Page 46 of Sticks and Stones (FBI Romance/Thriller #65)

The Condo

Saturday

Early Evening

W hen Greyson knocked on their door, they let him inside. He looked rattled, and that was anything but the norm. The man tended to be cool as a cucumber in most situations, so immediately, that worried Gene.

He hoped Gabe didn’t call him and tell him something horrifying about this case.

“Why do you look like you’ve seen a ghost?” Gene asked, keeping his voice low.

The man was honest.

“I have a serious problem, and I don’t know what to do about it,” he admitted.

Gene couldn’t imagine what was rattling his cage. He wasn’t the one meeting some anonymous text sender in a luxury hotel.

They were.

“What’s going on?” he asked, willing to help the man out.

Greyson shared.

“I went upstairs to change, and when I answered the door, thinking it was you or Ethan, Sasha was there. She came in and dropped her coat. She was in her birthday suit, looking for love in all the wrong places—my condo.”

Gene lifted a brow.

“Didn’t you tell her you were done banging that drum?” he asked.

Greyson nodded.

“Yeah, two weeks ago, but I may or may not have gotten back on the runaway train a few days ago.”

Oh, boy.

“But just now, I told her it was a bad idea to sleep with someone I work with, and I was aborting that mission. I had to tell her directly that we’re done having sex. She looked…worried.”

Gene was curious.

“And?”

“Well, clearly, she’s not taking no for an answer and didn’t believe me last time since I was an idiot and caved. I hope she gets the picture. I said over as of today, and I meant over.”

He laughed.

“You have some interesting problems,” he admitted, glad he was in a relationship with the man he planned on marrying one day. The dating pool was a swamp.

Oh, Greyson was well aware.

“The whole thing has me rattled. While normally, I’d appreciate her creativity, now I’m kinda freaking the fuck out because the vibe was way off.”

That didn’t sound good.

Not.

At.

All.

“What are you going to do if she doesn’t get the hint?” he asked.

That was what he was worried about.

“I might have to go to Gabe and say something. I can’t risk this being a situation where she tries to get in my pants, again, and when I turn her down, she reports me for something horrible like assault,” he whispered, not wanting to say the ‘R’ word if Corbin could hear them.

Oh, boy.

“If you do that, you risk him being a dick or as everyone calls it, Gabe being his normal self.”

Greyson was aware.

“I know that, but I’m not accustomed to being snuck up on. At work, she’s always there, and now she shows up uninvited to my condo. That’s a problem.”

He was curious.

“Did she leave without a fight?” he asked.

He nodded.

“Yeah, and to be brutally honest, it was off. I’ve broken it off with PLENTY of women. Each time, they got damn angry.”

He lifted a brow.

“And she didn’t?”

He shook his head.

“There wasn’t an ounce of anger. If some guy blew you off and dumped your ass, wouldn’t you feel something?”

He nodded.

“Well, yeah. I’d be annoyed.”

That’s when he said it.

“She looked worried. Like us not sleeping together was a problem. So she’s either a psychopath, or she’s up to something. I told you that the whole thing felt off to me three weeks ago after she wouldn’t stay at my place and did a full three sixty.”

That set off alarm bells.

Why?

He had been feeling off about her for a while.

Gene was to the point.

“Between you and me, I really feel like she’s up to something too,” he admitted. “And I think I know what.”

Greyson listened.

He valued Gene’s perspective. The man was a good investigator, and he could read a room.

“What?”

Greyson went there.

“Gabe called us a few weeks back, and he said that he hoped Ethan and I were ‘cozy’ in our new place. He made it seem sexual.”

Greyson was to the point.

“Uh, I hate to burst your bubble, but it is sexual. You two are joined at the dick.”

Yeah, well, they knew that, but Gabe wasn’t supposed to know that.

Only, he found out.

Somehow.

Then, as if the lightbulb went on, Greyson gasped and knew where the man was taking this.

“Oh, holy shit, Gene! Was this right after I brought Sasha to your place to talk over the autopsy results?”

Gene nodded.

Both investigators were putting two and two together, and neither of them liked what they were figuring out.

This.

Was.

Bad.

“You think that he planted Sasha at the office to spy on us?” Greyson asked.

Only, before Gene could answer, Ethan came around the corner.

“Are you guys…?” he began, but then came to a dead stop. It was clear they were worked up about something.

The vibe was off.

“Uh-oh. What now?” he asked, seeing the looks on their faces and how intense the conversation had to be to make Gene stressed out.

Gene clued him in.

“When Greyson went to go change, Sasha showed up, naked. He had to dump her, and she didn’t get angry.”

Ethan lifted a brow.

“Women ALWAYS get angry when you blindside them with a breakup. The freaking woman I dumped for you, Ethan, wanted my head on a stick in her yard so she could watch the carron peck out my eyes.”

Greyson pointed.

“See? You’re gay, so maybe a man reacts differently, but when a dude dumps a babe, they lose their shit. She didn’t.”

Gene pointed out one thing.

“If Ethan dumps me, I’m losing my shit, and locking him in our condo until he changes his mind.”

That made Blackhawk laugh.

“Great. Kidnapping. Haven’t I been victim of that enough in this city?” he joked.

Gene wasn’t kidding.

“Test me, Native man. You and I aren’t breaking up,” he said emphatically. “As for Greyson, we were talking about how Grey and Sasha came here to work that night on the Christmas case.”

He thought about it.

“Okay, and? That was when he started getting twitchy about her.”

Gene told him.

“We were talking about how suddenly, right after that, Gabe called us and seemed to know shit he shouldn’t know about—like how ‘cozy’ our condo is.”

His dark eyebrow winged up, and Ethan immediately got it.

“Oh, well, I wouldn’t be shocked if he planted someone here to watch us. You know how The Dragon Slayer is. He likes to spy on his minions. That’s something he’d do and enjoy. He’d want to know more about how we’re working here and to make sure we are doing our job.”

Gene was pissed.

“It makes sense,” he admitted. “When Javier Hughes was threatening to blackmail us, we talked to him, and I told him about the video of us at the club.”

Oh, Ethan knew the one. He had a copy of it tucked away. They told Gabe so he’d have a heads-up.

“We told him that we were just partners, and he asked if we were being honest. We said yes, and that likely piqued his interest. He totally would want to find out for sure. Gabe doesn’t like when he’s lied to, and he must suspect we lied.”

Well, shit.

They had a spy.

At his words, Greyson got red.

“I swear to God if she’s a spy,” he said, his blood pressure going up. “I’ll be so freaking pissed that I’ll ruin her entire life. She’ll be going back to Seattle with her tail tucked between her legs.”

Gene pointed out one thing.

“Well, it’s a damn good thing you stopped sticking your dick in her. If she is reporting back to Gabe, then he likely has something on her. No sane person is going to come to a new city, and do shit like this.”

Ethan whistled.

“He absolutely would have something on her,” he admitted. “Gabe would use that as leverage. Like he did with us today. We have to stay a third year to get help on a case. Imagine what he’d do if she really fucked up in her job.”

Yeah, that sounded about right.

Greyson was tense.

“This fits. I told you two that I felt like something was off about her. How she’d never sleep in my bed, and then when I called it off, she did a one-eighty and started getting clingy?”

They nodded.

“Yeah, you thought she just needed a dominant man in bed,” Gene stated.

Ethan was profiling it now.

“What if that was to dig her claws in and save the mission?” he asked. “She saw you pulling away, and she panicked. If she can’t sleep with you, a person who runs the office, how would she get information for Gabe?”

Uh-oh.

Houston, they had a problem.

“Oh, fuckity,” Gene said. “I really hope you used protection.”

He did once in a while with her.

Not every time.

Greyson was furious. It pissed him off to be played, but it also pissed him off that him bringing her to Gene and Ethan’s home had risked them. They were his friends, and he didn’t want to compromise them.

Or have Gabe pull them to leave. They were doing a damn good job in Philadelphia .

“If he’s using her to spy…”

Ethan was to the point.

“If she burned Gene and me to Gabe, you won’t have to kick her ass. I’ll be doing it first. We invited her to our place and were nice. I won’t be nice if I lose the best partner I’ve ever had. If he ships us to different cities, I’ll be rabid,” he admitted.

Greyson was just as pissed.

“Damn it. What do we do now?” he asked, needing help to navigate this.

They all thought about it for a minute, and that’s when Ethan had a plan.

A good one.

The bottom line was that he was the mind fucker in the bunch, and he knew exactly how Gabe thought. What few people knew was that while Gabe was an agent when he joined the FBI, he profiled a lot for his partners.

Every one of the people Gabe had been partnered up with had been special agents, and he’d been their profiler. Yeah, he’d done the same job Ethan did.

Until he climbed the ladder.

Hell!

Ethan modeled his climb after Gabe’s career.

“I have a plan,” Ethan admitted.

They both looked over at him.

“It looks as if we need to figure out what he has on her, and then we take her down. We need to turn the tables on both of them. We should have known it was a problem when he put her at the office a little too easily when we asked for an ME here.”

Greyson agreed.