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S tone ran his fingers through Juliana’s long hair. She lay with her cheek on his chest, her body curled around his, drifting in and out of sleep. It wasn’t that late, but after a much-too-long debate following lunch about next steps, he’d rushed her home and, with an almost unbearable clawing need, he barely let her through the door before he had her up against the wall and was buried deep inside her body. Even though, in the end, they’d agreed to give the FBI—and HICC—time to pursue their investigation, the panic he’d felt when Griswold-the-asshole suggested she lure Lowery into a confession had left his blood boiling. Having her under him—or against him—and hearing her sighs, hearing her call his name, feeling her body take his, was the only way to soothe the beast inside him that had reared its (kind-of-ugly) head.

After that heated encounter, he’d led her upstairs where they’d both changed before heading to the river and the private hot spring. Where he’d seduced her again. Once in the hot spring, where she’d straddled him, and a second time on the blanket when he’d used his tongue and teeth and lips to leave her shaking and sated.

His reaction to the possibility of her in that kind of danger both surprised him and didn’t. He’d never given much thought to his own safety while in the army. He may have done a few reckless things, but they’d always been calculated. And, of course, he’d worried about his teammates. But they’d operated as a team—he knew their skills, their reactions, and their minds almost as well as he knew his own. More to the point, though, while they might not have always known exactly how their targets would react, they weren’t often surprised.

He had none of those comforts when it came to Juliana confronting Lowery—the one they’d identified as the weakest link. He didn’t know how the corrupt politician would react. He didn’t know how Juliana would react—she was really fucking smart and had proven how cool under pressure she could be when she’d first overheard Lowery and Polinsky. He couldn’t risk losing her, though. His teammates had all signed the same documents he had—they’d all been aware that they might not make it out of their service alive. All Juliana had done was accidentally overhear two horrible human beings. She wasn’t trained. She hadn’t signed up for any of this.

She stirred and flattened her hand across his belly. He covered it with his. After returning from the river, they’d fed Sherman, fixed dinner, then eaten outside. By silent agreement, they hadn’t talked about Lowery or Polinsky or Gregor or any of that mess. They’d gone to bed after cleaning up, and once again, he’d sunken into her heat. Only that time it had been slow and tender and he’d never felt such peace as when they moved in sync.

“You’re thinking too much,” she said, her breath sliding over his skin as she spoke.

“Hard not to in the quiet,” he replied, combing his fingers through her hair.

“We all agreed that I’m not going to put myself out as bait, so you don’t need to fret.”

He almost chuckled. His brothers would have burst into laughter if they’d heard her telling him not to fret . None of them were the fretting sort. Only it appeared, with Juliana, he was.

“For now,” he said. “We agreed for now. Which means there’s always later to consider.”

She shifted, propping her chin on his chest and looking at him. “Are you really worried about that?”

“Yes,” he answered without hesitation. It might never come to pass, but everything inside him rebelled against the idea of there even being a chance that she might go down that path.

She studied him, then reached up and cupped his cheek. “You are a good man, Simon,” she said before lying back down across his chest.

He dipped his chin and kissed the top of her head. She looked about to drift to sleep again, but her phone buzzed on the bedside table, eliciting a groan.

“Want me to see who it is?” he offered.

Grumpily, she shook her head as she rolled over to grab the device. The sheet slid from her body, and he took a moment to admire the sight. Juliana let out a small, indecipherable sound—interrupting his appreciation—then silenced the vibration and returned her phone to the table.

“Who was that?” he asked as she rolled back over.

She didn’t answer as she got comfortable, tucking herself against him again. “My aunt,” she finally mumbled.

He frowned. “I thought you said you didn’t talk much. Didn’t she call yesterday?”

“We don’t and she did. It’s weird, and I don’t want to deal with her. That’s why I didn’t answer.”

“What did she want yesterday?” he asked.

Juliana shrugged. “She spent most of the time telling me about my cousin’s honeymoon.”

“Where she’d go?”

She sighed. “I didn’t really listen. My aunt goes on about all the things her new husband buys her, the number of houses they have, and all the trips they take, but she never talks about her son-in-law as a person. After a while—a very short while—it’s a boring conversation.”

“She didn’t say anything else?” Given everything going on, he didn’t like that her aunt had called a second time. It seemed…odd. Then again, he’d already decided not to like either her aunt or her uncle—or her cousin, for that matter—on principle. Maybe his judgment was clouded.

“She asked if I was seeing anyone.”

Stone’s Spidey senses tingled. “What did you say?”

“Nothing. I stopped telling her anything about my life other than where I work ages ago. I don’t think she even knows where I live.”

A beat later, Juliana shot up, the sheet once again pooling at her waist. “I was too busy wondering about the surprise you were planning when she called yesterday that I didn’t think about it. But it’s weird, isn’t it? That the day after we’re followed, she calls to ask me if I’m seeing anyone.”

He hesitated, not wanting to add fuel to the fire. But he wouldn’t lie. “Yeah,” he said on an exhale. “It’s weird.”

Juliana cocked her head, her long tresses falling over her shoulder. “Lowery and Polinsky already know who I am, but they don’t know who you are. Was she trying to find out?” She paused, her brow furrowing. “But how on earth would Lowery or Polinsky or even Gregor know my aunt, let alone know her well enough that she’d do that for them?”

“I don’t know,” Stone replied. “It seems a stretch, but it also seems weird that she’d call you two times in two days. Has she ever asked you that before?”

Juliana wagged her head from side to side. “She has, but usually only in relation to my uncle. Like I said, she likes to ensure that I toe the line or keep my head down or any number of other idioms that basically mean I don’t do anything that might reflect poorly on my uncle. So while she’s asked in the past, it was usually to make sure I wasn’t dating someone with vocal political opinions that differ from my uncle’s.”

“Any chance your uncle has anything coming up that would prompt her to call?”

She shrugged. Given the topic of discussion, and the potential implications, he really shouldn’t notice how the move had her breasts swaying. But he did. He’d never thought of himself as a “breast man,” but when it came to Juliana, he definitely was. And a leg man. And an ass man. And a hip man. Actually, there was not an inch of her—body, mind, or heart—that he didn’t like.

“Seems like he always has something these days. He’s held his seat for over three decades, but times are changing. The platform he’s built his career on is less and less popular, especially in North Carolina where the demographics are changing.”

“Let’s find out,” he said, sitting up and grabbing his phone. He held out his free arm, and she leaned into his side so they could both view the screen. Pulling up a search engine, he typed in her uncle’s name.

In seconds, the small screen populated with links to recent news and articles. Only they weren’t in any chronological order. Or even close to any order.

“Go to his website,” Juliana said. “It should have his calendar of events.”

He typed in the most logical URL, and sure enough, the site popped up. Navigating to the menu, he found the calendar and clicked on that.

“Huh,” Juliana said after they both read through his schedule for the next two months. What little there was. “That seems on the light side,” she said. “Even for the end of summer.” She stilled, then reached for her own device. “Hold on, let me check something.”

He flicked through a couple press releases as Juliana searched for whatever she was looking for. He didn’t find much. There’d only been two in the past six weeks, one about his daughter’s wedding and another about a visit to a Civil War battle site.

“Here,” she said, tilting her device so he could see the screen.

“What is this?”

“The private family calendar,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if I still had access. It was the bible when I was living with them. We were not allowed to do anything without first checking the schedule—not even attend the annual student/alum football game the day after Thanksgiving. It was the event of the fall,” she added.

“What exactly did you have to check for?” he asked.

“There was an elaborate set of rules around when we could make plans and when we couldn’t based on my uncle’s schedule. Things like, we couldn’t go to the football game if my uncle had a speaking engagement that weekend.”

“That makes no sense,” he said.

“It doesn’t, not really. But when a couple of kids in our town drank so much at an after-game party and ended up half dressed in the fountain in the town square, my aunt decided they couldn’t take the chance of that happening to either me or my cousin.”

The more he heard about her aunt and uncle, the more he disliked them.

“It doesn’t look like there’s much on the calendar,” he pointed out. The only events noted were a fundraiser for a local hospital, a golf tournament, a couple of lunches, a dinner with their daughter and her new husband, and the travel itinerary for their return to Washington, DC, for the fall session.

“I agree,” she said, scrolling back through the year. “Look here,” she said, pointing out a meeting with another senator, the topic identified as a bill they’d collaborated on. Stone remembered the news around that piece of legislation. It was vastly unpopular and hadn’t made it to a vote. That wasn’t the point of Juliana showing him the entry, though.

“Are there others like that?” he asked.

She shifted to hold the device in both hands and rather than scroll through, she ran a search for the word “bill.” Ten instances popped up in the prior twelve months and none in the next three.

“Okay, so it’s safe to say your uncle isn’t planning a big announcement or getting ready to propose new legislation,” he said.

“Which means she didn’t call me to keep me in check.” She paused, then rolled her eyes and huffed. “As if I was ever out of control. Reading a book in bed is my idea of a good time.”

His gaze drifted over her gorgeous curves as he remembered how they’d been spending their time less than forty minutes ago. Reading had been far from both their minds.

“Stop looking at me like that,” she said, trying to contain a laugh. “Until yesterday, reading was my favorite activity in bed.”

Her implied new favorite activity pleased him immensely. Especially since it coincided with his new favorite bed-based activity.

She held up a hand to stop him from pulling her under him. In all fairness, after the afternoon they’d had, he wasn’t altogether sure he’d be up for the task, although he’d happily take one for the team. But she had a point. The implications of their discovery were disturbing.

“Is it at all possible that your aunt would know Lowery or Polinsky? Or Gregor?”

Her brow dropped, and she frowned. “I can’t speak to anything in her life before I moved in with them or after I moved out, but maybe Gregor is a possibility?”

“Why him?”

She turned her gaze to the window, as she no doubt sorted through her logic. A few seconds passed before she exhaled and returned her attention to him. “First, this is all conjecture. Informed conjecture, but still speculation.” He nodded. “Gregor is a developer. Presumably wealthy. I’d be interested to know if he’s done any projects in North Carolina. Maybe he did and that’s how they met? If that’s the case, she’d be more likely to keep a man like Gregor in her metaphorical Rolodex than the others. He’d be a potential donor to my uncle’s campaigns, and depending on how wealthy he is, he’d have useful networks.”

“But Lowery’s a politician,” he pointed out. “Wouldn’t that be useful, too?”

She shook her head. “If he’d been a senator or even a representative, yes. But a member of the San Francisco City Council? He’d have nothing to offer her. And before you ask, the only members of law enforcement she would ever deign to speak with would be the top officers in Charlotte and Raleigh—the biggest cities—and whoever it is that sits at the top at a state level. A lieutenant from a precinct in California—even one the size of Polinsky’s—isn’t someone she’d notice. Or rather, she’d notice, then dismiss them as not worth her time.”

“She sounds so charming,” he said, tugging her back into his arms. She came easily, resting her head on his shoulder and draping her arm across his torso.

“You have no idea,” Juliana said. Only he did. Maybe not her aunt’s specific kind of crazy, but he’d seen a lot of crazy in his day, and a narcissist was always a narcissist.

“So are we going to go with this idea, then?” he asked.

He understood her hesitation. It was wild to consider that one of the triad—most likely Gregor—knew her aunt. And even wilder to think he knew her well enough to ask that she find out who Juliana might be seeing.

But while it was far-fetched, if they were right, it also meant Juliana’s aunt cared so little about her that she’d throw her to someone like Gregor. Maybe the woman didn’t know the man Gregor was, but Stone doubted it. If she’d thought Gregor had good intentions, she would have just asked Juliana her question and not buried the reason for her call. No, as sick as it made Stone, it was more likely that Juliana’s aunt didn’t care. Maybe she even hoped something awful would happen to her. At least that way, she and her husband could play the grieving family and gain a few sympathy votes in the next election.

God, people could really suck. Thankfully, he had warm, beautiful—inside and out—Juliana trusting him enough with her body and her heart to remind him there really was goodness in this world.

“I don’t think we can ignore it,” she finally admitted. “I have no idea how long my aunt has known Gregor or how well she does—or, for that matter, if she knows him at all. But if she does, then she’s one more lead to follow in getting evidence against him and Lowery and Polinsky. She might know nothing about Gregor’s activities. To her, he might just be a rich man asking her for a favor—and it’s always a good thing to have a rich person owe you one back. But we won’t know unless we look. Or have Agent Parks look.”

He could feel her pain as if it were his own, and he hated it. Hated that she’d lost her parents. Hated that she had such little love and even less joy in her younger years. Hated that she had no family. True, other than his brother, James, he didn’t either, but he’d created one in the Falcons. She had two close friends, Alyce and Chiara. And Chiara’s parents, who clearly adored her like one of their own. But did she consider them her family ?

“You’ve gone quiet,” she said, her own voice growing sleepy. She shifted and a feeling of rightness stole through him with the movement. She belonged beside him. He belonged beside her. And whatever it took, he’d be sure she had the family she deserved.