“I just got off,” she groaned.
“You can get off again later,” he promised, hanging up.
He was shoving his cell phone in his pocket when Sidney came down the stairs, looking so positively dewy with female satisfaction that he gritted his teeth against the renewed urge to take her back to bed and screw her senseless.
After a few moments of silence inside his car, her pleasant afterglow faded. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I have some work to do. Lacy’s going to take over for me for a while.”
“When will you be back?”
“I don’t know. Do I have a curfew?”
Her face registered a mixture of hurt and surprise at his sudden personality change. Five minutes ago he’d been hanging all over her; now he couldn’t meet her eyes. Adding insult to injury, when he dropped her off at Pacific Pet Hotel, he didn’t say goodbye.
He headed home, needing some alone time to analyze the inconsistencies of the case. If he stayed overnight with Sidney, the only thing he’d be working on was going a few more rounds between her sleek, silky thighs.
As the headlights of his car hit his closed garage door, he noticed something taped to it. A manila envelope. Leaving the engine running, he got out, ripped the package off the door and sat behind the wheel to open it over his lap.
A dozen or so large, digitally printed photographs tumbled out.
At first, the images were so jumbled he couldn’t make sense of them. As the lines and shapes began to take form, he saw that they were extreme close-ups. The first depicted a woman’s round, supple breast, the upper curve framed by dark cloth, as if she’d lifted her top.
Sidney, he realized, his blood running cold.
Her legs, wrapped around his waist. The long, slender column of her throat. Her hands, clutching his hair as she climaxed.
There was only one full-length photo, and it was incredibly explicit. Their faces weren’t in focus, but what they were doing was clear. He was on top of her, pinning her beneath him, his pants pushed down his hips. His buttocks were clenched. Her hands were curled into fists, resting against the driver side door.
In contrast to the other images, which were vague and erotic, this one was shockingly graphic. It looked like a rape.
“That bloodsucking bitch,” he said, backing out of the driveway in a squeal of tires and heading south, toward Carlsbad, where Crystal Dunn lived.
Crystal was home, if the soft lighting visible through the small octagon-shaped glass window in her front door was any indication. She was also entertaining, judging by the dark green Jaguar in her driveway.
Straightening his shoulders, he knocked on the front door.
“Marc,” she said when she answered it, her expression revealing genuine surprise. “What brings you here?”
“I need to talk to you. Alone,” he added, knowing her latest plaything was lounging in the background.
Her eyebrows rose at his tone, but she stepped aside to allow him entrance.
It was a very cozy scene. Crystal was barefoot and casual in slacks and an ice-blue silk blouse, her pale hair cascading around her slender shoulders. Her coanchor was in his shirtsleeves, no tie or jacket, sipping red wine on her white leather couch.
“Brandon, why don’t you run to the store for me?” Crystal asked as he stood self-consciously. “I need some Evian.”
“Of course,” he said, slanting a glance in Marc’s direction. They’d only met once, but he knew the younger man recognized him. “Lieutenant Cruz,” he said quietly as he passed by, acknowledging his predecessor.
Marc didn’t grace him with a response. As soon as the door shut behind him, he strode forward, dumping the contents of the envelope out on her designer sofa.
Arching a brow, she perched her tiny little butt on the armrest and picked up the photos, studying them with mild interest. “This can’t be you,” she said unequivocally. Glancing up, she caught his sharp glare and looked again. “It is you! My God, were you drunk?”
“What’s your angle?”
Taking a sip of wine, she flipped through the photos once more.
“My guys didn’t take these. Whoever did used a telephoto lens with a nighttime scope, an expensive camera, no doubt about it, but consider the shots. Not one of them is worth a damn. How would we use this? Obscure close-ups and indiscernible faces?”
“Don’t mess with me,” he warned.
“Like I would,” she replied. Scorn blazing from her eyes, she shoved the pictures back into the envelope and returned them to him.
“You certainly have before.”
“Not when I had nothing to gain. You were taken off the case-”
“Because of you,” he interrupted.
“You have no leads, no suspects, no new information. I wouldn’t waste a moment of my time following you.”
He examined her cold, pretty face, knowing she was telling the truth. If he’d stopped to think, before flying off the handle, he would have reached the same conclusion. Crystal only made moves to feed her ego or her ambition; she was self-serving and unapologetic about it. Her ruthless personality had appealed to him at first, because he thought he’d finally found someone he didn’t have to pander to.
As it turned out, having a woman treat him as casually as he’d treated all the others wasn’t that much fun.
“Is she the one?” Crystal asked, her cool eyes assessing him.
“The one who what?”
Smiling slyly, she set her wineglass aside. “You never did me in the front seat of a car. Or on a picnic table.”
“You were more comfortable on your knees, if I recall.”
Her amused expression turned hard. “Do you even remember why you were there? In my dressing room that day?”
The question caught him off guard. They’d hurled insults back and forth, but never actually discussed the incident. Was she trying to claim he didn’t know what he’d seen? “I remember everything,” he asserted.
“Sure you do,” she said with a laugh. “You brought me flowers. It was a grand romantic gesture, for someone like you. Why did you do it?”
Women obsessed over insignificant details, he decided. “What difference does it make?”
“We had a fight the night before,” she continued, but it didn’t jog his memory. “I said I wanted to see you exclusively. I told you I didn’t want anyone but you.”
“Then you’re a liar and a cheat.”
“Goddamn it, Marc, I said I loved you. At the very least you should remember that.”
He shook his head wordlessly, surprised by her vehemence.
“Do you know what you said, in return? ‘Love someone else.’”
The conversation floated back to him, like a dream. He
“You’re goddamned right I did. I thought we were over. If I’d ever, for one moment, imagined you’d be knocking on my door to apologize the next day, flowers in hand, I would have told Carlisle to take a hike.”
The self-righteous indignation he’d been carrying around for the past few years dissolved into faint regret. How ironic it was for him to be having this conversation with her, today of all days. Crystal was the only other woman besides Sidney he’d ever thought he’d loved, and the feeling was twice as unsettling the second time around.
“I’m sorry,” he said finally.
“Why?”
“Because, once upon a time, you were the one.”
“Oh, Marc,” she wailed, her blue eyes filling with tears. Taking his hand, she allowed him to help her up, and put her head against his chest. “You are so insufferable.”
