Page 37 of Unbearable
She stood to walk him to the door. Before she could step away from the table, he took her face in both of his hands and peered into her eyes.
“I understand, but don’t think for even an instant that I like it.” He brushed his lips softly against hers. He was walking down the hall away from her before it had even sunk in that he had kissed her.
“Thank you, Bailey,” he said, stopping at the door. His back was to her, but he knew she heard every word. “For the lunch.” He paused before adding, “And for being so damn good. For being the safe haven in this hurricane.”
He was out the door before he could change his mind. His feet took him to his work truck, but his heart stayed behind. Ifonly for a moment, he had glimpsed what normal felt like. He knew what her sweet lips tasted like. It wasn’t enough, but it would have to do for now.
Bailey stood just inside her front door and watched as Fox pulled away from the curb. The kiss had been so fleeting that, for a moment, she could almost pretend it never happened. But then it would flood her senses once again. It hadn’t been carnal by any means, but it had still been perfect.
She felt the same angst, yearning, and need from him in that moment that she felt all the time. It was wrong on so many levels. He was her sister’s boyfriend. There was a code for sisters and their boyfriends.
Then again, when had Brooke ever considered her when she’d made a decision? If they hadn’t been six years apart in school, she was positive her sister would have stolen every boyfriend she had.
A close friend she could bounce all of her feelings off of would have been a welcome thing right then. Working from home, though, didn’t help when it came to making friends. She never saw her work colleagues since they all worked remote like herself. College was long enough ago that she had lost touch with those friends.
“Maybe it’s time to get a dog.” She shook her head when she realized she had been standing in her doorway for at least the last fifteen minutes staring down the road. “Good grief, Bailey.” She stepped back inside and closed the door. “The dog doesn’t sound like too bad of an idea, though. At least I won’t just be talking to myself.”
Climbing the stairs to her office, she tried to put all thoughts of Fox out of her mind. It would be an impossible task. She knew that kiss would feature heavily in her dreams both at night and during the day.
She already had a problem with dreaming about him most nights. Most of them were rather X-rated, which meant her vibrator was getting a workout. Now she could add him to her days too. Earning a living was becoming harder every time she saw him. How did she work when she was too busy staring into space imagining what could be?
She slumped into her office chair with a sigh. A couple of more hours of work, and then she could start scrolling for a dog. Her computer came to life with a swipe of her mouse. Soon she was knee deep in code again.
In the back of her mind though was a nagging thought.What if she gave in? What if next time she kissed him back? What if they did more than kiss?Brooke didn’t need to know, not yet anyway. Not until they could come up with a plan that didn’t harm Ethan.
Opening a new document, she typed “Fox plan” at the top. She would come up with a catchy name later. She then skipped a line and typed “1.”
After several minutes of watching the cursor blink, she closed the document. She wasn’t clever enough for a plan that complicated. Brooke would be. She sighed again and turned back to work. It felt like they were all racing toward a collision, and she couldn’t see how it would end well.
That dog looked better and better by the second. At least when it all blew up in her face, she would have company to commiserate with her. She shoved the thoughts of Fox deep down and focused on the three screens in front of her. Without realizing it, she had pulled up dog rescues in the area on one of them. She might as well check while she was there.
CHAPTER 14
Dover foundDex sitting in the incident room early the next morning. He was staring at the boards at the front of the room. He seemed to be especially riveted on the board with the first victim on it. She took a sip from her takeaway coffee and crossed the room to him.
“I keep coming back to the blonde with the first victim,” he said as she approached. “Have they not found her at any of the other bars before the other two disappeared?”
“Not yet, but she may have learned to stay out of camera range.”
“True.”
“Sean said he thinks it would have taken a lot of force to strangle the victims, though, so we’ve ruled it most likely a male suspect,” she said. “I mean, the medical examiner.”
“You can say Sean.” Dex smiled over at her. “You’re not fooling us. Don’t worry,” he continued when she opened her mouth to protest. “We can keep a secret. Although I can’t guarantee Knox won’t put him through his paces.”
“Speaking of, where is Knox?”
“He said something about a drug buy in Lowell. I don’t know. He was talking to some DEA guy on the phone yesterday.”
She debated asking more but decided she didn’t want to know. The only thing that she knew about the drug trade up north was that Brooke’s ex-husband was wrapped up in it. As much as she knew she should protest Knox getting involved in that, she couldn’t. One less bad influence in Ethan’s life, the better.
“Do you think there’s a chance it’s a team?” he asked.
“Like a man and woman team killing men?”
“It’s uncommon, but not unheard of. Bernardo and Homolka, Starkweather and Fugate.”
“Bonnie and Clyde. I guess it could be. I’m not ruling anything out,” she said. “So, she picks a target based on certain parameters and lures him from a random bar?”