Chapter 5 Grayson
GRAYSON
Mid-morning light filters through the curtains, heating the living room with the warm rays of spring. I’ve been up for hours, sorting through a different set of files than the ones that usually keep me awake at all hours of the night, both inside and outside of the apartment.
I’ve been reviewing the cases Macy has worked on over the past three years, as well as the agents she collaborated with. I have reduced the list of potential suspects regarding her actions last night to a select few, with my name being the only one I have confidently eliminated.
Macy has never flinched with me. Not once. So whatever happened must have been after our last joint assignment.
I slip a recently updated file under a stack of many when the bathroom door creaks open.
The bathroom’s aging pipes have rattled many times over the past five hours, but this is the first time Macy has gone to the living room rather than the bedroom after using facilities.
The glass of water seemed to help her heartburn, though it wreaked havoc on her bladder.
Macy looks more refreshed after sleeping in a bed. The twinkle in her pretty eyes is brighter, and the deep groove her forehead was never without yesterday has vanished. A good night’s sleep has stripped years off her age, and it tempts me to test it out myself.
“Morning.” The hem of my shirt rides to my midsection when I stand and stretch. “How did you sleep?”
Her guilt-filled yet genuine smile chips away at the memories of her pained expression in my head, and the sluggish withdrawal of her eyes from my abs replaces them with something more profound. “Better than I have in months. Thanks for giving up the bed.”
I wave off her gratitude; her praise is unnecessary. I got all the fuel I need to keep going from her needy stare. “You needed it more than I did. Besides, I’m used to sleeping on couches.”
After walking to the kitchen, I grab the bag of muffins I purchased this morning after a run and hand them to Macy with a heartburn-approved beverage.
Laughter rumbles up my chest when she sniffs the herbal tea before she takes a hesitant sip.
It must taste better than it smells, because after swallowing down the minute mouthful she took, she takes another sip before she pulls a blueberry muffin out of the bag.
She talks through a moan, the muffin melting on her tongue. “You’re too good to me, Grayson.”
I grin before flattening my hip against the kitchen counter and folding my arms over my chest. “Let’s see if you’re still saying that in a couple of hours.”
Macy raises a brow before she sucks in a sharp breath. “Did you find something in the files?”
I slacken her steps to the first lot of bulletin boards by shaking my head. I meant she should hold back her praise until after the excessive “healing powers” of the prenatal juice passes her intestines.
Online forums tout their benefits, but the juice bar employee warned me to keep the mom-to-be close to a restroom when I rattled off the ingredients I wanted included in the licorice, ginger, and chamomile concoction.
Hating that I got her hopes up only to dash them seconds later, I say, “I’m analyzing personal and behavioral characteristics on each individual you’ve identified as a suspect, but I need a few more hours to complete a thorough profile.”
When her nose crinkles in confusion, aware that it takes longer than twelve hours to conduct an in-depth behavioral analysis on one suspect, let alone multiple suspects, I explain that Brandon is uploading the files to a better version of ViCAP and that we can’t touch any of the files for another seven-plus hours.
Gratitude is Macy’s first expression. Panic quickly follows it. “Are my reports safe with him?”
“Yes,” I answer without pause for contemplation. “I give you my word. I wouldn’t have brought him into this if I didn’t trust him.”
She rewards me her faith way too easily.
“Okay. Good.” I realize there’s more to the incident reports I read this morning than they portray when she whispers, “I’ll take all the help I can get as long as it comes from the right people.
” After schooling her angry expression, she peers up at me.
“I emailed over a dozen requests to have a profiler brought onto this case. They denied every request within minutes of its receipt.” Her following words puff out my chest. “Now I have the best of the best.”
The pain in her eyes clears for loyalty.
If I were honest, I’d also admit she looks a little lost.
Undercover agents bury themselves so deeply into the case they’re working that they are barely recognizable to their loved ones when they return home.
Although Macy isn’t immersed as deeply in the trenches of this outfit as in the other undercover assignments she’s worked, it has a stranglehold on her emotions.
She doesn’t know who she is without a suspect file in her hand, and an unhealthy obsession with unearthing the identity of the perp running through her veins.
My theory is blatantly obvious when she wordlessly seeks my suggestions on how she should occupy her time, since she can’t touch the files she’s rarely without.
I shrug, also clueless. The hours I put into her fellow agents over the past three years are the most I’ve put into any case that isn’t part of a sex-trafficking or baby-making ring in seventeen years. I don’t know who I am outside of the bureau’s net either.
When Macy accepts my who-the-fuck-knows gesture as readily as she did Brandon’s inclusion in this case, I could leave it there, but my heart speaks before my head gets the chance to object. “We could probably kill time with some light shopping.”
Her gag is authentic, and it has my head giving my heart a pat on the back for the first time in over a decade. “Shopping, Grayson? Really?”
“Why not?” I grin like I’m at the comedy club instead of the seedy smile I usually give members of the opposite sex when I want them eating out of my palm. “It isn’t like we have anything better to do.”
She looks like she wants to shoot down my suggestion, or perhaps sulk that the one-bed trope isn’t as fire-sparking in real life as it is in romance novels, but it is the gleam of anticipation in her eyes I pay the most attention to.
It shows that she is as desperate as I am to fill her lungs with something more than corrupt and immoral air.
“We need groceries…” The brilliance of the mangled organ in my chest is unearthed without prejudice when my sluggish head finally clicks on to the reason behind my spontaneous proposal. “And while we’re there, we could get some stuff for… that.”
I need to stop calling her unborn child “that.” It weakens what should be an unbreakable bond forming between her and her unborn child. Macy is already in denial about being weeks from giving birth, and I’m not helping the situation.
Macy doesn’t seem to mind. Thank fuck. The investigation I’m undertaking is meant to restore her faith in humanity, not squash it. “What kind of stuff?”
I grab the never-used shopping list pad off the refrigerator and commence writing a long-overdue list of necessities. It doesn’t start how you’d expect for a thirty-four-year-old bachelor.
“Tums, prenatal vitamins…” With the fog of depravity that forever surrounds me slowly lifting, the lightbulb in my head switches on.
“You’re probably low on iron, so I’ll jot down iron tablets as well.
” I add iron tablets and a handful of items Macy will need to the list I could input into a DoorDash order if my eagerness to de-fleece the dead wood swamping me wasn’t as blindingly apparent as Macy’s smile.
“But if you get iron tablets, you’ll probably need a stool softener too.
They clog some women up.” I add a handful more suggestions to the list. “You’ll also need sanitary napkins for after the birth. Nipple shields, breast pads—”
Macy’s grin slips. “They have pads for your breasts?”
Her pupils dilate when I nod. “They’re small compared to the ones you’ll wear between your legs.
They don’t need to be thick. They only catch the occasional squirt of breastmilk, not the big nasty blood clots…
” My words trail off when Macy looks seconds from fainting.
She sways so uncontrollably that I grip her shoulders to keep her upright. “Are you all right?”
She peers at me with massively dilated eyes. “Yeah… Um. I’m not good with blood.”
“Okay.” How am I only learning this about her now? We spoke extensively during our multiple joint undercover stings. Hemophobia never came up. “But you know you can’t give birth without it, right?”
Her shoulder notches toward her ear before a faint whisper tumbles from her mouth. “I was kind of hoping.”
Laughter chops up my words. I’m an ass for laughing, and it is highly unprofessional, but it can’t be helped. I’ve always viewed Macy as more of a friend than a colleague, but her expression warrants more than a half-assed smirk.
I rarely laugh, but it doesn’t bother me as it usually does since it is happening with Macy.
If anyone should be allowed to let go of the reins occasionally, it should be us.
“Mace—”
She wipes my smile from my face with a stern I-was-trained-how-to-hit whack to my stomach. “It isn’t my fault. Underpaid and overworked nannies raised me, and the only time I could mention periods was when I was placing one at the end of a sentence with my English tutor.”
I laugh again, assuming she is joking. I am way off the mark.
The disgust on her face proves this beyond a doubt.
It is the same look that morphed onto her face every time her mother’s big, bulky tennis bracelet hit the desk in the interview room of the New York field division office.
It was flashy and enormous and had me confused as to why anyone would kidnap her daughter.
The perps would have made more from the sale of her bracelet than from the sale of Kendall’s reproductive organs.