“You think I don’t know the difference between a woman leveled by an orgasm and one trying to keep her dinner down? I know what I saw. Then you tore out of here not thirty seconds later looking all sweaty and hungry—and not in the food way, mind you. You looked like you were about to devour something…or someone.”
“Maybe I had the stomach bug too.”
“I say this with love. Bullshit.”
“I had official police business.”
Sloane tapped a finger to her chin. “Hmm. Since when is getting naked considered official police business?”
I jabbed the brush into the paint, then slapped it against the wall. Maybe if I ignored her, she’d go away.
“You rattle her,” Sloane said behind me.
I stopped painting and turned to look at her. “What?”
“Lina. You rattle her. It takes a lot to do that.”
“Yeah, well, the feeling’s mutual.”
Her smile was bright and smug. “I can see that.”
Hoping the conversation was over, I turned my attention back to the wall.
“It’s good to have you back, Nash,” Sloane said softly.
On a sigh, I dropped the brush. “Now what’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know what it means. I’m glad to see you returning to the land of the living. I was worried. I think we all were.”
“Yeah, well, I guess it takes some of us longer to bounce back. So what’s with you and Lucian?” I asked, changing the subject and stabbing the brush into the deepest part of the gouge.
“Don’t you mean Nolan? Who, by the way, is currently sitting in my office eating all my candy.”
“No, I mean Lucian. You and Nolan might be havin’ a few laughs, but he’s not Lucian.”
She was too quiet. I looked up and saw she’d carefully rearranged her face into a mask.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“You’re not supposed to lie to a cop,” I reminded her.
“Is this an official interrogation? Should I get a lawyer?”
“You know my secret,” I said, nodding toward the wall.
The tension went out of her shoulders and she rolled her eyes. “It happened a long time ago. Water under the bridge,” she insisted.
Piper tiptoed around me to sniff tentatively at Sloane’s sneakers. The librarian crouched down and offered her hand to the dog.
I went back to the wall. “You know what I remember from back in the day?”
“What?”
“I remember you and Lucy sharing these long, meaningful looks in the hall between classes. I remember him ripping the helmet off Jonah Bluth and putting him on his ass during football practice because Jonah said something about your body that I as an adult man with great respect for women won’t repeat.”
“It was about my boobs, wasn’t it?” Sloane quipped. “The price you pay for developing early.”
I gave her a long, steady look until she flinched.
“Did Lucian really do that?” she asked finally.
I nodded once. “He did. I also remember driving home after curfew from some particularly heavy making out with Millie Washington and seeing someone who looked a hell of a lot like Lucian climbing the tree outside your bedroom window.”
Sloane had been a sophomore and next-door neighbor Lucian a senior. They’d been as much opposites then as they were now. The broody bad boy and the pretty, peppy nerd. And as far as I knew, neither had ever officially acknowledged the other beyond “hey” in the hallowed halls of Knockemout High School.
But outside those halls was another story. One neither of them had ever shared.
Sloane focused on coaxing Piper closer to her hand. “You never said anything.”
“Neither of you seemed to want to talk about it so I left it alone. Figured it was your business,” I said pointedly.
She cleared her throat. The noise sent the dog scampering back to the safety of my reach. “Yeah, well, like I said, that was a long time ago,” she said, standing back up.
“Doesn’t feel good to have people shoving their noses in your business, does it?”
She gave me a chilly librarian glare and crossed her arms. “If I stick my nose someplace, it’s because someone isn’t doing what they need to be.”
“Yeah? Well, from where I sit, this animosity between you and Luce isn’t healthy. So maybe I should start inserting myself into that situation. Help you two come to a resolution.”
She blew out a breath through her nostrils like a bull facing off against a red flag. The stud in her nose twinkled. The standoff lasted all of thirty seconds. “Ugh, fine. I’ll stay out of your business and you stay out of mine,” she said.
“How about this?” I countered. “I respect your privacy and you respect mine.”
“Sounds like semantics to me.”
“Might sound that way, Sloaney Baloney. But we’re friends. Have been for years. Far as I can tell, our lives are gonna stay tangled up. So maybe instead of butting in and being nosy, we focus more on bein’ there for each other when needed.”
“I don’t need anyone to be there,” she said stubbornly.
“All right. But I might need a friend if I can’t convince Lina to take a chance on what we’ve got.” She opened her mouth, but I held up a hand. “I probably won’t want to talk much about it if I lose, but I sure as hell am gonna need a friend to help keep me from disappearing again.”
Sloane’s face softened. “I’ll be there.”
“And I’ll be there for you if and when you need me.”
“Thanks for fixin’ my wall, Nash.”
“Thanks for bein’ you, Sloaney.”
I was just closing up the paint can when dispatch called for me over my radio. “You out and about, Chief?”
“I am.”
“Bacon Stables has a horse on the loose again. Had a couple of reports of a big, black stallion galloping its ass southbound on Route 317.”
“On my way,” I said on a sigh.
“I can’t believe you won him over with a damn carrot,” I said as Tashi Bannerjee handed the reins of the big-ass Heathcliff to Doris Bacon, who was holding an ice pack to her ass.
We were standing in waist-deep weeds in the east pasture of the foreclosed Red Dog Farm, a fifty-acre horse property that had sat empty for going on two years since its owner’s multi-level marketing skincare business went belly-up.
Heathcliff the stallion had decided he didn’t feel like riding around the ring today and had bucked Doris off on her ass before heading south.
The seventeen-hundred-pound son of a bitch had kicked the passenger door of my SUV and tried to take a bite out of my shoulder before Tashi had distracted him with a carrot and snagged his reins.
“You handle the snakes, Chief, and I’ll take the horses.”
“I seem to recall you riding one of Heathcliff’s relatives through a drive-thru your senior year,” I teased.
She grinned. “And look how that paid off.”
I kept my distance as Tashi and Doris coaxed the humongous horse up the trailer ramp.
Something tickled between my shoulder blades and I turned around. Two deer jolted, then disappeared into the woods. There was nothing else out there. Just weeds and trees and broken fences, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling that something or someone was watching us.