Chapter 33
thirty-three
. . .
LANE
“You…didn’t?” Sutton’s voice cracked, and my fear rose.
I shook my head. “Where’d it come from?”
She explained the box, how she’d found it on her bunk at the firehouse when she came back from a call yesterday.
I thought she had bought the lingerie herself to surprise me for Valentine’s Day. It never once occurred to me that someone else had given it to her, pretending it was from me.
What the fuck was going on here?
Everything had been so…quiet since I’d gotten rid of Addie. Why was this happening now?
“Do you still have it? The box, I mean.”
Sutton nodded. “It’s upstairs. Should still be on the bed in the guestroom.”
The euphoria I’d found with her moments before had completely evaporated. Leaving her where she was, I headed upstairs. Boots greeted me at the top landing, and I bent to brush a palm down his spine before continuing to the room. He trotted dutifully along beside me.
Right where Sutton said it would, the box was on the guest bed, the lid askew, the tissue paper tossed to the side.
Fuck, I should’ve grabbed gloves before I came up here.
I couldn’t touch it with my bare hands, not if I wanted forensics to run tests on it.
Racing back down to my office, I grabbed a set of nitrile gloves from the carton I kept in my desk drawer and snagged a plastic bag from the kitchen before returning to the room.
Boots sat on the mattress, right next to the box as though standing guard, eyeing me expectantly.
“Good boy,” I said, scritching under his chin. Then I donned the gloves, replaced the tissue paper and lid, and stuffed the box into the bag, tying the handles tightly.
It was the best I could do on short notice.
I brought it back downstairs and slid the package onto the kitchen island.
Before I could make it back to my room, Sutton met me in the hall. Wearing one of my tees, she held the offending bra and panties between her thumb and forefinger, as far away from her body as she could manage, like they were a shitty diaper she didn’t want to be carrying.
“Where are you going with those?”
“To burn them,” she said simply, marching past me, heading for the living room.
“Wait, what?” I asked, turning to rush after her. When I got there, she already had the fireplace lit and was lowering the garments toward the flames.
I stopped her with a gentle palm on her arm before she could complete the task.
“That’ll ruin the logs,” I said, indicating the faux lumber sitting inside my gas fireplace.
“Don’t care,” she replied, straining against my hold.
“Sunny.”
“Chief.”
“Please, baby. Just let me throw them away. You’ll never have to see them again.”
Sutton’s shoulders slumped, and she nodded, handing me the bra and underwear.
I brought them to the kitchen and shoved them into the bottom of the garbage can, then went back to her.
Lifting her in my arms, I carried her right into my en suite bathroom.
Setting her on the counter, I moved to my massive shower and turned on the rainfall one overhead.
Once I made sure the temperature was hot enough to burn even the devil himself—exactly how Sutton liked it—I picked her up again and walked us inside.
She clung to me, exactly as she had our first night back together.
“Talk to me.”
“I feel…violated,” she admitted, lifting her head from my shoulder to look at me. “Does that make sense? Like if that lingerie didn’t come from you, I have no idea who would’ve sent it, and that makes my fucking skin crawl.”
“I get it,” I assured her, sweeping the heavy, wet strands of hair back from her face. “I bagged the box for evidence, and I’ll bring it to the station when we’re done here and have Wallace dust it for prints and whatnot.”
“No!” she yelped, squeezing me tighter. “Don’t leave.”
“Okay,” I agreed instantly, pressing a kiss to her forehead. “I’ll have Johns come get it or bring it tomorrow.”
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“You okay if I put you down?”
She nodded, and I released her, slowly sliding her down my body until she was on her feet. Then I turned to the nook built into the wall and grabbed the bottle of her shampoo, filled my palm, and lathered it together.
“Turn around,” I demanded, and she obeyed, tipping her head back to let me work the shampoo through the strands at her scalp.
Sutton sagged against me, and I smiled. I loved taking care of her like this, loved having her soft, warm, and pliant in my arms. For a long time, I never thought I’d have this, where I couldn’t imagine it with anyone else and didn’t think Sutton and I would be able to find our way back to each other.
I was fucking thrilled to be wrong.
Once I completed my scalp massage, she stepped under the showerhead and rinsed, then came back so I could work the conditioner through her length.
Thanks to her, I now knew way more about the correct hair washing and conditioning technique than I ever needed.
Like how you only shampooed the scalp and let the water carry the suds through the ends when you rinsed, or how you applied conditioner at the ends then worked any leftover product through the midpoint up to the scalp.
Sutton also preferred to let her conditioner sit while she scrubbed her body, so I grabbed the large claw clip we also kept in here and swept the entire bundle off her neck, twisting it and securing it at the crown of her skill.
My girl also didn’t use one of your traditional loofahs.
Apparently, they were no better than a petri dish, growing bacteria, so she used something called an African net sponge.
I squeezed a healthy portion of her favorite body wash on it, worked it between my hands until a mountain of suds appeared, and went to work.
There wasn’t anything sexual about bathing Sutton.
I merely wanted to take care of her, wanted to do whatever I could to keep her here with me, lest she surrender to the shadows in her amber eyes.
Starting at her shoulders, I worked down one arm, then the other.
Over her chest to her stomach. Bending and propping one foot up on my thigh to scrub her leg and foot, which elicited a small giggle when I tickled her arch.
I repeated the process on the other side before gently sliding the sponge between her thighs, clearing away any evidence of our earlier joining.
Straightening, I reached up and removed the clip from her hair, then gently directed her back under the water.
While she rinsed, I quickly washed myself, my own routine taking a fraction of the time hers did, before joining her.
I settled my hands on her hips lightly, and she wrapped her arms around my waist, tilting her head back to rest her chin in her favorite spot between my pecs.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you more,” I replied, bending to kiss her nose, then her mouth. “Take as long as you need. I’m gonna get out and call Johns.”
She nodded and let me go.
Dressing quickly and laying out some of my sweats for Sutton, I swiped my phone off my nightstand, but before I could make the call, my doorbell rang.
When I opened the front door, I blinked in surprise. “Damn,” I said to Johns. “It’s like you read my mind.”
He raised a brow. “Oh?”
“I was just about to call you to have you take a trip out,” I explained, then stepped aside to admit him. “I’ve got something for you.”
“Alright,” he said.
There was nothing outwardly strange about the word or his tone, of course, but you didn’t get as far as I did in life, or become as successful as I had at my job, by being oblivious to subtle tells.
Something was off with Johns. I could tell by the way he refused to meet my eyes, instead letting his gaze settle on everything within sight but me.
He’d been to my house numerous times before and headed for the living room, but he didn’t take a seat like he normally would have.
“Is Sutton here?” he asked.
“Yes…”
“I need to speak to both of you.”
“Okay, sure. I’ll get her.”
Unease pricked at my neck as I turned my back on him and headed for the bathroom. Sutton still stood under the water, face tipped up, her body a hazy silhouette through the fogged glass.
“Sunny,” I called, and she moved, albeit slowly, to poke her head out. “Johns is here. Says he needs to talk to us.”
“Okay,” she said quietly, and a moment later, the water turned off.
Leaving Sutton to her own devices, I returned to Johns, briefly bypassing the living room for the kitchen to collect my rudimentary evidence bag off the island. I walked back into the living room and passed it to him.
“What’s this?”
“Sutton received this package at the firehouse the other day. We’re not sure who sent it, but it’s obviously someone fucking with her. I want a full forensic profile run on it.”
He studied the bag intently, as if he had x-ray vision that would reveal all its secrets. Despite being in one of those opaque grocery bags, it was easy to make out the rectangular shape.
“What was in the box?”
“The contents aren’t important,” I told him.
“I disagree,” he pressed. “If there was something nefarious in there, we need to be made aware of it.”
“As the sheriff,” I reminded him, “I have been made aware. And I’m telling you as my undersheriff, to run the tests and not worry about what the box once held.”
Johns sighed and opened his mouth like he was about to say something else but snapped it shut when Sutton entered the room.
Her long hair left wet streaks on the shoulders and chest of my grey hoodie, and her feet were bare.
Clearly, she’d rushed out here. Normally, she took the time to dry her hair.
Because it was so long, the ends had a tendency to get knotted if she let it air dry.
Wordlessly, we all sat—Johns in a chair across the room, Sutton and I side by side on the couch.
“What’s going on?” she asked Johns. “Is this about the break-ins?”
“Actually, yes,” he said. “A few weeks ago, we received an anonymous tip regarding the responsible party.”