Chapter Sixty-Five
Brock
I tried to give myself a little slack.
It was, for all intents and purposes, inevitable.
I knew it from almost the moment I’d laid eyes on her, and she’d given me a once-over that said her mind was on the same wavelength.
Things were absolutely going to get physical.
But it was supposed to happen after the job was done.
Admittedly, though, I wasn’t exactly focusing on the job the way I knew I needed to be.
This wasn’t a cheating spouse.
This was a woman who was nearly murdered.
If someone hadn’t come across her bleeding out on the ground, she likely would be dead right now.
She didn’t need me saying shit about going down on her, telling her that she wore her desire for me on her sleeve, or kissing her in the street of my hometown. Where someone like Clarke could see.
She needed me fucking focusing on the case, finding who it was who’d hurt her, and making him pay for it.
So that was why I pretended to be sleeping in when I heard her moving through her apartment, getting her coffee, putting herself together.
I knew that if I spent too much time in close contact with her, I wasn’t going to be able to keep my mind on the job.
So, I took the chickenshit way out of it.
I avoided her.
Once she was at work, I was free to roam through her apartment again, making myself a coffee, then shutting off all the lights, and closing all of the curtains before grabbing a flashlight, and slowly and methodically working my way through every inch of her house.
She’d said she’d gotten creep vibes from the super. A man who’d been in her house, roaming around.
It wasn’t absurd to wonder if he’d been leaving cameras behind, if that was why she’d found him in her bedroom instead of the kitchen where he belonged.
But after almost an hour of the painstaking project, I was reasonably certain there was nothing hidden in her smoke detectors, alarm clocks, her shower head, in her statues, or anywhere else for that matter.
It was worth a look.
It definitely would have pointed a finger a little more firmly in the super’s direction, anyway.
I watched out the front window, waiting for the man himself to appear to head down the street to grab some lunch.
He wasn’t creepy in the way you could often find a super to be creepy. Greasy-haired, unkempt. Clearly, that kind of inattention to detail would never stand at a building such as Chapel Lane.
The super, a man named Aaron, was five-ten, with a medium build that leaned a little more toward doughy than muscular, dark hair that was receding just at the temples so far, a wide face with a stern-looking brow over dark blue eyes, and the kind of lazy, shoulder-swinging walk that just made him seem kind of cocky.
Taking my cue, I grabbed my phone and my kit, and made my way down the elevator to the main floor, since it didn’t have an option to get off anywhere else.
I held my breath, wondering if the keen-eyed doorman would see me, but he was busy talking to the newspaper guy out front, giving me just enough of a chance to make my way across the lobby and out the door that led to the back alley.
The nice thing about old buildings like Chapel Lane was that the plans were pretty much public access, so I knew that from the back alley was a door that led into the super’s office.
He exited through the front because the alley was a dead-end to both sides thanks to a massive dumpster the building next door had placed at one end so they could toss construction debris into it.
“Nice,” I mumbled to myself as I found an old green metal door that had no fancy bells and whistles to keep anyone out, just an old lock that was child’s play to pick.
I hadn’t exactly been in a lot of super’s offices before, so I didn’t know what to expect, but it was a pretty roomy space with wire racks lining one and a half of the walls.
The shelves were loaded down with what you might suspect—endless rolls of paper towels, toilet paper, room sprays, cleaners, and lightbulbs.
There was also just about any kind of tool you might need from a saw to a toilet plunger and drain snake.
He had a small desk pushed up against the wall, and when I moved closer, all I found on top of it was some sort of electronic that he was clearly trying to fix.
Nothing overly, well, creepy.
No pictures on the walls. No stash of panties belonging to the female residents. No notes.
It was just the man’s kind of sad, dark, little office.
That didn’t mean, of course, that he was innocent.
He could have just been smart enough not to leave any traces out where anyone could see them.
Scooting his chair back, I sat down to open the drawers of his desk, rifling through the mixed contents.
Rubber bands, pens, about a dozen different Alan wrenches which were probably from furniture assembly jobs some of the residents had talked him into, old sticky notes with the font completely faded, some pennies, a couple cans of WD-40.
But there, way at the back of the second drawer, I found it.
The little credit card key that matched the one Cam had given to me to use to get into Miranda’s apartment.
The thing was, it was quite literally covered in dust, so much so that I left fingerprints on it when I picked it up.
There was no way it had been used recently.
Sighing, I tucked it into my pocket.
Guilty or not, Miranda thought he was a creep, and creeps didn’t deserve access to her apartment.
Swirling in my chair, I let out a deep sigh.
If it wasn’t the super, then who?
The doorman?
It was an avenue worth looking into.
He did, clearly, use his key. Often. Bringing her dry cleaning and packages up.
But he was an older guy. Married, judging by the ring on his finger. A man who’d worked at the building for years.
He saw Miranda daily.
Why would he just… all of a sudden decide to attack her?
Especially when there seemed to be no other motive aside from the attempted murder.
If there had been a sexual assault component to it, I guess I could maybe understand it. The guy who saw her daily, pining over her, wanting her, mistaking her cordiality for interest. Then one day, something just triggers him and he attacks.
I could make that scenario work in my mind.
But without that, it just didn’t make any sense.
Sighing, I climbed out of the chair, and made my way back outside, but went ahead and walked down the alley, squeezing past the dumpster, and making my way down the block, just far enough that the doorman wasn’t looking at me as I watched him.
Outwardly, he seemed to be everything that a doorman at a fancy-ass place should be.
Friendly, efficient, anticipating of needs.
“Yeah?” Sawyer asked, leaving me to try to work with that one syllable, to see if Clarke had spilled the beans to Barrett, who had in turn told Sawyer.
That said, Sawyer wasn’t the type to wait for me to call. If he was pissed at me, he’d have reached out to let me know that.
Clarke, for whatever reason, was keeping my secret.
“The super seems clean. He had her keycard, but it was so dusty that there’s no way he used it recently.”
“Damn. That was a promising angle,” he said, exhaling hard. “Okay. Well, it’s out. So what are you thinking now?”
“I’m working on the doorman angle,” I told him. “Can you run a check for me? I don’t have my laptop right now.”
“Yeah. Give me a name. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. We just got two new clients, so it might be a couple of hours.”
With that, we hung up, and I went to grab myself some lunch, hating the fact that I didn’t have anything else to work on right then to distract me from thinking about all that shit.
Her in my house.
Her in my favorite spots in the town.
Looking like she fit right in at all those places.
Then, of course, her with a little foamy cream on the tip of her nose as she let out a moan that I felt in my dick as we stood there on the street.
I don’t know what the fuck happened to my self-control at that moment, but there seemed to be nothing holding me back from grabbing her, from sealing my lips over mine, from exploring her with my lips and teeth and tongue, feeling her soft body melt into mine as I did so.
All I could think about was more.
More kissing. Down her neck, between her breasts, down her belly, between her thighs.
And the sound of her moaning urging me on as I went.
“Fuck,” I hissed as I let myself back into her apartment with my cock straining in my pants, making me feel like a goddamn horny teenager as I put my to-go drink down on the counter in the kitchen before making my way through the guest room, then into the bathroom I’d been using.
My hand worked with impatient fingers on my button and zipper before reaching in and pulling out my straining cock.
I thought about her there on her knees in front of me, her plump lips parting around my dick as I stroked myself, as I tried to purge myself of the need that was courting through my body, despite everything within me knowing that nothing was going to ease it but finally getting to fulfill the fantasy.
To strip her bare.
To lick, nip, suck, her into a frenzy before settling between her thick thighs and surging inside of her.
That was the only real relief from the feelings I was dealing with.
But that didn’t stop me from fisting my cock, bringing myself up and through a powerful orgasm that made me have to slam a hand on the countertop to keep myself upright as it moved through me.
“Christ,” I hissed afterward as I washed my hands, looking up at my reflection in the mirror. “Get it the fuck together,” I demanded, rolling my neck, then reaching into my bag for my meds, realizing I hadn’t taken them because I hadn’t gone out first thing for my coffee like I normally would have.
I wasn’t ashamed on being on meds. They kept me even. But that didn’t mean that everyone around me knew about them. Hell, I wasn’t even sure I’d ever told Sawyer or Tig about them.
Though, objectively, Sawyer would probably understand more than anyone else.