Into the Fury (BOSS, Inc. #1)(32)
“It was Mom and Pops Hartman. They took me in. They put their arms around me and walked me out of that police station, and I swear I could feel their love right then. They lived on this little farm in Bellingham. They raised chickens, had a couple of milk cows. It felt like home from the moment I stepped out of the car. I changed because of them, because I wanted them to be proud of me. I still do.”
She blew her nose, wiped a last tear from her cheek.
Ethan’s smile was gentle. “I know they’re proud of you, Val, and I’m glad you told me. I don’t think it’s important to the case, but you never know.”
She just nodded. He’d listened and seemed to understand. She shouldn’t have felt somehow lighter, but she did.
“I need to shower and get ready.” She smiled, the pressure gone from her chest. “Thanks for the coffee.”
He nodded. “Thanks for trusting me.”
She didn’t say more as she walked away and neither did Ethan, but she could feel his eyes on her all the way down the hall.
Ethan spent a couple more hours on the computer, but nothing in the files he had checked so far looked promising.
He was beginning to feel frustrated and restless when Val walked back into the living room.
“I’m going crazy sitting in the house all day,” she said. “Any chance I could talk you into taking me to the gym? Weekends are usually slow, especially if the weather’s good. What do you think?”
He smiled. “I’m feeling a little housebound myself. Let me give them a call, see if I can convince them to give us private access for a couple of hours.”
“Seriously? You think they might?”
“Yeah. With the right inducement, I do.”
Not surprisingly, the Twenty-Fourth Street gym agreed. He’d send the bill to La Belle, but it wouldn’t cost as much as he’d figured, and the benefits of a good, solid workout were worth it to both of them.
By the time they had finished and returned to the house, he and Val were both feeling better. The stiffness was gone from his muscles, along with some of the tension he’d been feeling.
All but the sexual variety. Thank Jesus, Val had worn loose-fitting yoga pants and a T-shirt, not the skintight gym clothes a lot of women wore. Still, watching her moving gracefully through her workout routine had him gritting his teeth to keep from getting hard. No way around it, the woman flat turned him on.
Once they got home, he kept his distance. Val worked on some of her Internet study courses and, that evening, called out for pizza, which they ate watching an old movie on TV. He didn’t expect to feel so comfortable sitting next to her on the couch, wished to hell he didn’t.
After Val went to bed, Ethan checked the house and grounds half a dozen times before curling his tall frame into the too-short sofa.
Early Monday morning, the day of the funeral, he was sitting at his laptop, going over the last of the background information Sadie had dug up on the top models. They all had interesting stories: a lot of them were world travelers, some married, some even had kids. Hard to believe with their perfect figures, but apparently true.
A fanatic might think a mother was an even bigger sinner than the rest. He made a note to speak to Caralee Peterson, the woman he remembered as the Southern belle from Atlanta. Caralee had a husband and a four-year-old daughter. He hadn’t seen anything in the file that pointed to a problem with anyone from her past, but he wanted to speak to her, make sure she stayed alert.
He was surprised to see Megan O’Brien was a single mom with a two-year-old boy. Dirk hadn’t mentioned it and neither had Megan. He needed to talk to her, too, make sure she didn’t get singled out because she had a kid.
With the biblical tone of the notes, Ethan had asked Sadie to cross-check any religious affiliation, but Ian’s middle-aged computer whiz had come up with zip. The women’s religious preferences were as varied as their backgrounds: Agnostic, Protestant, Jewish, Catholic, Buddhist, nothing that specifically connected them to anyone who might be a threat.
He wanted to talk to the men Delilah had dated, hoped to get the names from Hoover, see if the cops had come up with anything in that regard. He also wanted to know if the police had found any old murders with a similar MO.
He glanced up to see Val walking out of the bedroom dressed for the funeral in a black knee-length suit, black high heels, a wide-brimmed black felt hat that dipped over one eye, and a veil that wasn’t pulled down. She looked elegant and remote and completely untouchable. A shot of lust rippled through his blood like a heat wave.
Her blond hair was swept up severely and her face looked pale, but her unadorned appearance did nothing to deter the kick Ethan felt.
Damn, she was beautiful. He went hard just standing there watching her. And now that he knew the brutal past she had endured, how she had worked to lift herself out of it, he was even more attracted to her.
It didn’t matter. He had a job to do and it didn’t include hauling one of La Belle’s top models down the hall into bed. It didn’t involve ripping off those dark, forbidding clothes and taking her every way he could imagine.
Exactly what he felt like doing.
“I’m ready,” she said, and the tremor in her voice calmed his raging libido. This wasn’t a day to be thinking of anything but a needless death and catching the bastard who had stolen a young woman’s life.