“What?” she whispered.
“What… the fuck… was that?” he ground out.
“I –” she started, blinking again, but he didn’t let her continue.
“Don’t do that shit again, Faye,” he growled, took a step toward her and pointed in her face. “Do not do that shit again.” He dropped his hand but put his face where his hand had been and kept growling. “I don’t know what bullshit game you’re playin’, following me around, suddenly everywhere I am. But straight up, I’m not playin’ it. You got some romantic idea I’m a wounded soul you can heal with…” he shook his head and flipped out a hand, “your limited charms, think again. I already told you, I do not want your concern. I do not want your company. And I do not want your inexperienced bullshit fumbling. Trust me, I had in my bed the master at that shit and she got nowhere. And you, just now, got as much as you’ll ever get. Get this in your head, Faye, all I want from you is for you to leave me the fuck alone.”
He didn’t allow the look on her face to register. He didn’t know what was happening with her. What he did know was, for her sake, he had to make his point clear. And if that meant being a dick, he had to be a dick.
So he was a dick.
He turned around and prowled to the door.
But at it, he braced, turned back and looked at her. He ignored the pain back in her features and the fact that it was magnified to such an extreme, if he wasn’t set on ignoring it, honest to Christ, it would have brought him to his knees.
“You get a book, you call Frank Dolinski. I’ll brief him, he’ll be your point of contact from now on,” he informed her, turned, yanked open and strode through the door, through the Station and straight outside where he walked to his truck.
And while he did this, he didn’t give one fuck that Jon’s eyes followed him the whole way nor did he care what that would mean tomorrow would bring.
Chapter Three
Drift Away
You’re giving up?!?!?
I stared at the message box on my computer and sighed.
Yes, I was giving up. A week ago, Chace had laid it out. I didn’t get it. I wasn’t experienced enough to know. It felt for a good while there, when his arms were around me tight, his lips locked to mine, his hand in my hair, that he was into kissing me…
Kissing me.
And oh, my, fraking Lord, what a kiss.
And to be that good, it seemed he had to be into it. Into me. Like Lexie said. Way into me in a hungry heart, longing, soul destroying if you can’t have it, put your life on the line to get it kind of into me, well, into me.
Then I suddenly wasn’t in his arms and he was making it perfectly clear he was not into me.
Not at all.
Not even a teeny, tiny bit.
And I had a wise father who liberally shared his wisdom, a wise mother who shared her wisdom through deed rather than action and I also had a Master’s in Library Science.
I was no dummy.
I got it.
So I was giving up.
I lifted my hands to the keyboard and typed to my on-line friend Benji, We weren’t getting anywhere anyway.
We were! He typed back. It has to be someone in The Elite who hired the hit. And we’ve already discovered some of the players! The money behind the corruption. The money that paid for a clean hit. We have to keep digging.
I’d met Benji on a forum celebrating everything that was the new Battlestar Gallactica, or, as Benji called it, “The best television show fraking ever.”
I disagreed. I loved Battlestar Gallactica but Firefly was by far and away the best television show ever which made its mid-season cancellation an act (I thought) of sacrilege. Fortunately, they made a movie about it. And also fortunately, Nathan Fillion moved onto another awesome show, Castle.
But nothing topped Firefly.
Nothing.
Years ago, Benji and my relationship had gone off-forum and grown so I’d introduced him to my other on-line friend SerenityWash. I’d met her on a Firefly forum and that was her screen name. Me thinking she was a “her” was the fact that she could perv on Nathan Fillion for hours in a way that I wasn’t sure but I thought could not be gay-love. Serenity and I were friends, close. We’d “known” each other years and we messaged each other all the time, talking about life, jobs, family, thoughts, feelings, emotions but I didn’t know her real name, her gender, where she lived or anything tangible about her. All of this she gave hints at but at the same time guarded like it was a State secret. So I never knew if the hints were real or if she was trying to throw me off-track.
SerenityWash was her screen name, the name of the spaceship in Firefly, “Serenity”, plus her favorite character from the show, “Wash”.