Page 99 of Stay Toxic

I knew the moment he’d recognized me, too.

His eyes narrowed, and despite the darkness, I could see the look of pure calculation in his eyes.

He saw me, and I knew that this was about to go very, very bad.

Because of the few times that I’d met him in person, he’d always been very confrontational toward me because I was a “dumbass blonde.”

At the time of our first meeting, we’d been talking about public safety personnel and their need to stop for buses that had their stop signs out and their blinking red lights on.

I’d argued that firemen had to follow the rules of the road regardless of whether there was an emergency—at least within reason.

And he’d automatically contradicted me because “people were dying while stupid ass kids were getting on the bus.”

I didn’t care who, what, or why. Kids always came first in my book.

I also had a thing about people that didn’t respect it when a kid was loading onto a bus.

Kids were injured and even killed during loading and unloading because of drivers thinking they owned the road and rules didn’t apply to them.

It was one of my hot buttons, and the man that’d called me a “dumbass blonde” had pressed it. Repeatedly.

Needless to say, I was neither a dumbass nor a blonde.

I dyed my blah brown hair to a more appealing dirty blonde that didn’t look too bad when I went eight to ten weeks between appointments because I was a lazy bitch.

But his automatic assumption about my intelligence had rubbed me the wrong way the first time we’d met, and I’d called him on his shit.

Every time from then on I’d seen him, he’d sneered at me like I was a disgusting addition to Viveka’s life that he’d like to scrape off.

Viveka never had, despite Gabriel’s obvious dislike of me.

“What the fuck?” Gabriel snapped. “Now it’s all making fucking sense!”

I blinked at him. “At first, I couldn’t figure out why she would bring the kid to him, and seeing you, it’s all clicking into place. You encouraged Viveka to find this man, didn’t you?”

Well, I was sure how it looked.

But I hadn’t exactly encouraged Viveka to find Shasha in particular. Just a man that would be scary enough to stand up against Gabriel’s scariness and rich enough to withstand a legal battle if the asshole took it that far.

I was happy to find out she’d chosen Shasha, though.

It worked out well for me in the end.

My hand tightened to the tails of Shasha’s shirt, but my spine stiffened.

Before I could go blurting out what I really thought of the asshole, Shasha murmured, “We literally just met. Any circumstantial evidence you’re adding up in your head doesn’t compute. Also, why are you only concerned with the baby here? Let’s talk about the hit-and-run. From what I understand, you used to own a Tesla, correct?”

The quiet officer turned to look at Gabriel then.

He knew about the case.

That was why he was here.

Was he a detective?

If he was, that would make sense of why he was there, just observing, and not actually participating in keeping Gabriel out of Shasha’s face.

Another car started down the road just as the first few sprinkles from tonight’s impending storm started to drop around us.

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