Then, because it was his job, he watched her and her father. And he saw that Townsend didn’t hide anything from Sadie. He wasn’t concealing how he was able to give her a very good life. She knew all about it. She seemed to have no problems with that which made Hector wonder if she was somehow involved in the operation.
Hector looked into it and found she wasn’t involved.
She was clean. Squeaky clean.
In Hector’s experience, no one was squeaky clean. This made Hector suspicious. So he watched her closer.
And watching her and her father (but mostly her) made him uneasy.
Being from a big, loud, loving and in-your-business Mexican-American family, he’d never seen anything like it.
There was no affection, no teasing, no loving displays.
There was also no visible abuse.
There was nothing.
Mostly that nothing came from Sadie. She was like a robot. Not just around her father but all the time.
She did everything right, everything exact, everything perfect. The way she dressed, ran her father’s home, organized his parties, everything.
She seemed to be able to do it with minimal effort. She never got stressed, frustrated, on edge. She was never anything but completely together and in control.
Further, she didn’t invite closeness or affection not only from her father but from anyone. She didn’t laugh or joke or lose her temper or display the barest hint of a personality.
She just did her job. All the time. Twenty-four, seven.
All that nothing made Hector want to make her feel something but she didn’t invite that either. She was ice cold.
This had the perverse effect of really making Hector want to make her feel something.
Then she started helping him, feeding him information.
He couldn’t f**king believe it. Not just because she was doing it but because she was really not good at it.
He’d even walked up to her father’s office door and seen her place a file in the drawer where she put information for him. The house had been empty before he entered it, he knew and undoubtedly she knew that Seth was away but it was still risky as hell especially leaving the f**king door open.
He’d stepped to the side so she couldn’t see him, guarded the door in case someone showed and disappeared when he heard her preparing to leave the room.
Anyone could have walked up and seen her do that. If anyone else but him had seen it, she’d have been dead.
Like her mother.
In the end he had to spend his time trailing her in order to protect her so she wouldn’t do something immensely stupid and get caught helping him and thus blowing his cover and getting him and more than likely herself killed.
And she was taking the risk for nothing. Most of it wasn’t even good information. Drug lords didn’t tend to keep sensitive shit in the safe in their home. However he couldn’t tell her that.
She never let on to anyone, not even a hint, that she knew who he was or that she was trying to help destroy her father.
She was always the Dutiful Stepford Daughter.
When she’d walked in that night, smiling a sweet but highly inebriated smile and telling him to kiss her, he didn’t hesitate. He had already made up his mind that when it was over, when he’d brought Townsend down, Sadie would be his. He couldn’t move in on her early, it could have f**ked up the case and he’d been working it for over a year.
But when she’d put her hands on him, pressed her body into his and he could smell her expensive perfume close up for the first time instead of the hints of it he caught when she drifted by him, he lost control and couldn’t stop himself from accepting her invitation.
This did not make sense. She was not his type.
He liked his women to have long legs, pronounced curves and lots of attitude. She had the curves but she was petite and what personality she displayed was frigid, nowhere near the hot-headed, in-your-face attitude he liked in his women.