I grinned at him, a gesture I wouldn’t have dreamed possible during this conversation. But then again, this was Keltan. He broke all the rules.
“It totally does,” I informed him, eyes roving over his face. My hand trailed down the taut ridges of his abs. “But that’s okay. I like dirty old men. I love them, in fact. Well, not them. One dirty old man in particular.”
My teasing had its intended effect, the hardness pressing into me, plus the blackening of desire in his eyes. That was until my last sentence.
Then he froze. Literally. His entire body.
I couldn’t even feel the rise and fall of his breath.
I frowned at him in concern until it came back. “Okay, I know I said you’re an old man, but don’t keel over right here, right now. We’ve only just started this,” I instructed. “Or properly started,” I corrected.
“You love me,” he said instead of responding to my statement.
I stared at him. “Of course, I love you,” I replied simply.
And then I wasn’t on top of him any longer. I was flipped so his body pressed on top of mine, him bracing himself on his forearm so I wasn’t squashed by his muscled expanse.
So I could breathe.
“Of course, you love me?” he rasped, his accent rounding the words in a beautiful caress.
“Yes,” I whispered. “Of course. I have since bungee jumping and crunchy peanut butter. Even before then.” My voice was so small and quiet, but the chaos had receded so there was nothing to obscure it.
His eyes were glittering with everything. “Been livin’ in chaos, baby. Since I put my ass on the plane to go to a war I thought would be noble to fight in. No respite.” He paused. “Sometimes chaos is good, great.” His hand ghosted down my hip to tell me exactly what kind of chaos he was referring to. “But I’ve been craving a sort of stillness that I thought would be lost forever. Until you. Until everything with you, but mostly until you said those three fucking words. Warning you, babe. Now that you said them, I ain’t livin’ in chaos again. Ever. Not unless it’s when I’m inside you.”
I blinked at him. At the words that should have scared me. Terrified me. I’d spent so much time pushing him away you’d think they would have me wanting to run. To sprint.
“No. I don’t ever want chaos again either,” I whispered back.
Fuck running.
Standing still was best.
Until chaos came back in.
And then we’d face it together.
“Walker! Where the fuck are we with this story?”
I jumped from the perusal of the piece of paper in my hand that I’d been comparing with my search on Google.
Shipping manifests were not actually easy to read. And the list of items on this particular one looked reasonably usual to me. At least nothing was jumping out and straight-up saying “this is the reason a woman got murdered and here’s how to tie it to her murder.”
So inconvenient.
Plus, it was the first time I’d had to look at it since I was kept very busy the night before.
I whirled in my chair, meeting Roger’s eyes.
“We are in a good place,” I lied.
He crossed his arms, his cheeks moving as he sucked his lozenge. “A good place would be that screen—”He nodded to the computer. “—being filled with words of a fuckin’ story. Not….” He squinted. “Google, Jesus.”
I clicked it off. “I’ve got this.” I waved the paper like a child wanting their parent to approve of their homework.
He leaned forward, snatching it off me to look. “And what is this?”
“A manifest.”
“I fuckin’ see that, Walker,” he muttered.
“A manifest that may or may not have been what the murderer was looking for,” I told him, voice low, mindful of Stephanie’s ears.
He glanced up at me, no longer irritated. Or quite as irritated.
“The cops know about this?” he asked, waving the paper.
“They may not,” I hedged.
He shook his head, thrusting it back at me. “I never touched this.”
I took the paper.
“And I never told you to push the fuck out of the manifest before you give it to the proper authorities,” he added.
I grinned. “Yes, sir.”
“Don’t fuck it up.”
I nodded.
And then he was gone.
Leaving me with Google and the jumble of words that was the manifest. The police didn’t know about it. It wasn’t exactly obtained by legal means, that was for sure. And if I wanted to get technical, it was withholding evidence. But procuring it in itself was already breaking the law, and I was an all-or-nothing kind of girl. And I would give it to them. Once I figured out how to use it for my story.
Keltan didn’t exactly know about it either.
We didn’t really have time to talk about such things, too busy talking about the demons of the past, and then doing the whole “I love you” thing. My stomach dipped just thinking about that. And what came after that.