“What did you say?” she murmured against my lips when we broke apart.
“That you’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. That I think about you constantly, even when I should be concentrating on other things.”
If she had anything to say to that, it got swallowed by another kiss—deeper this time, more demanding. Her fingers threaded through my hair, tugging slightly in a way that sent heat straight down my spine.
I lifted her onto the edge of my worktable, careful to avoid the restoration materials, and stepped between her legs. The position brought us level, face to face, her thighs bracketing my hips. I felt one of her hands sliding under my shirt, her palm warm against my stomach, nails scraping lightly against skin.
“Tell me something else.”
“Tu me rends fou,” I murmured into the curve of her neck, tasting salt and the faint vanilla scent of her lotion.
“Translation?”
“You drive me crazy.”
“Good.” She pulled my face back to hers, her eyes dark and wanting. “That’s only fair.”
We kissed until breathing became difficult, until the worktable creaked under our combined weight, until Shay was gasping my name as my hands traced every inch of her skin. She arched into me, her body moving with fluid grace, responding to every touch like an instrument being played by someone who knew exactly which strings to pluck.
The book lay forgotten beside us, its damaged pages waiting patiently for attention I could no longer give. The dark basement pressed in around us, intimate and isolated, a world unto itself where nothing existed beyond this moment.
Tomorrow I’ll finish the restoration. Tomorrow I’dcarefully mend the torn pages and reinforce the broken binding. Tomorrow, I’d go back to feeling the hunger. That gnawing emptiness would return with the dawn. The itch beneath my skin would resume its persistent demands, reminding me of what I was beneath the careful facade of normalcy.
But tonight—tonight I let myself be just Tom. A man who knew French and restored old books and was falling dangerously, irreversibly for a woman who called him a geek in the fondest voice he’d ever heard.
11
Tom
Detective Sawyer valued her private space. She’d mentioned it once, offhand, when the subject had been brought up.I need my own space sometimes,she’d said.It’s nothing personal. I just get claustrophobic.So for her to let me into her home was something significant. A threshold crossed. An invitation into a part of her life she kept carefully separate from everything else.
Her house was messier than mine; the kind of disorder that came from long days and short nights, where you came home too exhausted to do anything but collapse.
The walls were painted a neutral beige, a handful of framed photographs breaking the monotony, unevenly spaced. One showed a young woman pushing a little girl on a swing, their matching blonde hair a blur of movement. The next one was more formal—an older man in a military dress uniform posing stiffly for the camera, mouth set in a thin line. Sentimental mementos, mostly.
Blankets lay thrown over the couch in rumpled waves, one half-sliding onto the floor like she’d kicked it off in the middleof the night. A leather jacket hung over the back of an armchair, since she was apparently allergic to coat racks. A book lay facedown on the coffee table, spine creased from repeated readings, a few of the pages dog-eared.Forensic Psychological Assessment in Practice: Case Studies.
I wasn’t surprised. Shay didn’t seem like the type to draw hard lines between work and home life. The job followed after her, settling into her everyday life. She was sitting on the couch, reading through a file, brows pulled together in concentration.
“Any news on the Baker case?” I asked, moving to sit beside her.
She sighed, the sound heavy with months of accumulated frustration. “Not really. Every lead I had ended in a dead end. It’s like chasing smoke.”
I knew the feeling. I knew it more intimately than she’d ever imagine.
“It doesn’t help that Donovan’s constantly on my ass about it, either.”
“What does he say?”
Her expression darkened instantly, mouth twisting with barely concealed contempt. “Donovan thinks these are unrelated cases. He’d rather close them as individual homicides and keep his clearance rate up than actually investigate a pattern.”
I’d come to make my own assessment of Captain James Donovan over the past few months, and determined that the man was an idiot. Worse—he was a willfully blind idiot, the kind who preferred convenient lies to uncomfortable truths.
“But you don’t think so,” I said.
“Iknowthey aren’t unrelated.” She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, conviction radiating from every line of her body. “It’s obvious if you actually look. Linda Fell, Alfred Thorne, Martin Baker. All three of them had criminal records—domestic violence, child pornography, sexual assault. I get the sense that the killer thinks of themselves as a vigilante, of sorts. Someone with a mission.”
“Someone young, most likely, idealistic,” she continued. “Wanting to take justice into their own hands. But they’re inexperienced, green around the edges. They got spooked when their last kill went wrong. But they’ll start again, eventually. People like that always do.”
