Wet and Reckless (Private Pleasures 4)

“Thank you, Roxy. Think you can be comfy here?”

“I’ll be more than comfy.” She glanced toward the door at the other end of the laundry room. “What’s through there?”

“Oh. These are shared machines. The upstairs tenant accesses the laundry through there. That door locks from the other side. You can lock this one”—she pointed to the door they’d entered through—“so everyone has their privacy.”

Addy’s smile turned slightly…something. Roxy didn’t know her well enough to say for sure, but her new boss-slash-landlord looked like she was enjoying a private joke.

“Is there anything else I should know?”

“Nope. I’ll help you unload your things. I think you’re going to be really happy here.”

…

God save him from redneck Cheech and Chong. West hauled his ass home at midnight and fell face down on his bed—uniform, shoes, and all. The only thing he’d removed was his duty belt. That’s how tired he was.

Not that Dobie and Kenny hadn’t been right. They had, indeed, stumbled across a dead body then run back to the roadside—and cell service—to call it in. Thereafter they’d self-medicated with what West speculated to be at least a dime bag’s worth of herbal anxiety relief and consequently had a hard time staying sufficiently “focused” to find their way back to the DB. Unsurprisingly, they’d been the only ones to find the situation piss-your-pants hilarious.

After hiking in circles for an hour, the baker brothers had managed to retrace their steps to an old—but not skeletal old—corpse in a duck blind near Potter’s Pond. At this point, his former SEAL teammate and current boss, Chief Shaun Buchanan, had identified the DB as one Elton Nixon. A driver’s license located in the wallet found in the back pocket of the corpse’s hunting camos supported said conclusion. Sixty-seven-year-old Elton went MIA just before West joined the force, but his history of heart problems coupled with his fondness for hunting made it likely the man had died of natural cau

ses doing what he loved. Killing innocent, unarmed creatures.

He’d kept that last part to himself as it was a NYC opinion not necessarily popular here, but after relying on his gun to keep him alive more than once over his career, he had no interest in a pastime involving shooting things for sport. He did have an interest in solving crimes, but the evidence at the scene suggested no foul play. The coroner would conduct an autopsy, of course, but Buchanan and the other local experts believed Elton had gone duck hunting on his own one February morning, lined up the shot of his life, and suffered a coronary.

Instant Karma. Or utter coincidence, if one preferred.

And speaking of coincidences, it seemed the second Route 9 incident of his day was completely unrelated to the first. Even so, he couldn’t help taking it as some kind of confirmation of his gut reaction. Roxy Goodhart stirred up trouble. Thankfully nothing held her in Bluelick. She’d move on in a couple days and take her penchant for bending rules with her. Not a moment too soon, because her departure might be the only thing that relieved the irritating push-pull between his cop instincts, which warned she was hiding something, and his baser instincts, which kept getting distracted by all the things she put on full display. In half a day, she’d gotten under his skin in ways none of the locals had managed in almost half a year. But since he had no guarantee scratching the itch would make it go away, he intended to resist his baser instincts.

Hell, he’d just steer clear of her.

Music filtered into his room.

What the…?

Notes progressed to chords, and then a soft voice layered over the music. It drifted like smoke through the floor vent, too low, at first, for him to distinguish the words, but steadily rising and strengthening as she set fire to “Louisiana Rain.”

And his blood.

Fuuuuck.

There was only one person the husky, lonely-heart vocal could belong to. His exhausted mind found the energy to picture Roxy cross-legged on the bed in the little apartment downstairs, guitar perched on her lap, fingers dancing their way up and down the frets as she finessed the melody out of the instrument. His dick drilled into the mattress, and he nearly groaned. A short trip down a flight of stairs was all it would take to see if he imagined correctly. How badly he actually wanted to do it worried him. He considered texting Addy to find out how long she expected his new neighbor to remain in residence, but his landlord probably didn’t respond to messages at midnight. Besides, the duration of Roxy’s tenancy wasn’t really the issue. The issue centered around how in God’s name he was supposed to keep his distance, and sanity, with her living under him.

“Louisiana Rain” segued into something slow and bluesy. He didn’t recognize the melody, but her straight-up sexy voice begged him for things he couldn’t make out yet couldn’t refuse.

He rolled onto his back, toed his shoes off, and unfastened his pants while his one-track mind wrote explicit lyrics to match her music. Eyes closed, he took full creative license with her performance. It wasn’t hard to imagine her playing him instead of the guitar, touching and stroking as she pleased. When the song reached the final hook, he clenched his jaw to keep from cursing out loud as he came into his fist in a hot, draining rush.

She’d transitioned to “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” by the time his heartbeat leveled out and he finally let go of his wrung-out dick. He grabbed the box of tissue on his nightstand and cleaned up. Then he shrugged out of his clothes. He’d always liked this song, and he liked it even more in her soulful, acoustic style. As soon as she finished, he’d get up and throw himself in the shower.

Hours later, he woke drenched in the aftereffects of an achingly vivid dream involving Roxy kneeling across the backseat of his cruiser, handcuffed to the oh-shit handle while he frisked her from head to toe—with his tongue. A weak wash of moonlight infiltrated the gaps in the curtains, and what was beginning to feel like a permanent erection tented his sheet.

He cursed, dragged himself up and straight into a cold shower because he refused to take matters into his own hands twice in less than twelve hours. At least there was a light at the end of this tunnel of torture. A day or two, max. He could keep his shit together for the duration.

Chapter Five

The sun crested the treetops just as the dryer buzzed. West finished pouring his second cup of coffee and left the mug on the kitchen counter to cool while he trekked downstairs to get his laundry. The clock on the coffeemaker read six fifteen, which conscientious people might deem too early to be running the machines now that another tenant called the unit on the other side of the wall home, but he’d agreed to lend a hand on a charity construction project headed by local contractor Tyler Longfoot, and he was down to one stray sock and a ratty pair of NYPD sweat shorts. Conscientious types might also say he ought to put something on when entering a space he no longer had exclusively to his self. He’d opted for the ratty sweats over the stray sock.

Then again, based on how late into the night Roxy’s concert had run, he could probably traipse up and down the stairs stark naked for the next several hours without a single witness. He doubted she’d stir before noon regardless of the churn of the washer or the Jeopardy buzzer of the dryer.

He stepped into the small room, relieved to find it as empty as he’d left it forty minutes ago, except…he inhaled deeply. It smelled different. Sweeter. He stared at the door leading to the other unit. It smelled like her.