Royce appeared in the archway, his dark hair tied at his nape, his jeans and t-shirt molded to delicious muscles she now knew intimately. “I’m driving you to work,” he said.
She should have been irritated about the command, but a few of his bedroom orders flashed in her mind – harder, faster, lick me and her mouth went dry. Lauren set her cup on the kitchen counter. “You don’t have to take me to work.”
“Yes, I do.” He leaned on the archway, his shoulders taking up the entire tiny space.
She studied him, reading what he wasn’t saying, and nerves knotted her stomach. “Stop. Stop acting like a watchdog. You’re making me uptight. You’re making me think about the phone calls and the calendar pages. I can’t do my job if I can’t think straight.”
“You have to think about this, Lauren, and you have to look over your shoulder. And I’ll be looking too.”
“You can’t watch me all day, Royce. And even if you think you can, for how long? We didn’t get another call, or another calendar sheet, this weekend. Maybe it’s over. Maybe this person got their laughs and moved on. Or maybe you being with me scared them off.”
“No. He’s not tired. He’s not scared. He’s trying to get you to let down your guard.”
“You don’t know that. We don’t know anything at all. And you’re going to make me crazy.”
He closed the distance between them and pulled her into his arms. ”Just humor me for a few days and play things safe until I get some answers. I’ll drop you off at work and pick you up. That way I have an excuse to take you to dinner,” his lips curved, “and have you for dessert.”
“Bribery isn’t going to make this better.”
He laughed. “Bribery, huh?”
She couldn’t laugh. She couldn’t do anything with the invisible vise tightening on her chest. “I’ve been working criminal cases for years. I’ve had threats. I did with those what I told you I do with everything else. Threats, bloody pictures, and random body parts in bags. They are the same to me. I put them in this imaginary place in my mind, a box that I seal and don’t open unless I have to. It’s how I keep going.”
“I know,” he said. “If anyone gets that, it’s me. If I had any other choice, I wouldn’t push you on this. There’s something about the way this has all gone down that I don’t like. I need you to be on alert, and I need you to be cautious, until I figure out why.”
“Damn you, Royce. That just made me more on edge. I know to be careful. I’m always careful.”
“Curse me if you want,” he said. “Yell at me. Just do what I say.”
She let out a sigh. “What is it about me and controlling men? I’m drawn to them.” She stepped out of his reach. “Drive me if you must.” She tried to walk around him and he caught her arm. “Please don’t. Not now. And I know I’m probably being unfair but I just feel like everything is spinning out of control. I need some space to figure out where my head is.”
His eyes, so blue, so piercing, held hers, his expression unreadable, before he let her go. And God, she was so confused and conflicted, because she hated he let her go, when she’d just told him to.
***
Two hours after arriving to work, Lauren sat behind her simple steel public servant’s desk, in her box of an office. She and Royce had barely spoken on the way to her office and that had her just as crazy as everything else. He’d made her put his number and both of his brothers’ numbers in her phone, and told her not to leave the building. No kiss goodbye. Just a quick ‘I’ll call you later and check in.’
The intercom on Lauren’s desk buzzed and she jumped, silently cursing her edginess. She punched the button on her phone. “There is a Jonathan Wilkins here to see you,” came the familiar gravelly voice of her sixty-something year old assistant, Alice Harper. She cleared her throat and lowered her voice, “He’s very determined.”
Of course he was. His sister was about to go on trial for murder. She could only hope this was heading towards a confession. “Send him in.” Lauren leaned back in her chair and waited for her visitor but she didn’t, and wouldn’t, get up. Not with this particular visitor, whom she’d read the file on. She’d learned a long time ago that sitting behind a desk was as good as towering over a man. It proclaimed ownership of the room, it said she wasn’t intimated into standing. It worked with the more dominant types.
Her door was open and it took all of sixty seconds for a strikingly large man, she knew to be thirty-six years old, to appear in the entryway. And true to his military duty, his hair was short, his jaw strong, his expression hard.
“Hello, Ms. Reynolds.”
There was something about the way he said her name, the way it came out almost like a threat, that set a warning bell ringing in her head. “Please, have a seat, Mr. Wilkins.”
For a moment, he stood there, so still, she almost thought he’d frozen in place, turned to stone, before he gave a surprisingly polite, “Thank you,” and claimed a visitor’s chair.
“I assume this is about your sister,” Lauren prodded, eager to get on with this. He was a time bomb she could almost hear ticking.
“I’ll cut to the chase,” he replied, bypassing a direct answer. “I know what Beverly did was wrong, but don’t you think you are being a bit harsh in your quest for the death penalty? I mean the woman was terrorized by her husband.”
Lauren leaned back in her chair, carefully schooling her features into an emotionless mask. “Have you talked to your sister’s attorney about this?”
He let out a bitter laugh. “Funny. That’s exactly what your father asked me.”
She cringed at the idea that her father had been dragged into this, but managed to clamp down on an obvious reaction. “My father is a State Senator. He can’t do anything to help your sister.”
His lips thinned. “So he says.” He shrugged. “I guess that means it’s all on you.”
“Unless you have new evidence to present, Mr. Wilkins, this case is in the jury’s hands.”
He leaned forward and pressed his hands onto the desk. “I’m Special Forces. I was away on a mission. I’m all she has since our father died last year. She married that bastard when I was in deep combat territory, and instead of taking care of her, he beat the crap out of her. Had I been here, things might have been different. Had I even known what was going on, things would have been different.”
“I can see how much this is upsetting you,” she said. “And I understand. But a man is dead and buried, Mr. Wilkins, and his family is in pain. They want his side of the story told.”
He pushed to his feet, his voice rising with him. “I let her down. She was desperate to survive. Don’t you understand her need to end the pure hell she was living? Do you have no heart, Ms. Reynolds?”
Her heart was what made her job both difficult and rewarding. The victim of this crime was dead, but his family painfully lived on. “Look, Mr. Wilkins. I want to help but I need new evidence. Something to clear your sister. Have your sister’s attorney call me. I’ll talk to him.”
He stared down at her, his jaw tight, his breathing a little too fast. “This isn’t over,” he said in a low, threatening voice, before turning and storming out of her office.
Stunned, Lauren read the threat he intended. She watched him leave, fingertips pressed to the top of her desk. It wasn’t until she heard the front lobby door slam that she realized she was holding her breath and her hand was shaking. She exhaled, rattled when she normally wouldn’t be. And she knew why. The calls, the calendar sheets. Royce’s paranoia over them. All those things were messing with her head and that meant whoever sent them was getting their way, and she didn’t want to give them that satisfaction. She had to shake this off.
Her intercom buzzed again and Lauren punched the button. “You okay in there?” Alice asked, concern in her voice.
“Yeah,” Lauren said. “I assume he’s gone?”
“Oh, he’s gone,” she said in a disgusted tone. “And he did so quite loudly.”