8. Declan #2
I didn’t rush right into it, instead taking a moment to run my fingers through Brogan’s damp, dark hair. He was growing more concerned, so I decided to just throw it out there.
“My investigator was able to uncover some things about Enslee, or at least what's available.
From his report, it doesn't appear that she has any living family because her parents and grandparents are all deceased. She also has no siblings, and her parents had not had any either. The van of hers is registered in Alabama, but the address on her license is an empty lot.”
“Is that all?” I shook my head.
“No. As she’d mentioned in your office, she does have a blog and a podcast, and the latter is consistently ranked in the top 10 of all true crime podcasts in the country.
Hers involves different cases. Some are cold cases, some of them are active cases, and the others are cases where killers have already been convicted.
She's been nominated for a few awards, including one regarding an interview she was able to get with a father on death row who’d killed his wife and four young children, as well as another involving an interview with a school shooter.
She's very good at what she does. I’m really worried about what's going to happen once she recovers her memories.”
“Fucking hell,” Brogan cursed, and the dark expression from earlier was quickly returning. As I felt the ache in my ass when I moved, I knew I couldn’t bring him out of it the same way as earlier tonight. That was for sure.
“I was hoping we could buy her silence, but it doesn’t look like she is in need of cash. Enslee’s managed to amass a large number of followers, so she gets paid ridiculous amounts of money for content. In her world, that is more than any bribe we could give her.”
“Yeah, why would she need money from us when she could make it from the internet exploiting us? The publicity alone would send her catapulting to the top for sure. A suspected damn killer and Hollywood’s bad boy fucking each other and their lives up at the same time.”
I stroked the side of his face hoping to calm him.
It worked momentarily because he turned his face into my palm and laid three kisses to it before he rolled back over.
“If she were to tell everybody, to put out there what she knows, it would give the police all the motive in the world to arrest me for Layla’s disappearance while outing the both of us.
And in addition to my being arrested, my father will follow through with his orders and completely disinherit me.
Your team will drop you. Fuck! I don't know what to do. I’m so tired of feeling so goddamned helpless. ”
“I know, and I wish you didn’t have to go through this, Bro—”
“Constantly having to keep it all together is as useful as using a chain link fence in the middle of the ocean to hold back water. I'm struggling to stay afloat most days, so this is the last fucking thing I need on top of everything else.”
“Her timing is so fucking incredibly bad,” I remarked.
“What if I were to give her an interview under the condition that everything she’d seen between us stayed a secret?”
I rose up fully this time and grabbed his gorgeous face between my hands.
“You can't be serious? The last thing you need to do is talk about this case to anyone. Remember what your lawyer said? Hell, I’d even asked another lawyer, a friend of mine, and he agreed with your counsel that talking to the press could cause you to incriminate yourself, especially since you won’t do a lie detector test. They said it would be defensive suicide because right now there's no evidence of a crime.”
“I can’t let this fucking girl drag you into this, Declan. It’s my mess.”
“And mine too. Let’s just think about this for a moment.
A grown woman has basically left town. Whether she, you know…
is running away, or whatever… There's nothing tying you to her disappearance.
If the interviewer were to ask you a question and you were to respond in a certain way, they could read your body language and the way your words come out.
The tone alone would be a complete disaster. “
“What do you suggest then? She's going to recover her memory, and when she does, we're all screwed. We're going to fucking go down on a sinking ship.”
“I know, and I’ll think of something.”
Brogan looked at me, then over my shoulder. I turned, expecting to see Enslee, but there was no one there. I turned back to face him. He now had a smile on his face, and I was almost worried about asking him what it was, but I needed to know, so I arched a brow.
“What if we give her memories?”
“What?” I asked in confusion.
“We wouldn’t give real memories, but ones that we plant?”
“What do you mean by plant memories?”
“What if we tell her that she’s in a relationship with the two of us?
You know, I really doubt she’d want that secret in her little blog.
How would it look for her to be in a relationship with two men, including one having an affair with her and another man?
I don’t think her followers would be that supportive of her having sex with a suspected killer and his lover.
So if she thinks we're in a relationship, she'd be less likely to try to use the truth once she remembers it, to hurt us.”
“This is crazy, but there’s a certain genius to it.”
He grinned broadly, and it was likely one of the first genuine ones I’d seen in a while. “I do know a few somebodies actually. If we can make it appear as if we've been in this relationship for a while, then—”
“That’s going to be a hard spin, though, Brogan.”
“God damn it. I know. The last thing I want to do is pretend that we're living some fantasy life with a girl we don't even fucking know, and one who has completely uprooted our lives even more than our lives have already been.”
“I’ll do it,” I said, then we came up with a plan.
I made a few calls, even this late, then looked down at my lover.
By morning, my personal assistant would stop by here and get her hoodie, then pick up her van from Sinclair.
We’d have all of Enslee’s things, including her clothes.
From there, we’d have to pull off the most convincing performance of our lives.
“Are you sure about this? Because once we start this, we can't turn back.”
I nodded. “This might be the only way to get through this. I didn’t want to bring a third wheel into what it is that we have, but this is going to buy us some time, which I seem to be quickly running out of. We need to find Layla and make sure that this girl doesn't talk.”
“I get it,” he told me as he reached up to stroke my face.
As he did, he shifted closer to me, and I could feel how hard he was once again.
“The police already think I'm this mastermind criminal who can make women disappear at will. I mean, if I really wanted to, I suppose I could, and if I have to, I will.”
“Let’s not talk like that. We—”
“We don’t need to talk at all,” he rasped.
And between his expression, his tone, and the hardness of his cock nudging me, I grinned at him, then spun him around so he was on his stomach. “You’re right, only this time, I’m going to fuck you.”
“Make it good, baby.”
A few minutes later, I thrust into him, and our day… night… plan… and everything else was forgotten as we lost ourselves in the only Heaven we’d ever know.