Chapter 23
Charlie
“Okay, where are we at?” I ask Ryder and Sadie, rubbing my eyes, gritty from lack of sleep. For the past two days, we’ve been combing through the lists of names Jessica has given us from the river project. But so far, we’ve come up empty.
I turn my attention to Ryder. “Has Diaz’s team gone over the dashcam footage again?”
He nods. “They spliced together the sequence of events based on the footage we recovered, and it shows exactly what it did the first time. Crenshaw was at fault. He was speeding, driving erratically, weaving in and out of traffic before losing control of the vehicle and T-boning the SUV of a housewife driving with her two kids in the car, setting off a chain reaction. There is zero connection between him and the family.”
I’m tired and dull-witted, my brain churning through information but unable to find the connection. I promise myself, yet again, that tonight I’ll get a good night’s sleep. Something exceedingly difficult to accomplish with Jessica invading my life.
After I’d told her about my childhood, I expected her to pull away. To see that, despite our chemistry, I’m not relationship material, but that hasn’t happened.
Instead of her pulling away, she’s everywhere I look.
She’s in my house.
At my job.
In my head.
Rushing through my blood.
I take a huge gulp of the cold coffee on my desk and hope the caffeine jolts my brain into working.
Sadie’s studying the pictures of a vase of colorful wildflowers from Hazel Myers’s room. “Bringing a bouquet coated with peanut butter in the hope of triggering anaphylactic shock isn’t exactly the brightest move, but her allergy was well-known, so it didn’t help narrow down the field of suspects.”
Ryder flips the page of our investigation notes.
“Only thing we know for sure is that the suspect is a white male, approximately five eight, with a stocky build and a beer belly. So he’s stupid enough to trigger the reaction in a hospital full of meds but smart enough to use a baseball hat and the bouquet to hide his face from all the cameras.
The car he drove to the hospital was stolen, but we cross-referenced the plates with the plates from the accident and found no connection. ”
I scrub a hand over my jaw, contemplating. “So we have a messy accident, a stolen car, and a sloppy murder attempt, yet the suspect covered their tracks so well we can’t find a connection between the accident, Crenshaw’s death, the mistress, or the river project. Do I have that right?”
Ryder shakes his head, sighing. “That appears to be the case. “
“All right. All we can do is stick with it and keep working through the list.” I look up from my desk and spot Jessica through the glass. She smiles and waves at me.
Today, she’s wearing a pair of black pants and a matching thin, V-necked top. Just looking at her makes my heart beat faster, which is something I never thought possible. I’m not even sure I can define how I feel about her. I don’t have the vocabulary.
Word travels fast and everyone knows we’re together, so since this meeting is effectively over, I wave her in.
She opens the door. “Am I interrupting?”
“No, we were finishing up,” I say.
Ryder shifts in his chair, craning to look up at his sister. “Hey, Jess.”
“What’s up, girl?” Sadie beams at her.
Jessica gives her a huge smile in return. “We’re still on for lunch, right?”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Sadie says.
“I’m making a delivery.” Jessica walks into the office and puts a glass jar with a bamboo lid and an attached wooden spoon on my desk in front of me. She pats me on the shoulder. “This is for you.”
I stare down at it. “What is it?”
“Breakfast. You didn’t eat,” she says.
Dumbly, I say, “It’s eleven.”
“Twelve is the cutoff.” She reaches over, takes the spoon off its little holder, and hands it to me. “It’s strawberry cheesecake overnight oats. It’s good for you.”
I blink, confused. “What is happening right now?”
Ryder laughs. “She made you breakfast, dumbass.”
“Oh.” I continue to stare at Jessica, unable to process my surprise.
She leans a hip on my desk. “You were running late, and I couldn’t help feeling like it was my fault.
You need your energy, and since I didn’t trust you not to eat doughnuts like the cop you are, I brought you this.
It has everything you need to keep your blood sugar stable with protein, whole grains, and fiber. ”
She’s…taking care of me.
I don’t think anyone has ever tried to take care of me. It’s such a foreign concept it never occurred to me she’d try.
Sadie grins. “Oh my god, this is so cute.”
Ryder looks at his sister with curiosity. “Very cute.”
“What? Am I supposed to let the man starve?” Her expression is so soft when she looks at me, it makes my heart stutter.
“No, no,” Ryder says, giving me a cocked brow.
“Anyway, what are we talking about?” she asks.
“We were finishing up talking about the Crenshaw case,” Sadie says.
“Any progress?” Jessica asks.
My lieutenant shakes her head. “Not yet.”
The three of them spend a few minutes talking shop while I try to figure out why Jessica bringing me something to eat is making my chest feel tight.
When they finally leave, closing the door behind them, she turns back to me. “You’re not eating.”
My brow pulls as I look up at her. “I can’t believe you did this for me.”
She scoots around my desk, resting her ass against the edge, at the side of my chair. “I’ve expended a lot of your energy. You need to take care of yourself if you want to keep up.”
I want to kiss her but restrain myself, considering the entire station has a view. Instead, I settle for putting my hand on her knee and squeezing. “Thank you.”
Her legs part, letting me slide my hand higher up her thigh. “It was entirely selfish.”
She talks a good game, but for the people she lets in, she’s a marshmallow. And somehow, I’ve made it on to that list.
But she needs to posture, so I let her have it. “I’d expect nothing less.”
She takes off the wooden top and gestures to her concoction.
I dig the small spoon into the jar and take a bite. It’s weird and mushy and lumpy. It tastes healthy with a vague hint of the strawberry cheesecake flavor she described. It’s nothing I would make myself, nor is it something I would eat voluntarily.
She’s looking at me like she’s expecting a Michelin star to be handed to her. “What do you think?”
It’s horrible. “I think I’m the luckiest man on the planet.”
Her expression blooms with joy.
And I eat every last bite because I’m unable to stand the thought of her not being happy.
Later that night, Cole Montgomery shakes my hand. “We good?”
I nod. “Good job tonight.”
“You too,” he says.
We pound each other on the back.
After a wreck caught fire, my previous plans to relax and go to bed early, hopefully with a naked Jessica beside me, went to hell. It had been all hands on deck, and the fire chief and I put Jessica aside and came together to lead our teams in a dangerous and serious situation.
Tonight is the reason we’ve been having regular team-building exercises between the two groups in the first place, and it paid off. It was one of those rare moments where everyone and everything came together as it should, and we performed like textbook professionals.
Now we’re that mixture of exhausted and hyped-up on excess adrenaline, blowing off steam at Sam’s before we go home.
He juts his chin toward the door. “I’m going to head out. Give them a chance to let loose without their boss around.”
“I’m not too far behind. Have a good one, man.” I’m ready to go, but I feel like I need to talk to Sam.
And over the years, I’ve learned never to ignore the intuition.
My phone buzzes, and I look down to see Jessica’s name.
Jessica
Come over when you’re done.
I think of the last time I sat here wishing I could exhaust myself in her. How fucking badly I’d wanted her. How I’d longed to see her.
And now I have her.
Charlie
You sure? It’s late, and I’m probably not going to let you sleep.
Jessica
Why would I want to sleep?
I am grinning at my phone like an idiot.
It beeps again.
Jessica
COME OVER.
Who am I kidding? I can’t resist her.
Charlie
Okay, I won’t be too much longer. I’ll text when I’m on the way.
I put my cell on the counter. Under all the adrenaline buzzing through my veins, I feel a satisfaction warming the center of my chest.
I think…
I might…
Be…
Happy.
It’s not that I’ve never felt happiness. But I’m not talking about the I’m having a good time type of happiness.
I’m talking about a happiness in my bones.
That’s what’s new. What’s making me nervous.
It’s hard to trust something you’ve never had.
“You want another?” Sam’s voice rips me from my thoughts. “Or are you already jonesing for your girl?”
This wasn’t the insight I was looking for, but with Sam, you don’t get to choose. I put a hand over the top of the bottle. “I’m good.”
He spreads his palms over the polished wood, cocking a brow. “You’re wondering what I have to say about her.”
When it’s just the two of us, Sam doesn’t hold back. Doesn’t pretend he doesn’t have a gift none of us really understands.
I shrug one shoulder. “Yeah, I guess I am.”
“You already know.” He chuckles, and it’s relaxed and lazy.
The sensation of calm laps over me, smoothing away some of the buzzing in my head. I don’t know how to respond or what I’m even looking to hear, so I shrug.
Sam scrubs his hand over his stubbled jaw. “That first night, when you came into the bar and she was wearing that red dress. You were both trying so hard to pretend there was nothing between you. But if you saw what I did, you would have seen it was a losing battle.”
Unable to help myself, I lean in, curious. “What did you see?”
“You know how when you don’t want me to read anything, you envision building a wall between your mind and mine?”
The complete change of subject, mixed with surprise, gives me whiplash. “Yeah. Does it work?”
“It’s more effective than most. But I still get flashes.”
“Good to know. Not sure I understand where you’re going.”
“There’s a difference between the wall and the door.”