Flash Point (29 page)

Bleu de France flashed in. Just a hair different from the shade she associated with submissiveness, but the color of depending on someone all the same.

Maybe that was the difference, though. Hank would've trusted his
own
plan. And while his plan would've been every bit as much to protect his daughter and Jenna, he and Jenna didn't always share ways of thinking. Hank did things Hank's way. Got things done Hank's way. While Jenna would've trusted his intentions, she would have felt unsettled that they weren't on the same page.

His brother, however, she'd never followed to see his actions, given suggestions for strategies, or questioned his methods. She'd just known from the very day he'd promised her he'd take care of it that she didn't have to. When it came to protecting Ayana – and keeping Yancy's past in the past was vital to that – for some strange, unexplainable reason, their philosophies aligned.

Headlights flashed across the kitchen window as tires rumbled up the gravel drive. A car door slammed.

‘That's my cue,' Victor said, standing and putting on his hat. ‘What do you think? Will any of the people I search in the door-to-door demand I stop so they can take their picture with me?'

Jenna laughed. ‘You know, of all the city-wide lockdown door-to-door manhunts I've heard of, it's actually been the cops in the riot gear that seem to get the chicks, but you never know. Maybe they'll think you're too important to risk frontlines and riot gear so they'll want your autograph.'

Victor smirked. ‘Hi. Lare. Ee. Us. Cops got feelings, too, you know,' he said, giving a sniffle and wiping a fake tear from his eye.

Jenna smiled. ‘I'm keeping you humble.
Someone
needs to.'

He chuckled, bent to start unlocking the front door to let Yancy in and him out. ‘Well, Bad Ass, on that job, you are to be
commended.'

Jenna leaned against the door jamming, listening as the keys clicked in their various stations. ‘Hey, Victor?'

He glanced up from where he was sliding the last bolt through its casing near the floor. ‘Yeah?'

‘I really do doubt they're going to find anything related to Black Shadow in this door-to-door. They'll have been planning for this, and even if lightning strikes and cops end up in their homes, they'll be model citizens on their best behavior, not armed to the hilt with sawed off shotguns and tossing Molotovs out the windows. But if I'm wrong …'

Victor smirked, squeezed her calf with his broad hand, simply because it was the part of her closest to him. ‘I'll be fine, Bad Ass. Don't you give it another thought.'

Jenna nodded as he let go and stood, swinging the door open. Yancy strode up the walk, Oboe trailing behind him, lagging on the leash as he slowed to sniff at bird poop splattered on the cement.

‘Come on, buddy, it's just crap. You do it, I do it, Fox News anchors are full of it … just crap,' Yancy said, giving the leash a yank.

Oboe fell in line and trotted toward them. Victor and Yancy met in passing, stopped for a handshake. ‘Thanks for coming today, man. I appreciate it,' Yancy said.

‘Anytime, dude. Gotta run. Duty calls,' Victor said.

Victor climbed in the cruiser, and Yancy reached the door. Jenna peeled her eyes from where Victor was backing out to take in her boyfriend's deep-set eyes. She wrapped her arms around his neck and pecked his cheek while Oboe took his time waddling through, then turned to close and relock the door.

‘I'm glad you decided to come over tonight,' Jenna said. ‘I feel like the time we get to spend together these days is more like snapshots rather than actual minutes or hours.'

‘I know what you mean,' Yancy said, squatting to unhook Oboe's leash from his collar, then turning to get a water bowl from where it sat on the sink. ‘Life's always busy, but with all this stuff with the Potomac Twelve and—'

‘Is that what people are calling them? The Potomac Twelve?' Jenna asked amid a mouth full of the muffin she'd snagged from the basket on the counter. She'd spent so much time thinking about them as the bank attackers and then Black Shadow she hadn't thought that of course the public would have a name for the group by now. The team decided early on not to release the name Black Shadow for fear of tipping off its members they were on to them and give them time to run – one choice General Ted for Toffee had actually agreed with – so they'd kept it under wraps.

‘Yep. I feel like I've been talking nonstop ever since I got out of bed this morning,' Yancy said.

Damn. She'd been so into her own day it hadn't even occurred to her that Yancy was probably getting dispatch calls to 911 all day with people phoning in not just the attacks but probably false alarms when people got spooked, crazies thinking they'd spotted a sign their roommate was one of the killers. She let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding, and her chest loosened ever so slightly.

Yancy looked up from where he was squatted next to Oboe, who had finished lapping up his water and had now rolled over and was stretching his back legs out to their fullest length, enjoying a belly rub. ‘What was that?'

Jenna quirked her head. ‘What?'

‘That sigh. Like we're at the movies, and I just ordered the tickets, and you realized I wasn't going to force you to sit through a third showing of
Star Trek.
'

Jenna shook her head. ‘I was worried was all.'

‘About?' Yancy asked, standing and taking the chair across from her. ‘Oh, wait. I get it. You just realized that the reason I had to get Victor to cover my tot fortress shift was due to the fact that there are madmen with sharp weapons running all over the region stabbing people and
not
because I'd become worried about another damsel in distress like CiCi and launched a campaign to save her.'

Jenna looked at her lap, half-laughed. ‘Something like that.'

‘Well,' Yancy said, standing and taking Jenna's hands in his. He gently urged her to her feet. ‘While I know I deserve the doubts until I earn some of the trust back, you can rest assured that those bastard terrorists have kept me
way
too busy today to locate any princesses in towers with bully boyfriends or even anything remotely close to that. This freakin' crisis has
all
of my attention. Trust.'

As he said the last part, something changed in his voice. Sounded tired. Weary. Alice blue flashed in.

Maybe they could both use a break from the horrors they'd seen and heard all day. As antsy as she was to get news that the killer's body in the morgue had been identified and as strong as the urge was to stay up all night, obsessing over the case details while she waited, now that Yancy was here and she was, too, it felt a lot easier to follow him down the hallway into her bedroom and close the door.

As he pressed his lips against hers, his hands working her shirt upward, she let the details she'd felt so keen to analyze drift away. They'd be there in the morning, and right now, she needed this far more.

His lips parted from hers long enough for him to tug her shirt over her head and toss it on the ground. She kicked off her heels and backed toward the bed corner, perched on its end as she undid her trousers.

Yancy, now bare-chested in the dim lighting of only the little reading lamp by the bed, moved toward her and, with a lick of his lips and rubbing his hands together, bent slowly at the knees, grabbing the waist of her khakis and sinking lower and lower as he pulled them to the floor with him.

As he stood back up, towering over her, she let the strap of her bra droop off of her right shoulder, then reached across and used her hand to cause the left strap to do the same before she let herself fall back on to the bed, tempting him. As he climbed on the bed, he knelt over her, straddling her torso, a sly grin on his face, and she scooted back until her full body was on the bed, stretched diagonally across it.

‘If those straps won't stay up, we might as well just do away with them, don't you think?' he said, and he playfully scooped under the small of her back with one arm, using the momentum to roll her on to her stomach. She felt his weight move from over her, the bed sink behind her as he sat back, as though waiting.

Obliging, she got to her knees and, still facing away from him, inched closer to where he waited. She reached up and twisted up the locks of hair hanging down her back, not because he needed her to, but because she was playing along.

His hands rubbed her shoulders, smoothed inward to where they dipped down. The firm, rolling massage almost made Jenna forget she was holding her hair up, but she caught it a second before she let it go.

After a moment, Yancy's hands trailed down her shoulder blades, and he leaned forward, brushing her right shoulder with a soft, warm kiss. His fingers worked at her bra clasp now, his lips still lingering next to her skin.

‘You know, I pretend these things are easier to undo when I can see what I'm doing,' he breathed against her skin, ‘but really, I only play it up as a difficulty because I really
really
like getting to see you from the back every now and then.'

Her beige bra dropped to the bed, the cool air hitting her bare breasts. Yancy's arms reached around her torso.

Jenna looked down, took in the sight of her breasts cupped in his hands. Felt the warmth of his chest against her back.

‘You know what? I think I like this angle every now and then, too.'

Jenna sat in the antique paisley armchair in the corner of her bedroom, sipping a nice fresh, dark roast with two creams, and stared out the window, watching the dragonflies zoom around the porch in a weird, intricate chase of a mating dance.

She glanced toward where Yancy still lay in bed fast asleep, his arm tucked under his pillow, clutching it to him. Last night had been everything she needed, but sleep hadn't been long enough, and unfortunately, the second it left her, the cogs in her head were whirring full force. So, she'd slipped out of bed, readied herself for a steady infusion of caffeine, and settled back into the comfy chair in her room where she could at least still creepily enjoy the cute faces her boyfriend made when he was dreaming while she mulled over the case facts nagging at her like an itch she couldn't quite find to scratch.

Really, as soon as the body was identified, things would roll. Once one perp had a name, they'd have connections: neighbors, friends, haunts, Internet footprints. Strand by strand, the impossible web would collapse as, one by one, the UNSUBs were identified, found, and caught.

So why was she so stressed about
this
case as if there was something important she'd missed that could change the game? The pieces were in play, the body being examined. Waiting was never easy, but this really was the small piece that would start the unraveling of Black Shadow's whole operation. So why? Sheer curiosity?

She ran through the hall, slick with blood. She almost fell, but grabbed the banister. Keep running! Keep running for Charley!

Jenna opened her eyes, shook the memory. Curiosity. Yeah, right.

‘Morning, gorgeous,' Yancy's groggy voice said through a yawn.

Jenna glanced his way and smiled as he stretched his arms wide before sitting up and leaning back against two pillows propped on the headboard. ‘Let me guess. You woke up early and were too excited to go back to sleep because you knew when I woke up you could
definitely
talk me into a day-long, winner-takes-all Settlers of Catan tournament? If that's it, though, you better hope Charley and Vern are game and that they can help explain it to Ayana, because it's really designed for five to six players …'

She rolled her eyes and chunked the blue throw pillow beside her chair at him. ‘As thrilling as that sounds, I can't stop thinking about—'

‘The Potomac Twelve attacks,' he filled in.

She folded her lips, shrugged. ‘You know me well.'

He shifted to hang his leg off the bed's edge and reached for his prosthetic. ‘So, what's bugging you this fine sunny morning? What colors are clashing?'

You really
do
know me too well.

‘Hit me with it,' Yancy said. ‘I've got my leg on, so now I can think properly …'

Jenna snorted. ‘Well, to be honest, the whole time it's been the father and son in Exam Room Six. Something was just always off about that. The dad was killed first, but he was farther inside the room than the son. Now obviously, the son could've been farther in when Marius entered—'

‘Marius?'

‘The particular attacker that stabbed the father,' Jenna clarified. ‘Anyway, the son could've been in a different place when Marius came into the room, making the dad the closest target and then the son tried to escape, but the sword wound in the son hit him at an angle that meant he was stabbed from the front. Did Marius kill the dad and somehow make his way back around the son so he could look him in the eye while he stabbed him?'

Yancy shook his head, picturing the surveillance footage in his own mind. ‘It'd be a cool aspect to try to profile if he did, but I doubt it.' He closed his eyes, trying to picture the video. It had been so grainy, and the angle hadn't been good at all going
into
the room. It hadn't showed anything of what occurred inside it.

But then it hit him. There
was
something funny there, now that he thought about it. It had been right in that area and right around that time that one attacker had killed the other outside of that room, too.

‘Could the dad's wound and the son's wound have come from different swords?' he asked.

Jenna's eyebrows raised. ‘Hmm. I mean, I suppose it's
possible
, though Marius was the only long sword carrier at the bank. I didn't notice any other swords in the hospital footage, but it was hard to make out much of anything in the chaos …'