“I’m glad you think that way, baby, but—”

She cut him off. “And I was kidnapped for a reason.”

Fuck.

“Babe,” he said low.

“No. It’s true. If I wasn’t, I would never understand in the way I do now how much I love you. How important your love is to me. How precious. How I don’t ever want to lose it. And, belatedly, how I should work not to do that.”

That he’d accept because he f**king loved it.

And he did that by dropping his forehead to hers and murmuring, “Honey.”

“Same with Mom and Dad. Same with everybody. It took me a while to learn the lesson. But one could say I’ve learned it.” He watched her eyes smile. “Definitely.”

“It is not okay what he did to you,” Deck said gently.

“No. It absolutely isn’t. But it’s also not okay for me to live through that and not learn. He did wrong. He hurt me, my parents, you, anyone who loved me. Life has a lot of lessons, some of which I was too scared for too long to learn. Now what I have to learn is not to let that happen anymore.”

When she was done speaking, she tipped up her chin to touch her mouth to his.

When she settled back he lifted his head and she spoke.

“Please don’t be upset you got that angry with me. I can see why you would be but what I want you to see is why I needed you to be.”

All right. It was safe to say he was done.

“You’re bein’ sweet,” he warned, and she grinned.

Then her grin faded and remorse filled her eyes.

“So are you, honey. But then, you always were to me.” She took in a ragged breath and finished, “Always.”

Deck suddenly didn’t give a f**k about her parents maybe coming home soon so he dropped his head and took her mouth.

He got one sweet stroke of her tongue, her strawberry scent all around, when they heard Barry shout, “We got chicken!”

He felt Emme giggle against his tongue.

It sucked that he couldn’t do what he wanted to do.

But that didn’t mean the taste of her laughter on his tongue wasn’t all kinds of sweet.

Chapter Eighteen

More Bedrooms

Three weeks later…

Deck, working at his computer at home, stared at his monitor.

He was close to something on the robbery case. He just couldn’t put his finger on what it was.

Their mystery man who met with McFarland months ago, a man named Jon Prosky, had not come back from seeing to his mom who was sick with MS. Now he’d lost his job because of it, but he was current with all payments on mortgage, credit cards and utilities.

The red flag was that he was paying from accounts in his mother’s name. Accounts that held hefty amounts, made that way by cash deposits made relatively recently.

If that cash could be connected to robberies in the county, they’d nail him. But when local cops in Denver paid him a visit, he’d provided a trail from “friends and family” who gave cash gifts to help out with his mother’s care.

Dead end.

And there was another red flag. When asked by the Denver police, Prosky stated he had no recollection of meeting with McFarland that night. When shown the surveillance photos Chace took that were dark but clearly showed his truck was there, even if the photos of him were indistinct, he’d said he’d loaned his truck to a guy from work.

That had been followed up, the man who supposedly borrowed the truck said this was untrue but he had no one to corroborate that he hadn’t met with McFarland. Possibly substantiating Prosky’s story, his coworker was getting rides to work at the time because his ride was in the shop.

One man’s word against another.

Another dead end.

Deck further could not find any connections, outside of Prosky’s now-alleged meet with McFarland. He had not worked with any of the crew who’d been tagged. He didn’t go to school with any of them. He had no record so he didn’t share a cell with the dealer. He had not been seen anywhere in the company of any of them. And he had no phone records that connected him with any of that crew. He also had no wife or relative who were associated with any of them.

Another dead end.

But Deck had gone to Denver on a variety of business, and some of that business was to spend time watching him.

McFarland was no boss. The dealer they hooked to that crew was a maybe.

This guy had what it took.

In photos, you wouldn’t see anything but he was a decent-looking guy, tall and relatively well built.

In person, he was compelling. An easy smile he flashed often. An open manner that hid something someone not paying close attention, or a high school student not experienced enough to know, would miss.

This was that his manner and smile were surface. His smile didn’t reach his eyes, his manner didn’t expose openly that every movement he made made him seem like he was protecting something.

He was also pathologically social, like a con man on the lookout for his next mark. In the time Deck followed him, he watched Prosky befriend everyone he came into contact with from a gas station attendant, to the waitress at a café, to hooking up in record time with a woman in a bar so far out of his league, that score was downright chilling.

But with nothing to link to him, Deck had nowhere to take his investigation.

So he was looking into every known associate of this mystery man. Boss, coworkers, relatives, friends and especially those friends who “donated” to his mother’s care.

The problem was, Deck’s gut was telling him the key to breaking this was the kids. However, they had nothing at all on the kids and couldn’t question them or follow them.

Clicking through credit reports, Facebook pages and any other thread he could pick up for the last two hours, he was relieved when his cell on the desk rang.

The display said “Emmanuelle calling.”

He took the call.

“You need a ride?” he asked, knowing this call meant his purgatory in computer hell was ending, which in turn meant Deck’s lips curved up.

“Yeah, honey,” she answered.

“Am I bringing Buford?”

“Yeah,” she repeated.

“Be there, twenty, twenty-five.”

“Okay, Jacob.”

“Later, babe.”

“ ’Bye, honey.”

He hung up and turned his attention to shutting down his computer.

Emme was at The Dog, a bar in Gnaw Bone. Girl’s Night Out with Nina, Krys, Lauren, Lexie, Faye and Zara.

This was the third time they’d gone out since her breakthrough. Deck was her ride home though she was probably not inebriated. Emme didn’t lose control like that, he’d noticed. Not back when, not now. But she would be tipsy.