The Naturals (The Naturals #1)(54)

Knowing Lia, she’d probably managed to pry at least half of the story out of Dean already—and with my luck, she would pass it on to Michael with embellishments. It was better that he heard it from me—so I started at the beginning with Club Muse and the message on the bathroom wall and didn’t stop until I’d told him about the crime scene in Arlington and its resemblance to my mother’s.

“You think the similarity was intentional,” Michael said.

I nodded. Michael didn’t ask me to elaborate, and I realized how much of our conversation happened in silence, with him reading my face and me knowing exactly how he’d respond.

“The theory is that the UNSUB staged all of this for me,” I said finally. “It wasn’t about the UNSUB reliving the kill. It was about making me relive it.”

Michael stared at me. “Say the second sentence again.”

“It wasn’t about the UNSUB reliving the kill,” I repeated.

“There,” Michael said. “Every time you say the words reliving the kill, you duck your head slightly to the right. It’s like you’re shaking your head or being bashful or … something.”

I opened my mouth to tell him that he was wrong, that he was reading too much into that single sentence, but I couldn’t form the words, because he was right. I didn’t know why I felt like I was missing something, but I did. If Michael had seen some hint of that in my facial expression …

Maybe my body knew something that I didn’t.

“It wasn’t about the UNSUB reliving the kill,” I said again. That was true. I knew it was true. But now that Michael had pointed it out, I could feel my gut telling me, loud and clear, that it wasn’t the whole truth.

“I’m missing something.” The horror at the crime scene had been familiar. Almost too familiar. What kind of killer remembered the details of a crime scene so exactly? The splatter, the blood on the mirrors and the light switch, the knife marks on the floor …

“Tell me what you’re thinking.” Michael’s words penetrated my thoughts. I focused on his hazel eyes. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a shadow in the doorway. Agent Starmans. Had he overheard us? Was he trying to overhear us?

Michael grabbed my neck. He pulled me toward him. When Agent Starmans glanced in the room, all he saw was Michael and me.

Kissing.

The kiss in the pool was nothing compared to this. Then, our lips had barely brushed. Now, my lips were opening. Our mouths were crushed together. His hand traveled from my neck down to my lower back. My lips tingled, and I leaned into the kiss, shifting my body until I could feel the heat from his in my arms, my chest, my stomach.

On some level, I was aware of the fact that Agent Starmans had hightailed it back down the hall, leaving me alone with Michael. On some level, I was aware of the fact that now was not a time for kissing, of the vortex of emotion I felt when I looked at Michael, of the sound of someone else coming down the hallway.

My fingers curled into claws. I dug them into his T-shirt, his hair. And then finally—finally—I realized what I was doing. What we were doing.

I pulled back, then hesitated. Michael dropped his hands from my back. There was a soft smile on his face, a look of wonderment in his eyes. This was Michael without layers. This was Michael and me—and Dean was standing in the doorway.

“Dean.” I forced myself not to scramble backward, not to lean away from Michael in any way. I wouldn’t do that to him. The kiss might have started as a distraction, he might have taken advantage of the moment, but I’d kissed him back, and I wasn’t going to turn around and make him feel like nothing just because Dean was standing in the doorway and there was something there between him and me, too.

Michael had never made any secret of the fact that he was pursuing me. Dean had fought any attraction he felt for me every step of the way.

“We need to talk,” Dean said.

“Whatever you have to say,” Michael drawled, “you can say in front of me.”

I gave Michael a look.

“Whatever you have to say, you can say in front of me, unless Cassie wishes to speak to you privately, in which case I completely respect her right to do so,” Michael corrected himself.

“No,” Dean said. “Stay. It’s fine.”

He didn’t sound fine—and if I was picking up on that, I didn’t want to know how easy it was for Michael to see what Dean was feeling.

“I brought you this,” Dean said, holding out a file. At first, I thought it was the case file for our UNSUB, but then I saw the label on the file. LORELAI HOBBES.

“My mother’s file?”

“Locke snuck me a copy,” Dean said. “She thought there might be something here, and she was right. The attack on your mother was poorly planned. It was emotional. It was messy. And what we saw today—”

“Wasn’t any of those things,” I finished. Dean had just put into words the feeling I’d been on the verge of explaining to Michael. A killer could grow and change, their MO could develop, but the emotions, the rage, the titillation—that didn’t just go away. Whoever had attacked my mom would have been too overwhelmed by adrenaline to commit the minutiae of the scene to memory.

The person responsible for the blood in my mother’s dressing room five years ago wouldn’t have been able to reenact her murder so coldly today.