Nick took a sip. “So far, so good.”
“I’m telling you, you’re going to regret insulting this place,” she said. “It’s the best.”
“You come here a lot?” he asked.
She considered her answer. “Often enough.”
“Do you always do that?” he asked.
“What?”
“Think so hard before you answer a simple question?”
“It’s an occupational hazard,” she said.
He nodded. “I can see that.”
“What made you leave BPD?” she asked.
He raised his eyebrows. “Cut to the chase, huh?”
She shrugged.
He looked her in the eye. “Thought I’d try something new.”
She watched for tells that he was lying and didn’t find any, but her feeling that there was more to the story was more than instinct. She’d read the background on the Murphys, knew their youngest sister Erin had overdosed after Nick graduated from high school.
The knowledge felt too personal to reveal. Her interest in Nick Murphy might have been professional, but she wasn’t an asshole. This wasn’t a formal interview. She wouldn’t pick at painful details of his past unless she had to.
“Your father was on the force,” she said.
Nick nodded. “Retired now, but I imagine you already knew that.”
“He has an exemplary record,” she said. “He must have been proud when you joined.”
It was one of the things she found most intriguing about the possibility that the Murphy brothers were running a mercenary operation under the guise of MIS: the fact that their father had served BPD for thirty years without a single stain on his record.
If it were true, if MIS really was a front for something more sinister, how did they reconcile it with Thomas Murphy’s obvious dedication to the law?
“He was,” Nick said. A shadow passed over his features and he took a drink of his coffee. “He’s a good man.”
“I got that feeling,” she said. “When I read the background, I mean.”
He studied her. “Isn’t this against the rules?”
She turned her coffee cup in her hand. “I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s fair to say it’s… unusual.”
Admitting it felt treasonous, like she was confiding in the enemy.
“So why did you agree?” he asked.
She was glad when the waiter showed up with their food. It gave her time to think about her answer, and she needed to think, because the truth was, she didn’t know why she’d agreed.
It would be easy to say it was a ploy to get information out of Nick Murphy, to find a crack in the impervious facade of MIS and the Murphy brothers, who had seamlessly closed ranks as soon as they’d realized she was with the AG’s office.
But now that she was sitting across from him it wasn’t such an easy sell. Because now that she was sitting across from him she’d realized his eyes were the green of a tropical waterfall tucked away on a forgotten island. His jaw was as defined as if it had been chiseled by a master sculptor, his dark hair adorably tousled from his run. He was at least six feet tall, his sculpted pecs and arms filling out the workout shirt he’d revealed when he’d taken off his jacket. And while his lower body was hidden by the table between them, she hadn’t been oblivious to his muscled thighs when he’d pulled her off the ground in the park.
“Something wrong?”