Love's Protector: A Maverick's Shield Novel (9 page)

“He didn’t tell me that,” Amour told Jason as they stood outside Abigail Pruitt’s home.

“No he didn’t. He said he hadn’t worked the case, now all of a sudden he did?”

“Why would he lie about that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe he thought I wouldn’t get very far with my findings.”

“That’s what I’m guessing. Do you have the copy of that report with you?” Jason asked.

“Yes, it’s in my bag, why?”

“I need to see it.”

Amour fished it out of her tote bag and handed it to Jason. “What are you looking for?”

He paused for a moment to read the paper before he answered. “The only thing this report mentions Mrs. Pruitt saying to them was that she saw the color of the woman’s hair. Nothing about the woman being in Carly’s house for any length of time, being parked in front of it on any given day and certainly not anything about the two of them arguing and the woman storming out the door.”

“Nor did it mention what she was wearing which Abigail clearly remembered,” Amour said softly.

Jason nodded. “ Ok…so far we’ve got a nut case calling you and threatening your life, two lying cops, a faked police report, a senile old lady who turned out not to be so senile and a mysterious woman with red hair. Is it just me, or do you feel as if we’ve got ourselves into all kinds of craziness?” She didn’t respond. “Amour?”

She turned in the direction of the small house next to Abigail’s and instantly felt sad. After walking over to the lawn of the house, she paused for a moment, and then spoke. “I’m standing in front of the beginning of my childhood, as well as the end of part of it. My mother was here.” A tear fell down her cheek at the thought of how horrific that day must have been for her father. “This is where he found her.”

He wrapped his arms around her, pulling her close. “I know sweetheart, just try not to think about it.”

She roughly wiped the tears from her face, angry at herself for having them. “I can’t believe I’m crying again. I didn’t cry this much when I was a child especially over someone I didn’t even know.” She chuckled. “You probably think that I’m the weirdest person alive.”

He lifted her face to his and looked into her eyes. “No I don’t. The bond between a mother and child is formed at birth. Just because you didn’t know her well, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t feel the pain of having your life with her cut short.”

Her eyes left his and then she looked away. “I’m usually much stronger than this.”

“But you don’t always have to be. Suppressing your feelings never leads to anything good. Take it from someone who knows.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“Come on, let’s go.”

She walked ahead of him towards the truck but stopped and turned to him once she got to the door. As he approached her, what she was about to say to him suddenly escaped from her mind. “Jason…” That’s all she was able get out as he moved closer to her. His hazel eyes turned dark making his hunger for her evident. Considering the topic of the conversation they’d just had, she wasn’t sure where it came from but it was definitely there.

He placed the plastic container full of cookies Mrs. Pruitt had given them on top of the truck and said, “I don’t like when you cry.”

She tried to respond but couldn’t. Between the scent of his cologne, the feeling of his hard body inching closer to her and the ninety degree heat, she could barely breathe. “I…” She wasn’t sure what she was trying say exactly. Whatever it was, it went astray as with all other thoughts when he touched her face and gently rubbed his thumb across her bottom lip.

“Do you trust me Amour?”

His words came out even lower and more sensual this time. Her lips parted and her eyes slowly closed as his finger tips went from her face, to the back of her neck, before slowly traveling down her back. “Yes…I trust you.” Her tone was low and breathy.

He placed his other hand on her waist and gently lifted her off of the door of the truck allowing his other hand access to her lower back. She could feel his lips and the heat of his breath gently graze over her ear. “You make me hard.”

She felt the evidence of what he’d just whispered to her when he pressed his hard body against hers and his erection against her belly. “I’ve n…noticed.” She wasn’t sure what part of her brain that response came from or how she managed to get it out; the one thing she
was
sure of was the arousal she felt throughout her entire body.

He looked into her eyes again. “Have you?”

“Yes…” She could barely hear herself over the pounding of her heartbeat.

He cocked an eyebrow and gently bit his bottom lip as his mouth curved into a provocative smile. He leaned into her and pressed his warm lips to her ear again. “I want to fuck you hard and deep.”

His words were dirty, making her clit pulse and her knees weak. He removed his hand from her back and used his body to press her against the truck again. A mental image of the erotic words he’d spoken formed in her mind as his tongue flicked her earlobe and his lips moved down her neck. She was so wet, so aroused that her body was going to explode.

His lips reversed directions, gently kissing up her neck, grazing over her chin until they reached her mouth were he planted soft kisses on her lips. “I love your mouth. I want to see those sweet, pretty lips around my cock.”

Oh god! She had to stop this, or they were going to be having sex right here…outside…in front of Mrs. Pruitt’s house. She barely knew him, she couldn’t do this. “Jason!” she said, sparsely gathering enough strength to push him off of her and break the spell. She took in several gulps of air. “We can’t do this here! We have to go.”

“Alright,” he said in a low tone.

He grabbed the cookies, opened the door for her and then walked to the other side of the truck sliding behind the wheel. She quickly stepped inside of the truck and closed the door before looking out of the passenger window and spotting Mrs. Pruitt in her door way.

“Have a nice evening!” The old lady said seductively as she flashed a big smile.

It was obvious she had seen them. Amour had never been so embarrassed in her life. “Good bye Mrs. Pruitt.” She waved at her and then slowly put her head down placing the palms of her hands over her face. “Please Jason, let’s go…now!”

* * *

“What the hell was that?” Amour exclaimed when they’d gotten a considerable distance from the old lady’s house.

“What do you mean?” Jason knew
exactly
what she’d meant and he knew she would ask, but he figured he could control the conversation by joking around with her because he couldn’t explain exactly what it was either. He really just wanted her to stop crying initially, but his hormones had gotten the better of him.

“What do I mean? You know precisely what I mean Jason! I can’t believe you did that, and right in front of Mrs. Pruitt’s house! You know she saw us don’t you?”

“Yeah, I figured she would.”

“What?
Oh my god!”

“Why are you so worked up over this? That old lady’s like a hundred years old. I’m pretty sure she’s seen her fair share of people kissing, and haven’t I already told you how horny you make me? Are you really
that
surprised by this?”

“I don’t care Jason!” She popped the top off of the container causing the smell of oatmeal cookies to fill the truck. “That was very embarrassing!”

“Why? We were just kissing and don’t act like you weren’t hotter than hell too!”

“No I wasn’t!”

He spoke through a laugh. “Yes you were. I know what a woman looks like when she’s horny Amour.”

She bit off a piece of the large cookie she’d taken out of the container. “I doesn’t matter Jason. I don’t like public displays of affection alright!” She chewed a few times and then swallowed. “It’s completely inappropriate!”

Although he wasn’t the least bit, he could understand how she would be embarrassed. She seemed to be pretty uptight when it came to anything sex related. He understood that as well to a certain extent, he’d felt uncomfortable also when they’d first met but not about wanting to have sex with her, it was the
constantly
wanting to have sex with her part of it that was getting to him. Usually he wouldn’t feel that way about a woman until after he’d already done the deed with her. Well…if it was
good
sex, and even then she wouldn’t have
this
affect on his libido. He hadn’t even had sex with Amour yet and he could barely keep from touching her, not to mention she occupied just about every part of his mind.

But now that he’s gotten to know her a little better and have gotten much more comfortable around her, he can now push those feelings back with greater ease. Yes, the very sight, touch and smell of her made him so aroused he could barely think, but she also had a way about her that put him at ease and made him forget about his troubles. Since he’d met her, and for the first time in years, he hadn’t had any nightmares and only one headache; for that reason alone he was grateful. He turned to look at her and said, “I’m sorry.”

She took another cookie out of the container after she’d finished the first one and bit off a large chunk of it this time speaking and chewing simultaneously. “Oh, that’s alright. I can’t be too mad at you. I was there also and I definitely participated. You didn’t force me into it.” She pointed her finger at him and swallowed. “But I’m going to need for you to
never
do that again alright!”

Although it was not going to be easy to keep that particular promise, he nodded in agreement. “You sure are scarfing down those cookies! You mind saving me some?” he said through a laugh.

“I’m sorry, I’ve gotten a little fidgety after all of that and I guess I just need something to do with my hands and mouth.”

Oh god! She was making this too easy for him, he raised an eyebrow. “I can think of a few things.”

She shot him an angry look. “Excuse me?”

“You said you needed something to do with your mouth and hands; I believe I’ve already given you an idea or two when we were up against my truck earlier. We can go back to my place or yours if that would be better for you and I can show you a few more things.” He knew she was getting upset, but she’d walked right into this one. He found this all rather amusing.

Her lips thinned. “Or…you can stop being a pervert and take me to my mom’s storage!”

He laughed. “Ok fine. Since you wanna be a buzz kill, we can do that.”

When she chuckled, he could tell that
that
was the moment she’d realized he’d been joking the whole time. “You’re silly, you know that?”

“I can be at times.”

She reached over and placed her hand on his leg. “You don’t seem to be the man your friends say you are. You don’t seem uptight and angry all the time to me.”

“Yeah, well…” he said dryly.

She was wrong about him though, but he would rather her continue to feel that way. If she knew the Jason Kincaid his friends knew, she wouldn’t be so comfortable. In fact, she would be terrified. Their relationship was right where it needed to be, on a friendly and sometimes flirtatious level. There was no way he could let it advance beyond that. He was every bit of the man his friends said he was and he had to make sure she was never made aware of it. She
was
right about one thing though; he couldn’t let anything like what had just occurred happen again. The first time it was his hormones reacting to her. This time, it was beginning to be more than that. So from now on, it was strictly business between them. He couldn’t allow himself to get caught up in the rapture of her. His plan was to help her solve this case, then let her go back to where she belonged. That was the best thing for both of them; there was no other choice.

They’d arrived at the storage facility just in time. They were just twenty-four hours away from auctioning off her mother’s things and Amour took a sigh of relief. After paying the bill, she and Jason located the storage locker towards the back of the place. As she approached the pad lock on the door, key in hand, she began to feel cold and shaky. For some reason, this gave her a creepy feeling inside and she all of a sudden couldn’t bring herself to open it.

“Do you want me to do it?” Jason asked from behind her.

“Yes. Please. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I was fine a minute ago.”

“It’s okay, it’s perfectly understandable.”

Taking the key from her, he stuck it in the lock and quickly popped it open removing it from the door. As he bent down to lift the door up, she started to feel anxious again and she could feel herself starting to get another headache. She shook it off and said, “My father said that nothing was in here but the things she’d kept in the house. But maybe something in here will provide us with at least some information about what kind of life she led. She may have had friends that we could possibly question about her activities since my father was working so much.”

“Hopefully,” Jason said walking into the locker. “We’ll see.”

The dark and dusty storage locker smelled of mildew and consisted of a few small pieces of furniture and several boxes of various sizes that were stacked on top of one another. “This is a lot of stuff. It’s going to take us hours to go through it all,” Amour said while surveying the small area.

“Well we can start with some of the boxes. Let’s grab a few of them and take them home to sort through them. We can always come back for the rest if we need to.”

“Alright.”
She walked a few paces to the left and spotted three boxes against the wall labeled
“photos and important papers”
. She looked up a Jason and said, “Maybe we should start with these.”

He nodded in agreement after walking over to her and observing the boxes. “Ok, let’s get these home and see what we can find.”

After showering and putting on her night clothes, Amour made herself a cup of tea and sat in the living area of her suite staring at the boxes she and Jason had brought home from the storage facility. She wasn’t sure what to expect from the contents of the boxes and for whatever reason, she wasn’t eager to open them. Because of her sudden uneasiness,
she decided to wait for Jason to finish showering before she looked through them. Fifteen minutes later, she heard Jason step out of the bathroom and into the small hallway separating the rooms from the living area.

“Are you ok?” he asked.

“Yeah, just waiting for you to finish showering so we can go through all of this.”

“Alright, I’ll be done in a sec. Just let me throw something on okay.”

She looked up at him before she replied and instantly lost her ability to breathe when she’d realized he’d come out of the bathroom wearing just a towel around his waist. Her entire body heated at the sight of his nearly naked one. Naked, muscular…and wet. When she was finally able to catch her breath, it suddenly became rapid and her heartbeat began to accelerate. She managed to get out a meek, “Okay.” but she wasn’t sure if he’d heard it,
she
barely did. When she noticed the lower half of her body had reacted to him in much the same way her upper half did, she quickly turned away from him and stared at the floor.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, and then stepped inside his room and shut the door.

After taking a few minutes to cool off, she quickly lifted the top off of one of the boxes and started to take out a few of the large yellow envelopes inside of it and sat them on the coffee table in front of her. Even though she didn’t want to do this alone, she’d decided that this would be a perfect way to get her mind off of what she’d just seen.

“Okay…so what do we have here?” Jason asked as he entered the living area and sat beside her on the couch. He’d put on a tank and pajama bottoms but she couldn’t get the thought of him in that towel out of her mind.

She looked up at him and could tell that he had just shaved. His stubble was gone and she could smell his aftershave lotion which was very intoxicating to say the least. Her hands tingled at the thought touching his face. She cleared her throat. “Well, I have a few envelopes here. I haven’t opened them yet, I was waiting for you.”

He picked up one of them, opened it and pulled out several papers held together by a large rubber band. After removing it, he studied them. “This just looks like a bunch of bank statements and bill receipts. What do you have?”

“Photos,” she said softly. She handed him half of the stack in her hand after he’d placed the papers he had on the table. “Wow, look at her. She was so young in these photos. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen then.” She then picked up a photo of Carly sitting on her father’s lap. After studying the picture for a few seconds, she said, “This must’ve been when they’d first met. That looks like a tray of drinks on the table next to her.”

“They met in a bar?” Jason asked.

“No.” She chuckled. “Not exactly, it was a lounge where my mother worked as a cocktail server.”

“Would that be the Eleganti Lounge?”

“I guess. How did you come up with that?”

“Well, she’s posing in front of it in this picture with some brunette chick and they’re both wearing very short dresses so I just assumed.”

She grabbed the picture from him. “Wow. That must’ve been the place then. I wonder who that woman is with her.”

“So do
I. We should keep this with us just in case we run into someone who can recognize her.” Jason picked up another picture. “It’s incredible how much you look like her.”

She took a deep breath. “I know.”

“Your mom definitely passed her hotness onto you,” he said giving her a quick wink then staring back down at the picture.

All she could do was laugh because she didn’t know how to respond to that. She picked up another stack of photos and looked through them.

“Did your father ever mention a woman who looked like this to you?”

“No he didn’t. If she had any friends he didn’t know any of them.” After looking through all the photos in her hand, she put them down and picked up another envelope. Dumping out the contents of it, she heard the sound of something hard hitting the glass table before dropping onto the floor beneath them. “What was that?” she asked.

Jason reached down to pick up the object. “It’s a key.”

“I wonder what that belongs to.” Taking the small silver key from his hands, she noticed it had a small black tag attached to it that had the numbers 5861 on it. She looked up and said, “It has numbers on it.”

“It looks like it belongs to a safe deposit box. I’ve seen enough of those in my line of work to know what they look like. Now where the box is, I have no idea. Since there are literally hundreds of banks in L.A., providing that it’s even in the city, finding it would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Even if we do manage to find it, the likelihood of her things still being in it is slim.”

“Why is that?”

“Because after a while if the bill stops being paid on it, they turn it over to the state’s unclaimed property office. Unless your father kept paying on that as well, that box is a done deal I’m afraid.”

She rolled her neck as fatigue started to consume her. “I’ll ask him in the morning if he knows anything about it.” She let out a yawn and stretched.

“Okay.”

She turned to him and fixated on the tattoo of a large snake that started from the top of his shoulder, curled around his upper arm and stretched all the way down to his forearm. This was the first time she’d noticed it. “When did you get that?”

“What?”

“Your tattoo?
That’s awfully huge.”

“Oh, when I was sixteen.”

“What made you get it?”

“I don’t know. Rebellion I guess.”

“That
had
to hurt,” she said while cringing.

“It may have, I don’t remember.”

She laughed softly. “How can you
not remember what getting
that
felt like?”

He looked at her and said, “Because I was completely stoned.”

She laughed again. “Boy do I know the feeling.”

His hazel eyes widened.
“Really?”

“Yeah…”

“That’s surprising.”

“Why?”

“Because you don’t seem like the getting high and partying type.”

Did he really think she was
that
uptight? “Well I have, lots of times.”

He laughed. “What could you have possibly gotten high on?”

“Let’s just say there’s a reason why I didn’t want to take your Norcos.”

His facial expression turned blank. “You were addicted to pain pills?”

“Bingo!”

“How long did you use?”

“About two years.”

“Did your father know?”

“After a while he did. It was easy to hide it in the beginning though. That’s the stage when you’re a functioning addict and you think to yourself,
why do people become hard core addicts? What’s wrong with them?
” She snickered. “That’s when you can skip a few days and it won’t affect you and you start quoting those famous last words: “I can stop anytime I want.” But you don’t and before you know it, the need to have it takes over your mind, body and eventually your soul. Then you get to the final stage when you’re willing to do anything for it, even if it means hurting the people you love.”

“Your father,” he said softly.

“He had been diagnosed with his illness two years prior. He wasn’t in a wheelchair at that time but he still need help to walk. One morning I had come home from being out all night and I was literally passed out the whole day. He hadn’t eaten, bathed or anything at all that day. He tried to wake me but I was so stoned I didn’t budge so he tried to take care of everything by himself. He managed to get up out of his recliner and slowly walk to the bathroom but he lost his balance causing him to fall and hit his head on the side of the bathtub and pass out.”

“What happened?” Jason asked.

“Luckily one of our neighbors happened to come by to see him. I accidently left the door unlocked when I got home and I’m so glad I did. She came inside and called for help when she found my father.”

“That was a pretty damn close call.”

“Yeah, at that point my mind was gone. I’d nearly gotten kicked off my racing team because I wasn’t showing up for practice and when I did, I was so high or hung over I couldn’t even function enough to drive a regular car, let alone a race car.” She inhaled slowly, and then let it out. “And that’s when I checked into rehab. I’ve been clean for a year now.” It was extremely hard for her tell Jason all of this, but once she had, she’d felt like a huge weight had lifted off of her shoulders. I felt good to talk about it with someone who seemed to understand what she’d gone through.

He gently stroked the back of her head. “At least you got the help that you needed.”

“Yeah…that’s partly the reason my father is always so worried. He doesn’t want me to go back to that.”

“I can understand that.”

She let out another yawn, this time much bigger. “I’m tired. I think I’ll head to bed now.”

“Alright, I think I will also, I’m pretty tired myself.” Jason said as he stood to his feet.

“I think we should pay a visit to the Eleganti Lounge tomorrow. What do you think?”

“I agree. We will, but for now, let’s get some sleep.