Caught (5 page)

But something about Toni Crawford and the sexy-librarian fantasies she inspired threatened his normally ironclad control.

Laurie shook her head. “If she’s sneaking out, it’s not to meet Sean. I think the guy she’s seeing is older. I never met him, though.”

“So the party was the last time you talked to her?”

“In person. She still posts on the V-Club network, but I don’t know why she bothers.”

Toni motioned to the laptop that sat closed next to Laurie on the kitchen table. “Would you mind pulling the site up for us?”

Laurie sighed and looked at her watch. “My mom and I are already late.”

Toni’s stare was cold, hard, unwavering. “Your friend is missing. Your nails can wait.”

“She’s probably passed out somewhere,” Laurie said, but she opened her laptop and clicked on the page. Laurie gestured at the screen. “I told you she’s fine—she posted a message this morning.”

Toni moved around the table until she was standing behind Laurie, who had navigated her browser to a page emblazoned with a banner that read “V-Club. Virgins of the World, Unite!”

Kara had mentioned the social network to Toni, and Toni had even tried to visit. But to visit, you had to be invited, and Kara hadn’t offered an invitation. Toni could easily have posed as a teenager seeking support for her sexual choices, but she didn’t feel right about lurking without Kara’s knowledge.

Now she wondered if she was just as stupid as the parents she mocked who thought it was important to give their kids “space.”

Posted near the top of the most recent messages was a picture of Kara, in all of her blond, fresh-faced glory.

“What does it say?” Ethan pushed out of his chair and moved to stand behind her, his tall, broad body somehow managing to move gracefully in spite of its size. Now why couldn’t she master that sort of athletic ease? She’d never quite recovered from shooting up to her current height at the ripe old age of fourteen. Though she dressed to flatter her lean frame and tried to use her height as an advantage, underneath she still felt like an awkward, clumsy teenager who could barely control her unexpectedly long limbs.

Next to Ethan, who seemed to have perfect control over every rippling muscle in his body, she once again felt like the girl her classmates so sweetly dubbed “Stork Legs” after she’d made the mistake of wearing shorts to gym class. Joyce and Laurie didn’t help, with their tiny figures that barely topped five foot three. They both looked like little brunette dolls, perfectly sized to fit in the palms of Ethan’s big, broad hands.

She could feel the heat of his body permeating her thin shirt as he leaned in to read over her shoulder. As subtly as possible, she tried to move forward but found herself pinned between the back of Laurie’s chair and the massive wall of Ethan’s chest. She resisted the urge to shove an elbow back under his ribs as her body temperature rose another five degrees. Which had nothing to do with the ridiculously masculine pheromones Ethan was giving off, and everything to do with the fact that after a lifetime in the Pacific Northwest, Toni still hadn’t become acclimated to the Bay Area’s sun-drenched summers.

She refused to acknowledge the low hum of the air conditioner and the fact that it kept the house at roughly sixty-five degrees.

A trickle of sweat rolled down Toni’s neck, and she shifted uncomfortably, careful to keep herself from erasing the millimeter of air Ethan had left between them. Hadn’t the guy ever heard of personal space?

His breath wafted over her ear as he read Kara’s posting aloud. “Just dropping by to say hi. Nothing new to report. More later.”

“She posted that at eleven thirty-eight this morning,” Toni said. Almost an hour after she’d left the Kramers.

“That’s good news, right?” Joyce said as she came back into the kitchen. On her arm was a handbag roughly the size of Canada. “If she’s posting on the Internet she can’t be in too much trouble.”

Toni nodded absently. She thought of Kara’s computer, missing from her room. Could be Kara took it and really had posted the message. But there was always a darker possibility Toni couldn’t avoid.

“It wouldn’t be hard for someone to use her computer or hijack her account,” Ethan said, echoing her thoughts.

Okay, she had to concede points for his being more than prime eye candy. “Mind if I post something really quick?”

Joyce closed her eyes in exasperation. “Fine, but then I’m afraid we really have to go.”

Toni leaned over the table and used Laurie’s account to post a quick message:

This is Toni, looking for Kara. Call or text me ASAP. Your folks are worried and so am I.

She straightened up, only to finder herself flush against Ethan, her back to his front. She shot him a glare as her butt made contact with his thighs.

“Sorry.” For a split second, something gleamed in his eyes, a mischievous spark that told her he was messing with her, that he enjoyed making her uncomfortable. But it was gone in an instant, replaced by a perfectly bland and deferential look.

“Thanks for your help, ladies,” Ethan said, turning to Joyce as he stepped out of Toni’s way.

In her hurry to get away from him, Toni took another step to the side, mortification bursting in her stomach as she stumbled over her own feet. At least she was wearing sneakers and was able to catch herself before she fell on her ass.

Joyce Friedland spared a glance for Toni, barely masking her scorn, then refocused one hundred percent of her energy on Ethan. “You’re so welcome, Ethan,” her tone almost breathless as she placed an earnest hand on his arm and stuck out her ample cleavage. It took a Herculean effort for Toni not to roll her eyes. But she couldn’t help sneaking a glance at Laurie to see if she was as embarrassed as she should be to see her mother blatantly flirting with Ethan.

If anything, Laurie looked even more enthralled with Ethan’s square jaw and buff body than her mother did.
And to think we give men a hard time for being blinded by big boobs and a pretty face.

“If there’s anything we can do, please don’t hesitate to call me,” Joyce continued. “And I mean anything.”

Okay, this was getting ridiculous. Toni stepped bodily between Ethan and Joyce and stuck out her hand, which Joyce shook reluctantly. She dug a couple of business cards from her pocket and handed one to Joyce and one to Laurie. “If you can think of any other information, anyone else she might be with, call or text me anytime. Or e-mail me. I’m always online.”

“No surprise there,” she heard Ethan mutter as she showed herself to the door. She could hear the muffled sounds of Joyce’s laughter and Ethan’s answering chuckle and had no doubt that by the time he left Ethan would have another job offer—investigating the contents of Joyce’s pants.

Before she could get in her car, she heard Ethan call over, “Hey, Toni, wait up a sec.”

Her spine stiffened, every instinct urging her to get away from this man, and fast. Then she reminded herself of Marcy Kramer’s order to keep an eye on him. Like it or not, until Kara was safe at home, she needed to resign herself to spending a lot more time with or near a man she couldn’t stop imagining naked. And wondering how it would feel to have him naked beside her.

On top of her.

Under her.

She was going to melt like a Popsicle before he reached the car.

“Was there something you needed?” Toni asked, keeping her tone cold even if her body was radiating more heat than the asphalt.

It didn’t deter him one bit. If anything, his grin widened as he strode toward her. She kept her gaze pinned firmly in the middle of his face, forbidding herself to stare at the way his trousers pulled against his strong thighs as he moved.

I really need to get out more if this is the way I’m going to react to the first remotely hot guy I see. Okay, to be fair, Ethan is more than remotely lot. He is yummy male hotness, the likes of which you rarely see, so appreciate it for what it’s worth for the next five seconds and then focus on the task at hand. Five, four, three…

“I’m thinking this will go a lot more smoothly if we work together.” he said.

She pulled her mind away from wondering whether he had a four-pack, six-pack, or full-fledged eight-pack under the cotton brocade of his shirtfront and replied, “Oh really, how so?”

“No offense, but I noticed you weren’t exactly making friends in there.” He jerked his head in the direction of the Friedlands’ house, his lips still quirked in amusement.

Her eyebrows shot up to her hairline. “Making friends isn’t part of my job description.”

“Are you always this standoffish?”

She folded her arms across her chest and jerked her chin up. “Just because I’m a professional and don’t hit on every member of the opposite sex I come into contact with doesn’t make me standoffish.”

He had the gall to look mildly offended. “I wasn’t hitting on Joyce Friedland.”

“Oh, please, like you didn’t notice the way she was practically pouring her boobs out onto your arm.”

He gave an arrogant shrug. “Women like me.”

“Not all women,” she lied and went to climb in her car, but stopped when he wrapped a big, long-fingered hand around her upper arm.

“Don’t you know it’s rude to walk away when someone’s talking to you?” he said.

“You want to tell me more about the legions of women falling at your feet?”

He gave her another smile, one that made the lines around his eyes crinkle. “We got off on the wrong foot. There’s no reason we can’t help each other out.” He leaned one hand on her car, just to the right of her shoulder, almost but not quite boxing her in. It wasn’t exactly intimidating, but the way he made her tilt her head back a notch to look up at him was his way of establishing authority. He was good at this, taking command with his size and his charm, so subtly that most people probably didn’t even notice he was doing it.

“Yeah? How so?”

“I don’t know who you’ve worked with before, but people in this area are used to a certain amount of ass-kissing.”

“At which you obviously excel,” she muttered.

His blue eyes turned steely, and for the first time she got a glimpse of a hardness that matched his tightly honed exterior. “When necessary, yeah. Especially if it helps me find out the information I need. Now, you do ninety percent of your investigating at your keyboard. Am I right?”

She shrugged and nodded. Jeez, the way he put it, it made her sound like some little troll slaving away in her cave. She thought of her dark, cramped home office and conceded that he wasn’t too far off the mark.

“Come on,” he said. “Let me finish interviewing Kara’s friends while you find out what you can, and we can meet up later to compare notes.” His smile changed, suddenly saturated with sexual intent. “Let me take you to dinner so we can get to know each other better.”

Toni swallowed hard. God, he was good. Even knowing that his hot look was calculated to make her melt and manipulate her into doing whatever he wanted, she was tempted to say yes.

To dinner, to Ethan, to the amazing, headboard-knocking sex that would no doubt come after. That she was so sorely tempted was enough reason to turn tail and run, even if Marcy had told her to keep an eye on him.

“I’m sorry, Ethan, but as you’ve probably already guessed, I work much better alone.”

Before he could stop her, she slid into her car and closed the door, not caring if his fingers made it to safety or not. As she drove away, she could see him staring after her through the rearview mirror, his expression one of amusement mixed with annoyance. God, she hated that he always seemed on the verge of laughing at her. Reminding herself that she didn’t give a crap about Ethan Taggart and what he thought of her, she stuck her hand out the window for a final wave before she pulled out onto the street.

T
ONI SIGHED AND took a gulp from the glass of ice water next to her laptop. She squirmed in her seat as a bead of sweat trickled down her rib cage. Her air-conditioning had been on the fritz for the past week, and Mrs. Arroyo said it would be at least another week until it would be repaired. There was nothing to do but suffer through it. For the rent she was paying, Toni was lucky to have A/C at all, and she figured if her tiny Filipino building manager and four children could survive the heat of their cramped apartment, so could Toni. At least she had a fan to move the hot air from one end of the room to the other.

What she wouldn’t give for a cool Seattle summer rain. She thought wistfully back to the adorable flat she’d had in an old Victorian in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood. She remembered how she’d love to curl up on the window seat of the big bay window in her living room and sip a cup of coffee while admiring the view of the Cascades.

Instead, she was spending yet another sweltering afternoon in her home office, such as it was. It was Sunday afternoon, and Kara was still gone. The multiple text messages Toni had sent had gone unanswered, and Marcy hadn’t heard anything, either.

Toni had spent most of yesterday and this morning poring over the messages posted to the V-Club, the online community Kara and her friends had set up on FacePlace. Though it offered some insight into the pressures teenage girls faced when it came to sex, as far as giving any clues as to where Kara was, it was a bust. There had been a few responses to Toni’s message, but no real information. And so far, Toni could find no evidence of the double life Laurie Friedland had alluded to.

The only bright note was that Kara had posted again late last night. The message was as vague as the last, assuring everyone she was fine but containing no details.

Toni had checked the source IP address. The last two messages had been posted from Kara’s computer. So why was her spidey-sense on high alert, sensing something off about the last two messages? Why couldn’t she buy the notion that Kara was holed up somewhere with a friend and posting messages to let everyone know she was okay?

Toni contacted several members of the V-Club individually. With over three hundred members, many of them living out of state, Toni had focused on the most active members who lived closest to Northern California. None of whom knew anything.

Toni looked at the phone sitting on her desk, willing it to play a snippet from “Wish You Were Here,” signifying the arrival of a text message from Kara.

Nothing.

For now, Toni was stuck slogging through a long debate among V-Club members about whether a girl who’d had anal sex could still be a member of the V-Club. There were a lot of strong opinions.

You’re just trying to make excuses for acting like a whore.
Laurie Friedland added her two cents. “Letting a guy fuck your ass is the same thing as your pussy. You’re exactly like Kstar90, trying to give in on a technicality. Either you’re a virgin or you’re not. No middle ground.”

Intrigued, Toni did a search on Kstar90. She’d been added as a friend by Kara several months ago but banned from the group a month later. After a quick scan through her messages, Toni understood why. Kstar90 was all about technical virginity, full of all kinds of advice about how to get yourself and your boyfriend off without giving up the goods.

Toni’s mind fairly boggled at the possibilities.

Kstar90 had engaged in several flame wars with the other members before finally being kicked out of the group. Kara had come to her defense and tried to talk the other girls out of banning her but had been overruled by the cybermob.

As she read through Kstar90’s posts and Kara’s, Toni started to get a tight feeling in the pit of her stomach. She clicked on Kstar90’s member page. According to her profile she was eighteen and lived in nearby Menlo Park. Her photo showed only a woman’s topless torso, her hands cupped playfully over her breasts, her face cast in deep shadow, unrecognizable.

She was about to click the link to additional photos when a sharp knock interrupted her. She peeked through the peephole, frowning when she saw Ethan Taggart standing outside her door.

Kstar90’s comments careered through her head, and her brain filled with images of herself, naked, doing all the things Kstar90 recommended for keeping your man satisfied without having actual sex. God, she could tie Ethan to the bed and keep herself busy for days.

Don’t even go there,
she thought, purging her brain of the lust-inducing images. She considered pretending she wasn’t home, but Ethan quickly nipped that plan in the bud.

“I heard you walk to the door, Toni. Open up.”

Not for the first time, Toni cursed the thin walls of her cheaply built apartment building.

She slid open the chain and reluctantly opened the door. “What do you want?”

He stepped inside without an invitation, his tall, broad-shouldered body seeming to suck up the space in her postage-stamp-size apartment.

He gave her a quick once-over, taking in her threadbare T-shirt and khaki shorts that had seen much better days. His sharp turquoise gaze lingered for a moment on her bare legs, and Toni felt a lick of heat low in her belly, followed by a surge of embarrassment to be found looking like such a slob.

His full lips cocked into a half smile. “Nice outfit.”

“I’ve been working,” she snapped, turning on her bare heel with as much dignity as she could muster.

She felt the heat radiating from his chest as he walked up behind her. “Jesus, no wonder you’re so angry all the time, spending so much time in a place like this,” he said.

She didn’t have to follow his gaze to know exactly what he was seeing. He didn’t miss a detail of the kitchen, with its cheap Formica counters, faux oak–finish cabinets, and ugly linoleum. Instead of the hardwood floors of the old Victorian, her boxy one-bedroom apartment had cheap, industrial carpet in the living room and bedroom. The only view from the minuscule patio was of the parking lot. Still, that didn’t stop her hackles from rising at his reaction.

“I’m not angry all the time,” she huffed.

“Okay then, generally pissed off at the world.”

“How would you even know? You’ve known me for less than twenty-four hours!”

“Living in this dump would make anyone depressed.” He walked into the tiny living room. “Even if you’re not making any money with your investigations, surely you can afford to upgrade.”

“When’s the last time you looked at housing prices?” It was on the tip of her tongue to jump to her own defense and blurt out that it wasn’t her fault her savings had been depleted to the point where she was stuck in this dump until she could save enough to move back home. Her mom’s short but valiant battle with ovarian cancer had wiped out her own and Toni’s savings. And her ex-boyfriend John deciding to dump her while she was still struggling to get her investigation business off the ground hadn’t helped.

Still, she couldn’t hold John entirely responsible for the emotional and financial disasters she’d suffered recently. She was the one who’d been itching for a change, who yearned for a life outside her cubicle. And when he had offered her an escape to a new life in sunny California, Toni had jumped at the chance. Her knight in shining Prius.

She should have learned from her mother’s experience that depending on a man for anything was a recipe for misery. She’d always been so careful not to leave herself vulnerable. In work and in love, she’d always been careful and cautious, always choosing the safest route, ignoring the little voices inside her that clamored for more passion and excitement.

Until the one time she’d taken a chance in her boring, rule-following life, and look where it got her. Nearly broke in a crummy apartment that looked even worse as she saw it through Ethan’s eyes.

But she hardly needed to justify her living situation to him, especially when he was the one who had barged in on her. Speaking of which, “How did you know where I live, anyway? My information is unlisted.”

He turned and smiled, the hard angles of his face thrown into stark relief by the fluorescent lights of her kitchen. “Toni, I’m a private investigator. How do you think I found out?”

Anger settled like a hot weight in her chest. Toni was by nature an intensely private person, not prone to sharing her personal information or—God forbid—feelings with someone she barely knew. She wasn’t hiding any big skeletons, but the thought of anyone, especially Ethan Taggart, snooping into her business pissed her off.

“How much do you know?” she demanded.

“Worried that I came across some deep, dark secret?” he taunted.

“How much?” she repeated, her hand itching to smack the self-satisfied smirk off his face.

“For a woman who makes a living digging into other people’s lives, you sure are defensive.”

“The irony is not lost on me,” she snapped.

“Relax, Toni, I only have the information available on a standard background check. I wanted to see who I was getting into bed with,” he said with a wink.

“I didn’t have you checked out,” she said, though she saw his point.

“Maybe you should have,” he shot back. “So, you want to tell me what you’ve found out so far?”

Ethan could see Toni trying to keep a rein on her temper. He’d caught her off guard, and she didn’t like it. He’d given her a hard time about her casual-bordering-on-sloppy attire, but he found it almost as sexy as if she’d opened the door wearing something from Victoria’s Secret.

Her outfit revealed nothing and everything. Her T-shirt was gray, worn thin from hundreds of washings. It clung to the high, round curves of her breasts in a way that made his palms itch.

He forced his eyes away from the perfectly cuppable curves emblazoned with the slogan “Property of the MIT Computer Science Department” and his eyes slid lower as she walked into the minuscule kitchen off the entryway and reached into a cabinet for two glasses. His mouth went dry as he recognized his mistake. He’d noticed her legs immediately, and they looked even better bare. Sleek with firm, muscled calves and nicely defined thighs. Thighs he could almost feel clamped around his hips as he rode her long and hard. Her skin was smooth, pale, tempting him to run his tongue along every inch.

Even her feet were nice, narrow and slender, toes painted a surprising hot pink with a little white flower design. Who would have pegged Toni as a fancy-pedicure type? Heat flooded his groin as he imagined propping her feet on his shoulders, sucking her toes into his mouth as he pumped her hard.

He shifted on his feet, willing his cock down before she turned around and noticed the pup tent that was forming at the fly of his pants. As casually as possible, he crossed his hands in front of himself.

“You go first,” she demanded, filling the glasses with ice and water.

“Not much,” he admitted. “Most of Kara’s friends are out of town, away at summer camps or on vacation. The ones I did manage to connect with claim they haven’t hung out with Kara in quite some time.”

“Did you look at Kara’s FacePlace page?”

“A little. Didn’t find much to go on. But who knew there were so many degrees of virginity?”

Toni didn’t acknowledge the comment, but he could see the flush of color creeping up her neck.

“I always thought it was cut-and-dried,” he goaded. “Insert tab A into slot B.”

“I don’t want to discuss your thoughts on sex or virginity,” she said. But he could tell from the deepening pink of her cheeks that she sure as shit was thinking about it, and thinking about it with him. “Anyway, it’s not funny. Girls talking like that attract all kinds of creeps and pervs.”

Toni’s mouth was tight with concern. For whatever reason, Ethan was compelled to ease her fears. “I noticed she posted again. That’s good news.”

“Maybe.” But she didn’t seem to share his optimism.

“What makes you think differently?”

“I don’t know,” she said, shrugging him off. “The posts were both made from her computer, but…” she trailed off.

“What?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t sound like her.”

“How can you tell? They’re two sentences each.”

She shook her head. “Maybe I’m just being paranoid. Anyway, I found something right before you got here. I don’t know if it’s anything yet.”

He let her change the subject. For now. “Show me.”

She motioned him over to the corner of her living room that apparently served as her office.

Piled in the small space were a desk, printer/fax combo, and of course her computer. Papers littered the desk in semi-cohesive piles. More papers peeked out of the drawers of an overstuffed file cabinet and out of the tops of boxes.

Ethan thought of his own spacious office with its giant desk and state-of-the-art computer system and couldn’t help but wince. “This is how you work?”

Her shoulders tensed. “Not all of us can afford fancy office space. Besides, I have everything I need right here.”

He held his hands up in a supplicating gesture, snagged one of the two rickety wooden chairs from her kitchen table, pulled it over to the desk, and settled in next to her.

As he leaned over her shoulder to see the monitor, he caught her scent in the sultry air. A mix of shampoo, laundry soap, and pure female hit him like a ton of bricks. Sexier than any perfume, it had heat pooling low in his belly.

She popped open a window on her browser. “I went back a few months in the archives and came across this girl.”

Ethan took in the naked torso, bare breasts barely covered by the girl’s own hands, and shifted his gaze away. Sure, her profile said she was eighteen, but he still felt like a dirty old man looking at her.

“She was a member of the V-Club,” Toni continued, “invited by Kara, but she got kicked out after a month.”

“She doesn’t look like their typical member. Guess I don’t have to ask why they kicked her out.”

“The girls were cool at first, but then”—Toni’s blush, which had barely subsided when they sat down, returned in full force—“Kstar90 started giving the other girls tips.”

“Tips?” He arched a brow, waiting for her to continue.