I wasn’t going to complain though. Each snap of his hips sent a ripple of painful pleasure through me, driving me toward another orgasm. Though it wouldn’t come soon enough to catch him if I didn’t help it along, so I reached underneath me and pressed my fingers against my clit. I made short, brisk circles – the best way to get me off after I’d already come once – and just as Clay’s rhythm started faltering, I came again.
“Yes, yes, yes,” I chanted as white-hot pleasure exploded through my body.
Clay was talking too, but I didn’t pay much attention to what he was saying. All I cared about was that the tension in my body had faded. I’d done what I’d come here to do.
After a couple seconds, he pulled out and moved away to take care of the condom. I rested a few moments longer and then straightened. I glanced at the clock. Dammit. Not enough time to attempt to go back to sleep.
I bent over to pick up my underwear, and then went to the door for my pants. “I’m heading back,” I called. He was in the bathroom, but I knew he could hear me.
“You want a ride?”
“No,” I said. “I still have time to run back, shower, and get to class on time.”
“I’ll see you there then.”
I heard the shower turn on as I pulled on my shoes. We both knew he only offered me a ride to be polite. No one at Quantico could know that Clay and I had been sleeping together. He wasn’t my supervisor, but I doubted anyone would make that much of a distinction. I was eleven weeks into FBI training and he was a guest lecturer. Not exactly kosher, even if we had known each other before.
It didn’t matter though, I thought as I left the hotel. Once training was over, I’d be off to wherever I was assigned, and Clay would be off to the next lecture. We’d keep in touch, cross paths, maybe fuck. It’d never be anything more than that.
3
A quick, but thorough, shower and a cup of coffee with a bagel were enough to wake me up completely. I might be flagging by the end of the day, but right now, I was good. My first class would be with Clay, and it didn’t matter how long he’d known me or the fact that we were sleeping together, he’d call on me if he thought I was dozing. It was one of his favorite things to do to trainees. It didn’t matter if he was lecturing in a full auditorium or doing a more casual class where he was in front of only a dozen people. He demanded attention. The thing that kept him from being a total asshole was that it was always about making sure people were learning what they needed to, so they’d do the best job possible. Sometimes, that meant embarrassing the hell out of someone. I sure as hell didn’t want it to be me.
As I walked in the building, he was there. I barely glanced at him, but I felt his eyes on me as I walked past him and into the classroom. Today’s lecture was about family annihilators and what made their psychopathy different from mass murderers or serial killers. We wouldn’t be dealing with those sorts of cases much here in the FBI, but a family hostage taker could be an annihilator and we’d need to know how to handle it differently than, say, someone who wanted something.
I couldn’t say I was looking forward to it, but I’d deal with it the same way I’d dealt with everything else in my life. Besides, if I couldn’t handle hearing about it, I’d be no good if I was called to a scene where it was the issue. As an Intelligence Analyst, that wouldn’t be my usual case, but I believed in being prepared. Besides, there was no guarantee I’d actually make it in the field I’d chosen. Best to plan for all possible contingencies.
I usually sat in the first couple rows, but before I’d gone more than a few steps, the door opened behind me.
“Quick!”
I turned around, the movement automatic the moment I heard the familiar bark of Martin Edwards, one of the senior agents at Quantico. He wasn’t the very top guy, but he was up there pretty far, and he scared the shit out of pretty much every trainee here. Not me, but I wasn’t exactly the best judge when it came to fear. Not many people intimidated me. I couldn’t think of a single one off the top of my head.
“Yes, Sir?” I gave what I hoped was a polite, but not too cheery, smile.
He scowled at me and my heart sank.
“Come with me.”
Shit. Had someone figured out about Clay and me? Shit, shit! We could deny it, I supposed. The fact that we’d known each other before could be a believable reason for me visiting him at his hotel. He’d been my uncle’s friend, after all.
When I was almost at the door, he walked away, and I hurried to keep up with him. He clearly didn’t want to walk and talk, but I was fine with that. If he was about to chew me out for fooling around with Clay, I definitely didn’t want to do it with an audience.
We made it all the way to his office without a single word being said, but as soon as he opened the door he snapped at me, “Sit.”
My stomach twisted. This was worse than I thought. I sat.
He settled in his chair and folded his hands in front of him. His face was back to being expressionless, but that didn’t necessarily mean I was off the hook. Especially when he didn’t start talking right away. I vaguely remembered hearing somewhere that he’d been one of the agency’s top interrogators, and I finally admitted that I was in extremely deep shit.
“Rona Quick.”
“Yes, Sir?”
He gave me a look that said he hadn’t wanted a response from me. He’d let me know if I was supposed to speak.
“Rona Elizabeth Quick.” He reached forward and picked up a file folder from his desk. “That’s the name you submitted on your application.”
Fuck. It wasn’t about Clay.
“Mother, Dana Quick, father unknown. Birthplace, Carmel, Indiana.”
My pulse raced but I didn’t interrupt him as I tried to figure out exactly how bad this was going to be.
“Do I need to keep reading?” he asked, clearly expecting an answer this time.
“No, sir,” I said quietly.
“You were asked if you were known by another name, and you said no. At the end of the application, you were asked, as was every applicant, if the contents of the application were true to the best of your knowledge. You checked the ‘I agree’ box and signed underneath it. In doing so, you also accepted that lying on the form would be a federal offense.”
I was going to be sick.
“We would normally have weeded out any discrepancies fairly early on, but you came with a letter of recommendation from one of our own–”
Shit. Clay.
“He didn’t know,” I whispered.
Edwards continued as if I hadn’t even spoken. “Once we started looking, however, we found that you’d lied about several different things, including your name, your parentage, and the fact that a close family member had been convicted of a felony.”
I’d known it was coming. If they’d found one lie, they’d found all of them, because they were all connected. Pick at a single thread long enough and everything would unravel.
“I assume all of what we found is true, and not more fabrication.”
I picked up the folder and glanced inside. I didn’t need to read the details to know what it said. “It is.”
“Did you really think that you could get away with it?” He seemed more curious now, than angry.
I didn’t want to look at him when I answered, but I forced myself to do exactly that. I’d known the risks and the consequences, and I’d made the decision anyway. “I didn’t know, but I thought it was worth trying.”
He tossed the folder back onto the desk. “Why didn’t you fill it out truthfully?”
“I thought about it,” I said, “but I knew if I did, it would all be there in my permanent file, where anyone could find it if they wanted to look hard enough.”
“Your past wasn’t erased, Miss Quick. It can still be found.”
“You know all of it then,” I said. When he nodded, I continued, “I didn’t want anyone thinking I had a weakness that could be exploited, that I wasn’t strong enough to handle what someone mig
ht throw at me because of it. I didn’t want instructors using it as a reason why I wouldn’t make it. And I didn’t want it to be all anyone saw when they looked at me.”
Maybe the lengthy explanation wasn’t really necessary, but I wanted it out there. I hadn’t done it on a whim, or without understanding how serious it was. Other people might not get it – hell, I was pretty sure no one would get it – but I stood by my decision, even now.
Oh well. Nothing I could do about it now. Might as well get along with it.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“I need to know who knew about this,” he said.
“No one.”
He gave me a skeptical look.
“By the time I met Dr. Kurth, I’d already had my name legally changed,” I said. “As for the rest of it, we didn’t talk about it. Ever.”
“And you believe that your uncle never told Agent Kurth anything?”
“He wouldn’t have,” I said. “Believe me, it was the last thing either of us ever wanted to talk about.”
“What about when he talked to you about joining the agency?”
“I didn’t say anything,” I repeated. “He still doesn’t know.”
Edwards gave me a hard, searching look and I suddenly understood what it must have been to sit across from him in an interrogation room. As strong and stubborn as I usually considered myself, I couldn’t imagine lasting very long against him.
“This isn’t something that can be excused,” he said, “no matter your reasoning. You have fifteen minutes to clean out your room and any other possessions you may have on the premises. Your clearance is revoked, and you’ll be escorted from the grounds.”
It could have been worse, I supposed. I could’ve ended up with a fine or jail time. Instead, I was only being kicked out the FBI academy, bringing all of the plans I’d had for the future to a screeching halt. No Intelligence Analysis. No FBI. No solving cases or protecting people. From the first moment Clay had suggested the FBI to me, I’d been determined to make that my life.
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. I waited until he called for someone to follow me to the dorms, and then hurried away, desperate to leave before anyone realized how humiliated I was. I heard Clay calling my name, but I refused to even look at him. It was better this way. Once he realized that I’d been lying to him for years, he wouldn’t ever want to speak to me again, no matter what our history.
Yet one more thing to add to the list of ways I’d fucked things up, simply so I wouldn’t have to remember the past.
4
Five Months Later
I knew this place.
White curtains with teal trim, the ‘grown-up’ ones I’d wanted to replace the dinosaur ones I’d had since I was six. Dark gray carpeting that matched the rest of the rooms up here.
Right.
Stairs.
I was on the second floor. The scratch-scratch scratching was a tree branch against the aluminum siding. It was always louder after the leaves had fallen.
I frowned. What season was it? The room was warm enough, but it didn’t feel artificial, and I didn’t smell the almost antiseptic scent that came with filtered central air. I took a step toward the window, holding out my hand to see if I could feel a cold draft.
Nothing.
Not that it mattered whether it was spring, summer, fall or winter. I was here, and it was good.
I breathed deeply, wanting to fix the smells in my mind. I knew this place, and it was important to me.
A sugar cookie candle mixed with vanilla body spray, but both faint, like neither of them had been used in a while. Carpet cleaner that was baking soda based. ‘Sunshine-scented’ laundry detergent or fabric softener came from the basket of clothes sitting at the base of the bed.
It was half-empty, like putting things away had been interrupted.
I’d been interrupted. This was my room. My home.
I’d been putting away my laundry when something had caught my attention.
But what?
Fear was a metallic taste at the back of my tongue. Nothing here was scary, but my body was suddenly in fight or flight mode. A noise came from downstairs and I took a step toward the door. I needed to go, but even as I thought it, I realized that I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to know what was down there, waiting, lurking–
I jerked awake, my heart in my throat. For a moment, I didn’t recognize my surroundings and the fear from the dream translated into real life. Then I saw Stevie, my stuffed blue whale and knew I was home. Or at least where home had been for the past two months. Since I’d sold Anton’s loft in New York before I’d gone to the academy, I didn’t really have a home. I’d thought I’d be going straight from training to an assignment, and that’s when I’d find a real place of my own. A place where I’d start a real life with a real home.
Instead, I’d gotten kicked out of the academy and found myself homeless. I had money, at least, so I’d stayed in a hotel for a couple days as I’d figured out what I wanted to do. Then it’d been a weird game of darts where I’d moved from place to place, picking them at random by literally throwing a dart at a map on a dartboard.
I’d gone to Nashville, then Little Rock, then Sacramento, staying a couple weeks in each place while I tried to decide if there was anything there I actually wanted to do. I looked into a lot of different jobs, but I didn’t find anything that really struck me.
I climbed out of bed and walked over to the window. The Rocky Mountains were about thirty to forty-five minutes from Fort Collins, Colorado, which meant that the west-facing window of my apartment had a gorgeous view.
I’d ended up here almost by accident. My dart throwing would’ve had me going to Denver, but that had been one of the places where I’d been hoping to be assigned, so I’d picked a place at random, keeping it in the same area because I’d always wanted to see the Rockies. When I’d gotten here, I’d fallen in love.
Not with a person, of course. With the place. The more time I spent, the more I loved it. I’d found an apartment, put down a deposit, and officially moved in by the end of August.
I moved away from the window and started my morning routine. It wasn’t the same routine I’d had in college, or at the academy, but it was a routine, and it worked for me. A mile run even though there was a bit of bite in the early October air, a shower, then dressed for work.
It was a quick commute since I lived next door, which I had a feeling I was going to love even more when the weather turned bad.
I had to admit, I’d thought my life had gone to shit when I’d gotten kicked out, but now I was starting to think that it might not have been such a bad thing after all. I wanted to help people, and I wasn’t a fan of following the rules. What I was doing now fit around both of those things perfectly.
I smiled when I saw the sign on the door. Burkart Investigations. I’d been considering looking for a security job when I’d stumbled on this place, and it had felt more like coming home than anything else had in a long time. It wasn’t just that the business side of things was exactly what I needed. It’d been Adare.
Speaking of the owner, she was sitting in her usual morning spot in the tiny lobby. She’d managed to squeeze four comfortable chairs into the space and still leave room for the coffee maker. Every morning, she’d choose one of the chairs and sit there with her coffee as she waited for the first client to come in.
“Morning,” she said with a smile.
“Good morning,” I replied as I poured myself a cup and sat down across from her.
Adare Burkart was nearly fifty but looked closer to forty. She kept her jet-black hair pulled back in a simple ponytail and didn’t even try to hide the streaks of silver. Of Middle Eastern ancestry, she had toffee-colored skin that never came close to burning in this high-altitude environment, unlike my own fair complexion.
My first assignment with her had been at the end of August and I’d been tailing a man whose wife suspected was having an affair. Adare had warned
me to use sunscreen, but I hadn’t listened. I’d had on a hat, so my face hadn’t been too bad, but by the end of the day, my arms had been painfully burnt.
“You look tired,” she said as she studied me over the rim of her mug. “I know you’re not out partying until all hours, so what’s keeping you from getting a good night’s sleep?”
Adare lived in the apartment above the office, which meant she was my neighbor, but the buildings weren’t quite close enough for her to hear me if I woke myself up screaming. I considered that a good thing. She’d been really good about not asking questions, especially for a private investigator, but she didn’t let my desire for privacy keep her from checking on how I was doing.
“I haven’t slept well the past couple nights,” I admitted.
“Anything you want to talk about?”
Usually, when she asked that question, I said no, and we moved on, but today, I had something I could share. It wasn’t the reason I’d had last night’s nightmare, but I knew it was the reason I’d been run-down in general the past few days. Besides, she deserved to know something about my past that went deeper than the surface.
“Three years ago this past Friday, my uncle was murdered.”
Adare’s eyes widened, and I saw horror mixing with the sympathy in her eyes. She didn’t say anything though, letting me get through it at my own pace, revealing only what I wanted.
“Anton was an environmental lawyer in New York City and we were close. October of my sophomore year at Columbia, a former client who wasn’t happy with the way his case turned out showed up outside the courthouse. Gunshot to the heart. He bled out on the courthouse steps. The guy tried to kill himself too, but a cop stopped him. They got a full confession and he’s serving a life sentence, but it didn’t change the fact that my uncle was gone.”