“You’re living in the sad, sad past,” she said, and the previous night’s conversation with Kaci came back to haunt me. “It’s time to join the rest of us in the here and now, and you better hurry up, because in six months, I’ll be good and mired in my inevitable future.”
The flat note running through her typically upbeat chatter betrayed the cheerful facade she’d been putting forth all day. As if nothing had happened between us in the woods. But every time I met her gaze, I found it a little harder to look away. We might not be talking about what had happened, but neither of us had forgotten.
“So, how far are we from the murder house?” Abby flipped the visor down and used the mirror to apply pink-tinted lip balm while I backed out of the airport short term parking spot. With the scent of strawberries came a twelve-hour-old memory of what that lip balm tasted like smeared across my own mouth.
My hands clenched around the steering wheel. Focus, Jace.
“It doesn’t matter how far we are from the scene of the crime.” I was not going to call it “the murder house.” “Because you’re not going. I’m dropping you at the lodge when I pick up Teo and Chase.”
Abby dropped the lip balm into her purse and flipped the visor back up. “I can help. You should take me.”
“FYI, becoming an enforcer makes you even more obliged to follow orders, not less.” Especially since she’d been sworn in that very morning, in the presence of five other Alphas. Everything was official.
I was stuck with her, and that was like staring at a bag of candy I would never, ever be allowed to taste.
“I’m just trying to help. Why hire me, if you’re not going to use me?”
Take me. Use me.
She had to be doing that on purpose.
“You know damn well why I hired you.” I’d had no choice. “And you can’t go to the crime scene, because you haven’t even started training yet. You, rookie enforcer, are going to spend most of your holiday break sweating through drills with Lucas and Isaac at the lodge.”
Abby twisted in her bucket seat to face me, her full lips pressed together. “Okay, I get that I have work to do and dues to pay, and putting me under the supervision of my own brothers is a great way to remind me that you’re still mad. So, bonus points for that. But isn’t this crime scene actually on the way to the lodge? I mean, we’re practically going to pass right by it.”
I glanced at her as I changed lanes and found her typing furiously on her phone, shielding the screen from the glare of the sun with her own body. “How did you know that?”
“I have the internet and a functional understanding of my map app.” She held her phone out to show me that she’d already plotted our route to the crime scene. And that it was, at a glance, almost directly on the way to the lodge.
“But where’d you get the address? They don’t release stuff like that.”
“The police and the news stations don’t, but sicko crime scene junkies who run voyeuristic blogs do.”
“Well, aren’t you…” Exhausting. “…resourceful.”
“Thanks. And since we’re in a hurry to get this thing shut down before the killer exposes the existence of shifters to all of humanity, can you really justify delaying the investigation just to take me back to the lodge?”
“Nice try.” Even if she had a valid point.
“Come on; you know I’m right. What’s the harm in stopping on the way home to scope things out? The killer isn’t there anymore, right? So, it’s not like I’d be in danger or anything. And you just admitted I’m resourceful. I might actually be useful if you give me a chance.”
“No.”
Abby scowled, and I caught the reckless gleam in her eyes too late to do anything about it. “This is because I kissed you, isn’t it?”
My fists clenched so hard around the steering wheel that it creaked. “No.” It was because she’d railroaded me into hiring her, which had started our working relationship off on the wrong foot. But I couldn’t admit that without sounding petty and unprofessional. “Are you using humor as a self-defense mechanism, or do you have no verbal filter?”
“Why? You have a problem with me kicking the elephant in the car?”
“Kicking the… Are you speaking in riddles?”
She laughed, and the comfortable quality of that sound caught me off guard. “You know, the elephant in the room? Only we’re in a car.” She rolled her eyes at my blank look. “It means we’re both avoiding a subject that makes us uncomfortable.”
“I know what it means, but your rephrase was less than helpful.”
Her laughter said she didn’t believe me.
“And I’m not uncomfortable.”
“You are so uncomfortable. But I can’t decide if that’s because you didn’t like the kiss or because you did.”
“It’s not… I don’t…” I was uncomfortable because we’d made a big mistake, and officially, I wanted to forget it ever happened.
Unofficially, I wanted to replay the moment over, and over, and over.
“Why don’t we talk about something else,” I suggested. “Anything else.”
“No problem. Let’s revisit the issue of the murder house and how I’m going with you to investigate.”