“Let’s move this off the burner so I can get what I really need,” he rumbled, one hand on my belt buckle, tugging my dress shirt out of my pants with the other.
“You need to eat,” I managed hoarsely, the way my voice cracked not hot in the least. It wasn’t my fault, though; Ian could make me forget my name with not much work on his part. He had a drugging effect on me that was utterly sinful. “I want to feed you.”
“Well, I wanna—”
“Eat,” I asserted, grinning.
“Eat something,” he assured me before he turned me around, moving the pan off the burner at the same time, then laid a kiss on me that left no doubt in my mind about what he wanted. If his stomach hadn’t picked that moment to growl so loud it startled us both, I knew we would have been late for work.
I chuckled as he stepped back.
“Shut up.”
“Maybe you should eat, huh, baby?”
He grunted.
“What do you think?”
“Maybe,” he allowed, coming clean. “And don’t smile at me.”
I couldn’t help it. Just looking at him made me stupidly happy.
Minutes later, as he was inhaling his food, I got a begrudging smile coupled with flashing eyes that made my knees wobble as I clutched at the counter. There was no doubt about it. Ian Doyle had me wrapped around his finger.
“Jones!”
Brought back sharply to the present from my wandering thoughts, I saw Kage gesturing to me, and I looked back at Becker.
“I got him,” he said, taking hold of my prisoner’s arm. “Go.”
I bolted over to Kage, and he put a hand on my bicep—which he never did, not a big touchy-feely guy, my boss—while still listening to others standing in a semicircle around him but clearly about to give me directions.
He turned his attention on me, and I saw the concern there in his eyes. “You remember the marshal from Alabama who came in last week, the one working out of the Middle District in Montgomery?”
“Yeah, uhm.” I had to think a second. “Juanita Hicks. She was looking to talk to the couple from Madison who were put into WITSEC here.”
He nodded. “Well, it turns out that wasn’t Hicks. She was killed two weeks ago, and that woman is Bellamy Pine, Dennis Pine’s wife.”
“Oh shit,” I sighed, suddenly glad I’d put her off because of protocol. It was simple dumb luck: because I had put the adorable young couple into witness protection in Chicago, I had to be the one to go with her to see them. Since I hadn’t had time until this week, she’d had to wait, much, I recalled now, to her annoyance.
They were a nice couple, a ballet teacher named Jolie Ballard and her website-designer husband, Brett, who did not deserve to have Dennis Pine in their home at three in the morning along with three other men toting two witnesses. How they managed to witness Pine killing three people—the two he planned, plus one of his own who’d grown a conscience—and get out of the house with their two dogs was a miracle. They did it with misdirection and, apparently, as Jolie told me, a well-timed leap—or grand jeté, as she called it—over a smallish sinkhole in their backyard. Jolie could do it, years and years of intensive ballet training, even carrying her Pomeranian, but Pine went down, and that was that. Brett told me the county was supposed to fix the sinkhole, and he’d never been more thankful for red tape in his life.
As it turned out, Pine’s trial was in two weeks, and if Jolie and Brett took the stand, Pine would get the needle. His wife, Bellamy, was trying not to let that happen.
“Jones?”
“Yeah, I-I was supposed to call her today.”
He nodded. “Well, you need to keep that meeting. We’ll monitor you because Hicks had a partner, Christopher Warren, and he’s missing as well. They discovered Hicks’s body this morning behind an RV park in Mobile, but no sign of Warren.”
“So they want to take Bellamy alive.”
“That’s the plan, yes.”
“Okay.”
“Did Doyle go with you to meet Bellamy? Will she think it’s odd that you come alone?”
“No, sir, Ian went with Sharpe and White on the fugitive pickup out in Skokie last week, the guy who busted out of that prison in California—I forget which,” I told him honestly. “But that’s when I met with her, when most everyone else was out.”
“Okay, then,” he said, meeting the eyes of everyone else there, some in suits, some in tactical gear. “We need you to call her and meet her, and we’ll do the rest.”
“Yessir,” I replied, reaching for the phone in my back pocket.
He put a hand on my arm to stop me and then glanced around the circle, making sure everyone understood he was talking to them. “All eyes on my man, you understand?”