I was hungry by the time my clothes were put away but I wasn’t quite ready to brave the kitchen for food so I set up my laptop on the desk instead.
I opened it and stared at the screen saver, debating the merit of checking up on Travis Dorsey, especially now that I’d lost the Hunt.
What was the point? I would have to figure out another way to make him pay for what he’d done to my parents and Bram. Either that or do my time with the Hawks and try the Hunt again, assuming they even let me join, which was a big assumption because I had a feeling Bram was going to make sure no one would ever let me in again.
But keeping track of Travis had become something of an obsession, one that had gotten worse when Detective Grabowski stopped taking my calls.
I guess I couldn’t blame him. He’d inherited the case from another detective, and according to the Blackwell Falls PD, the investigation was closed. Travis Dorsey had done his time and been cleared to reenter polite society.
But I couldn’t let it go, and I’d stalked Travis’ socials for the past two years, making a bitter note of the milestones in his life — an engagement, a wedding in Vegas, a baby — knowing all the while that my parents wouldn’t have any more milestones.
That I wouldn’t have any milestones with them.
I would never be able to run home to tell them I was engaged or pregnant. My dad would never walk me down the aisle and my parents would never show up at the hospital to hold their newborn grandchild. My kids would never know them, would never hear my dad’s big laugh or be comforted by a “cuppa” from my mom.
So I’d catalogued Travis’ milestones instead, each one another stab in the tattered halls of my heart.
It was bad for me. I knew that. But keeping track of him was a way to hang on to my parents, a way to show them I hadn’t forgotten them, and for a while, it had been enough.
And then I’d seen him on the street.
He lived a few miles away in Carlton, which was why I was surprised to see him emerge from Syd’s with one of theBarbarians when I’d gone to Junior’s for ice cream with Daisy and Sarai.
He’d looked so normal stopping to lean against the building for a smoke, his scrawny frame folded against the brick facade of the biker bar.
The rage that had filled my body had surprised me, and all at once, I’d wanted him dead.
I blinked away the memory and leaned in to type in my passcode, then just about jumped out of my skin when something shifted in the room behind me.
I whipped my head around to find Vigo standing directly behind my chair, peering over my shoulder, the door to the hall wide open.
21
CASSIE
“Jesus christ!”My heart felt like it was about to pound out of my chest. “You scared the crap out of me.”
“Sorry.” He grinned. “I saw the light on under your door.”
“So you just walked in?”
He shrugged. “Why not?”
I had a feeling “why not” was basically Vigo’s middle name.
I wanted to be mad but the truth was, he looked good enough to eat in black sweatpants and nothing else. The ink on his torso only accentuated the lean definition in his biceps and the sculpted peaks of his chest. His abs were flat as a slab of marble, a defined V pointing right at his dick, which looked big enough to do some damage to someone like me.
It might have helped if his face hadn’t been so stupidly perfect, not just hot, with perfect bone structure and those sage-green eyes, but also weirdly adorable. His spiky blond hair gave him the air of a mischievous little boy, the freckles dusted over his nose almost subversive, like sweet vanilla cream on top of deep dark espresso.
His eyes were locked on my tits, naked under my T-shirt, and the stud in his tongue shone when he licked his full lower lip.
“Can I help you?” I looked at my computer and pulled up the coffee shop’s P&L, the most inane thing I could think of, hoping he’d leave.
Not because I didn’t want him there but because the longer he stood behind me the more I thought about the way he’d sucked my tit in the tunnels, the more I wanted him to do it again, my earlier self-care fading into the background, a shadow of the real thing just a foot away.
“I think the real question is can I helpyou?”
I shook my head, scrolling through my spreadsheet, trying to concentrate. “What do you mean?”
