Page 58 of Hard Heart

“You can walk away.”

If I’d realised we were both wingless flies, just waiting to get eaten, maybe I would have tried to crawl to some semblance of safety. But I didn’t, and instead, I stubbornly shook my head.

“I can’t.” I moved my foot an inch higher. “You must realise that by now.”

Those dark eyes turned molten. “Fuck.”

“Jim might have something to say if we tried that.”

“Something to say? He’d have a damn coronary. Give me your foot.”

“What?”

Sykes lowered his hands out of sight below the table. “Give me your foot, Serafina.”

I complied, lifting it into his lap, then gasped at the feel of his solid cock against my sole. My dreams hadn’t done him justice. Levi Sykes was packing a truncheon in those trousers, and yet another of Rudd’s inadequacies had been laid bare.

“See what you do to me?” he said, his voice low. I felt it to my core.

But he wasn’t just being a horny asshole. I groaned as his thumbs dug in, and one thing was absolutely clear—this wasn’t the first time Sykes had given a foot massage. Those artist’s hands worked magic with more than a paintbrush.

“Virginia Rules of Professional Conduct,” I muttered. “Rule 1.8(j) A lawyer shall not have sexual relations with a client unless a consensual sexual relationship existed between them when the client-lawyer relationship commenced.”

“Technically, you’re not my lawyer. You’re not a lawyer in Virginia at all.”

“I’m not sure the bar association would see it like that.”

“And we’re not having a sexual relationship. I’m merely getting the knots out of your foot.”

“Explain that to your dick.”

He smirked at that. “I won’t tell if you don’t. Give me your other foot.”

That was the moment I knew I was in big, big trouble. About nine inches, to be precise. Sykes might have been in prison, but I was as much of a prisoner as he was, and I was also the only person who could set us free.

No pressure.

Fuck indeed.

CHAPTER 19

SERAFINA

“C’mon, don’t be so negative,” Heidi said. “Don’t think of this as a wild goose chase. Think of it as an adventure.”

With every passing day, I was sinking deeper into the quicksand that was the Sykes case. This morning, we were on our way to Loudoun County, where August Groveland had once lived in the small town of Bishop’s Junction. In between Heidi’s shifts at Jackson’s, she’d been ploughing through the conspiracy files, page after page of tenuous theories and notes that, for the most part, read like the ramblings of a madman. Or madwoman, since I suspected Bliss had been responsible for some of them.

But every so often, Heidi had found an interesting snippet, and it was one of those snippets that formed the basis of our fool’s errand today. To give Save Our Planet credit, they’d at least been more helpful than the authorities had, and possibly done a more thorough job too. During their investigation, they’d visited dozens of neighbours and carefully noted their conversations with each of them. Over half had told them to get lost, while most of the rest had expressed condolences and offered nothing of use. But there were a handful of witnesses who’d reported seeing two people running through the streets on the night in question, and those were the folks we wanted to speak with.

Raelene had approved a day of annual leave—I got precious few of those, so I hoped it wasn’t a wasted trip—and Heidi had decided to join me. I was driving because she’d only managed three hours of sleep since she staggered in from the club last night.

“An adventure is hiking in Shenandoah National Park, or skiing in Colorado, or riding an airboat in Florida. This is just one more step on our descent into darkness.”

“Oh my gosh, don’t be so melodramatic. This is the most fun I’ve had since I tore up my ankle.”

When Heidi fell asleep, I set a bar prep lecture to play. With so little time until the exam, I couldn’t afford to waste even an hour, and therefore I had to multitask because failure wasn’t an option. We arrived in Bishop’s Junction at a quarter to nine.

“Ready to go?” I asked, steeling myself for what was to come. I’d always been an introvert. Canvassing witnesses outside of a work setting was my idea of a nightmare.