Playing With You (9 page)

Thoughts of the times when she was young…her father and uncle touched her in her private places when they were certain no one was looking. Her stomach churned at the memories of the things they made her do to them. She hadn’t quite been a teenager when they started touching her and forcing her to touch them…and worse.

She clenched her hands so tightly her nails dug into her palms and she felt like she was going to throw up from the ache in her belly.

And then, as if having sexually abusive adults in her life wasn’t bad enough, Deena had married a bastard who had beaten her.

If her father hadn’t died when he’d choked on a piece of steak, and if her uncle hadn’t moved away, she might have killed them when she was old enough to defend herself. Her ex-husband had been lucky because he’d skipped out of town. One more day with him and she knew she would have put him out of her misery.

She shuddered and felt as if black sludge coated her skin. She turned up the water’s heat and the power of the spray to blast the terrible feelings from her body.

With effort, she forced all bad thoughts aside and concentrated on good ones.

Like thoughts of Ricki, which were always good. She was such a lovely woman. Not only was she pretty, but she was like Deena’s mother had been with her sweet disposition and her ability to set people around her at ease.

For a long time, Deena stood under the hot spray until she felt clean again and she had relaxed. She’d filled herself with positive thoughts about how pleasant it would be when she was out with Ricki.

Deena smiled. It would be fun testing the waters with Ricki tonight and gauging just how far she could go with her this soon. Unfortunately, it probably wouldn’t be too far. Not yet. It would take her a little longer than she’d like to seduce Ricki completely, but she would do her best to be patient.

Not that being patient was easy for her. Not at all.

When Deena finished showering, she dried off and slipped into lacy black panties with a matching bra that didn’t leave a lot to the imagination. She didn’t bother to put on any other clothing, but moved around in her lingerie.

One of her eyes started stinging and it burned and ached as if she’d gotten a piece of sand in her contact. She went to the bathroom and picked up the bottle of saline she’d left on the counter before removing a brown contact lens, leaving her for a moment with one pale blue eye and one brown eye. She rinsed off the contact with saline then put the lens in again. She blinked rapidly as the contact settled. Much better. She went ahead and took out her other brown lens and rinsed it, too, before putting it back in and blinking until the contact was settled.

For a moment she studied her reflection and touched a finger to her full lips, remembering when they used to be thin. She rather liked this new look with the cropped and bleached white-blonde hair, sable brown eyes, and collagen enhanced lips. Not only had she changed her hair and eye color, but she’d lost close to forty pounds and was now slim and trim and enjoyed showing off her body when she could. She couldn’t wait to show it off to Ricki.

She was virtually unrecognizable and looked like she could be Angelina Jolie and Sharon Stone’s love child. She braced her hands on either side of the sink, leaned forward, and inspected her hairline. She was going to have to bleach it again to take care of the dark roots that were just starting to show.

The air in the room was cool on her bare skin as she settled in an overstuffed chair and put her feet up on a desk chair. She took her iPad off the end table and visited a job hunting website as she started looking at employment opportunities in Prescott.

Not a whole lot was there that interested her. Sooner or later she was going to have to give in and pick something. She’d told Ricki the truth that she’d been in management. She just hadn’t mentioned that it had been at a fast food chain.

She’d risen up just about as high as she could go and made enough to get by, but not what she deserved to be paid. Now that she’d created a new life for herself, she was creating a whole new résumé and she intended to bullshit her way into a good job with good pay.

Fortunately, Deena had stashed away the inheritance that her grandmother had left her three years ago. Deena hadn’t been close to her grandmother, but the woman had left each of her grandchildren a generous sum, so Deena had enough in cash to live off of for six months. She didn’t plan on taking that long to get a job—or to see all her plans fall into place. Once she was with Ricki, things would be even better.

Deena smiled to herself, thinking of spending time out on the town with Ricki. It was still a couple of hours until it was time for Ricki to pick her up and Deena was anxious to go.

She was more than ready. Every step was another step closer to having Ricki all to herself.

He couldn’t stay away from Ricki. She was like a drug that he needed and couldn’t live without. He hadn’t been able to keep himself from going into the bakery and asking her to join him, and he’d enjoyed every moment of it.

Garrett clenched a document in his hand and had to relax his grip. He set the paper on his desk, and smoothed it out with his fingers as he absently stared at the information for a case he was working on. This one involved a suspected cheating spouse, one of his least favorite types of cases. Especially since he knew the woman who’d hired him, Sally Johnson. He’d gone to grade school with her and had always liked her.

He didn’t know her husband, Andy Johnson, but already Garrett wanted to knock the shit out of the man if he was cheating on Sally, a real sweetheart. Considering the Johnsons owned half of Prescott and were prominent in the community, it was going to be a real scandal if Andy Johnson was cheating.

From the time he was a kid, Garrett couldn’t stand an injustice being done. He’d gotten into fight after fight, defending kids being picked on, and had ended up in the principal’s office on multiple occasions. He’d been stubborn and shut down when the principal and counselors talked with him, refusing to tattle. As far as he was concerned, in most cases he’d already made the bully regret what he’d done.

Would Garrett have taken it upon himself to champion those who couldn’t defend themselves if his father hadn’t been such a brutal man? When he was young, he hadn’t been able to defend his mother and brother, or himself, against his father, when the bastard went on one of his rampages. So instead, he’d defended those he could.

Garrett grew up with the desire to get into law enforcement but decided to go into private investigations because he felt he could do more good there than he could as a police officer. He also liked to work for himself—he wasn’t much for following orders. He liked to do things in his own way without a bunch of red tape.

Despite everything, the fact that violence was in his blood concerned him more than he wanted to admit. He’d gotten into plenty of fights, even as a teenager. What if he lost control and hurt someone he cared about? The thought gnawed at him, making him clench his jaw in frustration.

His thoughts turned to Ricki. God, he could never hurt her or another woman. But the fact he had a violent past scared the shit out of him.

The sins of the father…

Garrett slammed his fist down on his desk, rattling the cup of pens and pencils that sat precariously on the edge. He moved the cup and let his breath out, then leaned back in his leather chair and studied the framed Norman Rockwell art on his walls. He’d always loved Rockwell and had several of his prints. “Runaway,” “Bottom of the Sixth,” and “Homecoming Marine,” were three of his favorites that he had in the office. He had several more in his home on the ranch.

Rockwell’s paintings depicted a simple, peaceful, happy existence that he wished better mirrored the world around him. In his line of work the world was a much darker place.

He wondered if it was possible to have a life like the ones depicted by Rockwell. He was a realist, so he didn’t expect things to ever be perfect and rosy, but a part of him, deep inside, was also a romantic.

Garrett rubbed his temples. He had to get his mind back on the job. He needed to follow Johnson when the man got off work, which would be any time now. He’d put a tracker on Johnson’s car and would wait until the man reached his destination before following him. Putting a tail on a man in a town like Prescott wasn’t an easy thing to do without getting spotted.

According to Sally, Andy always came home late from work on Wednesday nights, so tonight would be a good time to see what Johnson was up to. Hell, maybe he was just playing poker with the boys and didn’t want to tell his wife. Garrett hoped that it was that simple of an explanation.

He glanced at the time on his mobile phone that he’d left on his desktop before opening up the tracker app that located the device he’d put on Johnson’s car. Within moments he had a signal. Looked like the man was still at work.

Garrett left his office and stepped into the night that was lit by a streetlight in front of his building. He unlocked the parallel-parked nondescript tan sedan that he used for surveillance. He didn’t use his truck for these occasions because it was easily recognizable and didn’t blend in as easily as the sedan did.

After he climbed in and started the vehicle, he opened the tracker app on his phone again and saw that Johnson was now leaving his office. Garrett watched the GPS to see where the man was headed. Looked like he was on his way to the side of town opposite from where he lived. After Garrett took off his Stetson and exchanged it for a ball cap, he pulled out onto the street and followed the signal until he caught up with Johnson’s car. It was dark out, but Garrett still stayed three car lengths behind the man.

Fifteen minutes later, Johnson turned onto a residential street. Garrett parked on the corner when he saw Johnson’s car pull into the driveway of a modest ranch style home. Garrett used his surveillance phone to take a few pictures of Johnson exiting his vehicle, zooming in on the license plate and the house number.

Johnson stood on the doorstep, looking from left to right, and pressed the doorbell. A few moments later a woman in a white robe opened the door and let Johnson into the house.

Shit.

Looked like Sally was about to get her heart broken. Damn, but he hated this.

Garrett took several pictures of the pair as Johnson walked into the house. The woman closed the door behind them.

No curtains or blinds were open in the front of the house but the lights were on. Once Garrett had checked to make sure no cars were coming and neighbors weren’t out in their yards, he climbed out of his sedan and pulled down his ball cap. Carrying his camera, he walked across the street.

He gritted his teeth, his muscles tense. This was the part of his job he hated.

When he reached the woman’s front yard, he checked again to make sure no one was around then slipped into the darkness beside the home. He moved along the side of the house, listening. At first there was nothing but then he heard a feminine giggle and voices moving toward the back of the house.

The windows were dark in the backyard, but soon a dim glow came from one of the rooms. Clearly, a lamp had been turned on.

He had to step between two rose bushes as he moved closer to one of the windows, careful to stay pressed to the side of the house and not to make a sound. He’d done this far too many times for too many different reasons. The only way to complete the job was to get the photos.

His jeans protected him from rose thorns in the waist-high bushes as he shifted so that he could find an opening. All it took to capture his targets in the act was a space between the curtain and the frame, or a slightly opened blind to do what he had to do. Sometimes it was cheating spouses, other times it was tracking a thief and proving he had the stolen goods before the police were called. There were any number of reasons why he’d had to make use of his skills.

The woman who Johnson was visiting had made it far too easy. The window closest to Garrett had a space between the curtain and window frame an inch wide. He attached a small scope to his camera and put the eye of the scope to the window. Holding the nickel-sized lens in place, Garrett looked through the wide-angled lens and peered in.

The bedroom was medium in size and the bed was positioned at the center. At the foot of the bed, Johnson stood with the woman as he pushed her robe from her shoulders, letting it fall around her feet. Like Garrett had suspected, she’d been naked beneath the robe.

He watched with almost clinical detachment as he took pictures of the woman and Johnson. She was beautiful and had a fit body with large breasts, and long hair that fell to the middle of her back. She undressed Johnson slowly and in moments was on her knees sucking him off.

Once the couple was on the bed and Johnson was driving into the woman from behind, Garrett figured he had enough to close the case. He moved the smaller lens away from the window and disconnected it from the camera before pocketing it.

His skin burned from the anger bubbling through him. Damn, but he’d hoped Sally was wrong, that Johnson wasn’t having an affair on her. He didn’t want to show her the photographs. He’d show her one picture of Johnson and his mistress together with their clothes on.

After that he’d tell her what was in the envelope he’d give her and hope she took his advice and didn’t look at the rest of the photos. All it would do was cause her pain. She could take the images to her attorney and let him look them over to tell her the pictures were exactly what Garrett had said they were. Of course he wasn’t naïve enough to believe Sally or any other woman wouldn’t want to look. No matter how painful, she’d want to see.

No matter that he wanted to do nothing more than kick Johnson’s ass, it was a case and he couldn’t get more involved than being the tool that helped his client.

He got into his car and set the camera on the passenger seat before rubbing his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. He was damned well looking forward to retiring from the business of private investigations and spending his time ranching instead. Most of the money he made went into a savings account to buy a good-sized herd. He’d already purchased a piece of land next to his ranch to use for grazing. He was another step closer to doing what he really wanted to do.