Page 48 of Wicked Sin

“I don’t think I have a suit that would fit you,” I joke. But that only brings up the image of her skinny-dipping.

“I brought one,” she said. “Packed it when I thought I might be able to stay at the Wilshire while this was being sorted out.”

“I’m sorry that this isn’t the Wilshire.” I take a deep breath. “How about when it’s dark? I don’t want to be too paranoid, but it’s harder to be seen from overhead that way.”

She nods, staring out the window. “After the last two days—and the rest of my life behind it—I don’t think there’s such a thing as too paranoid.”

I sit down on the chair nearest her. Close enough to talk, but not so close that I’m crowding her. “About before…”

She pauses a beat before turning a brilliant, but cold smile on me. “That was wrong of me.”

“It’s been a long couple of days. It’s normal to develop intense connections—”

“I use people for sex.” She stares me down like she wants me to argue. “I manipulate men like other people breathe. Don’t make this something that it’s not.”

Well, all right then. “Deal.”

She looks back out the window for a moment, then sighs and turns back to the small living room. “Can I watch TV?”

“Knock yourself out.”

I go to the kitchen and double-check what I have in terms of food on hand. I’ve got enough to get us through the day, but I’ll need to do a grocery run soon.

I use people for sex.

Don’t we all? Obviously, not the way she means it, but that’s what dating is.

I manipulate men like other people breathe.

That one is harder to normalize. She probably does. Looking back over the last forty hours, I could probably pick out moments when she manipulated me.

Hey, Luke.

Heat crawls up the back of my neck.

But the kiss wasn’t that. For one thing, she was out of control when she did it. For another, it didn’t advance any kind of cause. It wasn’t good misdirection; it wasn’t getting me off course of an investigation.

She has no reason to truly want to manipulate me.

Which brings me to the thought that she just can’t help it. That she was sexualized from an early age, and was manipulated herself through her teens. She learned a lot of harsh rules about life as she moved into adulthood.

Nobody has ever shown her any other way to be.

Police work isn’t social work. That’s a rule drilled into us all the time. But I don’t think I’m trying to fix Taylor.

I wasn’t lying to her when I said I like her. In a weird way, across our very different worlds, Taylor feels like someone I could be friends with. One of those rare personality matches where we just click.

And then I had to go and fuck it up by kissing her.

I’m not doing either of us any favors by pretending our relationship is a normal cop-protecting-a-witness dynamic. That went off the rails somewhere and we’re not going to go back. But we can’t move forward unless I try something else.

I can’t expect her to be honest with me if I’m not honest with her.

I pour myself a cup of coffee and go back into the living room. The TV is on, but she’s not watching it. She’s flipping through a magazine.

Sitting down on the far end of the couch, I wait her out. She takes a while, but finally she sighs and puts down the magazine. “Yes?”

“I thought we could talk.”

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