Fighting Dirty (J.J. Graves Mystery #18)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

I woke to the feel of Jack’s mouth on my shoulder.

Not a kiss exactly—more like a question.

A slow, deliberate contact that said I’m here, and I’m interested, and there’s no rush.

His lips traced the curve where my neck met my collarbone, warm and unhurried, and his hand was already moving beneath the thin sheet, spreading wide across my hip in that proprietary way that still made my pulse trip after all this time.

The ceiling fan turned lazy circles above us, set to high to combat the humidity that clung to everything like a second skin.

An unprecedented May heatwave had settled over King George County three days ago and showed no signs of leaving.

Even at—I squinted at the clock—five twelve in the morning, the air was thick enough to chew.

But Jack’s skin was warm against my back, and his hand was sliding across my stomach with a reverence that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with what was happening beneath the surface.

Ten weeks. Still too early to show, too early for anyone to know except us and my doctor and Lily, who’d overheard at the hospital and had promised to keep our secret.

“You’re awake,” he murmured against my skin.

“You’re making it very hard not to be.”

His low laugh rumbled through his chest and into mine. “That was the idea.”

I rolled to face him. The pre-dawn light filtered through the glass wall—that massive pane that looked out over the trees and down to the Potomac—and turned everything silver and soft.

It was my favorite time in this room, when the world outside was still deciding whether to wake up and everything inside felt suspended, private, ours.

Jack propped himself on one elbow and looked down at me with those dark eyes that never failed to undo me.

He stretched over me, all height and muscle, his weight familiar and steady.

My palm slid over the ridged scar along his ribs, the one he pretended didn’t ache in cold weather.

His nose had never quite healed straight, and the scar through his eyebrow tugged when he smiled.

He felt like something carved from stone and built to last. His dark hair was cropped close to tame the curl that drove him crazy when it grew out. He needed a haircut.

“No morning sickness?” he asked.

“Second morning in a row.” I smiled up at him. “I think the worst might be over.”

“Yeah?” His hand moved back to my hip, and this time the question in his touch had nothing careful about it. “So you’re feeling…”

“I’m feeling like my husband should stop asking questions and start doing something useful.”

The grin that spread across his face was slow and devastating and entirely too pleased with itself. “Yes, ma’am.”

He kissed me then, really kissed me, and I let myself sink into it the way you sink into a warm bath at the end of a brutal day.

His mouth was soft and thorough and tasted like the man I’d somehow ended up building a life with, this impossible, stubborn, beautiful man who’d been my friend before he was my partner and my partner before he was my everything.

His hand slid up beneath my tank top, and I arched into his palm.

The calloused pads of his fingers traced patterns on my ribs that were almost unbearably gentle, like I was something precious and breakable, which I was decidedly not.

But the tenderness in his touch cracked open a vault I’d spent years constructing, and he’d dismantled it without even trying.

“I love you,” he said against my mouth, and it wasn’t a preamble or a performance. It was just a fact. The same way gravity was a fact, or the Potomac flowing past our cliffs was a fact. Immutable. Beyond argument.

“I love you back,” I whispered, pulling him closer.

His weight settled over me, and the world narrowed to the slide of skin on skin, the sound of our breathing, the magic of two people who knew each other’s bodies like their own, who knew where to touch and when to be patient and when patience was the last thing either of them wanted.

His mouth found the spot below my ear that made me forget my own name.

“God, I’ve missed this,” I breathed. The last couple of months had been brutal—weeks of nausea and exhaustion that had turned our bed into a recovery ward rather than anything resembling a love nest. But this morning, with the sickness finally loosening its grip and Jack’s hands moving with a purpose that made my blood hum, I felt like myself again.

“I’ve missed you,” he corrected, his voice rough and low in a way that lit up every nerve I had. His mouth traced a path down my throat, and my fingers dug into the muscles of his back, feeling them shift and flex beneath his skin—

His phone buzzed on the nightstand.

We both froze. That specific vibration pattern—dispatch, not personal. The one that meant someone, somewhere in King George County, had reached the end of their story in the worst possible way.

Jack dropped his forehead against my collarbone. “No.”

“You have to answer it.”

“What if I pretend I didn’t hear it?”

It buzzed again. Insistent. Unapologetic.

I laughed, even though I wanted to throw the phone through the glass and into the Potomac.

“Jack.”

He lifted his head, and the look on his face was so genuinely aggrieved that I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

“Get moving,” he said. “We can finish in the shower.” He rolled off me with the resigned grace of a man who’d had too many years of practice being interrupted. “I’m an excellent multitasker.”

“Such a romantic,” I said, stripping off the rest of my pajamas.

He grinned and reached for the phone. “Lawson,” he said, and his voice shifted, the warmth leaving it like heat from a window cracked open in winter, husband giving way to sheriff in that single word.

I watched his face change as he listened. Saw his jaw tighten, the lines around his eyes deepen.

“How long ago?” His free hand scrubbed over his face. “Who found the body?” A pause. “Secure the scene. I want a perimeter wide enough to keep any early bird employees back. Don’t let anyone near the body until we get there. And have dispatch call Cole. I want him there too.”

He hung up and met my eyes.

“Body?” I asked.

“Found about forty minutes ago. Dumpster behind the old Miller’s Auto Body on Route 3.

The one that closed down a couple years back.

” He was already moving, throwing back the sheet.

“There’s a strip mall next door that opens at six.

Sanitation driver was making his rounds, went to empty the dumpster, and saw a tarp hanging out the side.

Thought somebody had dumped construction debris illegally.

Lifted the lid to check and found a lot more than drywall. ”

My name is J.J. Graves, and somewhere in King George County, someone was lying dead.

Someone who’d had their life ripped away in blood and violence, whose last breath had been stolen in fear and pain.

Someone whose name would be forgotten if I didn’t stand for them.

As the county coroner, I was the only voice the dead had left, the only one who could read the story their broken bodies told and demand justice for the silence that had been forced upon them.

The dead always called. And I always answered.

I headed for the bathroom. Multitasking would have to be quick.

* * *

The house was quiet as we headed out. There was no sign of Oscar, our newest addition to the family. He’d be in Doug’s bed, the two of them snoring in tandem.

The sun wasn’t up yet, but the heat was already a living thing, and I subconsciously held my breath as I climbed into the Tahoe.

It pressed against the windshield as we drove, thick and wet, and it settled into your lungs and made every breath feel like work.

The dashboard thermometer read eighty degrees at six fifteen in the morning, which meant the local news would be warning people to stay inside.

By eight o’clock, the asphalt would shimmer like water.

By midday, the air would smell like hot tar and cut grass and the misery of a Virginia summer that never learned when to quit.

Welcome to late May in King George County.

Route 3 stretched ahead of us, mostly empty at this hour, just a few early commuters with coffee cups clutched like lifelines and a delivery truck lumbering toward Fredericksburg.

The world had that gray, half-formed quality it gets before dawn, when the sky can’t decide if it wants to hold on to night or surrender to morning.

Trees lined the road on both sides, their leaves hanging limp and motionless in air too thick to stir.

Jack drove with one hand on the wheel, the other holding mine, his thumb tracing absent patterns across my knuckles. Neither of us spoke. We didn’t need to. After years of partnership, we’d learned to read each other’s silences the way other people read words on a page.

My skin still hummed from the shower. Jack had been true to his word about multitasking—efficient and thorough and entirely too talented at making the most of limited time.

My hair was still damp against my neck, and every now and then I caught his scent on my skin beneath the soap, that warm, clean smell that was uniquely his.

It was the kind of morning that made you greedy—that made you want to call in sick and go back to bed and pretend the rest of the world didn’t exist.

But the rest of the world did exist. And somewhere at the end of this drive, someone was lying in a dumpster, waiting for us to tell their story.