Melt (Steel Brothers Saga 4)

Melanie’s coffee was a lighter roast, like a breakfast blend. I preferred a dark roast. French roast was my favorite, but no matter. Coffee making could be taught. As could many other things. I planned to teach Melanie a lot. She would eventually surrender to me.

But the essentials I didn’t have to teach her—like how to kiss me like a fucking siren, how to give me head as if she were sucking a golf ball through a garden hose, how to clamp my cock in her pussy so sweetly.

No. The essentials she had down.

The rest I could teach her. I would teach her. For I wasn’t giving her up anytime soon.

I took a sip of my coffee and felt the buzz of my cell phone through the pocket of my jeans. “Excuse me,” I said to Melanie. I pulled out the phone. Talon.

As much as I wanted to take Melanie to her bedroom and finish what we’d started, I couldn’t ignore Talon. Not after I’d failed him. I would always come whenever he called.

“I need to take this. It’s Talon.”

She nodded. “I understand.”

I stood and walked from the kitchen into the living area. “Hey, Tal.”

“Joe, thank God. Where are you?”

“In the city. What’s wrong?”

“I need you to come home. I hired some high-priced detectives to go through Jade’s old room at the house to figure out where the rose might have come from. You won’t believe what they found.”

Talon hadn’t told me what they’d found, just told me to get home right away. It was late, but Melanie understood. I rushed home.

When I got to the main house, Talon and Jade, along with Ryan, Marj, and two guys I didn’t recognize, were sitting at the kitchen table.

“What’s going on?” I asked. It had better be good since it interrupted my night with Melanie.

“A huge clue, Joe,” Talon said, rising to greet me.

“What is it?”

One of the guys I didn’t recognize held out a business card in gloved hands. I reached for it.

“No, don’t touch it,” he said.

“Then why the hell did you hand it to me?”

“So you could see it.”

“This is Trevor Mills and his partner, Johnny Johnson,” Talon said. “I hired them to go through Jade’s old room and also to try to figure out how someone got into this house. Guess whose business card this is?”

“Well, if you let me see it, I’ll tell you.”

I moved forward and took a hard look at the glossy card the man named Mills held. Colin Morse. Jade’s ex-fiancé.

“So you think Colin left the rose?” I asked.

“Not necessarily.” Jade shook her head. “He never gave me a card either of the two times he was here. The guys found this wedged under the carpeting.”

“It was planted,” Talon said. “If someone had dropped it, we would’ve found it. But no one could drop it so that it ended up wedged under wall-to-wall carpet.”

“Still, it’s pretty good evidence that Colin left the rose,” I said.

“We could go with that”—Talon sat back down at the table—“if Colin’s fingerprints were the only ones on the card.”

I raised my eyebrows.