Page 41 of Misadventures in Blue
Fantasies that would rob him of his youth and the rest of his life.
Fantasies that can never come true.
Monday morning finds me at my desk two hours earlier than normal.
Without Jace laid out behind me in a wall of warm male, I find it hard to sleep, and then I also find myself intensely irritated because I shouldn’t miss him so damn much after such a short time. After repeatedly telling myself nothing can ever come of our ill-advised liaison. After doing my goddamn best to guard my heart.
But I do miss him. I do.
After tossing and turning and barely skimming under the surface of consciousness into bleak dreams, I finally gave up and decided to start the day. So here I am, poring back over the license plate data from the last burglary. Last week, I had Jace run the plates through our system to see if anything came back flagged as linked to a criminal record, and we got a few hits. All dead ends.
Now I’m back to the beginning, narrowing the list down to the plates caught in the hour before the alarm was triggered and then seeing if I can find any patterns. It stands to reason that any burglar worth their salt would have done reconnaissance before—at least driven by once or twice—so I go back to the larger data pool to see if I can find any matches.
Ah, the glory of detective work. Spreadsheet-driven analysis and data tabulation. No wonder there’s so many TV shows about us.
After getting a fresh mug of hot water for tea—tea that I get endless taunting for drinking in a station full of coffee addicts—I pull up emails from the different office managers listing the plates of employee cars so I can eliminate them from any potential patterns I find. I highlight all of those and then cross-reference them with information from the burglary sites.
I find something.
I roll out my shoulders and take a sip of tea as I consider the screen, and then I pull up our informational system and run a plate through. Since it’s a cop system, it takes a long minute to load, and I click back to the spreadsheet while it searches, tapping my fingers against my lips.
The same plate number pops up at four of the five burglaries within an hour of the alarms being triggered. And at scene number five? The car passed through the closest intersection at 7:48 that morning and didn’t pass back through until 10:23 at night. Three minutes after the alarm had been triggered.
Drywall, I think. The stupid drywall.
I cli
ck back to the database to see the car is registered to a woman in her late forties named Debbie Pisani.
I scribble a quick note to Jace about where I’m going, grab the keys to a squad car, and head out the door, calling a patrol captain as I go.
Chapter Twelve
Jace
I nearly jerk my dick raw that weekend, being away from Cat. Three weeks of her in my bed and I’ve turned into something insatiable and ravenous. I’ve always had a healthy appetite before, but now with Cat, my need to fuck has exploded into a ceaseless, throbbing ache. An ache only she can ease, and she’s not here to do it.
I could call. I know I could. I could show up at her doorstep right now, and she’d let me inside and we’d fuck until this awful thing between us tucked its tail and hid. We could lose ourselves and our hurt in each other’s bodies, and maybe things would go back to how they were.
But I don’t want that.
I don’t want things to be how they were. I want more, and I’m not going to cheat us out of something better simply because a day and a half without Cat is agony.
No.
I love her. I need her forever. And I know I’m going to need every tool in the box to woo her away from these superstitions about age and occupation.
The most important tool: time.
Time for both of us to cool down. To miss each other. Time for the argument to recede enough that we can see all the unspoken fears underneath the words we said to each other.
So I settled for my hand as my body demanded its woman, and I made plans. Of what to say, what proofs to give, of when I’d concede her points and when I’d kiss the arguments right off her perfect mouth. We just have to get through work today, and then I’ll take her home and tell her about my love over and over again until she realizes that love is strong enough to swallow up everything else. What are some years between us when I love her so much? What is a job? Nothing at all.
But she’s not at her desk when I get there, even though I’m easily fifteen minutes early. I set down the cup of tea and donut I got for her—despite all the silk blouses and high school dressage trophies, Cat likes donuts just as much as any other cop, although she prefers the gourmet honey-and-sea-salt-type flavors to the glazed ones we usually have at the station—and then read over the note she left by her desk.
Ran out to reinterview Gia Pisani. Back by lunch.
I’m reading it over a second and third time when the phone at her desk rings. I answer it, in case it’s her.
