Page 5 of Undercover
God fucking dammit. He was cute as hell, enough to be wildly out of my league—but he also looked exactly like someone who’d sell heroin out of a yoga studio.
Hadsomeone made me, while I’d been staking out that studio over on Bradley? Maybe. Or maybe I’d been seen walking into the BPD station. I hadn’t been dressed or acting like an agent, so possibly this guy thought I was an informant, some kind of rival drug dealer eliminating the competition.
Either way, AD Kyle would be pissed if this went south. Completely absurd connections to yoga aside, the smuggling operation he had his eyes on was high-volume enough to make this a serious case, and as much as I hated being here and hated having to admit it—I was taking it seriously too.
I had to. I mean, what was next, if I screwed this up? Getting posted to the Omaha field office so I could spend the rest of my career chasing down stolen corn?
And yet. How seriously would it be possible to take someone who thought making contact in a drug-dealing scenario would be best accomplished through buying expensive hardbacks about Pablo Escobar? Someone who’d grown up on cheesy movies about the drama of drug smuggling, that’s who.
The cute little possible-junkie kept sneaking peeks at me around the shelf and over the book he obviously wasn’t paying the slightest attention to.
Andfuck, but I wished he’d been fixated on me for a good reason. A pound-him-into-oblivion reason. I hadn’t gotten laid in a while.
A while being nearly a year, ever since Kris got in the shower and left his phone out on the table. I hadn’t snooped. But the explicit and unmistakable message from his previous night’s Grindr hookup had popped up right as I leaned over to grab the remote for the TV.
Purple hair. Not my type. A glint of silver in his ear caught my attention as he shifted to the other side of the shelf sign to peek at me with his other eye. What color were his eyes? Not dark, I could tell that much from a distance. But that wasn’t enough.
For some reason, I needed to know what color his eyes were.
Fuck it, guys with multiple ear piercings weren’t my type either. To be fair, I had a bad-drunken-decision tattoo on my chest, but still. It didn’t show under professional clothing.
And even if I could be flexible on the piercings, drug dealers and addicts definitely weren’t my type, and if they started turning into my type, I wouldn’t be AD Kyle’s type, and that would be a bigger problem.
I turned another page.
Off to the side, the door between the wine bar and the bookstore opened, and the clerk who’d given me the books stepped through. I kept my head down and my eyes slanted to the side, peripheral vision turned up high.
The clerk stopped for a second, his gaze flicking from me to the guy with the purple hair and then back again. Purple-hair froze, and then it looked like he might have shaken his head slightly. The clerk shrugged and moved on to the counter, exchanging a few words with the girl there, and then headed back to the bar.
I wasn’t paying attention to him anymore.
The cute little possibly-criminal twink hadn’t just been watching me; he’d for sure bought me the books.
I knew. Did he know I knew? Probably not, since I hadn’t so much as twitched while I surreptitiously watched the exchange, and I’d kept flipping through the book and frowning like I always did.
The guy pushed his book back into the shelf with a thud audible even from where I stood halfway across the store, and he slipped away. I tensed, poised to follow. He didn’t leave, though. Instead, he followed the clerk through the connecting door and went into the bar.
I waited until I was sure he’d disappeared and wasn’t lurking by the door and spying on me, and then I set the book I’d been ignoring back on the shelf and headed out the front door, keeping to the side so I couldn’t be seen from the bar.
Two of the shops across the way had an alcove between them that just fit one guy leaning up and casually scrolling through his phone. The scents of handmade candles and freshly-baked something-or-other wafted from either side, making me instantly headachy and hungry at the same time.
Shit, maybe I should’ve followed the guy into the bar and gotten a drink myself. Not like I couldn’t use one. And if the clerk had some connection too…but no, that was way too paranoid.
And—no. I’d wait for him to come out, and I’d follow him, and then we’d see what we’d see. Maybe I’d see him go to one of the yoga studios I suspected, or possibly meet with someone. Or make a suspicious phone call. If I saw where he lived, I’d be able to run the address, get his name, check his criminal history. And if he happened to catch me at it, I’d play dumb and act like I’d thought he’d been hitting on me. He’d see what I wanted him to see.
Either way, I definitely wouldn’t be seeing his perfect little ass sticking up in the air waiting for my cock.
Anyway, he wasn’t my fucking type.
Goddammit, I hated this case.
Gabe
Shit, that’d been close. Rainn quirked an eyebrow at me as I glugged down my probably very nice glass of malbec. I’d only learned his name when I bellied up to the bar, breathlessly ordered a glass of anything he could pour quickly, and gotten an introduction and an instruction to take it easy.
God, I hadn’t even tasted the wine. Whatever. I waved the empty glass at him, wordlessly begging for another, and dropped down onto a bar stool.
Rainn popped the stopper out of the same bottle and upended it into my glass, not even bothering to grab a clean one. This was a nice place, I realized as I glanced around while he poured. Not the kind of place my snobbish family would set foot in—and not because of the queer thing, but the anyone’s allowed in thing—but nice, the kind of place where you got a fresh glass every time. Quiet jazz played over discreetly placed speakers, and all the leather and dark wood made it feel cozy, pleasant, and upscale.
