Page 6 of Meet Me In The Dark

She was gone. Micah waited for the relief to sweep in, but instead there was just…loss. And Micah, who always understood his emotions, couldn’t figure out where that came from. He didn’t even know the woman. He should be happy she’d left.

“It’s more than that,” Conor added. “It felt like… she felt like… I’m worried about her. Taking a stranger back to your hotel room is a reckless move, and the things she said, it’s like she doesn’t care what happens to her.”

Micah glanced over at Luke. Luke’s jaw was tight; unsurprising, based on the way Micah’s teammate had lost his mom.

Conor saw it, too. “Not like that. Just not willing to be safe. Or smart. And a woman like her…”

A woman as beautiful as her, he meant. A woman as alluring as her. Micah hadn’t talked to her at all, but he’d seen that much.

“She could get hurt easily,” Micah surmised.

He’d never really worried about what would happen to their triad if, or rather when, one of them met someone else. Even though Conor and Luke never admitted to their feelings for each other or for him, they’d die for each other. Period, end of. No one could ever break up what they had together.

But based on Conor’s reaction, this one was different. This one was a game changer. This one could take Conor away from them.

Unacceptable.

Conor began talking again. “I’d go after her, but I promised Mom I’d come home for a week. Maribelle just had her baby, and they won’t forgive me if I blow them off tochase a woman who doesn’t even want me. And after that, I’m off on that mission with Team Four. It’s going to fuck with my head, knowing she’s driving alone in that car to who the fuck knows where. The next guy she picks up in a bar,” Conor swallowed, “well he might be a scarier asshole than me.”

Luke cracked a smile. “Not possible.”

“We’ll keep an eye on her,” Micah offered. The words seemed counterintuitive, but they came from his gut. He wasn’t sure where he was going with this, yet—he had no plan—but he wasn’t about to risk Conor’s head not being in the game. Besides, Micah could spin this in a way that suited all of them. He knew himself, knew what he was capable of.

“We’ll do what now?” Luke asked, not following Micah’s mind’s trajectory. Luke was smart, but his infallible honesty made it hard for him to see manipulation and maneuvering for what it was. He was too straightforward; his imagination didn’t allow for the twists and turns that Micah took to get what he wanted and they needed.

“From a distance,” Micah added, mind whirling. “Watch her, make sure nothing bad happens to her. Only interact if it’s absolutely necessary.”

“And you’ll keep your hands off her,” Conor said.

“That goes without saying,” Micah said.

It wouldn’t be an issue. No woman—no person—could get under his skin enough to fuck up what he had with Conor and Luke.

Conor relaxed, looking less troubled than he had when he first showed up. “Thanks, bro. I honestly don’t know what I’d do without either of you.”

“Good thing you’ll never have to know,” Micah said, careful to make sure it didn’t sound like the threat it was.

And thus began “Operation Kryptonite Pussy”—so dubbed by Luke, behind Conor’s back, of course.

Micah followed Kara for a few weeks—she’d bounced from Santa Fe to Albuquerque to Austin, without any seeming destination in mind. Micah had sat at the back of bars or pulled over at rest stops, shaking his head every time she chatted up or was chatted up by a bartender or fellow patron.

“Just passing through,” she’d tell each fucking guy, and each one so obviously wanted to get in her pants, they might as well have waved their dicks in her face. “Yes, I’m traveling by myself. I like it—no one to fight with over the music selection.”

The first few times, he’d considered maybe she just liked sex with strangers, that this was her M.O. It would be easier if it were—he could tell Conor this when he got back and maybe the evidence that Conor was just one dick in a line of dicks would knock the sense back into his friend. But she never followed through with any of the dudes she talked to; she refused all of them. She never took a single jackass back to her motel room or followed him home or got it on in the alley behind a bar.

His second thought was that she was naive or stupid, but between stalking her online and listening in on her conversations, it was obvious she was neither. She knew how the world worked. She knew that people did horrible things, especially men, and especially to vulnerable women. He’d seen her watch out for drunk women at bars, watched her tell two younger girls to “always keep an eye on your drink and don’t touch it if you take your eyes off it for even a second.”

No, it was like—there was this gleam in her eyes, like she was purposefully goading disaster. Like she knew that anyof these fuckers could’ve followed her out to her car, that any number of awful things could happen to her, but didn’t care.

Why?

The question haunted him. It kept him company when he showered in hotel and motel bathrooms, when he tailed her on long stretches of highway, when he went for a run in the morning. It kept his ass up late into the night, and Micah never had issues sleeping.

That fucking question,why, was how Micah found himself sitting at a table near the back of a swanky New Orleans restaurant about four months later—on Christmas Eve, no less—pretending to ignore the redhead in the killer black dress sitting at the bar and flirting with the bartender. Micah wanted to punch the poor bartender in the face, and he didn’t know why.

Well, that was bullshit. He knew why. Just didn’t want to admit it to himself.

Seemed like he and Conor had the same kryptonite.

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