Page 114 of Wicked Sin

Once we’re parked, she reaches across the gear shift and puts her hand on mine. Her eyes are cool, calm. “Is Nora Vance the lawyer you dated?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” That’s it. She drops her gaze and unbuckles her seat belt.

“It was a while ago.”

“I know. You said that.”

“You remember everything, don’t you?”

“Probably.” She sighs and leans back against the head rest, her gaze sliding down the street. Into the distance. “This is going to sound weird, because of course I’m a little jealous—like a normal amount, that weird little twinge inside—but I like that you have a bit of a complicated past here, too. It’s kind of balancing.”

I laugh. “I like that take.”

“I thought you might.”

“I told her about us. You aren’t a dirty secret to me, Taylor. Or any kind of secret at all.”

“Oh.”

“I didn’t tell you about her because we had more pressing things going on yesterday, and then…we weren’t talking at all. It just slipped my mind because she’s just a colleague now. Has been for ages.”

“It’s fine.” She draws in another breath, a deep one, then claps her hands together. “Okay, let’s go upstairs so I can bare my soul once again.”

“Your favorite thing to do,” I murmur, leaning across the car to kiss her.

She rubs her nose against mine. “Only with you.”

McBride isin the waiting area when we arrive upstairs.

I sit down next to her. “What are you doing here?”

“Ferdinand and I just had a very interesting lunch.”

“Dining with the enemy, Sarah?”

She laughs.

But she doesn’t expand.

I pick up on her hesitance and drop it. Once Nora comes out to get Taylor, I pick it up again. “What did he say that you didn’t want to tell me in front of a witness?”

“She’s more than a witness.”

A fuck of a lot more. That’s not the point. “Fine. What did he say that you don’t want to tell me?”

“He got a weird pushback from somewhere up high on our request for flight data on Gerome Lively.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah. He brought it to me, cop to cop. I don’t think he’s our enemy.”

I rub my jaw. What the fuck does that mean? “Why would they want us to drop that, when we’d drop it anyway because we got the guy? Newcomb is our guy, right? He set up the nurse from the clinic, but he wasn’t set up by someone else, right?”

“He’s our guy. Newcomb knew where the investigation was going. He had the inside track for knowing what—and who—to put in our path that would look right. That kind of insider information wasn’t really available to Lively, anyway. And actually, I was able to use the flight data to rule himoutas a suspect, because he was elsewhere. The records alibi him. So no, I don’t get it. But I’m wondering if there’s something else I would see, if I watched that long enough.”

“But you can’t.”

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