Not that I needed my imagination to envision what was under there.
Karissa had blown her hair out and layered on some makeup, which was something we’d never seen before. It enhanced her natural beauty but it also changed her look. She seemed more sophisticated somehow. More feminine and refined.
But damn if it didn’t make her even hotter.
“So… where are you boys taking me?”
Karissa posed the question as she got into the car, scissoring one long leg after the other. She sat in the back with Bryce, while I drove. Beside me, Roderick leaned back over the passenger seat and smiled.
“Where are we not taking you?”
The ride was actually relaxing. Conversation wandered from standard work stuff down more personal avenues, as Karissa asked more in-depth questions about our shared pasts. She knew we’d grown up together, but she never knew details. One by one we regaled her with stories from our youth — the funny ones, the ones you could tell over and over again and still laugh at them, and her laugh was as charming as she was.
“So where exactly were you a cop?”
The laughter ended abruptly at Bryce’s question. While it seemed innocent and casual, I was pretty sure she’d consider it out of line.
“Up north,” Karissa responded very carefully. “New Hampshire.”
Roderick shot me a surprised glance. We were both equally stunned.
“Cool,” said Bryce. “Did you like it?”
“Yes and no.”
Roderick coughed. “You’re gonna need to elaborate.”
“Well you know how I can’t sit still?” she smirked.
“Oh yeah,” I laughed. I caught her gaze in the rear-view mirror. “We know all about that.”
“It’s one of the reasons we hired you,” Roderick agreed. “You have boundless energy.”
“Yeah, well boundless energy is great for a police officer,” Karissa said. “You’re constantly doing something new, always moving from call to call. You can’t really get bored, either. Those things appealed to me.”
“So what about the ‘no’ part?” asked Bryce.
I watched as she turned slowly away, to stare absently out the window. As she did, her expression changed. While still heartbreakingly beautiful her face seemed colder now, like it was chiseled from marble.
“Some people…” she began, talking so low we could barely hear her. “Well…”
“Suck?” Bryce offered.
“Yes.”
“I’ll bet you saw your fair share of people that suck,” Roderick said.
Karissa nodded slowly, her gaze still very far away. I felt a sudden sorrow for her. I didn’t even know why.
“When someone calls the police, something’s already gone south,” she said. “That’s the hard part of the job. Imagine showing up to fifteen or twenty calls a day. And every single time, someone’s hurt, or they’re in trouble, or they just had something bad happen to them.”
She looked back at me in the mirror, almost on purpose.
Was it on purpose?
“Bad things,” she said again, softly. “Over and over, they can be tough to deal with.”
Her eyes locked on mine and I could suddenly feel it: the deep-set heaviness in her heart. The pain of something terrible, an experience that somehow changed her. Still, there was more to it than that. Because reflected back in her eyes was also an understanding. It was almost like… like she somehow knew.
I get it.
A thousand words passed silently between us in that single look. A kinship. A shared sorrow. Then she blinked a few times and looked away.
“Sorry,” she chuckled, her voice a little thicker than before. “Didn’t mean to go all doom and gloom.”
“You didn’t,” Bryce assured her. His hand had closed over hers now. “It’s not like—”
“Being a police officer was the two best years of my life,” she said firmly. “All the stuff I did, all the people I helped?” Her face broke into a smile. “It made me feel better at the end of the day. Always made me feel accomplished.”
“Yeah, well you’ve been carrying over the whole ‘accomplished’ thing down here with us,” Roderick informed her. “We’ve hired a lot of people over the years, and no one’s kicked more ass than you.”
“Well I have long legs,” Karissa grinned, extending one for show. At the very end, one of her sexy red heels dangled from the toe of one slender foot.
“I was always good at kicking.”
Twenty-Seven
KARISSA
Dinner was a high-end steakhouse in South Portsmouth. The guys ordered just about every appetizer in sight, and followed it up with medium-rare porterhouses as thick as my wrist.
“You guys can eat,” I’d laughed, cracking into a stone crab claw.
“Yeah well we don’t get out much,” said Camden. He sat on my right, looking incredibly hot in a jet-black button-down shirt that hugged his muscular torso in a perfect ‘V’. “So when we do get out…”
“We usually go nuts,” Bryce grinned, finishing his thought for him.
Some girls in such a situation would’ve held back a little, and ate like a lady. Not me. I dug in ravenously, enjoying a little bit of everything they put in front of us. The place was fancy and expensive, and decorated with intricate wood paneling that reminded me sharply of Southhold. The kind of place with a lounge you’d sip whiskey in afterward, or maybe cognac.
Instead we ate and then left, even skipping dessert. Before I knew it we were back in the car, and although we’d talked all throughout dinner the guys still hadn’t said a goddamn thing.
“I thought we were going to talk?” I ventured, as the car pulled away.
“We are,” said Bryce.
“Now?”
“Afterwards,” Roderick assured me from the front seat.
Camden rolled us smoothly through the city streets, making rights and lefts seemingly at random. I sat back into the leather seat and relaxed, enjoying the buzz that had come from three glasses of merlot. It occurred to me that we were going somewhere else, and that was fine by me. I was just happy to finally be away from the manor. Excited
