Page 21 of Love Me Darkly
Giving him another meaningful look, she took up her tray and left, heading back to the bar. He didn’t dare turn his head, but could feel the Donovan’s gaze boring into the side of his head.
After a beat of silence, Donovan laughed, reaching out to clap one hand on Mateo’s shoulder. “Oh, snap!”
Rolling his eyes, he turned to meet Donovan’s gaze. “What?”
“I’m impressed. That whole brooding guy thing you have going on works like a charm. You got game.”
Mateo watched Melody empty her tray of the empty shot glasses. “I’m too old to have game.”
Donovan snorted. “False. Old guy game is the best game. You have all the experience. You’re all wise and shit. Women love that.”
“It’s not like that.”
“Right,” Donovan drawled. “The fact that you two were practically eye-fucking each other just now isn’t an issue.”
“Williams told us to blend in, so I’m blending in. You should try it.”
Donovan had been about to reply, but movement near the VIP section caught his eye.
“We got something,” he said, inclining his head toward the booth where five men were getting settled and attempting to gain Melody’s attention. Among them were Suede, Morrison, and Wilson.
Only Jones and the surveillance team would be able to hear what was being discussed in the booth, but Mateo watched them anyway. He didn’t want to miss anything that could offer him a clue to what Suede and his crew might be up to tonight. Melody treated the men as she had the other night, smiling and laughing with them, spinning in a circle to show off her outfit as they looked her over.
“I’m telling you, something isn’t right with her,” Mateo said. “She knows them.”
“Maybe,” Donovan hedged. “I’ll leave you to figure that out. I’m gonna go piss, and then I’ll hang out downstairs for a while.”
It was a good idea, and maybe while he was downstairs, Donovan would see something of interest. For his part, Mateo was rooted to the spot. Melody would come looking for him during her break, and that would be his chance to dig into her life a little more. It wasn’t why he had come here, but he wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight for the suspicion tearing him up inside. He couldn’t make a move on Suede or the others without the information they might gather from the wiretap. That left only Melody for the night, and he was determined to keep her in his sights. He watched her serve drinks, stopping frequently at the VIP booth to replace empty bottles and dirty glasses. At one point, she joined the VIPs on the leather sectional and stayed for a good ten minutes.
Mateo tried to reconcile this version of Melody with the one he’d shared coffee and beignets with and found it impossible. From the outside, she appeared the same, if only a little more polished. But Mateo had been trained to read people, to look past the surface to what they were hiding. His study of Melody had already begun exposing contradictions. It wasn’t just that he’d seen her dressed down and without makeup, or that when she wasn’t entertaining customers, she looked bored to tears. Everything about her was altered in the environment of the club, completely at odds with the woman he’d been following in his spare time. She walked differently, carried herself with aloofness and a touch of conceit. She attracted stares every time she moved from one place to the other, yet ignored those stares as if she thought herself above the people who dared to try undressing her with their eyes.
The woman from the café had been gentler, sweeter. The hard glisten in her eyes had been decidedly absent, and even her voice had softened, losing the sharpness it had when she was teasing or joking. When she hadn’t realized he was watching her, she moved differently, walked differently, held her head differently.
One of these personas was a façade, but Mateo couldn’t figure out which was her true face. He hadn’t gotten close enough to her yet. There was a part of him that wanted to get closer because of the ridiculous, delicious, spine-tingling things he felt when she got anywhere near him. Logic told him to stop thinking with his dick. It was clearly infatuated with Melody and couldn’t understand his rational mind. A mind that told him he was already entangled in one conflict of interest when it came to this case. The last thing he needed was another.
Resting his hand over his left pec, he reminded himself of the other reason he had to keep his head on straight. He closed his eyes and called up Mari’s face in his mind, holding onto her image with the ferocity that had driven him forward every hour of every day since her death. The ache in his chest intensified as his thoughts strayed to his daughter. Angelica was waiting for him to make it safe enough for her to come home. With every day, week, and month that passed, he came closer to losing her, to having her resent him for the rest of their lives for the distance he’d been forced to create between them. He had to put this to rest, even if it meant stalking Melody through the French Quarter until he had figured out what the fuck she was into. There was a chance she was a victim, playing a role forced onto her by association. He’d have Darcy examine her background, maybe see if there was a connection to Suede. He hadn’t sent their intelligence specialist Melody’s picture yet, for a number of reasons. At first, he’d been held back by Donovan’s insistence that she couldn’t be important to their case. Then, he had felt guilty for following her and intruding on her privacy. Now he realized that he should have followed his first instinct. He’d put Darcy on the job first thing in the morning.
Melody’s voice startled him out of his reverie
“I’m all yours now.”
For a moment, he couldn’t speak because he hadn’t registered anything past those four words. It took him a moment to notice the expectancy in her eyes or the furrow of her brow when it took him a little too long to respond.
I’m all yours now.
She couldn’t know what those words, in her voice, did to him.
Finally, he forced his limbs to move as he realized she did, indeed, refer to the promised dance. He was suddenly nervous, like he was about to slow dance at the fucking prom. Melody gripped his hand, which made sense given the way the crowd pushed around them as they walked toward the stairs. But even her light grip was enough to have him wanting to snatch away and nurse his hand against his chest. Forcing himself to relax, he followed her down into ‘Hell’, then took the lead to shoulder a path to the dance floor. Orange and red light pulsed in rhythm with the music, which had just begun to wind down from a thumping House mix to a throbbing, atmospheric Alternative R&B. The crowd, which had practically thrashed and rolled a moment ago eased into a rippling wave that coaxed them closer to the center of the room. A flash of orange light illuminated Melody’s face, sparking amber prisms in her eyes as Mateo was forced to grip her waist and pull her against him. The crowd swelled and pressed in, forcing them far closer than Mateo had intended. She was pressed against him from chest to hip, her hands gripping his shoulders.
For some indeterminable length of time, they didn’t move. Melody stood in his hold, staring at him with unblinking eyes. Mateo stared back, trying to see past the defenses erected around her. Defenses made of smokey eyeshadow, glossed lips, and a haughty tilt to her head. They stirred at the same time, the music pushing and pulling them in ebbing waves. He tried to put the barest inch of space between them, but someone nudged him from behind and pressed him against her again. The feel of her had Mateo gritting his teeth so hard his jaw ached. The rest of him was going liquid, melting against her gentle curves.
She used a hand against the back of his neck to pull him closer, until his cheek fell against hers and her mouth pressed against his ear.
“I didn’t think you would come tonight.”
It took him a few seconds to digest her words, caught up as he was with the weight of her fingers on the back of his neck. He felt like he would go to his knees, a tremor rippling down his spine.
“Why would you think that?”
