Page 8 of Off Limits Daddy

I wouldn’t deny that his suggestion appealed to me. But I had rules, and one of them was no entanglements, even just the friends with benefits type.

“Thank you for the workout and?—”

“Mind-blowing sex.” He waggled his brows.

“And that. I’ve got to go.”

He sat on the bench, watching me with those amazing blue eyes. “Well, I suppose you’ll have something to think about when you masturbate more.”

I gave him a coy smile to let him know he was right.

He winked.

And then I left him in the sauna.

1

Veronica – two weeks later.

Isat in my office poring over the paperwork for the new identity fraud case I’d just been assigned. It had only taken four deaths and the kidnapping of a four-year-old child for my supervisor to finally allow me to dig into the case.

I had all my notes from Liam Quinlan's statement and subsequent murder, along with his brother, Oliver Quinlan's, recent activities. I was still angry at Oliver for not waiting for me when he called to tell me his daughter had been kidnapped. I understood why he didn't wait, especially since he'd been with Detective Donovan. Oliver had trusted Donovan because they had grown up together. How could he have known that Donovan was dirty?

But now Donovan and his partner, a grifter named Darcy Patrick, were dead, likely killed by Wally Creighton, although I couldn’t prove it. I teamed up with an agent from the Organized Crime team who had a great deal of information about Wally. Unfortunately, they didn’t have anything that would hold up in court to convict him.

I rolled my shoulders and tilted my head from one side to the other to release the tension. Maybe I needed a massage. Better yet, a sauna. A large, hot man with a sexy smile and kind eyes flashed in my head. I quickly shook it away. It was irritating how the image of him would show up out of nowhere.

Agent Snyder approached my desk. "Matthews wants to see you."

Snyder was nearing retirement and after an injury two months ago was now finishing his time riding a desk.

"Do you know what it's about?" I closed my folders and rose, grabbing my jacket off the back of my chair. It was always best to be prompt and professional when meeting with my supervisor.

He shrugged. "Couldn't tell you." He headed off back to his desk.

As I slipped my coat on, I hoped my supervisor wasn't about to take this case away from me. I headed to his office, knocking on the door and opening it when I heard him say come in.

As I stepped in, I saw a young woman in her mid-twenties sitting in a chair in front of Agent Matthews’s desk.

"Agent Marsden, come in." He waved me in, motioning to the other chair in front of his desk. "This is Carrie Thomas, a social worker with DSS."

I extended my hand to shake hers and then sat in the chair.

"This is agent Marsden, who I was telling you about. Why don't you let her know what you've brought in?"

She turned to me. "I recently inherited a case from a social worker who just retired. He's a six-year-old boy who has been in foster care for about four years but who I just moved into a foster to adopt placement a few days ago."

I nodded and smiled, but inside, I was wondering what this had to do with me. Unless perhaps he was one of the children whose identity Wally had stolen.

"When I picked him up at his foster home, we went back to my office. I needed to take care of a few things before taking him to his new home. We have a makeshift playroom there. It has a lot of toys but also paper and crayons."

I glanced at my supervisor again, wondering what this had to do with me.

"Aiden drew a picture that was extremely disturbing. Initially, I put it in his file and made a note to look back in his history to see where this picture might've come from. I didn't have any luck and so yesterday, I showed it to my supervisor who actually has a background in art therapy, and she was the one who suggested I bring it to you."

My supervisor handed me the white eight-by-eleven sheet of paper. I turned it so that it was upright to study the image on it. Having used coloring as an activity to occupy my younger siblings growing up, I'd become fairly adept at deciphering drawings.

Looking at Aiden's, it appeared to be a car. Next to it lay two bodies with a great deal of red around them. Immediately, my mind went to the scene where Detective Donovan and Darcy Patrick had been murdered. They’d been killed right as they had made the exchange for the child they'd kidnapped in return for the papers Oliver had of his brother’s. But how would this child know this crime scene?

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