“With this bullshit?” Morgan asked. He scratched his head with his free hand. “Yeah. Get me a lawyer.”
She nodded and left. The photo still lay faceup on the table. Morgan glanced down at it for a second, at the lifted chin and shadowed eyes of a probably dead—let’s be fucking real—boy.
Bullshit.
He flicked the photo off the table with an angry swipe of his hand. It slid off the metal and floated to the floor. Morgan knew who he was.
More or less.
He braced the ball of his foot against the ground and bounced his knee in a nervous tattoo. It hit the bottom of the table every few jitters. His head was full of black, sour anger and old sutures, but this wasfuckingbullshit.
Just some cop bullshit.
He jittered his knee and drummed his fingers against the table hard enough that he could feel the impact in his knuckles. On the wall, behind a heavy grille, the clock ticked off the minutes since Bennett had left.
It had gotten to twenty when the door opened again. Bennett stuck her head in through the crack, as though he might have gone anywhere, and then stepped back to wave someone else through the door. Halfway through, anyhow, as the guy hesitated on the threshold to stare at him.
Morgan’s fingers missed a beat as he saw the stranger and flattened his hand against the table. Damn. He gave the guy a look from his dark, cropped hair to the battered desert boots under those tight gray trousers. Other than his thick-rimmed black glasses, he didn’t look much like a public defender. In Morgan’s experience, hot lawyers worked for people with money. It was usually the pasty nerds who turned up for legal aid. They had a social conscience, but never shoulders like that.
“You’re my lawyer?” he asked skeptically.
The guy blinked, opened his mouth to answer, and then glanced over his shoulder as though he needed a prompt. Morgan snorted to himself. Maybe he was a public defender, then. It would be just Morgan’s luck to get the hot idiot.
“Not a hard question,” Morgan drawled.
Dumb and pretty blushed. It crawled up from under the heavy five o’clock shadow on his jaw and aimed at the sharp angle of his cheekbones.
“My name’s Boyd,” he said and paused. From the expression on his face, he expected that to mean something to Morgan. It didn’t.
“Yeah, what’s it short for?” Morgan asked as he hooked his free arm over the back of his chair. His eyes flicked over hot and dumb from shoulders to lean thighs since he might as well appreciate the view while he had it. “Body of Evidence?”
Smooth, Morgan thought wryly as Boyd gave him a confused look. He should know better by this point than to try to flirt sober. He did best when he was in that sweet spot of too many beers but before whiskey seemed like a good fight-provoking idea.
“No. I’m not a lawyer. I’m…. Hell, I don’t know,” Boyd admitted. “They asked me to fly in, but I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do.”
He stepped out of the way to let Bennett into the room and leaned back against the wall, his hands shoved in the pockets of his trousers. The thin fabric pulled tight over his lean hips and the soft but perfectly acceptable bulge of his package, but from the wary animal-in-a-zoo look he had aimed Morgan’s way, the display wasn’t on purpose.
Irritation crawled over Morgan’s shoulder blades, a prickle of frustration where he couldn’t reach. It wasn’t that he cared whether he got to bang this one hot nerd or not. He just knew Boyd would have given him a very different look if they’d met in a club. If Morgan weren’t chained to a table like a bad dog or a pedophile, it would be Boyd who’d itch forhisattention.
“Look, Husband Material here is more fun to look at than the fucking walls,” he said flatly. “I’ve still got nothing until my lawyer gets here.”
“He’s on his way,” Bennett said. She pulled a key out of her pocket as she walked over and unlocked the cuff. “Until then I thought you might want to talk to Boyd.”
Morgan sat back and rubbed his wrist. His fingers itched as the blood seeped back into them. “What about? His dog? Where he sees himself in five years’ time? What he’s looking for in a man?”
“I’m assigned to missing persons, not the small-talk police,” Bennett said as she stepped back. She folded the cuffs together neatly and tucked them into her pocket. “But I’d suggest Sammy Calloway. I’ll get you both coffee.”
She closed the door behind her as she left, which meant there was probably someone who still had eyes on the room. Boyd gave the escape route a rueful glance and stayed where he was.
“I don’t bite,” Morgan said. He pushed the quick, intrusive flash of fantasy—bruises chewed on Boyd’s throat and down his shoulders as he squirmed under Morgan—out of the way. That could wait. He kicked the chair opposite him out from under the table hard enough that it banged into the beige wall. “Sit down and tell me what the fuck’s going on?”
Boyd studied him for a second. Then he pushed himself off the wall and walked over to grab the chair. He spun it around so he could straddle it, arms folded over the back.
“I….”
Morgan leaned forward into Boyd’s space and braced his arms on the table. “Yeah?”
He’d just done it to be a dick, but this close, he could see Boyd’s eyes behind those glasses. They were so ridiculously pretty—with thick lashes and pale-brown, almost whiskey-colored irises—it distracted him. It didn’t hurt that Boyd’s pupils expanded with clear, immediate awareness of Morgan’s presence in his space.
