Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
Derek watched Reese pummeling the bedsheets and saw flickers of his ex-wife.
Dawn had never liked his hours either, and he had left the house a lot of times feeling guilty about his career.
Which was ironic, considering he had taken the job paper pushing white-collar crime instead of pursuing violent crimes like he had wanted.
Shoving his gun into the holster after removing it from the safe, he grabbed his sweatshirt. “I can’t help it. It’s urgent.”
In fact, it was his informant, leaving him the code number they had worked out to let Derek know he needed to communicate with him. He couldn’t keep the guy waiting. This particular informant was nervous and liable to bolt if Derek didn’t keep in constant contact, always reassuring him.
Not that he could blame the guy for panicking a little.
He was a top pharmaceutical chemist and sat on the board at Delco.
He was privy to a lot of classified and sensitive information and when it eventually became clear he had ratted out his chums on the board, costing them millions and possibly sending them to jail, he was going to have a whole heap of enemies.
Derek knew what it was like to piss off your boss. He did that to Nordstrom on a regular basis.
Reese stop torturing the hotel pillow. “Oh, fine. Go save innocent lives and make the world a better place.”
She smiled at him, apparently over her tantrum. Derek blinked in confusion. Dawn had never capitulated that easily, and had cornered the market on pouting. Reese just lay there naked and smiled.
Reese was not his ex-wife. Not at all.
What she was, was intriguing and sexy and someone he really fucking wanted to get to know better.
He started sweating. Still semi-hard, he knew he couldn’t walk out of there without making plans. Damn, he was in trouble here. One time and he wanted more—much, much more. “Can I see you again? Tomorrow?”
“I have this stupid wedding to go to tomorrow.” She rolled onto her back, crossed her ankles, and laid her hand across her smooth stomach, which did interesting and perky things to her breasts. “Want to go with me?”
A needle in the eye would be more fun. “What is it, like a cousin or something? Is your family going to think I’m your boyfriend?”
She snorted. “No, it’s not family. I won’t know a single person there. It’s for the paper. The daughter of a New Jersey senator is marrying a guy she met on a reality show, who happens to be rich and the heir to some big company.”
Even worse than family. Self-important bigwigs flashing phony bleached-teeth smiles all night. It gave him a headache just thinking about it.
“Let me see who the guy is....I can’t remember his name.”
Reese flipped up onto her knees, still completely naked, and crawled across the bed to her laptop.
Derek watched her smooth pale behind wiggle away from him, and nearly passed out.
Her legs spread a little as she stretched forward, her hair tumbling down her narrow back, her breasts falling forward in tempting little mounds, and he found religion again.
As in God, that was incredible.
“Here it is.” Reese waved a hand at him over her shoulder and sat back on her feet. “His name is Phillip Chatterton and she’s obviously marrying him for the money because he looks very boring in these pictures.”
Derek dropped his pager on the floor. Holy hell, she was going to the wedding of the son of Delco’s CEO, Ashton Chatterton. The son Phillip also sat on the board, and both were knee deep in price-fixing.
“I’ll go with you.” The words were out of his mouth before she could continue reading her file and put two and two together.
Obviously Reese had gone through his Delco envelope full of evidence, but it hadn’t clicked yet that the large corporation connected to the Chattertons was the same one that the FBI was trying to nail.
But she would figure it out soon enough, and then letting Reese go to that wedding alone would be like sending a bull into a china shop. Subtle wasn’t exactly her middle name.
Three agents on the case, six months worth of work, and all because of a nosy sexy reporter and the wrong rental car, this case could explode in the Department of Justice’s face.
Or more accurately, in his face, leading to an unscheduled early retirement, minus his pension.
He bent and picked up his phone, stuffing it into his pocket.
“You will?” Reese stopped fooling with the files on her computer and looked at him in surprise. Then her eyes narrowed. “Do you own a suit? You can’t be looking scraggly, you’ll make me stand out. I want to blend.”
Of course he owned a suit. It was required for the job to have a closet full of boring, off-the-rack gray and black suits. Perfect for a wedding. “I can blend.”
He sure in the hell didn’t want to be drawing attention to himself with the Chattertons around. “But why are we blending? What are you supposed to be doing?”
“I’m supposed to report on the wedding for the paper. They’ve forbidden photographers and media, so I’m sneaking in. I’m now the third cousin of the fourth bridesmaid, who went to Kings High with my boss’s son, and is more than happy to embrace me as family in exchange for a reunion date.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Dead serious. I told you I worked for a rag.”
“I believe you now.” Derek checked to make sure his keys were in the pocket opposite his phone and said, “What time tomorrow?”
“Be here at seven. You have some explaining to do about certain things I might have happened to see in that envelope when it slid open.”
He just bet she’d accidentally seen a thing or two. When her fingers had ripped the envelope open.
Reese still hadn’t bothered to cover herself up, and he loved the way she was so comfortable with her body. Loved it so much, he needed to get out of the room before he loved it right through to tomorrow. “You won’t do anything until then?”
She shook her head, all wide-eyed innocence, which was hard to pull off with kiss-swollen lips and tight nipples, but she still tried. “I’ll just watch a rom com on my laptop and give myself a spa treatment. There are things I need to buff.”
Christ. Derek backed up, his boner back and bigger than ever.
“I’d like to watch you buffing things.”
“After the wedding, we can come back here and I’ll buff whatever you want.”
There was an invitation no sane man on the face of the earth could pass up.
“Tomorrow. Seven,” he managed to grunt, just barely remembering to grab his envelope of evidence before backing out of the room.
In the hall, he shut the door, leaned against it and gave his cock a hefty adjustment through his jeans.
This was stupid. Trouble. A big old thinking-with-his-dick mistake.
But he wasn’t about to let that stop him.
Derek started down the hall to call his informant, walking gingerly and counting the hours until he could lie back and let Reese buff him.