I looked at Ruby, her pretty red lips, her rosy cheeks.
All this was big. Huge. And in the midst of it, all I wanted was to lick the smudge of spaghetti sauce off of Ruby’s chin.
She was dressed in her normal uniform of white cotton shirt and khaki Dockers. Her hair was pulled back in its tight bun. No makeup graced her face. Classic Ruby.
But I’d seen her in all her glory—walking down the aisle in a light blue sundress with an orchid in her hair, barefoot on the beach in a miniskirt and tank top, and—the best—naked, moonlight streaming over her tight body, her rosy breasts bouncing as we made love.
Made love.
I loved this woman—this woman who had no idea how beautiful she was. Or who did…and hid it for self-protection.
“Take your hair down, baby,” I said.
She widened her eyes. “I was in the middle of a sentence.”
Had she been? Right, we were talking about my father possibly being alive. Then I’d started thinking about Ruby naked.
“I’m sorry.”
“Once you’re feeling better, we’ll check your phone records and get the number of whoever called you. We’ll get to the bottom of this, Ryan. I promise you.”
Ruby didn’t make promises on a whim. I knew that much about her. She meant to solve this puzzle. After all, she was as involved in it as the rest of us were.
“You want to know something really weird?”
I smiled. “Always.”
“My father called me yesterday too.”
Chapter Five
Ruby
He bumped his tray, nearly upending the glass of water he was drinking with the spaghetti. “What? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. You’ll never guess what he wanted.”
“What’s that?”
“He told me to ‘call off the Steels.’”
Ryan scoffed. “Or what?”
I knew one thing. My father didn’t make warnings for the hell of it. He wouldn’t harm me. He’d consider it offensive. It was okay to rape me, but now that I was grown and a cop? He had a strange desire to see me succeed, which was directly contradictory to him succeeding. That was my theory, at least. With the power he seemed to possess, he could have taken me out long ago.
However, he could harm the Steels. He’d have no qualms about that.
That wasn’t happening on my watch.
“My father doesn’t make empty threats.”
“Joe said something about when Wendy was holding him captive—that either Mathias or Simpson, I can’t remember which, said they knew the consequences if they harmed Joe. That could have been a lie of course. Are you telling me we should back off?”
“I would never tell you that. Even if I did, you and your brothers would never back off.”
His shoulders slumped slightly. “Ruby, I might.”
I stared at him, my eyes wide. Had I heard him right? That didn’t sound at all like the Ryan Steel I knew. And loved. “What?”