With Extreme Pleasure (19 page)

W
hen King opened his eyes the next morning, it was bright enough outside to be noon. Last night, he and Cady had done the dishes together, made the bed together, then crawled between the sheets and passed out with little more than a hushed good night and a kiss that had gone on forever.

She’d curled up facing away from the window. He’d spooned in behind her and held her for most of the night, waking up once to ease his numb arm from beneath her head and going lights out as soon as he rolled onto his back. He was on his back now, and she hadn’t moved except to switch sides. But now that she was facing him he could hear her breathe.

Propping his arms behind his head as Cady exhaled like the brush of a feather against his side, he stared at the ceiling, trying to decide if he was ready to wake up, or if a few more hours of shut eye would do him even more good.

But since his mind had stirred enough to start working, and had turned to thinking about where they were and why they were here, he gave up trying to doze off and instead drifted to the conversation they’d had with their soup last night.

What had Tyler whoever-he-was been doing in Cady’s apartment when she wasn’t around to see? Boning his supposed girlfriend Alice, obviously, but other than that, what no good had he been up to?

Living as she had for so long, on edge, looking over her shoulder, she wouldn’t have been careless enough to leave anything she didn’t want seen lying around when she was gone. She took her backpack everywhere, and except when she had it out surfing the Web, her laptop—the only thing she owned of any value—was always in it.

That put Tyler there as a spy. Watching Cady and reporting back to whoever sent word of her comings and goings to Tuzzi. Had Cady said how long he and Alice had been dating? She’d concluded that his crawling into her bed had coincided with Malling’s parole, but how long had he been in place?

How long ago had she sold her ride? Was he responsible for her slashed tires? For her botched job interviews and dates soured by graffiti-sprayed cars?

Had he listened in on any phone calls she’d made and spread rumors? Made her private life the stuff of public gossip? Had he come there with a specific assignment or just to keep his eyes peeled? And peeled for what?

That’s what King couldn’t wrap his mind around. With the Renee massage oil connection, there was no way Tyler was anything but a plant. Alice had been cute enough, so screwing her for the cause couldn’t have been a hardship. But it all seemed so ridiculously out there.

As if this entire situation wasn’t ridiculously out there? He frowned. Had they talked about the boyfriend to McKie? What if Tyler
wasn’t
there to launch a first strike against Cady as she’d suspected? What if—free pussy aside—he was still there because he hadn’t found what he was after?

And what if he couldn’t find what he was after because it wasn’t there? Because it was with Cady all the time? Before climbing into her bed, he’d made sure she was passed out. Had he doped her drink? Or left it up to the alcohol to wipe her out, clearing him to search her backpack, her laptop…

King rolled onto his side, propped up on one elbow, nudged his partner in crime. “Cady?”

“Hmm?”

“Wake up?”

“’M awake.”

“What’s in your backpack?”

“What?” she grumbled.

“Your backpack. What’s in it?”

She straightened her legs, rolled over, and pushed her bangs out of her eyes to look up at him. “I don’t know. The usual stuff. Wallet, lip balm, undies, meds, girly hygiene things, and lately a full change of clothes and something to sleep in. Your guns.”

So she had noticed. “I’m working on that.”

“Good.” She stretched, arched her back. The sheet slipped down to bare one breast. “I’ve got a backache from carrying them around.”

“If you’ve got a backache, it’s from boinking like a bunny, and from hauling your laptop everywhere,” he said, pulling up the sheet or else they’d never finish this conversation.

“I’m used to my laptop.”

“Yeah. About that.”

“Yes, I know. I’m online way too much, but since I don’t exactly have a lot of things going for me in real life…”

“This isn’t about you being online.”

She grumbled as she propped up on both elbows. “I might be able to keep up if I had coffee.”

“And if you hadn’t dragged me off to the backyard last night, you’d be drinking a cup even now.”

“I knew that would come back to bite me in the ass,” she said, rolling her eyes and yawning.

He leaned toward her and growled. “I’m going to bite you in the ass if you don’t listen to me.”

She sat up and cupped her ears, the sheet falling to her waist. “Better?”

He forced his gaze back to the ceiling. “Your laptop. On the Ferrer shoot. You had it with you. You had it when you climbed into my truck in the garage. We didn’t have to grab it when we went back for your things because—”

“Because I had it with me…and?”

“Did your roommates ever use it?”

“I don’t think so. They both had their own.”

“And Tyler? That night he was in your room. Could he have used it?”

She shrugged. “I suppose. Like I said, I didn’t know he was even there until I woke up to pee.”

“What’s on your laptop, Cady?”

“What do you mean?” she asked, and frowned. “The usual. Music, photos. All my saved e-mails.”

“What else?”

That question she didn’t answer right away, squirming in the bed as if thinking of getting out. He grabbed her nearest wrist to keep her from going anywhere. “Cady? What’s on your laptop?”

She rubbed both hands over what she could of her face, threaded her fingers into her hair. “I have a folder of stuff from Kevin.”

This time he didn’t care that she was half naked beside him. King sat up, plumped his pillows behind him, and leaned back. “What kind of stuff?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Term papers. Research, maybe. He worked for the campus paper, so articles? I never thought about it when he was alive, and after he died, I couldn’t bring myself to go through it.”

Interesting. More stuff he hadn’t known. “So he was in school at the same time?”

“Same time, same place, two years ahead.”

“And it’s never occurred to you that he might have had something that Tuzzi wanted?”

“Not really, no. The folder was on a flash drive he gave me before the thing with the heroin and the mascot ever happened. He told me to hold onto it. That he’d backed up some of his papers because his hard drive was flaking out. I kept it all, then after he was gone, transferred the files to whatever laptop I had at the time.” She pulled her knees to her chest, propping her chin there in the cradle. “It’s like the only connection to him I still have.”

“Is the folder password protected?”

She nodded.

“Do you still have the flash drive?”

She nodded. “It’s in my wallet.”

“Your wallet that’s always in the backpack you carry everywhere.”

She turned, looked at him and frowned. “You think that’s what Tyler found? That he wasn’t watching me pee or shower or change tampons. He was snooping in my backpack.”

“I don’t think so.” King shook his head. “If he’d found the flash drive, he would’ve taken it. It’s more likely he found the folder on your laptop when you were out of the room showering or…doing those other things.”

“That makes more sense. I know the flash drive is still there. At least it was the morning you skipped out on the bill at McCluskey’s and I had to pay for my cinnamon roll and everyone’s coffee.”

Speaking of coffee…He tossed back the covers. “Get dressed. We’re going to find coffee and breakfast, and buy food. Then we’re coming back and you’re going to show me what’s in that folder.”

“You want to wait? Shouldn’t we look at it now?”

He shook his head, digging for and finding new boxers, T-shirts, and socks in the duffel of things McKie had provided, but he stuck to his broke-in jeans.

“McKie’s the only one who’ll know what to do with the information. Whether he gets here in two hours or three isn’t going to make a difference. And that’s assuming we do find more than your brother’s homework.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“Hell, yeah, I’m right,” he said, whipping the sheet clean off the bed. “I’m a lot more than a pretty face.”

T
here was one thing King had yet to hear from Cady, and that was the story about the original prank that had started this whole mess eight years ago.

Demanding that she share the details would hardly put her in the mood to share. She didn’t like going back into her past. He couldn’t blame her for wanting to stay away.

That meant he had to convince her that telling him what he wanted to know wasn’t going to hurt. Unfortunately, that was one thing even he didn’t believe.

He’d listened to McKie’s version of events in the hospital cafeteria, but his head had been aching and he’d been too focused on Cady and that had been a long time ago.

He knew more about her now, and now he needed more about what had happened. He needed facts so he wouldn’t make a wrong move, and he needed them from Cady.

She sat across from him in the small restaurant whose ambience was not that far removed from McCluskey’s. It was like eating in the family room of somebody’s home. One that also served up country fare in country portions.

None of the skinny small food city portions he’d bitched about to Simon and Micky every time they’d gone out to eat at one of the trendy posh locations his cousin’s wife had swore he had to experience.

He’d sworn
at
the experience, but he didn’t think that’s what she’d had in mind. She’d called him names, insulted his taste, and then ordered him a second meal of real food delivered once they were home. She’d also sneaked more than a few bites off his and Simon’s plates.

Watching Cady eat now, he couldn’t imagine her sitting still for a plate that arrived with two asparagus spears tied together with a string of red onion, a half dollar slice of grilled potato, and a lamb chop the size of his toe topped with cheese that smelled.

She tucked into what he thought was her third waffle and caught him looking at her. “I’ll get a job one day, I swear. I’ll get a job and I’ll set up an automatic deduction from my check to pay you back for the food.”

“It’s good to see you eat.”

She stopped eating long enough to give him a look. “I’ve always been able to eat. I may not know when I turned into an oinker, but there’s nothing that gets in the way of my appetite.”

This was where King kept silent.

“Looking over my shoulder, grieving for Kevin, getting the crap beat out of my face…none of that has stopped me from eating, has it?” she asked, obviously a rhetorical question since she didn’t wait for him to respond. “Neither did the trial or getting booted from my house. You’re looking at a one woman eating machine.”

“Tell me about the prank,” he said, propping one arm along the back of his side of the booth and thinking it best not to pussyfoot but to get it out there and over with, especially since she’d given him the opening.

“What’s left to tell?” she said, dropping her fork against her plate, reaching for her cloth napkin. “What don’t you know? I thought Fitz had covered everything already.”

“He gave me his version. I want to hear yours.”

She’d wiped her mouth, and now tossed the napkin to the table. “I don’t know why. I’m sure they’re the same.”

“Let me be the judge of that.” Fitz hadn’t been there. He had no way of knowing what Cady did, hadn’t experienced what she had, didn’t share her memories. Those were the things nagging at King, things he could only get from the source.

“It’s not going to work, you know,” she said, slumping lower in her padded seat. “Talking about it is not going to make me feel any better about being so stupid.”

“I know you want to take it all back, chère. And I know you know that you can’t. Talking about it may not make you feel any better, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to make you feel worse.” Was she buying any of this? Hell, was
he
buying any of this? “Besides, if you haven’t talked about it since the trial, it’s probably time.”

She studied him for a minute at least, her eyes alert, her bruises fading from purple to green. “Get rid of it once and for all? Is that what you think will happen?”

Enough with the psychobabble bullshit. “I don’t think anything. I just want to hear it.”

“Fine.” She sat up straight, grabbed her fork, stabbed a square of waffle, and swirled it through a puddle of warm syrup opaque with melted butter. “It was my junior year. I was not exactly a joiner. I wasn’t some emo chick holed up in my room, but I did keep to myself. I wanted to get my degree and get on with my life. And here I am still trying to do that.”

“You’re getting there.”

He ignored her when she rolled her eyes. “My roommate, Edie Doyle, got into a big spat with this other chick, Stacia Ashton. She was president of a sorority that was very high profile, and kept giving Edie hell about parking her car in front of the sorority house when she went to the library. Edie was lazy. It was walk half a mile across campus, or park there, cut across their lawn, and hop the brick wall.”

“Stacia was Nathan Tuzzi’s girlfriend.”

Cady ate the bite of waffle she’d been toying with and nodded. “Edie was quiet on the surface. Underneath, she was something else. She hated Stacia and her friends, thought they were nothing but spoiled rich bitches. She was right, but that’s beside the point.

“Anyhow, she came out one night after studying to find her car had been papered with pantiliners.” She fought a smile, tried not to laugh, failed. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t laugh. It’s not funny, but it is. Or it was. You’d have to know Edie to understand.”

“Tell me about her.”

“There’s not a whole lot to tell. Not only was she quiet and, well, homely, she was mortified that girls talked publicly about things like their periods, or waxing, or using vibrators, or which boys gave the best oral sex.”

“She took the mascot for revenge.” It was the only thing he could think of to say, not really interested in hearing about the other things himself.

A nod, and she cut into her waffle again. “She pulled all those pads off her car, intending to hand them to whoever answered the door. No one did. She tried it. It was open. She tossed the garbage to the floor, grabbed the Persian cat from the pedestal inside, and took off with it.”

Took off and left evidence of her guilt behind. King imagined the rich bitches weren’t happy to have to clean up their mess. But Tuzzi…he would’ve been the most unhappy of all to find his product gone.

“She asked you to hide it?”

“Yeah, I have no idea why I took it home except having it around the dorm room would make it easy to find. And I guess I felt sorry for Edie.”

Cady grew pensive, and still, her eyes on her plate as she finished. “It didn’t seem such a bad thing to do, helping her out, after the way they’d humiliated her. Shows what I know, right?”

And this time when she laid down her fork, King didn’t think she’d be picking it up again.