Total pages in book: 158
Estimated words: 146477 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 732(@200wpm)___ 586(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146477 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 732(@200wpm)___ 586(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
“So you haven’t seen him all week?”
“Not even a little bit.”
“Not even a random black rose?”
“Nope.”
“Well, shit,” I mutter. “You must have thrown it back so hard in the club last week that the bastard is still recovering.”
Harper laughs and glances away, her cheeks brightening with the sweetest blush. “Or perhaps he’s been licking his wounds because he saw me over the camera saying that he could never give it to me as good as you do.”
“Yeah,” I laugh. “I agree. It’s definitely that.”
Harper lets out a breath and glances up at me, those big green eyes filled with regret, and for just a moment, I wonder if it’s me she regrets. “I’ve been out here for twenty minutes trying to convince myself to go in,” she tells me. “I can hear my brother in there with the twins and his wife, and Mom is doting on them like she’s never seen anything so perfect in her life, and I just . . . I don’t want to be here.”
“Nobody is forcing you to go inside,” I tell her, pointing toward the retaining wall around the manicured hedges and watching as her bright eyes shift toward it with longing. “If you’re not ready, we can just chill here.”
She nods and wanders over, sitting her firm ass down and blowing out a heavy breath. “Been busy?” she asks.
I scoff. “Don’t give me that shit,” I say, getting right into it. “Where the fuck have you been?”
“Me?” she argues, her eyes going wide. “It’s a two-way street. I didn’t see my phone ringing either, Mr. You Belong To Me Now. I mean, what am I supposed to do with that? You know this was supposed to be strictly sex only. You’re my uncle, for fuck’s sake. I can’t want you like this.”
“But you do want me,” I murmur, ignoring the uncle jab as pride swells in my chest, realizing she’s just as fucked up over me as I am for her.
Harper groans, and the sound does something wicked to me. “I swear, sometimes you only hear what you want to hear. We can’t do this.”
“Can’t or shouldn’t?” I challenge. “They’re two very different things.”
Harper’s face lights up with a wide grin, and I don’t doubt that she’s forgotten all about why she shouldn’t be walking through that door. “You’re impossible. You know that, right?”
“I like to refer to it as determination.”
She rolls her eyes and slumps against the retaining wall, keeping her stare locked on mine.
“Whatever happened to those two bodies?” I ask, inching closer, unable to keep my distance. “Ever figure out the cause of death?”
She shakes her head. “Not even a little. I stayed all night and searched every inch of those bodies but found nothing. There were obviously smaller injuries, but nothing that could determine how they died. It’s been driving me insane all week, and to make matters worse, when I went in for my next shift, Dr. McKullan had done up his own reports, stating their injuries were consistent with a car wreck. He concluded the first guy died from blood loss and the other from swelling of the brain.”
“The fuck?”
“That’s what I said, and so I went to look over the bodies again, and surprise, surprise, the two bodies were of men who were actually involved in a car wreck.”
“So the bodies from the club are gone?”
“Yup,” she says, popping the p before letting out a frustrated sigh. “Poof. Just like my panties at the club. But I gotta give it to this guy, he sure loves consistency.”
“That he does,” I muse as Harper lets out a heavy sigh and gets to her feet, suddenly feeling ready to face the fresh hell on the other side of the door. She steps up to the door, and I hold back, not wanting Elias or her mom to assume we showed up together.
She knocks, and as we wait for someone to answer the door, I find myself stuck on the two bodies that arrived for Harper in the morgue.
There’s something off-putting about them. Something that’s leaving me uneasy, and yet I can’t put my finger on it. I didn’t get a good look at their faces considering one was face down on an autopsy table and the other was still half inside a body bag, but they didn’t strike me as the type of men Harper would find herself grinding against in a club. Though I suppose I don’t really know her well enough to know what her standards are when she’s been heavily drinking, but judging from the snippet I saw last weekend, she’s a free spirit. All that mattered to her was having a good time.
I spent a good chunk of the week looking into the double homicide, and just like the first body, there wasn’t a single detail about it in our system. No detectives to question, no leads, no evidence or suspects, and it’s left me unsettled. Either this asshole is really fucking good, or he’s got someone working with him, and right now, my suspicions keep coming back to Detective Gray.