Page 3 of The Honest Affair

What the hell was she doing here?

Why did she have to be so crazy beautiful?

I had told Cardozo that I was off the case because I was in love with Nina de Vries, with the full conviction that the emotion was firmly in the past and had been since the moment I discovered her deception. Who the fuck are you kidding? I thought as I looked at her. You are in love with Nina de Vries. Then. Now. Forever.

The fact made me that much angrier.

“Hello, Matthew.” Her voice was low, almost husky, like she hadn’t had enough sleep or had maybe just woken up. It was pretty damn early.

Her sleek blonde hair was tied back, away from her clean, ice-sculpted face that included those big gray eyes, long nose, and full, pink lips that I knew turned the color of ripe plums when I sucked on them hard. She looked a far cry from the sex-tousled siren I’d left in Boston just a few days prior.

“Nina,” I said as I let the door close behind me. “What the hell is this? Some plea for attention? Trying to lure me back into your web?”

Neither of us mentioned the several dozen calls and texts she had sent me since Tuesday. All of them unanswered.

She refolded her hands. “I thought it was clear. I told Detective Kingston I was here to turn myself in.”

“For what, exactly?”

She looked up, and her eyes landed on me with the force of a gavel. “Well, I’m not sure about the correct legalese, but I believe it will be something along the lines of conspiring in sex trafficking, possibly of minors and illegal aliens.”

I raised a brow. “That wasn’t the story you fed me Tuesday night, doll.”

“Matthew, as you so judiciously pointed out at Skylar and Brandon’s guesthouse, I am part owner of over fifty houses used to abuse and transport young women across the greater Northeast.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t know it!” I blurted out without even thinking.

Something like relief fluttered over her fine features.

“Didn’t I?” she asked softly. “You seemed to think I did.”

It wasn’t until that moment I realized that deep down, I wanted to believe her. I’d been so angry about what I’d found. Felt so blindsided by the measures her husband had taken to traffic what had to be hundreds, maybe thousands of girls to other slimeballs, that even the thought of the woman I loved being a knowing accessory to those actions made me feel physically ill.

But now, a few days after the truth had sunk in, a few days after my skin still yearned for her touch, my heart still hollered for hers, even in my sleep…I didn’t know what to believe. On the bed, when I’d shown her the videos, she had looked horrified. Terrified. And I knew that woman on the screen. I knew her hair, her legs, the shoes she had been wearing the night we met.

But I still remembered her response: It isn’t me.

“I—I don’t know,” I said, sinking into the chair across from her.

Nina unfolded her hands, turning one over so it reached toward me, palm up. I stared at it. I wanted to take it. Just the touch of her, that impossibly smooth skin. But right now, this close, her inimitable scent of roses and light drifting toward me…

No. I couldn’t. I was confused enough.

“Do you—do you still have the video on your phone?” she asked. “The one where I…meet…this Ben Vamos?”

I ground my teeth at the thought of the skeezy bastard whom Derek and I had discovered was a family connection of Gardner’s from back when his name was still its original Hungarian, Károly Kertész. They had been working together for years, with Vamos running the houses through which they had trafficked girls from Eastern Europe into the country. With, apparently, Nina’s help.

Still, I nodded curtly. The IT guys had deleted all evidence from my hard drive, including my access to the secure file server where we could view digitized evidence. But I’d rebelled and saved one to my own device, if for no other reason than to remind myself of the truth. That Nina was a liar. A traitor.

Wasn’t she?

“May I look at it, please?”

I frowned. What was her game here? But I still pulled my phone from my pocket and flipped to the video in question. Nina showed no surprise I still had access to it. I placed it on the table and tried not to inhale that floral aroma when Nina leaned in with me to watch.

I’d seen it at least a hundred times. The black Escalade pulling to the curb of a shitty New Jersey townhouse. The back door opens, and out walks Nina in her prim white dress, her sleek blonde hair tousled around her face. I knew exactly how many steps it took for her to walk from the sidewalk, through the gate, and up the porch steps. She knocks on the door, and it’s opened by Vamos, a thick middle-aged man with gray hair buzzed close, a stained shirt the color of old socks, and a permanent frown etched onto a reddened face.

They talk, and after a few minutes, she enters the house. Later, she leads a parade of girls from the house to the Escalade that will take them to a private airport, where they would disappear from the investigator’s lens.

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