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“Ok-kay, sure.”
“You alright?”
“I’m fine.” She licked her lips and forced herself to sound calm and collected. “Just checking stock in the pantry.”
Oh my god!
Lexie couldn’t believe this was happening. Nico was going to make her come, right here at work, with her boss less than twenty feet away! The knowledge should have mortified her, but instead, she found herself all the more excited. Locking eyes with him, she moved her hips with every upward thrust of his hand, willing him on. Nico’s smile turned feral, his movements more urgent as he dipped his head into her neck and went for the gold.
When her orgasm hit, Lexie had to bite down on his shoulder to keep from screaming as it rippled through her body. Every nerve ending exploded, every cell, every molecule pulsed to life. She clung to him, riding the endless waves of pleasure, before gradually, peacefully, descending back down to earth.
Nico was the first to move. He removed his hand from her shorts and Lexie watched as he sucked the two fingers that had been inside her into his mouth, tasting her. It was the sexiest thing she’d ever seen, and it made her heart accelerate all over again.
He leaned in, his words hushed, meant for her ears alone. “And now we’re even.”
Christ, he was done for.
After sneaking him out the back door, Lexie had returned to work while Nico replayed their encounter in his mind as he drove the short distance back to the station. Feeling her come alive under his touch, hearing her sigh his name, then bite into his shoulder in ecstasy, had to be the single most erotic moment of his life. Odd, considering there was no sex involved. The attraction between them was intense, to say the least. He’d never felt anything like it. He couldn’t wait to feel more of it, more of her. He blamed that damn photo, the one that just about knocked him on his ass when he saw it. Quiet, genteel Lexie had sent him a nude. A tousled, carefree, insanely sexy nude. It was all the evidence he needed that there was, indeed, a god. The photo had been in his possession for less than twenty-four hours, yet already he had it safely committed to memory. Warm lamplight spilling over her body, creating shadows in unseen places and driving him wild with curiosity. Breasts tucked safely beneath her. Back arched. Eyes cast down. The coy upward turn of her perfect mouth telling him she didn’t feel all that shy about it. She’d been toying with him, and by making her wait for his reply in person, he was doing the same right back.
Nico had been gone less than an hour. Pulling into the staff parking lot, he was abruptly booted out of his good mood by the rush of uniformed bodies racing urgently to the cruisers.
“What’s going on?” he asked through his open window to whoever was listening.
“We got another body,” Frank shouted over the commotion. He was shoving his arms into his police windbreaker with the driver’s side door hanging open. Seth ran to get in the passenger side.
Nico saw red. “And you didn’t notify me?”
“We just got the call ourselves, LT.”
While they were shouting, Zoe jumped into Nico’s car and buckled her seatbelt. Frank did not wait for a reply. The chief was also on the move toward his own vehicle.
“Shit. Where are we going?” he asked Zoe.
The look she gave him was dire. “Darcy Walsh’s trailer.”
Chapter nineteen
“Based on body temperature, I’d estimate the time of death to be ten to twelve hours ago,” the balding medical examiner said.
West checked his watch. “So, around midnight.”
The ME nodded. “Give or take.”
Nico was having trouble accepting what his eyes were telling him was true. Darcy Walsh was dead. Murdered. The angry mess of stab wounds on her chest and abdomen told the story of her violent, painful, ending. Dressed in nothing but a camisole and pajama shorts—both stained a bright crimson—she was duct taped to a plastic chair. Tightly. Cruelly. The same way they’d found Isabelle Moss.
The report had come in from a passing jogger who, in her words, knew something wasn’t right when she spotted Darcy’s cat scratching at the door to be let in. Though they didn’t know each other well—save for their habitual wave in the mornings while Darcy drank her coffee on the same lawn chair she’d died on—one thing she knew for sure was that Darcy loved that cat and would never leave him out in the cold. After busting down the door to confirm what the jogger had seen through the window, the team of officers had declared it a crime scene.
Nico rubbed his jaw and swallowed hard.
Not the same.
The mantra he’d adopted to tamp down his anxiety clanged through his head like a dropped saucepan. For some reason, it no longer held the same calming effect it used to. Maybe that was just frayed nerves—god knew this was not what he’d had in mind when he requested a transfer to a remote town in Maine—or maybe it had more to do with this now being the second victim killed the exact same way in the space of a week, after decades of the island being homicide-free.
His head whirled. He couldn’t understand it. It seemed almost planned. For him? Why else would women start showing up dead the second he moved here? Why kill them in the only manner that would rock him to the core? He had a million questions with zero answers, but suddenly it didn’t seem all that ridiculous to wonder if his past was connected to all this. The implications of what that might mean slammed down on him hard enough to make sweat bead on his forehead as he backed away from the body and made his way outside.
Gulping some much-needed fresh air, he tried to think logically. What was that famous Sherlock Holmes quote? “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
Impossibility number one—Bryan Fowler. Sara Riley’s killer was tried by a jury of his peers, convicted, and sentenced to life behind bars. Never mind that both of the two recent murders bore uncanny similarities to the way Sara was killed, there was no way he could have been the one wielding the blade.
