Page 7 of Philly
Besides, they’d been kids when the shit hit the fan. And kids did and said stupid things all the time. The fact thathehadn’t gotten over that night was his problem.
“If you dry that glass any more, your wrists are going to be too sore for your other late-night activities.”
Philly’s gaze dropped to the bar. Ava Warwick perched on a stool on the other side, grinning at him. She tossed in an eyebrow waggle in case he hadn’t picked up on her entendre.
“Come on now, Ava, your imagination is better than that,” he retorted with a grin. Several of the Warwicks frequented Rita’s, but Ava was his favorite, excluding Charley and Joey. Not a Warwick by birth—she’d married Mitch Warwick a couple years back—the glamorous Black woman never hid in the shadows of her husband’s family. Opiniated, flashy, freaky intelligent, and with a wicked sense of humor, what wasn’t to love?
“The Krakens let you out tonight?” he asked, referring to Mitch and their son.
She rolled her eyes, then arched into a stretch, setting her hand on her lower back.
“That’s not a baby bump anymore,” he said, nodding to her belly as he picked up another glass.
She glared at him. “When you carry a thirty-seven-pound watermelon around on your front side for months, then, and only then, may you comment on my belly. Until then, shut it.”
He chuckled. She had a point.
“Mitch and Elijah are assembling the twins’ cribs in the nursery tonight. I had to get out of there,” she said.
“Too much chaos?” he asked, pouring her a tall glass of sparkling water. He added a slice of lime and a drop or two of habanero bitters, then handed it over.
“I wouldn’t have married Mitch if I couldn’t handle chaos. The problem is he keeps swearing at all the directions. Then Elijah repeats him—and I mean, he’s repeating things no toddler should ever say. But it sounds so ridiculously adorable that I start laughing, and I don’t want to encourage it. For his sake—and the sake of all his cousins—I had to get out of there.”
Philly snorted a laugh. Cody, Mitch’s younger brother, would think it hilarious if his twin girls picked up the words from Elijah, but the rest of the Warwick clan wouldn’t be nearly as amused.
Monk wandered back over, glanced at the box still filled with bottles, sighed, and started unpacking them.
“So, Agent Parks is back in town,” Ava said after taking a sip of her drink.
Philly felt Monk’s glance, but his brother didn’t say anything.
“Word travels fast,” Philly replied, picking up another glass to dry.
Ava shrugged. “Not really. Not about this, anyway. She’s staying at the lodge. I stopped by last night to run a check on the security system and saw her having dinner at the bar.” Ava worked with Leo on the cybersecurity team at HICC—a private security company with its West Coast headquarters south of town. Their bread-and-butter projects tended to be things like hunting terrorists and stopping drug cartels, but they helped family and friends, too.
“What’d she want?” Ava asked, cutting to the chase.
Philly paused. He’d spent most of the day dealing with the emotional aftermath of seeing Callie again, but that question had popped into his head more than once. She hadn’t given him any details about her investigation or what she thought Laura might know.
Glancing at Monk, he raised an eyebrow in question. Laura Nolan was all their concern. Monk held his gaze, then gave a tiny shrug, leaving it up to him how much he wanted to share.
“You two are as subtle as a train wreck,” Ava muttered before taking another sip of her drink.
“I’ll go take that drink order,” Monk said, tipping his head to a group gathered at the end of the bar. Philly nodded and shifted as his brother passed behind him.
“I don’t know,” he said, answering Ava’s question. “Whatever she told me, it’s not the whole story.”
Ava tapped one of her long fingernails—painted black and orange with a tiny white ghost on it—against her glass. “It rarely is with the FBI. Cagey fuckers,” she muttered. “As if I couldn’t uncover their entire life story in less than an hour if I wanted.”
The scary thing about Ava’s statement is that Philly didn’t think she was kidding. She couldn’t do it legally, but everyone on the HICC cyber team had skills best left not talked about.
“Talk to me,” she said, refocusing on him and leaning forward. Well, as much as she could with her pregnant belly. The one he wasn’t going to mention ever again.
“She came to me for information on a woman named Laura Nolan,” he started.
“Who is?”
“The wife of Rian Nolan. She disappeared a few years back, but Callie only seemed interested in her for the information she might have on the Nolan family, not in the fact that she’s a missing person.”
