Guilty Pleasures. Tori Carrington

word.

      Of course, she understood how young she’d been then, emotionally as well as in years. And she was happy to say it had been a good long while since she’d actually thought about that time in her life.

      Until now.

      Until she’d been plucked out of Butler’s files and set up for murder.

      Oh, she’d read the news that Gerald had been arrested some time ago for charges that ranged from crimes against the federal government to murder. But she’d barely given the news piece a cursory glance and a heart pang before closing the paper and then lighting her welding torch, returning to her artwork, something that never betrayed her, never lied to her, was always there for her.

      If she’d worked for twenty hours straight in order to cleanse thoughts and memories of Butler from her mind before finally collapsing into a dreamless sleep … well, that was between her and the sculpture she’d been working on.

      Now, she cleared her throat and rubbed her nose. It was one thing to know someone you loved had never really loved you. Quite another to be set up for murder for reasons she knew benefited him.

      “You know, you didn’t ask if I did it …” she said quietly to Reece, her body already beginning to succumb to sleep again. “Just saying. If it were me, it would have been the first question I asked.”

      He didn’t respond. Not that he could.

      “See you in a while, Reece. Don’t try anything stupid …”

      HOURS LATER, JON CURSED himself for not keeping a metal handcuff key in the secret pocket sewn inside the waist of his jeans. Then again, he hadn’t expected to need one.

      He did, however, have a small pocket knife and had long since taken it out and freed himself from the plastic restraints, which were tighter then the metal ones. He’d blindly tried to pick the metal lock with the blade, only to cut himself on the pad of his thumb. He felt the blood drip from his fingers, but knew it wasn’t anything serious. It did, however, convince him to stop trying to pick the lock for a while, lest he accidentally hit a vein.

      At one point, he’d drifted off to sleep himself, leaning against the metal pole he was tied to. While Mara had switched off the ringer to his phone, she’d left it on Vibrate. And he’d listened as it buzzed almost nonstop where it sat on the desk.

      Julie, no doubt.

      Damn.

      He’d like to say his reaction was because he was afraid she was worried about him. Instead, he was more concerned his cell battery would go dead.

      He leaned his head against the pole and cursed.

      Julie …

      What wasn’t there to like? She was blonde, sexy as hell and a kindergarten teacher. All those girl-next-door qualities that brought guys sniffing.

      Just when had things started to take a bad turn?

      He couldn’t really say. They’d dated for two years before moving in together and from the get-go, he’d joked about her control-freak tendencies. He’d found them cute. Sometimes, he’d even enjoyed it when she got grumpy about one thing or another, usually connected with some imagined infraction. And she was adorable. Her sexy pout was the stuff of which dreams were made.

      Then he’d left his safe employment as an insurance salesman—a job that bored him all to hell—to take the position with Lazarus….

      To say Julie wasn’t pleased would be an understatement.

      “Come on, honey,” he’d pleaded with her for the umpteenth time when he’d left on his first assignment with a Lazarus team to search for a missing girl in Florida. “Just look at this as an opportunity for you to get in some important ‘you’ time….”

      “I don’t need ‘me’ time. I need you,” she’d said. “Besides, how am I supposed to get ‘me’ time when I’m completely responsible for Brutus?”

      Brutus was the puggle they’d adopted from an animal shelter. He’d been Jon’s surprise to her one Christmas morning.

      Oh, she’d been surprised, all right. Shocked was more the word. And unhappy.

      She never let an opportunity pass to pitch a bitch fit. “See, we could take a teacup Chihuahua anywhere we wanted to go. We wouldn’t have to worry about imposing on friends,” she’d said when he’d arranged a weekend trip to Catalina. “And there would be much less dog dirt to clean up….”

      Of course, what had he been thinking? “Julie” time was all the time.

      He grimaced.

      When had her pouting become irritating?

      The phone vibrated again.

      Was it him, or did it seem weaker somehow?

      Double damn.

      Mara’s leg jerked.

      He glanced at her. She hadn’t moved the entire time she’d been asleep. And he was sure she was sleeping. He could tell by her deep, even breathing and soft snores, the latter probably because she’d gone so long without quality shut-eye.

      Still, the fact that she could sleep at all, given what was going on, was remarkable in and of itself.

      Definitely military.

      Or some sort of similar training.

      He found his gaze trailing over her, appreciating her form. Where Julie was long-limbed and … well, elegant, Mara was toned and compact. Not that she was short. He guessed the two women were the same height. But where Julie rocked a pair of high-heeled shoes, he guessed Mara would look awkward in them.

      And the opposite applied in the case of cowboy boots. At least true ones.

      He looked at where Mara still wore her short, black combat boots. Suddenly, he could picture her as a child, the victim of schoolyard teasing: “Your mama wears combat boots.”

      Likely Mara would have cocked a hand on her hip and said, “Well, that would make her more capable than yours, now, wouldn’t it?”

      Julie, on the other hand, would have been horrified at the mere thought.

      And so would her Stepford Wife mother.

      Jon’s gaze traveled up the back of Mara’s jeans to where her bottom was rounded and pert, then to the small of her back where her T-shirt had ridden up a bit, revealing a stretch of firm flesh.

      He swallowed. Hard.

      Which seemed to be the word of the minute, because he found a certain area of his anatomy growing noticeably harder.

      He caught sight of a tattoo on the back of her left shoulder where she’d rolled up the sleeve. He squinted, trying to make it out. A bird’s wing? Angel? He couldn’t tell. There wasn’t enough visible.

      He heard sound outside.

      Jon moved his head so he could see the warehouse interior. The sun slanted low, creating dingy, golden shafts of light against the gritty floor between him and the car some seventy-five feet away. He made out the shape of someone looking in the vehicle-access-door window much the same way he had hours before.

      Competition for the bounty?

      Made sense.

      Then again, the Feds could be making another pass.

      The sound of the individual trying the door echoed in the room.

      Shit.

      He heard the quiet dragging of something metallic across the floor. He realized Mara’s breathing was no longer deep and even. She had moved only her arm and was now pulling his 9 mm closer to her side.

      Wow …

      She slowly turned to look at him, nodding in the direction of the visitor outside the building. “With you?”

      He