the past few years, she’d been cutting back on the work she did for him and she was torn now, torn between taking care of Jillian and staying here. The guilty ache in her heart demanded she take Jillian home, mother her, baby her, stroke her and soothe her and pat her . . . which would drive Jillian nuts.
The other part of her, the fighter, the psychic, that part of her was being tugged in the other direction. She was needed here. Taige didn’t know why. Joss was the one most capable to handle this. The last thing she needed to do was plant her ass in the middle of a situation she wasn’t equipped to handle and she knew it.
Sighing, she shifted her focus to another picture, using a pencil to draw it closer so she wouldn’t have to touch. This was a girl, maybe twenty. Light-skinned black girl. Biracial, maybe, Taige thought, her skin the same coffee and cream as her own. Short hair, cut a little longer in the front. A pretty smile, just a little wicked. And all sorts of attitude and cockiness in her smile.
According to the info she had, her name was Daylin. She’d been missing for six months. Still officially listed as missing, but in her gut, Taige knew the girl was dead. And it was something awful . . . she could feel the horror lurking as the gray tried to wrap ever closer around her.
Carefully, she pushed it over to the look-at-later pile, again using a pencil so she wouldn’t have to touch it. The ones she’d look at once she decided she had to get involved, she told herself. Although she already knew she was involved in this.
If you weren’t supposed to be involved, you wouldn’t feel like you need to be here. Talk to Jones. He’ll let you know if he wants you in or not, a quiet voice in the back of her mind whispered.
Yeah, and that would go over well. She and her husband were already having a rough time. She’d slept in Jillian’s room because she couldn’t handle being around Cullen last night. But although she was mad at him, she didn’t want to fuck up her marriage and Cullen had so much anger—
A knock at the door had her straightening in her chair.
“I’ll get it,” Dez said, rising from the couch. She slid Taige a grim look and added, “I’m not good for much else on this trip.”
Taige didn’t respond. Hunching her shoulders, she went back to staring at the picture she’d just pushed away. Her fingers trembled as she reached out, hovering just a breath away from the picture.
“You’ve been here for forty-five mintues, Taige,” Taylor said quietly.
Looking up, she met the steel blue of his eyes.
“Is that your polite way of telling me to leave?” she asked. Vaguely, she heard the voices at the door.
He shook his head. “If I wanted you to leave, I would tell you to leave. But you’ve been here, avoiding a connection you know is there all this time . . . for some reason. And now you’re going to do it, because of a knock at the door.”
Curling her lip at him, she crossed her arms over her chest and leaned back.
As Cullen came through the doorway to the dining room, Taylor gave her a brief smile.
She barely resisted the urge to flip him off.
* * *
IT was a quick meet.
Joss could tell by the look on Jones’s face that they weren’t going to be chitchatting much. They hadn’t chatted much the previous night either when Joss had dumped Hennegan’s unresisting body into Jones’s lap. No telling what Jones had done, but the man didn’t look any worse for wear, although Joss knew he’d slept even less than Joss had.
“Here,” Jones said, his voice terse as he passed on a black duffel. His voice made it clear he wasn’t in the mood to talk.
That was fine with him. He had managed to mostly settle his new gift back into place, but he still needed some time to solidify those shields and get a grip. He’d done this too soon, and he knew it—now he was left trying to patch a busted flood wall.
Studying the black duffel, he hefted it, tested the weight. He had a rough idea what was inside it, although he’d take a better look once he didn’t have so many people around him. “Gee, boss, you shouldn’t have. I didn’t bring you anything,”