Splinters of You (Retired Sinners MC #1) - Anne Malcom Page 0,13

of the story might do, I let him “accidentally” graze my boobs when reaching over for a pack of gum in his car and I went out on “dates” with him, and in one of my lowest points—there were a lot of those to choose from—I let him stick his tongue down my throat for three seconds.

Possibly some of the longest of my life.

And I was already self-deprecating enough about kissing a married man for selfish reasons, trust me. But it did get me what I wanted.

Plus, he was still deluded enough to think I might actually sleep with him at some point, hence him risking his job for a request about a murder outside of his jurisdiction.

“You’re gonna meet me for drinks sometime this week?” he asked.

“Sure,” I lied. Not even convincingly either. He was a cop, wasn’t he meant to see right through all of this?

“The Ritz?” he asked, with so much desperation I wanted to gag. Or maybe it was the fact he was trying to impress me with getting dinner at a pretentious and overpriced hotel that conveniently had opulent rooms in which we could have what I could only imagine would be extremely disappointing sex.

“Thursday?”

He obviously didn’t know I was out of town because he didn’t even bother to follow me on Instagram. That was weak for a man trying to start an affair. Or maybe just an old, lazy man.

“Thursday sounds fine,” I said, not even bothering to sound excited. “As long as you email the details about the murder,” I added. There was no point in pretending this wasn’t about that. I was a woman who didn’t dance around when it came to what she wanted. He’d still be scrambling to break his code of conduct and his vows, no matter what.

“I’ll get them to you before Thursday,” he promised.

I didn’t even bother to say goodbye.

And he did pull through with the details on the murder, including photos, which were not pretty, as well as notes from the local sheriff that he suspected it was connected to three other murders which had happened in neighboring states over the past two years.

The sheriff, it seemed, was not living up to the small-town idiot cliché. I was interested to meet him. Hopefully he’d be partial to a full C-cup too.

I continued my perusal of Emily’s shelves.

She had a few predictable romance books I would have expected from a woman with such tasteful—and on the right side of girly—decorating skills. Truth be told, a woman was likely to read at least one romance book in her life. No matter how cynical. We were born with a penchant for romance. Or a weakness, depending on your viewpoint. I went through plenty of phases when the comfort of knowing a happily ever after awaited me at the end of a book, especially when I knew it wasn’t going to happen at the end of my own life.

Happily ever afters weren’t permanent. And they didn’t happen at the end of love stories. Usually they were pretty near the start of them, when everything was shiny and new and people were lying about who they truly were.

So yeah, women needed a little—or a lot of—romance when it was hard-pressed to come from a living, breathing man after the six-month mark.

They were good choices too. Nora Roberts. Paulinna Simons.

She had a hefty amount of Stephen King. He filled up two shelves. A collection of his best works, all almost falling apart. I picked up The Stand, smiling at the wrinkled pages, slightly distorted from getting wet.

Yes, Emily and I would’ve gotten on quite well. She was a reader. A true reader.

When putting the King back, I spotted few familiar spines. My name was half faded on one, a stain obscuring the other.

She didn’t have all of my books. But eight was pretty good, especially since I’d written seventeen. Not because I wanted to churn them out so no one would forget about me, but so I could continue make the money I’d never imagine could come from writing. Because that’s how it had worked for the first ten years of my career. I kept writing. I couldn’t stop. My publishers loved it, though I refused to adhere to a “schedule” of how many books I should release in a year. I wrote when I wrote.

To be fair, that refusal came from a place of extreme privilege and one of the highest advances paid to a debut author in this current climate.