Page 21 of Live for Me

“Uh, yeah.”

I nodded my head as convincingly as I could muster.

He chuckled and came across the room to cage me right where I sat on this desk by placing his hands on either side of my hips.

“You know, you could just ask me beforehand? I’d probably even pose for you.”

For someone who’d always taken an awful lot of pride in the efficiency of my brain, it sure hadn’t been working well for days now.

He smirked when he seemed to grasp that I couldn’t say a fucking word while he was this close to me.

“As long as it was my good side, then,” he said and shook his head. “Come on, angel. Let’s go kidnap a crooked cop.”

He leaned down to kiss my cheek before he just walked away, like he wasn’t turning my world a little more upside down every time he welcomed himself into my personal space.

CHAPTER TEN

utah

Iwas making her terribly uncomfortable.

With pretty much everything I did.

That much was obvious.

But I couldn’t stop myself once I was close to her. She gave me the tiniest inch of just wanting to be in the room with me last night, of wanting to touch me and talk to me, and I immediately wanted ten more miles to get us to the point where I could bury myself inside her as deep as I could get, so I could erase every other male who might’ve existed in her memory.

One fucking step at a time, though.

The number of times I’d had to remind myself of that was infuriating.

She wasn’t comfortable. She wasn’t ready. Something in me made something in her hesitant. Trying tomakeher meet me in this place of fucking uncontrollable desire before she was prepared for it would just push her further in the wrong direction.

I had so many other things to focus on for the moment, anyway. I didn’t normally have accomplices physically present for these jobs. While it added the pleasant aspect of company, it also added a tension to my neck and shoulders to have the company of someone who didn’t do this side of the job. She might’ve watched New Jersey do things similar to this through a screen, but she probably hadn’t stood behind him and watched him torture a man into speaking. Being present to watch me do such a thing up close and personal might devastate thatuncontrollable desirethat I wanted her to feel, too.

Indy had been on top of Detective Samuels for several weeks now. He knew everything that cop did and on which day he did it all. Samuels worked odd hours doing odd things, but it would very much play out in my favor when it came time to snatch him out of his routine. The beauty of crooked cops was that most of them ended up being pompous assbags who believed they were too important to be knocked the fuck out when they weren’t paying attention.

Samuels seemed to end this particular workday each week by leaving his desk, going to some little pool hall with two other detectives, and then he went to the opposite end of the city to stop in at a bar where he spent no money that was traceable and didn’t even stay long enough to drink anything. All things that led me to believe he was still on the crooked side of the spectrum.

That bar, though, with its lone security camera over the front entrance, would be my best chance to grab Samuels between the building and his car, even if it did have to happen right in the middle of the fucking day with the sun shining bright.

I’d already shifted everything from the truck bed into the backseat, had the extra lock for the bed cover, kept the handcuffs and the brass knuckles, and explained to Memphis very thoroughly that she was not allowed to move from her seat inside that truck regardless of what she saw anywhere in that parking lot. I put the radio in my ear and was blessed instantly with the sound of Indy humming along to whatever he was listening to back in Indiana. It made Memphis smile, though, as the sound was also coming through the speaker on the computer in her lap.

As soon as Samuels’ car pulled into the lot, I jumped out of the truck and stood in the open door to place my gun in its holster in the front of my jeans, added a ski mask that covered everything but my eyes, and pulled the hood of my sweatshirt up.

“I’ll be on the other side of the building,” I said to Memphis. “I’ll wait there until he comes back out so I can catch him from behind. I’ll be bringing him straight over here once he’s unconscious.”

“What if—?” Memphis tried to ask before I interrupted her.

“Do not get out of this truck for anything. Don’t.”

“We don’t disobey Daddy, Memphis,” Indy added.

She definitely didn’t smile at that. I imagine the look in my eyes told her clearly enough that Indy could say whatever he wanted, but nothing about this was a joke.

“Lock the doors,” I ordered before I closed her in and made my way to the back of the building. “Someone time him,” I whispered. “Let me know when he’s likely to be on his way back out. Give me a couple seconds notice to be ready.”

“You got it, hoss,” Indy said in my ear.

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