Page 29 of Misadventures in Blue
I call him back and agree to dinner, deciding I owe him this conversation face-to-face. I won’t tell him about Jace—certainly not—but I’ll tell him there’s someone else right now. It will be a hard conversation to have, but Kenneth will understand. I doubt he spent his three years in St. Louis pining for me, and surely he didn’t expect to come back and find me pining for him.
But now it’s nearly time for that dinner—just a few hours away—and I still haven’t told Jace that I’m going out with Kenneth.
He won’t understand, I think.
But you know that he’d want to know about it anyway, I argue with myself, and then I sigh. I’m thirty-seven, and I’m obsessing over boy drama like I’m in junior high. What the hell has gotten into me?
With a sigh and a quick press of my fingertips against my forehead to help alleviate some of the pressure building there, I refocus on the files in front of me. I’ve been combing through them ever since our last two leads ran dry.
In a case as big as this, there’s always another lead. Always another angle. I just have to find it.
I’m deep into the file on the last burglary—the one where I met Jace—and I’m clicking through the photos on my laptop when I hear a deep voice ask, “Drywall?”
Startled but happy, I turn to see Jace leaning against the edge of my cubicle, looking like a cop from a cop calendar with his crossed arms showing off biceps and forearms and his pretty mouth lifted into the tiny crook that passes for a smile for him.
“Drywall?” I ask back, trying to think through the temporary haze of electric lust and happiness that descends upon me every time I see him.
He tilts his head at my desk. “You were staring at your laptop, muttering ‘drywall, drywall’ at the screen.”
“Oh.” I turn back to my desk to make a quick note while gesturing for him to come in. “I hadn’t realized I was talking out loud. How was the warehouse search?”
“Nothing there,” Jace says and takes a seat in the spare chair next to me. He brings the chair close enough that our knees touch under my desk, and I want to melt. I want to run my fingers along the cut hardness of his thigh up to the heavy cock currently pushing at his zipper.
I don’t. But the temptation is agonizing.
“Any chance they could have moved the televisions before you got there?” I ask, forcing myself to focus on the task at hand. I sent Jace to check out a couple locations that had been used to hide stuff like this before. A shot in the dark but worth looking into.
Jace shakes his head. “One warehouse is being renovated into lofts, and the place was crawling with a construction crew. No one I talked to had seen anything being moved in or out. The other was completely abandoned but had a few squatters staying inside. They swore up and down they hadn’t seen any trouble.”
“They would say that,” I murmur, but I trust Jace’s instincts—for now.
“And the drywall?” Jace asks.
I frown back at the screen. “I’m not sure yet. There’s just something about all that drywall dust at the scene that keeps tugging at me. It will come.”
“Mm,” Jace says, and from the way he says it, I can guess the word come sent his mind in a very different direction than police work.
I’d roll my eyes, but that wouldn’t be very fair of me since I’ve spent the last five minutes vaguely considering pulling him back into the meeting room for a quick round to help me last the rest of the day. The day that I’m—sigh—spending part of with Kenneth.
Tell Jace. Tell him now. He’ll be pissed, but he’ll be less pissed than if he finds out later.
I open my mouth to speak, but Jace gets there first. “I have my niece’s birthday party this evening,” he says quickly, almost as if he’s blurting it out. “It’s nothing super formal, just a barbecue and cake at my sister’s house, but I thought you could come with me. And, um. You know.” He looks down at his boots, suddenly bashful and boyish and so…un-Jace-like.
The first time I ever drove a car faster than one hundred miles per hour, I was in academy and terrified beyond all reason. Yet there was this moment as I accelerated—adrenaline screaming through my veins, and my stomach back where I left it at the starting line—when my heart floated in my chest out of sheer, exhilarated joy.
I feel that now.
Jace’s invitation to meet his family and the unusually shy way he asked—it makes me feel like I’m driving one hundred miles per hour, with my heart hammering fast and happy even as my body registers unheard of terror.
Because I know what happens when you drive fast.
You brake hard.
I can’t meet his family tonight because I have to have dinner with Kenneth, and anyway, it would be ludicrous for me to meet his family. How would I even introduce myself? As the coworker he’s been jeopardizing his job with because we can’t seem to wrangle our hormones under control? As the cougar who caught his poor, innocent body in her claws?
Jesus.
No. I can’t meet his family and his parents, who will only awkwardly be a decade or so older than myself.
