RAY
FOUR
It was hard to concentrate. All my thoughts kept going back to Tammy snuggled up next to me in her soft bed.
I never would have taken Tammy for a snuggler, but that woman was full of surprises, and I wanted to find out every single one of them.
That was not me—at all.
I was divorced with no plans to get married again. I didn’t even really feel up to having a relationship at this point in my life. I was fifty-one years old with one failed marriage under my belt and another bad relationship since then.
Over the last few years, I’d gone on an occasional date, maybe a one-night stand here or there, but that was it.
At that thought, my mind went back to Tammy. She was feisty, funny, and gorgeous. She was also incredible in bed. I wasn’t sure if it was because it had been more than six months since I’d last had sex or if she was just that great, but the sex had been phenomenal.
I wanted to kiss her, taste her, have her all over again.
She was short, especially compared to me, with a muscular build, but she didn’t lack curves.
The woman had more than a handful of both boobs and ass.
Her dark-brown hair was accented by a few lighter strands—a combo of blonde and gray—and the slight wrinkles around her eyes suggested she was in her forties.
Yet, everything else about her gave the impression that she was ten years younger.
I’d left her place early this morning and gone back to my hotel room to shower and change before heading over to my meeting.
I was only planning to be here for a week, but I knew I was going to try to make time to see her again before I left.
I’d been around enough women in my five decades to think I understood them, but Tammy had proved that theory wrong.
She’d sparred with me like she enjoyed the challenge, yet blushed whenever the attention was put back on her.
And despite the brush-off vibes she’d given other men I’d seen her interact with, she’d clung to me like a magnet the moment I had her in my arms.
It was just after ten in the morning, and I was in a conference room at the Ranger Shield Security office next door to the pub I’d gone to last night.
The memory of meeting Tammy in that bar and then leaving to go back to her place put a small smile on my face. Just the thought of touching her had me fighting hard to keep my dick under control. It wouldn’t do very well to have a raging hard-on in this meeting.
My old Army buddy, Frank, had called me Monday morning, asking if I’d fly into town and help with a burglary for his son’s business.
His son and his buddies had started a private security and investigations group a couple of years ago.
Frank said someone had broken into their building, and despite the fact that they had a security system and multiple cameras, this thief had been able to navigate around all of it.
“There he is,” Frank Fletcher hollered from the doorway.
I got up from my chair and made my way over to him.
“Holy hell, Ray. Good to see ya,” he said, coming in for a hug.
Frank and I went on an annual fishing trip, but I was planning to come see him more often now that I was retired. He and his wife, Susan, had even come out to Texas to see me a few times.
“Frank! Good to see ya, old man,” I replied.
“Who you calling ‘old man’?” he teased. “You’re only a year younger than me.”
“Yeah, but I’ve aged like fine wine. You look more like a prune,” I shot back, but I was lying.
Frank was still in good shape, even though he’d retired from bounty hunting a few years ago.
A few chuckles and snorts could be heard from the other men who’d entered with him.
“Good to see you, Ray,” Frank’s son Vince said from beside me. “I hate to interrupt this reunion, but we’re all here now, so let’s get this going so we can come up with a plan.”
Frank took a seat next to me at the large oval table. It was a windowless room with a dry erase board and TV monitor on the far wall, but it was otherwise simple for a meeting room.
“Ray, you know Dad and me, but I’ll go around the table and make some introductions so you know who the rest of us are,” Vince said. “To my left is my cousin, Archer, who I believe you met a few times when we were younger.”
I nodded, though I hadn’t seen the kid in probably more than a decade, so he didn’t exactly look the same.
“Next are Wade, Jack, and Axel,” Vince added. “Except for Axel, the others are the founders of Ranger Shield Security, along with me.”
I nodded to all of them.
“This is my dad’s Army buddy, Ray Delacruz.
He spent two decades working counterterrorism for the Army at Fort Hood in Texas until he switched over to work for a bodyguard services team and then retired last year,” Vince continued.
“We asked him to come in because his specialty is infiltration. Dad and I figured if anyone could help us figure out how this son of a bitch broke in, it would be Ray.”
After years of nagging, my buddy Chase Jackson had finally convinced me to retire from the military and join him at the bodyguard services company he and his wife Sadie had opened in Fort Hood
It was actually a branch of her uncle’s company, but Chase and Sadie ran it. Once I’d hit my twenty-year mark in service, I’d retired and joined his team for a decade before fully retiring.
“I make no guarantees, but I’m happy to help,” I replied. “Walk me through what you’ve got so far and the basics of the burglary.”
“We don’t think this was random,” Vince said cautiously. “The alarm system was not cut. It was deactivated. Someone either knew the code ahead of time or knew how to override it, because the panel was used and unarmed as if it were one of us.”
An insider definitely could be the culprit, but there were other ways to work around an alarm system to unarm it and not raise red flags.
“They also knew where every single camera was and either turned them off or avoided them,” Jack said. “While some of those cameras are out in the open and very obvious, two of them were hidden very well, so someone had to know they were there in order to avoid them.”
“I thought you said you had one camera that did catch something?” I asked, remembering the few details Frank had given me.
“I didn’t realize my manager had hidden one behind the bar,” Wade said. “Without that one, we would have had no idea someone had actually broken into the pub.”
Wait. What had he just said?
I held up my hand to stop him. “Did you say the pub was robbed? As in the pub next door?”
Vince nodded in confirmation, and my brain did a quick recall of my conversation with Frank yesterday morning.
“You told me your son’s business was robbed, not the business next door,” I said to Frank.
I watched as Frank started to reply but was cut off by Vince.
“We own the bar too. We own this entire building, actually. Wade’s uncle used to own this building and ran the Watering Hole for thirty years.
He leased out the space that is now Ranger Shield to other businesses, and he also owned the two floors above us.
When he retired, we bought the entire building from him, including the pub. ”
“The woman who used to help my uncle run the place does most of the heavy lifting still so we can focus on the security business,” Wade added. “Her name is Tammy. We’ll have you meet with her a little later.”
Oh, shit.
This just got a lot more complicated.
A mumbled curse slipped from my mouth. “So, the employees who work at the pub are also considered your employees.”
This time Archer chimed in, slowly, as if sensing there was a more complicated reason I was asking. “Yes. Why?”
I released a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.
“I came by the bar last night when I got in. I knew it was late, but I figured I could walk around the building and get the lay of the land for a bit, especially at night since that’s when you said the burglary took place.
Then, realizing I was hungry, I went into the bar. ”
I sighed and wiped my hand over my face.
“At the risk of you finding out eventually and needing this whole investigation on the up and up, I met someone, and things progressed. I slept with your bartender last night. In my defense, you didn’t say the bar was robbed, or I never would have gone there. ”
Instantly, all eyes moved to the man at the end of the table.
“You slept with Axel?” Vince and Wade asked at the same time.
Axel choked on his drink as I replied.
“No. I slept with Tammy.”
Murmured curses could be heard round the table, while Frank laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Vince asked him.
“Can I go with you when you introduce him to Tammy and tell her he’s working for you?” Frank asked cryptically.
“Why?” Wade asked.
“So he has backup when Tammy tries to murder him.” Frank was casual in his reply, but the sinister grin told me everything I needed to know.
“Shit,” Jack said. “This is gonna complicate things.”
“Actually,” Archer said, leaning back in his chair as though he was working through a new plan in his head, “I think this could work in our favor.”
“How?” Jack asked.
Archer held up his hand. “Hear me out. The whole point of our plan was to have him sit in the restaurant and pretend to be a customer to see if he noticed something, right? Check out the regulars and employees, see if anyone acted suspiciously. Well, now he has the perfect excuse. He’s seeing Tammy. ”
“Not if she kills him first,” Frank said, shaking his head back and forth.
“She’s not gonna kill him,” Vince shot back.
“Son, if she finds out you hired him to scope out potential people at the bar—potential employees—she’s gonna think he was there to spy on her. Add in the fact that they slept together… She’s gonna think he did it to get close to her.”
“Why would she think that?” Axel asked.
“Because it’s exactly what any undercover cop or private investigator would do if they suspected her of being involved,” Archer explained, and his history in law enforcement meant he understood this better than most.
Shit. He was right.
And the mumbled curses around me showed that the others agreed.
In my defense, I hadn’t known the bar was the place that was robbed, but Tammy didn’t know that.
She absolutely might think the worst. While I didn’t know her well, I had definitely picked up that she was not only inherently suspicious, but she was also smart.
“Then we talk to her and tell her the plan,” Wade said.
“We need someone to be in the bar and see if anyone acts suspiciously or if we missed something. All the regular customers know who we are. They won’t know him.
If he’s there under the guise of dating Tammy, people won’t suspect him, and they may slip up or he may catch something inadvertently.
We’d also like you to interview all the employees to see if they noticed anything unusual. ”
They could do that themselves, which meant there was more to it than that.
“And see if any of them look like they could be the suspect.” It was more of a statement rather than a question that I had asked, but Wade nodded in response.
“How long can you stay?” Vince asked me.
“I’ve got a hotel through Sunday night and a plane ticket for the next afternoon, but I can adjust if you need me to,” I told them, having bought a fully refundable flight just in case.
“Don’t waste money on a hotel. Come stay with Susan and me,” Frank offered.
I appreciated the offer and likely would have taken it, but there was a part of me that hoped to have another night with Tammy, and I’d like to keep my hotel as an option just in case.
“I’m already paid up for these next few nights, but we can figure something out if I have to stay,” I said, hoping to appease him.
“I’ll go over to the Watering Hole and watch the bar while you talk to Tammy,” Axel suggested. “Plus, I have a princess cake from Stella’s bakery that I can give her to soften her up a bit before you talk to her.”
All the men in the room seemed to nod in agreement to that.
“Great idea,” Jack concurred. “Take Ruthie with you, too, so she’s got a friend when she comes back.”
I wanted to laugh, but no one else in the room was. It seemed weird to me that they felt the need to not only bribe Tammy with food—although I needed to make a mental note of this bakery Tammy was so fond of—but also send over a friend for support.
I had met Ruthie an hour prior when I arrived. She was the receptionist for Ranger Shield Security and Jack’s wife. She was sitting in the front lobby and greeted me along with a woman named Cat—Vince’s wife.
Maybe I had vastly underestimated Tammy and her propensity for violence and spite.
I sincerely hoped everyone was just being overly cautious. If not, this was about to get interesting.