face.
“Maybe,” he said, righting me onto my feet. “Can’t have been much fun to sleep next to.”
“I’m getting used to it.” I went over to the coffee machine and refilled the water reserve, and when I turned back, he was watching me with a small smile.
“Yeah,” he said. “Me, too.”
“So what’s the plan?” I asked. “Are we jumping the first train out of town?”
“Let’s have coffee before we do anything else.” He crossed the room to kiss me, apologized for his morning breath, and headed for the bathroom. I set about making coffee with my heart fluttering.
When he came back out, hair damp and wearing only a towel, he wrapped his arms around me from behind. I leaned into his embrace, felt his palm settle over my heart, and closed my eyes in contentment. Jack put his lips close to my ear and murmured, “We can’t cut and run until we know what happened to your sister. I made you a promise to find out the truth. I intend to keep that promise. After that…” He turned me around in his arms. “After that,” he said again, with meaning.
But I thought again of his words last night, of the fear I’d felt when he spoke so matter-of-factly about killing or being killed. “But JJ—”
He quieted me with a kiss to my forehead. “There’s time enough, Trouble. Sandro can’t make a move against me until his father’s dead. And his old man’s a cockroach; he’ll live awhile yet. No, don’t try to argue with me. We’ll find out what happened to Annie first and settle up with her killer.” He moved past me to the coffee machine. “And until then, we stick together. You’re staying here with me.”
“Fine,” I sighed dramatically, bumping him with my hip as I joined him at the coffee machine. “As long as we buy some groceries. There’s never any food in this place.”
Over our cereal breakfast, Jack returned to business. “Check your emails,” he said with his mouth full, pushing his laptop over. “Let’s hope there’s something there. I’m supposed to report back to the Boss tomorrow.”
That idea just raised my stress levels even further, so it took a while for me to log in and find the email, but there wasn’t a single word of complaint from Jack about it. When I found the video from the security firm waiting there in my inbox, I croaked, “It’s here.”
Cereal forgotten, we shuffled over together to watch it on the screen. My heart rate started ratcheting up as it played. The video showed four different views, cycling through, and it was anxiety-producing trying to watch all of them at once. So when a black-clad figure appeared, walking quickly across the house to the front door in broad daylight, I jumped so hard I just about sent my coffee flying.
“Careful,” Jack said sharply, his eyes fixed on the video. He scrolled back a few seconds as I collapsed back into my seat, staring hard at the screen. The figure was only caught a few times on camera—the driveway, which I’d missed on first viewing, then at the front door, and then inside the foyer. They immediately went upstairs, as if they knew exactly where they were going. About a minute later they fled the house, grabbing onto the hoodie over their head so their face remained hidden from the cameras the whole time.
Jack rewound to the start and paused on the clearest picture from the driveway, the back of the figure as it walked up toward the house. “I’m no expert,” he said drily, “but that looks like a woman’s build to me. Agreed?”
I nodded, dazed. “Yeah. That looks like girl-butt.” The woman, whoever she was, was dressed in tight black jeans along with the black hoodie. The hood was pulled well over her face through the whole video so it was impossible to see any identifying features, except for—
