Chapter Twenty-Five
TIG
They didn’t think they were in danger?
Seriously?
I understood strong women. I knew a lot of strong women.
I actually preferred women who stood on their own two feet and wouldn’t take my bullshit and didn’t need to be taken care of in any way, shape, or form.
That shit was sexy as hell. Give me a woman who could take her ass to Home Depot in a pair of heels, drag a giant box off the shelf, buy it, and go home and assemble it herself any day over a goddamn damsel in distress.
But there was strong, and then there was false bravado.
When some psychopath is sending letters, messages, and breaking into your place and talking about violently raping you? Yeah, that was a reason to genuinely be worried. No. Not just worried—fucking terrified.
I took all the shit the girls gave me and made my way back to the office, being greeted by Sawyer’s massive Mastiff, Slim, sitting in my chair and gnawing at the leather on the back.
Sawyer would probably fucking save money if he invested in some office chair company with how much he had to replace the chairs we all sat in because of him.
“How’d the meeting go? She got a crazy ex?
She’s the type to have some of those,” Brock said, coming in behind me, leaning against the doorway, a lazy smile on his lips.
Sawyer and Brock, they screamed ex-military.
It was in their posture, in their confidence, in the buzzcut Brock still kept his blond hair in, in the darkness they held in the depths of their eyes.
And Brock, well, he had been in a bad place for years when he got back from the black-ops shit they’d done together.
It took a while, but he slowly came back into himself—got back down to earth, became the shameless flirt, laid-back smartass he had always been before. Or so I heard. I never knew him ‘before.’
“She and her business partner have a stalker that wants to rape them breaking into her store and destroying shit.”
To that, everything about Brock stiffened as he slowly straightened, eyes wary. “And she said she wasn’t in fucking danger?”
I swiped my hand across my brow with one arm and guided Slim to the floor with the other, sitting down and spreading the shit the girls gave me over my desk. “They actually told me that they thought maybe they were overreacting by contacting the police and us.”
“What’d she get herself into now?” Sawyer’s voice joined, moving past Brock and into my office.
They didn’t want her case, but they had known Kenz since she was a kid.
They wanted to know everything was alright.
I reached for the picture I had taken of the message on the mirror and held it up to him.
“What the fuck? Her brothers need to know about this.”
My gaze lifted, my head shaking. “She doesn’t want them to know. She’s the client. It’s not our place to call them.”
He knew I was right. It was in the ticking anger in his jaw because he didn’t like it, but he knew that there was nothing he could do either.
“You bringing in Barrett?”
“Yeah, their camera was brought down, so I need to see how.”
“Did you get a list from them?” Brock asked, looking down at my paperwork. “Of exes? Old employees?”
“Got the employees and all their business contacts,” I hedged.
“And the exes and hookups?” Sawyer pried.
One thing that perhaps made Sawyer the best out of all of us was the fact that he genuinely didn’t give a fuck.
Not about what people thought, how easily they got offended, what they thought they wanted.
He didn’t care. He asked the hard questions and demanded the answers, or he wouldn’t take the case.
There wasn’t a fucking delicate bone in his body.
Brock had that to a lesser degree, generally using charm to disarm people and get what he wanted.
Me? Well, I wasn’t great with the hard questions.
“We don’t need to tell you that it’s likely someone one of them has been in contact with,” Sawyer said, knowing I knew that.
“And it would save a fuckuva lot of time if you asked instead of trying to figure it out all on your own. And since this is escalating, you might not have the time to dig up all that shit on your own. I know Kenz is ah… what’s a nice way to say ‘pain in the ass?’ Well, let’s just go with that.
She’s stubborn and hard to work with at times, but she’s a smart girl.
If you tell her why you need the list, she might not like it, but she will offer it up. I assume the partner is the same.”
My air exhaled hard through my nose as I nodded. He was right. I couldn’t handle a serious situation like that with kid gloves.
“I’ll head back over tonight to get it after I talk to Barrett about the cameras. Got anyone on the force who will tell me what they have found so far about her case?”
Sawyer shook his head. “You know what it’s been like since they brought IA in and swept the place.
That place is locked up pretty tight. And they have doubled up on security since Janie and Alex kept hacking in.
It would likely not give you anything anyway.
That store has got to be swamped in prints, and if they had anything to go on, they would have followed up on it by now. ”
True enough.
“So was she a thorn in your side the whole time?” Brock asked a moment later.
My brows drew together as I looked up. “No. She was quiet most of the time. Her partner did a lot of the talking.”
“Kenz?” Sawyer balked. “Kenzi was quiet? Shit. She must be pretty spooked over this to be quiet. You definitely need to get this shit handled as soon as possible. Especially if we are leaving Paine and Enzo out of the loop. If something, God forbid, happened to their little sister, I don’t think I need to tell you the world of shit you will be in. ”
With that, they both shuffled out, a lazy, stretching Slim following them with a look over his shoulder at me that said he wasn’t the least bit goddamn sorry about my chair.
I started a file, the motions rote; nothing interesting about paperwork, even if it did involve the most gorgeous woman I had come across in a good long time.
There wasn’t a part of me, as I left Barrett’s office in the steady rain later that evening, that wasn’t perhaps a bit too excited to hop back over to Luxe and see her again.
Unprofessionally excited.
It had not a damn thing to do with wanting to get more information to go on, in getting a case moving forward.
Of course that was a goal, as it always was, but I didn’t care so much about the list as I did about maybe getting another glimpse of the hellion Kenzi had been at the office when she asked for help instead of the oddly staid one I had dealt with earlier that morning.
As I pulled down the street and saw the light on in the store still and her car not out front? Well, let’s just say I had even more reason to go in and likely rub her the wrong way, getting a genuine reaction out of her.
But as I parked in the back next to her car, which was not only in an abandoned lot with a barely flickering overhead light but also parked right beside the damn dumpster for cardboard, a perfect spot for a creep to hide and wait for her, I was no longer excited—just a bit worried, maybe even a little ticked that she was being so careless.
When I reached for the door handle and found it turned in my hand when she was alone in the damn store, yeah, maybe I let the next couple of sentences get away from me.
“Stubborn fucking woman, you got a death wish?” Her head shot up at that, her hypnotic hazel eyes huge, her soft lips parting in surprise as her eyes none too subtly raked over me, stopping at my arms for a long moment before moving back up to my face.
But still, she said nothing. “I told you to move the damn car.”
Oddly, maybe even inappropriately, her lips slowly curved upward, making her eyes go warm. “I forgot,” she admitted into the strained silence that followed my words.
“You forgot? You forgot that some sick bastard wants to rape you and your friend, and that parking in a dark, empty lot next to a place where he could hide and wait to grab you is a bad idea?”
“I have mace,” she defended, obviously not the type to easily admit she fucked up.
“Which would do exactly squat if he grabbed you from behind and threw you in a trunk before you could spray him with it. And this door?”
Her eyes followed the length of my arm to where I was gesturing toward it.
“Cass just left. I…”
“Should have been at the door with her, locking it as she left or, better yet, leaving with her and letting her man walk you to your car.”
Her eyes sparked at that, giving me a hint of what she was usually like, the person everyone else seemed to know.
“Last I checked, you are my private investigator, not my personal security guard.”
“Apparently, I fucking need to be both,” I said, a smile pulling at my lips as I moved over toward her.
Again, her gaze traced over me, and because she wasn’t looking, my eyes did a slow one sweep as well, taking in whatever was visible from above the desk, which, unfortunately, kept her long legs and great ass out of view.
“Did you find anything out?” she asked, making me aware that I had been staring at her mouth because I noticed the way her lips curled around each syllable in that sentence.
“I have Barrett on the cameras. Hopefully, that will lead somewhere because otherwise, there really isn’t much to go on. Which is why I am here.” Her hand lifted, waving outward in a ‘and?’ motion. Better to get it over quickly, right? “I need a list of all your exes and anyone you’ve slept with.”
Her dark brows drew together slightly at that. “Oh.” Her mouth even formed a little “o” at that, making me realize again how I needed to fucking stop staring at her damn mouth. “Is that all? I thought it was a little weird you never asked earlier.”