“Well, Sam still wrote me a speeding ticket on Christmas Eve. Probably gonna cost me a couple hundred bucks.”
“Probably because you shouldn’t have been speeding.”
His lips twitched slightly. If he was concerned over the ticket or the ensuing cost, he didn’t particularly look it.
He knew Hayley’s name but not Sam’s? Being the only female deputy sheriff around, she stood out even more than Hayley, the psychologist.
She pushed aside the thought and picked up her sandwich, only to set it back down again. She plucked a French fry from the pile and nibbled on the end instead. They were crispy. Salty. Still hot and exactly the way she liked them. But her stomach still didn’t seem thrilled at the prospect of food. She forced down the rest of the fry anyway and wiped her fingers on a fresh napkin. It was the last one in the dispenser. The rest were on the floor performing sop-up duty.
When a burst of laughter came from one of the nearby tables, she made herself meet Seth’s eyes because she was a grown woman and no longer a socially awkward teen. “What are you doing in here alone?” Unfortunately, the question came out more blunt than flirtatious, and she wished the floor would just swallow her whole.
He didn’t answer. Merely lifted his beer bottle and finished off the contents. Then he set the bottle back down alongside her cosmo, and his knuckles grazed hers. She went hot in spots that didn’t show from the outside and was glad for that. He reached for his wallet, pulled out a few dollars and left them on the table and filched several more French fries, which he ate in one gulp as he stood.
Maybe if she’d spent more time developing a social life instead of her career, she wouldn’t get all hot and bothered by the briefest, most unintentional contact imaginable.
“You have someone to drive you home?” he asked in his deep voice. Drive sounded more like drahve. He was looking at her cocktail glass.
She managed, somehow, to loosen her tight fingers from around the stem and blood reentered her fingertips. “I’m walking.” She lifted the sandwich again, but her roiling stomach kept her from taking the charade of hunger any further.
“It’s snowin’ outside.”
“It often does around here this time of year,” she said with such blitheness she was actually impressed with herself.
“I’ll drive you.” He lifted the sandwich out of her suddenly lax fingers and set it on the plate. Before she could gather her wits, he’d grabbed the towel from her lap and cupped his hand around her elbow. “Come on.”
She stood, because, well, what else could she do considering the way he was tugging her off the barstool? “I don’t want to go home,” she blurted, the fake blitheness beyond her reach again. Her grandmother, Vivian, was staying with her. And facing her would mean admitting what a disaster Hayley’s latest attempt to visit her parents had been. Avoiding that embarrassment was the very reason why Hayley had been warming the barstool in Colbys in the first place.
Seth dropped the towel on the table. “Then we’ll go to my place.”
She stared at him. She couldn’t help it. “And do what?”
His gaze drifted over her face. “I think we can find something to entertain us. Don’t you?”
Her belly lurched. There was no mistaking his meaning.
His lips twitched slightly as he looked pointedly at the table. “You going to pay your check? Or does your friend let you eat and drink for free?”
Truth be told, Jane never wanted Hayley to pay for anything in Colbys, but Hayley always insisted. Flushing darker than ever, she snatched her purse from the back of the barstool and left a wad of cash on the table to cover her tab plus a tip.
“All right, then.” His faint smile widened a bit as he held out her coat for her.
Swallowing hard, Hayley slid her arms into the sleeves. Seth’s hands lingered on her shoulders for a moment. Something was going wrong with her breathing. “My jeans are wet,” she said stupidly.
His smile widened. His teeth were white and very straight, except for the faintest gap between his two front teeth.
“I think we can do something about that, too,” he said leaning forward near her ear.
Then he spread his palm across the small of her back and nudged her gently toward the door.
Head spinning, not knowing what else to do and not wanting to do anything else anyway, Hayley mindlessly put one foot in front of the other and walked out of the bar with him.
Three months later
His jaw going so tight that it actually ached, Seth stared at the other man. “You have got to be kidding me.”
Tristan Clay’s calm expression didn’t change; his light blue eyes looked glacial. “Do I look like I’m joking?”
Seth clenched his teeth to keep from spitting out an oath. There was a time and a place for that, and here in his boss’s home while Tristan and his wife hosted a joint wedding shower for their nephew and his fiancée was definitely not it.
Fortunately, the honorees, Casey Clay and Jane Cohen, were on the far side of the room and were the focus of everyone else’s attention. But Seth still kept his voice down. “I don’t believe you’ve fallen for this—” he hesitated, revising the words he wanted to say “—story that Jason McGregor has amnesia.”
“That’ll be up to Dr. Templeton to determine,” Tristan said smoothly. “She’ll be the one treating him. But the condition does occur. My own brother dealt with it once upon a time.” He smiled suddenly and lifted his beer mug in salute when he overheard Casey say something about him hosting the party. “Thank my wife, Hope,” Tristan announced loudly to the assembled guests. “Everyone knows she’s the brains behind this gig.”
Laughter and smiles followed as Hope Clay, easily as beautiful as women half her age, rolled her eyes and continued nudging wrapped gifts toward Casey and Jane.
Seth’s contribution to the effort had been a case of microbrew from some dinky little startup out in Arizona that Casey had a liking for. The fact that his coworker was marrying the owner of a bar and could get all the beer he wanted had already been laughed about.
“Whatever happened with your brother is one thing. But McGregor should be facing murder charges,” Seth told Tristan, not for the first time. “Not your hired shrink’s couch.”
His boss didn’t blink. On the surface, Tristan Clay was the brilliant mind that had started Cee-Vid as a little video gaming company several decades ago and built it into a hugely successful player in the world of consumer electronics and gaming. But more important, behind the company’s front, he was the number-two guy at Hollins-Winword, a secret organization with an even longer history of black ops and international security.
Cee-Vid, where Seth and Casey ostensibly worked, was pretty much a household name.
Hollins-Winword, though, was a closely guarded secret that not even the real employees of Cee-Vid knew about.
“Dr. Templeton isn’t my shrink,” Tristan said in a low voice. “She’s an impartial professional whose expertise and discretion were good enough to get this whole operation approved in the first place. She knows only what she needs to know about HW in order to do her job well.”
Seth’s fists curled, frustration ticking like a bomb inside his gut. “And how’s that supposed to help Jon and Manny?” They’d been McGregor’s partners up until the point when their bodies had been discovered in a Honduran hut six months ago. McGregor had been nowhere to be found until a few months later, and only then because he’d