Out of Time (Fall of the Morelli Crime Family #3)

1. Chapter 1

one

Mark

Six Weeks Later

I wasn’t being very subtle about scanning the bar for her, but did it really matter? She hadn’t been here a single night for the last six weeks.

“Come on, you’re the one who wanted to celebrate!” Lucas said, holding up his pint glass to clink with my beer bottle. “Why are you moping?”

“I’m not moping,” I lied. “I’m just thinking about how we’re actually going to do it.”

It was true, even if it wasn’t the answer to his question. We finally had a break in the Morelli case, finally knew the angle to exploit, but there were still issues to figure out on how to get it done.

The actual answer to his question was that I’d been stuck in a stew of self-pity ever since I met and lost Bee. It was only one night, a few hours of my life, but I thought I found the one woman who could turn my rotten luck with love around. Then she snuck out before I woke and didn’t leave a way for me to get a hold of her. I didn’t even know her last name.

Maybe I imagined her reactions, the look on her face. My feelings were one-sided, and we experienced a meeting of bodies, not of souls.

I had to move on.

“But you’re right, we should celebrate!” I said, lifting the bottle to my lips. “I’ll deny it if anyone else asks, but you had to be right about something at some point.”

Lucas rolled his eyes, but took it for the win it was. He was used to Happy Mark. Cheerful Mark. Joyful, joking, just-kidding Mark. I could fake it easily enough.

“We’ve got a lot to celebrate,” I continued, holding the bottle up in a toast. “To knowing the next step.”

“The next step,” he concurred, clinking his drink to mine.

We’d been working side-by-side for almost two months in a joint FBI-SFPD Organized Crime task force. We’d made progress, brought in witnesses, fugitives, and enforcers, but had been stuck in a stalemate for over a month. Now we had a lead on one of Carlo Morelli’s dirty cops, Theo Gates, who’d been in hiding since he was made a few weeks back. We got news that he regularly attended a certain underground poker game and we were coordinating with local SWAT units to go in hard and grab him afterward undetected. We needed as much ammunition as possible when we brought the head of the Morelli crime family to trial, and what better way to do that than getting someone on the inside?

Six more days.

I knew Theo from his early days on the force. If we could find him, I felt confident I could talk him into rolling over on the Morellis. A mole would be ideal, but a rat would do.

The only wild card was actually finding him: something that was a lot harder than it seemed. What if Theo wasn't at the game? What would we do then?

“I love this bar,” I lied again, a huge smile on my face. We needed happy, positive Mark, not bad-attitude Mark. “The atmosphere is just so quaint. Classy, even.”

Lucas snorted, pointedly looking around at the fake palm trees and tiki masks decorating the walls. “The epitome of taste and refinement. Is that why you’ve been coming here every night?”

Shit, he noticed? I came inside for the first time after the worst day I’d experienced in years. I left that warehouse crime scene with nausea, but Lucas walked away with real injuries. He and his girlfriend almost died. I wanted a drink, and the bar was a block away from the precinct. I never expected to become a regular.

“It’s not every night,” I said. Just last week I skipped a night to take my Ma and Dad out for their anniversary. “What do you care anyway?”

Our families grew up next door to each other, but Lucas and I hadn’t been close for years. Not since that thing I had with his sister. Was he trying to get chummy again? I didn’t hang with a lot of bros—hell, I didn’t hang with anyone these days—but it might be nice if we could be friendly again.

“I don’t care. Not yet. But I will if your drinking problems leak into the job, yeah?” Okay, fair point on his end.

“I don’t have a drinking problem.” And it was true. I didn’t. I never had more than one drink, and really only ordered the one because I’d feel like shit sitting there all night without buying anything.

“Then something else is going on. What is it?”

“I come for the ambience. I like the natural beauty of the tropical landscape. Really makes you feel you’re in paradise, am I right?”

The bartender snorted as he cleaned the bar near us and popped a little paper umbrella in the opening of my beer bottle. “You should be on our marketing team.”

I flipped him off, but he just smirked at me, continuing past to wipe down the rest of the bar.

“No seriously,” Lucas continued. “Why do you keep coming back here if you’re not drinking every night?”

His raised eyebrow reminded me that he knew my family, knew my dad’s history with the bottle. Dad might not drink anymore after the liver transplant, but that just made him grouchier, somehow. Poor guy missed his booze. I needed to change the subject away from me.

“When did you get all observant, man? It wasn’t that long ago that you were oblivious to your own damn feelings, nonetheless someone else’s.”

“I work for the FBI, jackass. I know when someone is acting out of character. Out with it: what’s going on?”

I debated lying again, but there was no point. Lucas and I were never that close, even when I was dating Danielle, but we had history together. We weren’t bros, but we worked together, and partners shared crap, right? Anything was better than him hating me forever because of what happened after his sister dumped me.

“I met someone here a few weeks back,” I admitted. “But I didn’t get her number, so I’m kinda hoping she’ll come back so I can see her again. I don’t have a drinking problem, I got women problems.”

Lucas snorted. “Not a surprise. You’re not exactly a charmer, are you?”

Ouch. No, I really wasn’t, but I tried hard. “What do you mean? I’m a regular Prince Charming! Finding the sexy glass slippers and sweeping the ladies off their feet.”

“Looks like you swept this one right out the door. It was probably your crappy jokes that sent her running.”

Bee actually couldn’t seem to stop laughing. She liked my crappy jokes about the stupid theme bar. I could practically see her sitting on the barstool next to me, giggling as I shifted so one of the paper palm trees seemed to sprout from my hair. “I didn’t think I’d like this décor at first, but it’s really growing on me.”

Lucas just didn’t have the right sense of humor.

I grabbed my heart and exaggerated a look of pain. “Damn, tell me what you really think of me! Ever consider lying to save my feelings?”

“Nope. I wouldn’t do you the disservice.” His teasing smirk dropped for a moment of seriousness. “You told it like it was with Athena, and I’ll always be grateful for it.”

I nodded. I told him to go bang a witness in our case and he listened, fell in love, and took out a mafia enforcer. Because I saw the side eyes and attraction and begged him to just get the sexual tension out of his system, now we were one step closer to taking down the mafia in San Francisco.

All thanks to my sarcastic-ass comments.

Sure, Lucas ended up with a few cracked ribs from the encounter, but if I was reading the looks right between the two of them, at least the sex was worth any amount of broken bones.

I had sex that good once… I recalled the feeling of Bee’s fingernails digging into my back, the taste of her mouth, the way her toes curled when I—

“Are you actually trying to grow up and mature? You’re not just trying to get laid?”

I knew he was kidding, trying to lighten the mood, but I still pushed him half off his fucking barstool anyway. He laughed, shifting back onto the seat again.

“Maybe I wanted to get laid at first, but things changed. She was sweet, kind. I just want to see her again, but I don’t even know why I’m trying. She clearly doesn’t want to see me or she would have left her number.”

I spent at least twenty minutes looking for a note that morning, but there was nothing. Not a discarded glass slipper, pair of panties, or anything that could lead me to her. Just a cup of cold coffee and a bag of scones, which made things even more confusing.

“Maybe it was an oversight,” he suggested. “She had to leave in a hurry and forgot.”

“Maybe she left a note I didn’t see right away and a breeze blew it out a window,” I added. I kept my windows closed overnight, but still.

“Maybe she figured since you’re a detective you could find her without a phone number.” Did we talk about my job? I know we mentioned her shop, but I don’t think I mentioned my job specifically.

“Maybe she was in a car accident and ended up in a coma and when she wakes up she’ll think only a couple hours have passed,” I continued.

“Maybe she’s been really busy and hasn’t had a chance to come by and find you again.”

The likelihood of any of those scenarios being accurate was slim, but they weren’t zero. Hell, if we were lucky enough to get a hit on Theo Gates, maybe I would be lucky enough to find Bee again if I kept at it.

“Or maybe she was a hit-it-and-quit-it kind of girl and was pissed you didn’t just take her home and bang her brains out.”

I choked on my sip of beer. Lucas laughed, pounding me on the back.

“Damn it, Lucas,” I said, wiping off my chin with a napkin. “Girls don’t lie about that stuff.”

I paused.

“I mean, do they? If they just wanted to fuck they could just say that to a lot of men. They wouldn’t need to lie about wanting more, right?”

Lucas took pity on me. “No, probably not. I just wanted details. You took her home? Maybe you didn’t finish the job right so she changed her mind about sticking around.”

I rolled my eyes. Some orgasms were impossible to fake, and Bee had two. Something else had to have happened.

Shit, maybe I should have been doing more to find her.

What if something was really wrong? I was an Inspector with the San Francisco Police Department, after all. I had resources. I knew things about her, even if I didn’t have a last name. I could figure out who she was to make sure she was alright.

Maybe she wasn’t ghosting me, but had an actual reason for leaving me alone in bed. Maybe Bee would be grateful if I found her. Maybe she accidentally locked herself out of my apartment and forgot the way back and was too busy to go back to the bar and didn’t remember my name.

Maybe the ball was in my court the whole damn time, and I wasn’t just another idiotic, hopeless romantic. I was starting to feel hope ful.

“I recognize a look of determination when I see one,” Lucas said, taking another sip of his beer.

I downed mine, throwing enough cash to cover both our drinks on the bar before I stood.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Lucas waved me off, but I couldn’t even pause long enough to say goodbye. I had to act now while I still had confidence in myself.

I was buzzing with energy, feeling alive and full of purpose for the first time in weeks. I needed to get home and make a list of everything I knew about Bee and use those clues to figure out how to track her down.

It was still terrifying. Enough women have put me in my place and told me exactly why they needed —not wanted, but needed —to dump me. I didn’t want to experience that again, but it would be worth it if this was a misunderstanding.

The possibility of a life with Bee was worth everything to me.