25. Be Good

TWENTY-FIVE

Be Good

His phone was rattling on the nightstand.

Rus opened his eyes, and for a second, he didn’t know what was happening.

Then he smelled Lucinda’s perfume.

He put his chin in his throat and saw her form through the dark, draped down his side, arm across his stomach, head on his chest, in his bed.

She was still wearing her dress, but she’d taken off her boots.

Last night, when she’d started to settle in, get comfortable, watching her unzip and tug them off had been one of the most erotic things he’d ever witnessed.

He couldn’t say he’d given her the same. He was in his lounge pants and thermal.

They were on top of the duvet, but the plaid blanket was over them.

And she’d finished the bottle of wine, he’d finished the bourbon, she’d shared she didn’t know how bad it was going to be when she came to him last night, so Madden was spending the night with her brother, who Madden adored and who was going to spoil her ridiculously, and then he was taking her to school that morning.

Rus had shared that was the most meaningful thing a woman had done for him in a decade.

Then they’d talked deep into the night, moving it from couch to bed because it was more comfortable. They’d started cuddling, and Rus had the sneaking suspicion he was the one who fell asleep first.

But she’d stayed.

And now she was draped on him, he had his arm around her, he was on his back, and she felt great.

Best morning he’d had in years.

By far.

He reached to his phone, mostly to silence it, but took the call because that was what he always had to do.

“Lazarus,” he said quietly.

Lucinda stirred.

His body went tight, and his morning erection vanished when Jennifer snapped in his ear, “You’re on assignment?”

“Hey, just a sec,” he said, still talking quietly, now trying to extricate himself from Lucinda without waking her.

This failed.

Her head came up.

“Why are you talking like that?” Jenn demanded.

At this demand, Rus stilled.

Completely.

Because, first, she didn’t say hello.

Second, it was still dark, so it had to be early, even for her, where it was four hours later.

Third, it was no longer her business if he was on assignment. She made too much money to get alimony from him. He left her in the house they’d bought together. They’d saved for the kids’ college, a fund she managed at her decree.

So in all things that mattered, they were covered.

Outside incidental Acre and Sabrina things, there was no reason for them to speak anymore, and definitely no reason for her to be up in his shit first thing in the morning.

He looked into Lucinda’s shadowed face.

“I’m talking like this because I have someone with me, but don’t worry about it, she’s awake now.”

He heard Jenn gasp.

“I can—” Lucinda whispered, making a move, but he answered that by tightening his arm around her.

“Are you on assignment?” Jenn asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you working right now?”

“I was sleeping.”

It was high-pitched when she asked, “With someone else?”

He looked to the clock. “Jenn, it’s five thirty here. Why are you calling?”

Lucinda tensed against him at the name.

Yeah, they’d talked a lot last night. With stories that were accompanied with showing her numerous pictures of his kids, his brothers and sisters-in-law, nieces and nephews, she now knew a good deal more about Jenn.

“Why do you have someone with you on assignment?” Jenn returned.

“Are the kids okay?”

“Are you…are you…fucking someone?”

He pulled himself up in bed, and this time, Lucinda came with him, doing this herself, keeping a hand on his chest.

While he was on the phone with his ex, she was claiming him.

Very nice.

But sadly, with Jenn in his ear, not nice enough.

“Are. The kids. Okay?” he pushed.

“Yes, they’re okay. But you told Sabrina you’re on assignment and you know how she worries,” she snapped.

“This has been her life since she could cogitate. I know she worries. It comes with the territory of having an FBI agent for a dad.”

“I’ve told you I don’t like you telling her when you’re out doing that kind of thing.”

“And I’ve told you that’s between me and my grown-ass daughter. And she disagrees with you. She wants to know. ‘That kind of thing’ is my job, Jenn, and my girl is proud of what her father does.”

“It upsets her.”

“Since she’s an adult now, it’s her call.”

Lucinda leaned into him to reach across to turn on the light, and when it lit up the space, he squinted against it.

“She’s not grown, she’s only eighteen. It’s your job to protect her from these things.”

“Jesus Christ, you’re calling just to get on my ass. Is your husband away on business or something? Not there to ride his?”

He could see in the room now, and what he could see was Lucinda smiling.

His cunning queen was enjoying this.

Yeah.

He’d told her all about Jenn.

“Leave Royce out of it.”

“Royce is your husband. I’m not. How about leaving me out of it?”

“What’s gotten into you?” she clipped.

“Some sense,” he retorted. “Now, if there’s nothing pressing with the kids, I’m ending this. Later.”

He then hung up on her.

Lucinda went at it immediately.

“Does that happen often?”

“You know, she was such a part of my life, it didn’t filter in that she never really stopped being part of it. So yes, it does,” he replied. “And hello, gorgeous, good morning.”

She smiled, white teeth and all.

His phone buzzed in his hand.

He looked down at it.

Jennifer.

“Take it,” Lucinda urged.

He shook his head. “No. She can stew. Want coffee?”

“Rus, honey,” she purred, a light in her eyes that might make his morning erection recover even after an episode with his ex-wife. “Take it.”

Feeling his lips twitch, he took it.

“Jenn, this isn’t cool,” he said, but it sounded like he was smiling.

“Am I amusing you?”

It was close to a shout.

He took in Lucinda, her cloud of dark hair framing her face and falling down her chest. Her makeup seeming fresh, as if she’d just put it on.

There she was, in his bed, after keeping him company all night because he’d had a shit day…hell, a shit few days. Driving from work and making arrangements for her kid so she could be there.

And he hadn’t even kissed her.

She didn’t freak out at serial killers but threw a mild fit to demand to pay for the funeral of a girl who wasn’t blood.

He reached out, ran the backs of his fingers down her soft cheek, then he turned, threw his legs over the side of the bed and knifed out.

“Right, it’s important you listen,” he said into the phone as he walked to stand at the window. “I’m not yours to jerk around anymore, Jennifer.”

Another gasp.

“We divorced. We’re done. You made that plain by fucking another man in our bed. I didn’t want you after you took some other guy’s cock, and you didn’t fight it.”

“You didn’t fight it either,” she fired back.

“Is that what I was supposed to do?” he asked. “Beg you to come back to me when it was you fucking somebody who was not me?”

“We had a marriage, Rus, we had children.”

“Yeah, we did, so why did you fuck another guy?”

“Well, my husband wasn’t home to fuck so…”

“So? So you fucked another guy? So you, you, Jenn, put an end to our marriage by betraying it, and somehow it was on me to save it for you and our kids?”

There was silence from her end.

Yeah.

Fuck yeah.

“Do you hear yourself?” he pressed his advantage. “Do you know how fucked up that is? Christ, I loved you, Jenn. But that died instantly when you looked over his shoulder at me standing in the door to my own damned bedroom watching my wife get fucked. We’re divorced three years, I woke up with a woman next to me, you knew it, and threw a fit. What if I did to you what you did to me?”

“Rus, maybe—”

“Answer me.”

“What’s gotten into you?”

“I told you. Some sense. I felt so much guilt for not being everything you needed me to be, it escaped me that you weren’t what I needed either. You were demanding. You were unappeasable. And in the end, unforgivably cruel. I didn’t make you happy, and you didn’t make me happy, and we’re over. So why the fuck do you keep calling me?”

“I’m trying to protect our daughter.”

“No, you’re trying to lead me around by my dick. Take this in, Jenn, when you took his, you lost hold on mine, and you can’t have it back. Yeah?”

“You can stop being crude now, Rus.”

“You can stop calling me, Jennifer. The kids. That’s all we talk about. Are you listening?”

“Fuck you, Zachariah.”

Christ, she knew he hated that name.

“Right,” he bit off then ended the call.

He turned to Lucinda who was staring at him not with fear, or revulsion, but like she was proud of him.

So yeah, there was something happening between them.

Trial by fucking fire.

“A twenty-three-year-old girl came in yesterday and explained how she’d been gang raped by a guy she had a crush on when she was fifteen, and he invited his friends to the party. They didn’t do it once but came back repeatedly. She’s so fucked up by it, she might be in a position where the only way she can get pleasure from sex is to be raped. To test this theory, she set up a stranger danger scenario to get raped again. But it didn’t go down how she expected. She wasn’t raped. She was raped. She paid someone to rape her.”

“Rus,” she said quietly, her eyes melting, her beautiful face full of sympathy.

“That’s my job. That’s my life. That’s the shit I have to deal with. And that’s not the worst of it, Lucinda.”

“I know that.”

“Okay. You’re smart. You’re getting this. You know I mean to freak you. It sucks I gotta jump ahead when I haven’t even kissed you, but you’re into me. I’m way into you. And you need to know what you’re getting into with me.”

“We can remedy part of that now, honey, if you kissed me,” she invited.

And damn, sitting on her hip and propped up on her hand in his bed, she was inviting.

“No way, baby,” he whispered. “It’s not about morning breath. I’ve wanted to fuck you since I met you. Now you, in my bed, so damned beautiful, it wouldn’t stop at a kiss, and I got shit I gotta do.”

“Okay,” she murmured, the invitation still in her eyes.

He used her words of last night.

“Stop it.” And added, “Be good.”

She bit her lip.

Jesus.

She let him off the hook. “I cared about Brittanie a lot. You have to find who hurt her. I know what you do, Rus.”

“Okay,” he muttered.

“And I know this won’t help, but that was an outrageously serious turn on, listening to you make mincemeat of your ex.”

“It helps, but it doesn’t help. And that isn’t being good.”

“She deserved it.”

“You’re way into me too.”

“Yes,” she said simply. “I am.”

Well then.

Fuck it.

He went to her, pulled her to him, twisted to his back on the bed, and held her on top of him as he kissed her.

He didn’t experience morning breath.

She tasted musky and forbidden and fucking delicious.

And she might be queen of her domain, but she submitted totally when kissed.

Fuck.

He rolled her to her back and broke away to stare down at her.

“Wow,” she whispered.

“Yeah,” he whispered back.

“You were right, that wasn’t a good thing to do.”

“I know.”

“I’ll be good from now on, I promise.”

He kind of hoped she wasn’t.

Still, he said, “Obliged.”

“Rus?”

“Right here?”

“You’re a remarkable man, and even though the why breaks my heart, I’m really glad I met you.”

Goddammit.

He was right.

He was glad she couldn’t keep her promise for even ten seconds.

He kissed her again.

He got hard doing it.

But…fuck it.

She earned it.