Page 10 of Clay

He liked things clean and orderly. Like the room downstairs.

This… this made something inside him twist with the tiniest bit of discomfort.

But he wasn’t here to be comfortable, he reminded himself yet again. He was here to talk with Ivy about her strange call, and the text he’d received would hopefully tell them who’d been on the other end of the line.

Then Ivy surprised him one more time by heading to the far wall and another set of stairs that he hadn’t even seen until she headed that way.

“C’mon. I want to talk about this in the open air, with the sun on my face.”

Bemused, he followed her yet again and walked into yet another layer of Ivy Foster.

The rooftop deck was as surprising as the rest of her. Comfortable rattan furniture rested beneath a large sunshade that’d be barely visible from the street. In fact, even with his training, he hadn’t noticed a thing out of the ordinary when he’d approached the building. So bravo to her for blending into the neighborhood seamlessly.

The waist-high wall concealed her improvements and was so non-standard in buildings like this it made him wonder what the structure had been before she’d transformed it.

He settled onto one of the chairs, took a sip from his mug of coffee and held back a grimace. He was more of a tea man, and this tasted just awful.

Ivy moved about the space, fussing with a succulent in a bright pot, fluffing a pillow, before sitting opposite him. She'd been nesting, trying to make herself comfortable in an attempt to center herself.

He recognized it… because even though they were diametric opposites in personality, style, and taste, he did the same thing when he was unsettled. Probably because he’d never had much to nest with and so had made his condo the first true expansion of his character in his life.

While she fiddled, he looked at the text from Dev.

Damn. The number that’d called her was from a burner phone, which wasn’t all that surprising, but given the fact her friend had disappeared, Dev was taking it more seriously than a teenager screwing around. He was currently working on triangulating the source, but that would take a bit of time, since he had to hack into a different part of the phone company to get that intel.

While he was poking around, he’d pull anything he could on McAlister’s call and text history as well.

Ivy finally sat, peeling the label from a bottle of water she’d grabbed from a subtly camouflaged refrigerator.

“I feel silly,” she said. “It was just a phone call, a heavy breather.” She said the words with such force he knew she’d almost worked her way into believing them.

He hated to burst her bubble, but this job just kept getting murkier, and he didn’t like it one little bit.

At his core he was a protector, always had been, and right now, instinct was telling him to protect this woman. He couldn’t put his finger on why, but he’d heed his intuition. The rest of the team was doing their thing in looking for McAlister anyway, so he’d just hang tight with Ivy, at least for the time being. Just in case.

“With your friend missing, we need to act as if it’s more. And it might be,” he said, keeping his voice calm, soothing. “It was from a burner phone, which is not something someone on the level calls from. We’re trying to track where it originated from now.”

She stared at him, as if not comprehending his words, then it seemed to hit her.

Everything in him wanted to cross the space between them, to take her into his arms again and soothe her. But then her expression firmed up, her head tilted in a way he was positive she wasn’t aware of, and she got a glint in her eye.

“The asshole was trying to scare me,” she said, anger threading through her tone.

Damn, she was fantastic.

“Screw that,” she said. Then looked him square in the eye. “This has something to do with Katie going missing, I know it does. Before we go any further, how about you tell me your name?”

~

Ivy would have snickered at the expression of mortification on his face if she wasn’t so mad.

Mad that the jerk on the phone had succeeded in scaring her. Mad that she’d allowed that negative energy into her space. Mad that she’d allowed this man to cross her threshold without even knowing his name.

Shit, he may have even been the bad guy, masquerading as SMS.

She discarded the thought as soon as it formed. This guy, whatever the hell his name was, was legit. It screamed from his pores.

“Clay,” he said. “My name is Clay Andrews.”

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