Chapter Ten
J ocelyn walked out of the Epson Police Department, a copy of Serpent’s Tongue Ink’s paperwork in one hand and her phone in the other with her boss on the line.
“It’s a smaller community, right?” Angelo asked her, his voice competing with the morning traffic. “Maybe find out what you can about the owners and who they associate with. It could come in handy when you need to verify any findings.”
The change in Birch’s eyes as he dropped her off last night rose to the forefront of her thoughts, that shift from resignation to a hardened determination happening in a flash as they said their awkward goodnights. “I will. Talk soon.”
She walked the final stretch to her hotel, clutching the thick envelope as she rode the elevator to her floor, entered her room, and placed it on the dinette.
Piece by piece, she assembled her workstation. Her laptop was open and set to the top right corner, her fresh coffee right beside it. A hotel notepad and pen sat in the left corner alongside her phone. A pack of small yellow sticky notes and a single highlighter were nestled between her coffee and laptop for easy access. With her shoes tucked to the side and her chair pulled in, she was ready to dive in with the professional detachment she promised herself she could uphold. Because in the game of following the money, emotions were off the table.
Easing the stack of photocopied papers from the manila envelope, she took each paperclip-secured pile and scanned them, starting with the company’s purchase expenses.
Whoever copied the paperwork in the evidence processing department had been meticulous about not wasting paper, fitting as many smaller receipts as possible on each page. One by one, she highlighted dates and vendors and entered them into the custom spreadsheets she had tailored early on in her career to help her track the multitudes of numbers businesses generated over time.
She was a third of the way through the first set when she paused, her highlighter hovering over the vendor’s name on the handwritten receipt. Flipping back through the receipts she’d already entered, she found its match and eased it out, placing a sticky note to mark its position.
She didn’t know anything about tattoo equipment.
But she knew someone who did.
Hesitating while staring at Birch’s number, she contemplated the ethics behind contacting him. She often worked alongside the companies she investigated, as their input was invaluable when encountering discrepancies. Sometimes her findings were easily explained through errors, and eliminating those in her report was essential to being able to highlight the more severe violations she found.
The only difference was she had kissed this particular business owner.
And, despite the warning bells screaming in her head, she still wanted to kiss him again.
With a deep breath, she tapped his number and waited, his wariness when he answered expected…but upsetting nonetheless.
“Hey,” she greeted him, getting to her feet to separate herself from her job for a moment. “How’s the day off going?”
“Fine, I guess. Unless you know something that I don’t?”
As much as she knew his guardedness was warranted, it stung. “Well, no,” she replied, sitting on the sofa. “But I was wondering if you had time to answer a few questions today or tomorrow.”
He went silent.
“Obviously you don’t have to,” she rushed to say. “I just—” She closed her eyes and leaned back. “How often do your tattoo guns need to be serviced?”
She could hear him closing a door, followed by the sounds of lawn mowers and engines coming to life in the background. “What do you mean, serviced? Ryder and I take care of the cleaning and oiling, but we keep a spare on hand in case one goes down.”
“So you haven’t had any of them repaired this year?” she asked, straightening up.
“No. Why are you asking?”
Glancing over at the table where the two handwritten receipts for repairs sat, she frowned. “Maybe you should come by the hotel. I’ll have lunch sent up.”
*
Birch hiked his jeans over his hips and tossed his towel over his bedroom door as he grabbed a shirt. “Grey? I’m heading out for a bit. If you can pick up those spark plugs, I’ll be back to help you change them before dinner.”
His brother merely grunted in reply from his room.
With his phone, wallet, and keys accounted for, he locked up the house and jogged to his truck, his mind racing until he began the drive to her hotel and had a moment to sort his thoughts out.
Jocelyn had to be mistaken. He’d been meticulous in organizing the paperwork he brought to Trevor Drayson’s and knew for a fact that there were no receipts for the tattoo guns they purchased three years ago.
She probably didn’t know enough about the tattoo business to know what she was looking at in the invoices and receipts. So if him being there to answer questions would keep his ass off the Epson PD’s radar, he needed to do it. And do it without getting distracted by the woman who would be sitting there with him.
His heart was still pounding in his chest from her call. Her number showing up on his phone had given him a double hit of adrenaline as he lay in bed, moving the chess pieces in his head.
The logical part of him knew it was a business call.
The other part? That side needed to be put right back where it was before Jocelyn Fucking Carter had walked into Serpent’s Tongue Ink.
He parked in the back lot and walked around to the lobby, hoping to stay invisible as he beelined to the elevators and ducked inside as the doors slid shut. Jocelyn stood in her doorway, flinging his mind right back to the night he picked her up for their movie date.
It felt like it was years ago, not days.
“I’m glad you came,” she said, stepping aside to let him in. “Lunch should be here in a few minutes.”
“You kind of caught me off guard when you called.” Keeping his eyes off the faint outline of her bra beneath the fitted striped button-down shirt she had on, he looked to the makeshift office she’d established on the dining table. “I wasn’t expecting to hear from anyone until charges came down.”
He felt her hand graze his arm and he tensed as she slipped in front of him, forcing him to see her.
“It’s not my job to have it out for anyone,” she said softly, tucking her hair behind her ear. “Even if you weren’t you, and we…even if we didn’t know each other, my job is to explain the numbers. You can help me do that.”
He shoved his hands into his back pockets to avoid reaching out to her, to stop himself from wrapping his arms around her and letting her warmth melt away his tension.
But that ship had sailed back on Trevor Drayson’s veranda.
There was a knock on the door and she answered, returning with a small cart. “We might as well get started.”
He waited until she sat before he followed suit, pulling up a chair on the other side of the cart. “So how are your legs feeling today?”
“I’m dying,” she said without a smile. “Everything hurts and I’m dying.”
Opening one of the trays, he passed the mustard-free burger to her and took the other for himself. “Good. Because my quads are so sore I’m one fast move away from sobbing. Have I ever mentioned I don’t like running?”
The nervousness in her gunmetal eyes disappeared and she handed him a bottle of water. “You didn’t have to. You run like a man achieving a goal, not a runner chasing a high.”
“That obvious, hey?”
“Only to those of us daft enough to get our thrills on the track. So, what amazing thing did I yank you away from?”
Taking a long sip of water, he shrugged. “Lying in bed contemplating and deliberating.”
“At one in the afternoon?”
“I have a lot to contemplate and deliberate.”
She sat back in her chair and tilted her head, her blond hair falling over her shoulder. “I have a feeling you’ve always had a lot to contemplate and deliberate.” Shifting gears, she picked up her burger again. “When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?”
Taking a bite of the fresh-cut fries, he chewed, thinking about the question he hadn’t been asked since he was in second grade. “An archaeologist. Except I didn’t know the proper name, so I told my teacher I wanted to be a dirt digger.” The memory, one of the few positive ones he had from school, made him smile. “Mrs. Fleming obviously misunderstood what I meant, so for the rest of the year she bombarded me with books about bulldozers and excavators and pumped me up to live my dream. She even went out of her way to find videos of them when I was done my schoolwork. And since I didn’t want to disappoint her, I never corrected her. Even though I actually hated those big, noisy trucks.”
Jocelyn grinned. “You were probably such a little charmer as a kid. I bet teachers absolutely doted on you.”
“When I was little, yeah. But by fifth grade, I was one of those Baker boys coming up behind Winter. I don’t know how much you’ve heard about my older brother, but I guarantee every rumor is true.” He licked his lips and smirked. “Not saying I didn’t contribute to the family legacy, but it was always for altruistic purposes.”
Crossing her arms, she leaned back. “Altruistic? So a modern day Jean Valjean?”
“Well maybe not that altruistic all the time.” He laughed. “Sometimes I was just a punk. How about you? Were you always going to be an accountant?”
Straightening smugly in her seat, she folded her hands on her lap. “I’ll have you know I wanted to be a princess or a fashion designer, until I discovered jobs in royalty were scarce and I can’t draw.” Her steel eyes narrowed. “I can’t picture you being a teenage thug. You aren’t vicious. And you’re smart. Maybe once Grey’s done with school, you could give it a go.”
“Thug is extreme. I fought when I had to. Like Winter. But neither of us were the type to jump people. Most of the guys doing that had parents with the money to bail them out.” Polishing off the last of his burger, he turned to his dwindling pile of fries. “As long as Serpent’s Tongue is viable, I have no desire to go back to school. I was expelled at sixteen, so even if I did want to go, I’d have to get my GED first.”
Her eyes widened. “Expelled? What for?”
“Stealing shoes from the locker room,” he admitted. “River was growing fast and there was no way our dad would replace the sneakers his feet had blown holes in, so I took care of it.” Clearing his throat, he nodded at the stack of familiar receipts on the table. “Speaking of theft, what were you wanting to know about the gun repairs?”
*
Jocelyn took a moment to switch gears, her thoughts still fixated on the idea of a teenage Birch sacrificing his future to ensure his brother had shoes. It was another reminder that he wasn’t like the man who’d swindled her, pursuing her with expensive gifts and trips to private resorts with the hope he could break her ethics before the courts broke him. He wasn’t like the others, who saw the tarnished reputation her ex left her with and attempted an encore of their own.
But it does prove he would do anything to protect what’s his.
The words hissed through her mind, slithering deep into the back where she kept her betrayals and heartaches locked up tight.
“Um, here,” she stammered, rolling the food cart aside and inching her chair closer to him to set the two receipts down. “Now, I’m not even halfway into the expense receipts, but these two are similar enough to stand out.”
He frowned as he studied them, his jaw flexing as he clenched and unclenched his teeth. “That’s Ryder’s writing. And the vendor is the company we buy the tattoo guns from. But we haven’t had one break down, so I don’t know why he’d write these up.”
Flipping through the pile she’d already entered into her spreadsheets, she removed six more receipts, placing sticky notes to mark their positions. “These are from the same stock pad you can pick up at any office supply store.”
They examined the scant, handwritten details. Each paper listed companies Birch recognized, but he couldn’t identify the reason the receipt existed. Dates were hastily scrawled in, the amounts rounded up to the nearest hundred.
“That fucker,” he whispered beside her, his eyes dark as he got to his feet and paced the floor. “What the hell has he been up to?”
Tracking the discrepancies in her notebook, she returned the receipts to their places in the pile and stepped in front of him, placing her hand on his chest to halt his movements. “Without knowing what else I might find, this looks like a business partner skimming a bit extra for himself. But it isn’t anything either of you would face jail time for, okay? This isn’t the worst scenario, Birch.”
His entire demeanor had shifted back to the tense vigilance he’d had when he walked into the room an hour ago. Gone was the smile she’d managed to coax from him while they ate, the easy banter they’d fallen right into again.
The difference in his stance alone was stark, something she hadn’t noticed before now. Through his grey tee she could see the strain in his muscles, as though each one was spring-loaded and ready to fight. It was the way he’d looked the day she met him, the way he’d walked into the room earlier. She could see the stress he held in his every movement, the casual strength he exuded when he was relaxed around her now replaced by a caged animal.
He looked down at her fingers splayed across his chest and swallowed, the tension in his jaw holding. “I promised Grey I’d help him with his car before it gets dark. Will you text me if you come across anything else?” When she nodded, he took a step back and turned, walking straight out her door.