Back in Black (McGinnis Investigations #1) - Rhys Ford Page 0,9
and I looked forward to teasing those smiles out of him for a long time.
“I’m glad you’re home, Cole-ah.” Even his voice held a hint of the chilis he loved, scorching a fusion of lust and desire down my spine and across my belly. The kiss ended way too soon, and I went in for seconds, but Jae pinched the end of my nose, stopping me in midswoop. “Hold on to that thought, because I planned on waking up when you came home, but something dragged me out of bed.”
“I’m guessing that something has to do with me,” I mumbled as if suffering a tremendous cold, unable to speak clearly with my nose held firmly between his fingers. “Could you let go? I sound as if I’m going to go take a job as a nanny for a man named Sheffield with three kids and a butler.”
He let go, leaving me with a kiss on my injured nose tip. Reaching across of me, he dislodged Neko, who’d settled against me on the other side, and snagged a piece of paper I’d not seen tucked in under the bowl of mango.
“I wasn’t asleep, because I was worried about you, even though you told me you were fine. I was still worried,” Jae admitted in a soft whisper. Neko, however, voiced her opinion at being ruffled with a loud strident meow at odds with her tiny body. Honey, probably sensing the cat’s impending rampage across the room, wisely picked herself up off of the floor and shuffled over to one of the dog beds where she would be safe.
“I was fine.” I could see he didn’t believe me, and since I’d left out the part about being shot at, Jae probably suspected I was lying. Actually it was probably more than suspicion, because he could always tell when I was lying. “It was a little hairy at times—and remind me to tell you about the sheep—but I was okay. What woke you up?”
“The phone.” Jae held up the piece of paper so I could see the numbers he’d written down. “A man named Arthur Brinkerhoff called about an hour ago. He’d like you to find out who killed his wife and why the cops are accusing her of stealing two million dollars in diamonds.”
Three
“WAIT. BRINKERHOFF.” Claudia hovered at the edge of my desk, holding my coffee cup hostage, just out of my reach. “We know that name, right? Wasn’t that the name of the spanking dominatrix grandma who nearly popped your head off with a shotgun a few years back?”
“I don’t know about dominatrix,” I grumbled, grabbing at my cup as it wove closer. “Okay, maybe.”
“She sure as hell beat your ass,” my alleged surrogate mother shot back as she set my coffee down with a firm thump. “And now she’s dead, and somehow it’s your problem?”
“Well, I did kind of find her.” The coffee was strong. At some point in Claudia’s past, someone taught her how to make paint thinner out of coffee beans, and she’s been perfecting her toxic brew ever since. I was surprised I still had nostril hairs, but I was grateful for the punch to my heart, since I’d gotten so little sleep the night before. “I feel like I owe this guy. I haven’t thought about them in years, but it’s the case I was working on when Mike dropped Hyun-Shik’s case into my lap.”
The look I got from Claudia was a stern reminder of how she raised eight sons to a steady, responsible adulthood where they all made a good living and treated their significant others with love and respect. We’d both come a long way since the day she walked into my office, resplendent in her Sunday-go-to-church best, and subsequently took over my life. She became the mother I never had, a strong, bighearted Southern woman who told me when to pull up my socks and when to shut my mouth. Unfortunately for Jae and me, Claudia was also now best friends with Jae’s adopted aunt, a Filipino kathoey lounge singer named Scarlet who spent most of her life as a woman and a voice of reason alongside of Claudia’s already brimming sea of knowledge. The two of them together kept us wrapped up tight, doted on and loved but also subjected to their extremely strong opinions about practically everything under the sun.
I got a lot of sympathy from Claudia’s sons and their children, but mostly I believed they were just happy to have