Desperate Girls (Wolfe Security #1)(35)

“Reggie approached me after the Corby trial. I’d taken a leave of absence because I’d become so immersed in everything.”

“What constitutes a ‘leave’ for you?” he asked.

“I was gone three weeks.”

Erik bit into the egg roll. Holy shit. His eyes watered, and he reached for his beer.

Brynn smiled. “Told you.”

Erik waited until he could talk again. “That’s not a leave, that’s a vacation.”

“Well, for me, it was a leave. I went to Port O’Connor to visit my mom and her husband. Very restful. Reading, jogging, fishing every morning at five a.m. Napping in the afternoon. Of course, my mom and I got to bickering, but I knew that would happen. I love her to death, but we drive each other crazy.”

“And your dad? Where is he?”

“No idea. He left when I was little and hasn’t kept in touch.”

She dipped the last bite of egg roll into some mustard and ate it without flinching. “Anyway, Reggie tracked me down the third week. He laid out his argument and persuaded me to move to Pine Rock and join his firm. So I did. I switched to private practice, bought a house, met a guy. Everything was great.”

A young waiter showed up with a tray of steaming food. He unloaded the dishes, and Erik asked for a water.

“Wimp,” Brynn said. She scooped food onto her plate and gave his lo mein a disapproving look. Erik already had buyer’s remorse after seeing her barbecued spare ribs.

“You were saying?” he asked. “Everything was great?” Erik had definitely sensed a “but” coming.

“But then I started doing it all over again.”

“What’s that?”

“Putting in the hours, the evenings, the weekends. Skipping time off. Neglecting my friends, my boyfriend. So—big shocker—he met someone. I found all these sext messages on his phone.”

Interesting. From the conversation in the car, Erik had thought the guy broke up with her.

“You found out he was cheating? That’s why you dumped him?”

“I’d suspected he was cheating for months.” Brynn stabbed a bite of broccoli. “I dumped him when I realized I didn’t care.”

Erik watched her.

“And I started thinking, you know, there’s a pattern here. My problem isn’t the job or the boss or the city.” She leaned back against the booth. “It’s me. I throw myself in, immerse myself in work, block out everyone and everything that isn’t my job.”

“Maybe that’s why you’re good at it.”

“It is, I know. Work’s great.” She shook her head. “It’s the rest of my life that’s a wreck.”

Brynn lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to the faint hum of downtown traffic twelve stories below. She’d stayed in this apartment many times before. In this exact bed, in fact. And the noise had never bothered her. If anything, it had lulled her to sleep after a long workday.

Not tonight, though.

She kept thinking about that white truck. It was out there somewhere. James Corby was in it. Was he prowling the streets, watching her, waiting for his next window of opportunity? Or was he on the move, headed far, far away from the marshals and detectives and Texas Rangers who were scouring the state for him? Maybe he’d completed his revenge quest. Maybe he’d taken his last trophy and was on his way to enjoy his newfound freedom south of the border.

She thought of the digital pictures Erik had shown her, all the different images of what Corby might look like now. As if she needed a reminder. As if Corby’s stone-cold eyes weren’t permanently etched into her brain.

Brynn stared at the ceiling fan as it churned the air. She felt hot. Sticky. She kicked the covers off, swung her legs out of bed, and grabbed some cutoffs from the chair in the corner. Then she stepped into the hallway to check the thermostat.

And Erik.

The living room was dim, and she poked her head around the corner to see him sitting on the sofa, his arm stretched across the back. His suit jacket was off. He had his sleeves rolled up, and the light of the television cast him in a bluish hue.

“Still here?” she asked.

He just looked at her, and she felt a flush of embarrassment at the dumb question.

She padded into the kitchen and opened the fridge. Wine, Gatorade, water, beer. Nothing tempted her.

“Want anything?” she asked.

“I’m good.”

She grabbed a water and joined him in the living room, sinking into the oversize armchair beside the sofa. Close but not too close. She wasn’t wearing a bra under her T-shirt, and it was dark, but she didn’t want to give him an eyeful.

“I can’t sleep.” She twisted the top off her water and took a swig. Then she glanced at the TV. He was watching CNN, but he had the volume switched off and the closed-captioning turned on. “You can turn that up, you know. That’s not the problem.”

“I like it on mute so I can listen.”

Listen to what? Traffic? Voices? Footsteps in the hallway? She didn’t know how his job worked, exactly. The cameras at Ross’s were a part of it. Erik had gone through that with her earlier tonight—sharing information, just as he’d promised. Instead of two monitoring stations—one at each apartment—they had set up a designated control room in the spare bedroom at Ross’s. And they’d assigned an agent to monitor the cameras full-time, versus an agent in each apartment “keeping an eye on” the cameras. The new setup would eliminate the possibility of someone slipping into the building behind a tenant while both agents happened to be distracted, which was how Bulldog had gotten in.