Page 41 of To All the Guys I Killed Before

“Rue?”

I snap back to attention, barely able to hide my delight at this discovery.

But Hugo’s jaw is hard enough to crack the marble fireplace hearth at my back, and I realize I’ve been staring at him the whole time a nuclear bomb was exploding through my brain.

“Sorry.” I shake my head. “Just thinking about the case.”

The case. The one I’m here to work. And my work could keep Gomez off the police’s radar yet again. After all, I tucked that little leafy boy into the recliner to avoid adding a single thing to the possible evidence pile, and that was before I knew it might be Gomez’s calling card.

I’m frozen again wondering how many of those cuttings I’ve found and discarded over the years. There was the guy with the ladder, that lawn mower accident from the summer, the dude who was bitten by his venomous snake. Wasn’t there a little spray of those spatula-shaped leaves at that bathroom vanity scene?

I’ve known Gomez for far longer than I realized.

“Neighbor girl.” Hugo’s voice is worried, and I jump to attention.

“Shit!” I force a laugh. “I clearly shouldn’t have skipped lunch today. Good thing this turned out to be an open-and-shut case.”

“So you’re still thinking it was accidental?”

God, no. My vigilante situationship did this.

“Yes,” I say firmly, and my decisive tone works because his tense shoulders slowly drop as he exhales a long breath and straightens the cuffs of his hideous cardigan. Unlike the lightness I saw there earlier, his face is the expressionless mask I’ve seen cops wear when they’re forcing themselves to stay composed at a grisly crime scene.

“Zero judgment, Dr. Mohr.” I shoot him an encouraging smile. “You can wait outside if it’s too much. I know you’re used to clients who are still breathing.”

This finally pulls a smile back to his face. “No, no. I’m fine.” Then he does that thing with his glasses that I’m starting to find almost endearing, which clearly means I’ve been spending too much time with him.

With him, thinking about him, listening to his bizarre musical choices bleeding through our shared wall.

“Your nannies.” I start chattering on a new subject, hoping to pull him out of his own head and keep myself from dwelling on my mind-blowing discovery. “Were any of them big fans of Motown?”

He blinks at my non sequitur, his face relaxing into a more Hugo-ish smile. “Yes, actually. How’d you know?”

I grin at him. “C’mon, like you’re not fully aware of how thin our walls are.”

His answering smile’s almost… wicked. There’s knowledge in that smile that no thirty-four-year-old probable virgin should possess, and a pulse of heat hits me low in my belly at the things he might’ve heard me do at night alone in my bed.

My bed that shares a wall with his.

Oh my god, why is it only now occurring to me that this man has lain awake at night, adjusting his glasses as he listens to the hum of my vibrator?

“Dead battery,” calls a voice from the hallway to the bedrooms. My eyes flutter shut at the unfortunate overlap of my intrusive thoughts and Officer Dominguez’s report on McEwan’s carbon monoxide detector situation.

“Guess he should’ve invested in rechargeable ones.”

I jump at Hugo’s murmured words in my ear. “How did…” Then I narrow my eyes. No way is my irritating neighbor going to trick me into talking about the care and feeding of my sex toys in the middle of a goddamn crime scene. “Behave yourself.” I point a gloved finger at him. “What’s gotten into you today?”

He buries his hands in his pockets and offers me a lopsided smile. “Just enjoying you in your element.”

“I’m going to talk to my landlord about better soundproofing,” I mutter before I force my attention back to Trevor Dominguez. “How was the rest of the upstairs?”

“Spick and span,” the eager-beaver rookie says. “Even the underwear in the drawer was folded.”

“Well, that’s serial-killer behavior if I’ve ever heard it,” I say with the confidence of a serial killer whose underwear drawer is utter chaos.

“Hey,” Hugo laughingly objects. “I fold my underwear.”

“It never once crossed my mind that you don’t.” I grin at him as the ridiculous idea unfurls in my mind. “Should we check your crawl space for bodies next?”