15. Jaime
Chapter 15
Jaime
I can hear it in her voice—she’s trying not to cry. Guilt tears through me like a gust of wind, leaving my emotions scattered and messy. This is exactly why we should have just left each other alone. What the hell am I supposed to do now?
“You said yourself that he’d kill us,” I remind her. And he would, too. As bad as Cal can be around Maeve, she’s never seen him at his worst.
“I know,” she whispers, nodding. “You’re right.”
We drive in silence for a while, each lost in our own thoughts. Yeah, I felt conflicted when I brought Raya to my place last night. But technically I’m unattached, and the one girl I want is with someone else. Maeve may not be happy in her relationship, and she’ll probably leave soon, but she’s not available and I hate the way that makes me feel. Maybe last night was about more than just physical release. Maybe it was me punishing Maeve for not being mine.
Downtown Berkeley whizzes by the Audi’s tinted windows. I pull up to the cafe that sells that shitty excuse for Cuban coffee and watch Maeve walk inside. She seems off today, emotionally shaky the way she used to be when we first met.
Keeping one eye on Maeve, I open the GPS app I use to monitor Cal and the guys. I have federal clearance for it, just like the trackers I’ve hidden beneath their vehicles, and the Stingray I use to extract texts, photos, and other shit from their phones. Normally I use the data for investigative purposes, forwarding the good stuff to Lewis and the team, but today I’m consulting this app for personal reasons.
I don’t trust Cal and I need to know where he is at all times. Sometimes he stays out of town longer than he says he will, but other times he comes home unexpectedly early. He might come off as hardheaded and foolish at times, but he’s also cunning and sly. I have to always assume that he might be suspicious of me. After all, I live on his property and spend a lot of time with his girl. I’m the only member of his inner circle he didn’t grow up with.
If I were him, I’d be watching me at least sometimes.
So I stay a step ahead, making sure he only sees what I want him to. I regularly screen his property for surveillance devices to ensure there aren’t any besides the ones I installed. I can access the video feeds and alter them if necessary, looping or deleting small segments to mask my movements. Or Maeve’s, like the night she went from the pool to my guest house.
And now, I’m making sure that he is, in fact, still in Las Vegas. The last thing I need is Cal catching Maeve and me chilling or fucking around when our relationship is supposed to be purely professional.
She hands me a cup when she gets back into the car. “I want to go to the movies.”
I set it into the cupholder. “Right now?”
“There’s a noon showing of The Godfather at the Rialto.” She scans her phone as she sips gingerly at her coffee. “Let’s see that.”
“ The Godfather ?” I don’t know Berkeley like she does, so I put the theater’s address into my navigation before pulling onto the street. “Is that supposed to be ironic?”
“Maybe.” She gives me a tiny smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. “I just want to disappear for a while.”
Besides an elderly couple near the front, the theater is empty. I take the back row, where I can keep an eye on anyone coming or going, and Maeve follows, sitting beside me. We watch the opening scenes in uncomfortable silence, awkwardly aware of one another. I feel it, and by the stiff way she holds herself, she feels it too.
Then her small, cold hand closes over mine. “I just wanted to be alone with you,” she whispers.
I turn my hand over so that we’re palm to palm, our fingers interlocked. “You’re always alone with me.”
“You know what I mean,” she says.
I nod, because I do know.
“I’m always afraid someone might see us,” she says. “Callum didn’t grow up in the Bay, but he has family here. He spent summers here. He knows a lot of people and they know him.”
“I get it,” I say, squeezing her fingers. “I pay more attention than you think I do.”
Connie’s wedding continues on the big screen, replete with loud Italian music and Sonny screwing a bridesmaid.
“Is he hurting you?” I ask, glancing at her. It’s just a hunch, but I need to know.
Her fingers tighten around mine, but she doesn’t say anything. I let her be. Her life and what she goes through are none of my business.
“I mean, he cheats on me,” she says haltingly.
I nod.
“Have you seen him?” she asks after a beat. “With other girls?”
“Yeah, but I’m guessing that doesn’t matter to you anymore,” I say. “Something is keeping you here with him, and it’s not love.”
Maeve looks away from me and back to the screen. The flickering light illuminates her profile, the elegant slope of her nose, the natural curve of her lips. Her eyes shimmering with unshed tears. “I don’t want to talk about him anymore.”
Her words hang heavy between us, leaving me uneasy. I know all too well what life can be like for women in this world. Leaning closer, I tug her toward me until my mouth is at her ear. “You need to tell me if he’s hurting you.”
A loud gunshot from the movie startles her as Sonny’s adulterous bullshit comes crashing down around him. “He hurts me all the time. But he’s never actually hit me,” she says.
I release a heavy breath, frustrated at her ambiguous answers. “Maeve.”
“What would you do if he did?”
“I don’t know.” The web I’ve woven is too intricate for me to act spontaneously. Every move has to be meticulously planned because there’s so much at stake. The Oliveras family depends on me to get them the information they need, but beyond them, I have a responsibility to continue building the case I’ve been working on for years.
While I’ve been successful at each of these so far, it’s taken a level of vigilance that cannot be compromised. If I mess up, I could be extracted before the job is done, setting the investigation back. That would be shitty, yet still preferable to alternative worse-case scenarios like being beaten to death in a butcher shop or executed in a below-ground interrogation room.
I can’t think about that. Not now. I just have to be careful.
“What do you want from me?” I ask Maeve, my lips brushing her ear. It’s the same thing I asked her the other night, when she kissed me.
“I just want you,” she says softly.
Her words pierce my heart and hold, hooking me. Until now, I’ve tried to maintain some emotional distance, but I underestimated how it feels to be wanted by a woman like her. “You want my loyalty.”
She gives a small nod.
I rest my hand high on her thigh, my pinkie brushing the warmth between her legs. “You don’t want anyone else to touch me.” A sharp inhale of breath is the only indication that she’s affected. “Even though I have to live with the knowledge that he still touches you.”
“I don’t want him to touch me.” Her voice shakes, and she squeezes her eyes shut like the thought physically hurts. “I don’t want him to touch me ever again.”
Something’s going on, but until she’s ready to be honest with me, I have to let her go at her own pace. “If we do this, we have to be really careful. Callum pays attention to everything, even if most of his brain cells are gone.” Letting go of her thigh, I gently turn her face toward mine. “Are you ready for that?”
“Yes.” She blinks, dipping her chin. “But it’s not just the physical stuff, Jaime. I need to know that I can trust you.”
“You can.” I kiss her lightly.
“With everything. I need you to be loyal to me, not him.”
I pull back, looking at her. “I am loyal to you.”
She palms my cheek, rubbing her thumb over my stubble. “You promise? ”
I know better than to promise her anything when she doesn’t even know who I really am. And yet, I find myself nodding, pulled into the turbulent sea of her stormy eyes. “I promise.”
“I know he got these for security, but I always feel like he’s watching me,” Maeve says, glancing at the camera in the corner of the kitchen. “Guess it’s like my grandmother says, ‘suspicion haunts the guilty mind.’”
Chuckling, I join her at the counter and open the security app Callum had me download when I took over surveillance for his property. “Let me show you something.” Navigating to the kitchen feed, I click around and turn the phone toward her. “What do you see?”
She looks down at it, curiosity and then confusion clouding her features as she watches herself move around the kitchen—alone. I’m nowhere in sight. “It’s me, but … this was the other night, right?”
I nod. “This is what he would see if he logged on right now.”
Her eyes flash to mine. “How?”
“I have my ways,” I say. “It’s easy to manipulate stuff like this.”
She shakes her head, incredulous. “You can do this to any of the cameras?”
“I can, and I have.” I slide my hand around her hip and pull her closer. “We wouldn’t want him seeing you running out of the guest house in a bikini. At night. When we were the only ones home.”
The apples of her cheeks flush, and she ducks her head. “That was really stupid of me. God, I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“I put the patio’s feed on a loop, so it never shows anything,” I assure her.
“I guess I really can trust you, then,” she says, resting her head on my chest.
I chuckle darkly. “I better be able to trust you, too, because if Cal knew I was fucking around with his cameras, he’d do bad things to me.”
“Fucking around with his girl, too,” she says, looking at my mouth.
“Are you?” Pressing her against the counter, I kiss her long and hard. “His girl? ”
“No,” she whispers, looping her hands around my neck. “Not anymore.”
I sweep my tongue into her mouth, claiming her without words. Her breath hitches, but she melts into the kiss, her fingers tangling in my hair. There’s a desperate edge to our embrace, an understanding that we both crave more than just this.
My hands roam her curves, caressing her hips and sliding up to cup her breasts through the thin fabric of her top. She arches into my touch, a soft moan escaping her lips as I rub my thumbs over her nipples. The heat between us builds and builds, our kisses getting deep and horny and sloppy like we’re gonna do something about it when I know we can’t.
Breaking away, I trail my mouth along her jaw and down the graceful column of her neck. She tilts her head back, giving me better access as I suck her sensitive skin, careful not to mark her. I want more, so much more, but it’s just too risky.
I pull back, trying to calm the frenzy inside. “We should probably chill out.”
“Yeah.” She opens her eyes, giving me a small nod. “We should.”
“Give me something to do.”
Biting back a smile, she directs me to a bowl of potatoes. “Can you peel these?”
“You’re a good cook,” I say as I finish my second helping of roasted chicken and garlic mashed potatoes.
“I’m all right,” she says with a grin. “I enjoy it when I’m in the mood.”
“Me too. My mom worked a lot, so I learned to cook pretty young.”
“What’s your favorite thing to make?” she asks.
“Mm, good question.” I take a sip of water, thinking about it. “Probably mofongo. My grandma taught me that one.”
She nods, nibbling a radish from her salad. “The grandma in Puerto Rico?”
“The one and only.”
“What’s her name? ”
“Concepción, but everybody called her Concha,” I say, thinking of the gregarious woman I loved like my own mother. She was as loving as she was strict, liable to hug the shit out of me as easily as she’d take a wooden spoon to my ass when I misbehaved. “She passed a few years ago.”
“I’m sorry, Jaime,” she says, her eyes soft. “You guys were close, huh?”
“Mm.” I nod. I was already working undercover when Abuelita died, at a crucial point with the Oliveras family, so I couldn’t leave for the funeral. It’s one of my deepest regrets. “She had a good, long life.”
“Now I really want to try mofongo. What exactly is it?”
“Different people make it different ways, but basically it’s mashed green plantains with seasonings and meat. Cheese, sometimes.” I pull up a picture on my phone’s internet and show it to her. “Total comfort food.”
“That looks so good,” she says shyly.
“I’ll make it for you some day.”
“Promise?”
Her phone vibrates on the table between us. She tenses, relaxing when she sees the name on the screen. “It’s just my dad,” she says, smiling as she taps out a response.
It’s obvious there’s a lot of affection there. She’s almost transformed in this moment.
“You miss him,” I muse as she puts the phone down.
“Like crazy,” she says with a sad smile. “I miss my whole family. We’ve always been close.”
“I’m surprised they haven’t come to visit.” Really, I’m just hoping she’ll expound on the family dynamic. It might give me some insight into who she really is and ultimately what she’s willing to do.
“They’ve never been crazy about Callum. They put up with him for years because they saw how serious we were, but things changed when he started pushing for me to come out here.” Maeve stands, collecting our dinner plates. “They didn’t want me to move. And it wasn’t just the distance—they were used to me being on the road for dance. They were upset that I was moving in with him.”
I join her, carrying our dirty napkins and glasses to the kitchen.
“I’ve never fought with my parents like that,” she says, her voice wobbling. “And it was like, a part of me knew it was because they were worried. But I didn’t want to listen. I’d spent so much time fighting for my relationship with Callum that I was desperate to give it a fair shot.”
“Understandable,” I say evenly, rinsing the dishes so she can put them in the dishwasher.
“Yeah, well, they obviously saw something that I didn’t,” she says with a bitter laugh. “And it goes both ways, because Callum doesn’t like them either. Especially my brothers. They all went to boarding school together, but they never really got along.”
“Leave, then.” God knows my job would be a lot easier if she wasn’t here to distract me. “Go back home. You haven’t been happy here for a long time.”
“I will. Soon,” she says. “But Callum’s changed. Before, he would’ve let me go, you know? We didn’t have a perfect relationship, but it wasn’t the train wreck it is now. The last time I told him I wanted to go home, he grabbed me so hard I had bruises all over my arms for a week.”
Rage rockets through my body, burning everything in its path. Struggling to maintain my composure, I put down the glass I’m holding before it shatters. “I’m gonna ask you again, and I need you to be real honest with me, Maeve. Has he done anything else? Has he hit you?”
“No. That was the closest he ever got,” she says. “But it was just as bad.”
“Yeah, it was.”
“What, you got a soft spot for women?” she teases with a weak laugh.
“I’ve done a lot of shit in my life, but I’d never hit a woman,” I tell her. “That’s a whole different level of fucked up.”
“I know, Jaime. I know you’re not like that,” she says. “Callum used to not be like that, either.”
“But he is now.” I suck in a deep breath, trying to get my emotions under control. I don’t know why I’m so worked up. There have been signs that Cal’s a possessive, controlling asshole from the start. I guess I thought Maeve would’ve said something to me sooner. “Look, I took this job to get paid, but I can’t sit around and watch you get manhandled. You deserve better than that.”
“I know,” she whispers, wiping her face. “I know.”
“This isn’t about being unhappy anymore. It’s about your safety.” I’ve seen too much to know how this ends if she doesn’t make a move soon. “Have you found your license yet?”
She shakes her head and then goes still, raising her tear-stained face to mine. “Wait. Do you think he took it? So I couldn’t leave?”
That’s exactly what I think.