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“Hey,” Frank cut in. “I'll have you know there's a substantial amount of wisdom that comes with these gray hairs.”
The table chuckled—even Zoe, who seemed to loosen up again.
“And you two?” Nico asked the young officers.
“Locals too,” Zoe said. “But Seth didn’t, uh, I mean, he wasn’t . . .”
When her eyes darted to Seth, seeking some kind of permission, he finished her sentence for her. “I was home-schooled.” He shrugged. “Otherwise, Zoe and I would have been in the same grade.”
“I see.”
Only, he didn’t. Not really.
As the table went back to eating and laughing and talking amongst themselves, Nico couldn’t help the nagging feeling that despite jumping blind off a cliff for the sake of trust, he was still on the outside. These people had history—a lot of it. More than that, they had secrets. Secrets he clearly hadn’t been deemed worthy enough to be let in on. Yet.
Maybe West had been right when he said it would take time to earn what they all naturally possessed. Small-town loyalties ran deep, and he didn’t belong. If he wanted to be here, to make it work, maybe he needed to stop thinking of this as a temporary transfer and start letting himself relax into the fabric of this place. Not completely, but enough . . .
With that in mind, Nico ate his lunch and got to work chipping away at some of the walls he’d spent months building.
Just one brick, he told himself.
One brick at time.
Chapter five
Three days later, Nico finally felt like he was making headway with his new crew. Things were running smoothly. Seth and Zoe no longer looked at him like sullen teenagers. West had backed off with the alpha male bullshit. Even Cora had softened a fraction, being patient with him when he misplaced or couldn’t find something in the office. And Frank, being Frank, had welcomed Nico into the fold like a long-lost brother. Nico appreciated that, not realizing until now how much he needed it.
He thought about Lexie often, wishing he had an excuse to contact her while simultaneously worrying about her reaction if he did. The way she’d practically recoiled when he’d asked her out to dinner had been discouraging, to say the least. But then she’d stepped into his arms, all intimate-like, and whispered how glad she was that he was okay, leaving Nico confused as hell. Was she sending him signals? Or was it all just in his head? In any case, now that he was on the island and had spoken to her, things felt even more complicated than before, because now he wanted more. More time, more conversation, more of her. It was as if the proximity had switched his imagination into overdrive and suddenly, she was all he thought about. Her beautiful cobalt eyes. Her lips. That smile. The way those cutoff shorts shaped her perfect ass and—
Interrupting both his nefarious thoughts and his morning run, Nico’s phone rang in his pocket. When he saw Frank’s name on the caller ID, he found himself grinning.
“You’re up early,” he said, slowing to a stroll on the sand. “Calling in sick?”
“I wish,” Frank replied, his tone making Nico stop.
“What’s going on?”
A heavy sigh. “We’ve got a situation, LT. You’d better come in. Now.”
Nico’s feet felt heavier than usual, dragging like lead the closer he got to the yellow-and-black crime scene tape surrounding the run-down apartment block on Chestnut Avenue. The neighborhood was in a frenzy, a majority of the surrounding residents gathering in a group outside, making it impossible for him to go in unnoticed.
As he approached the barricade, a middle-aged woman in a bathrobe called out, “What’s going on?”—her question prompting a multitude of other voices to demand answers from him as well.
Here we go.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I know you’re concerned, but I’m going to ask you to please return to your homes until we can give you an official statement.”
“What happened?” someone else shouted.
“Where’s Isabelle?” asked another.
“I’m sorry,” Nico bellowed over the protesting crowd. “But that’s all I can say to you at this time. Go home. Please. We’ll update you as soon as we can.”
Remembering how much he hated PR, Nico turned and walked the last few paces to the edge of the crime scene, ignoring the persistent shouts of the public as he ducked and lifted the tape over his head. Strange, how a length of flimsy plastic held such power. In and of itself, it was nothing. And yet, by virtue of what it represented, it was everything. People saw those hard black letters against the incongruous yellow, the command to not cross, and they knew—something bad had happened here.
As if to offer a morbid reminder of the fact, Nico caught a white van pulling up in his peripheral. Two men in navy jackets with the word Coroner printed across their backs unloaded a gurney.
Seth had been stationed out front to guard the perimeter, though judging by the haunted gaze coming from his otherwise stone-set features, Nico knew he’d seen what lay inside. He gave him a bleak nod on his way past.
