The Girl in the Mist (Misted Pines 1)

Oh, I got that.

I’d been completely in denial about it.

But I got it.

Bohannan gave me a squeeze.

“If the last couple of days were days he watched, it’s driving him fucking crazy I’m more interested in stringing your lights than breaking my back trying to find him. Jace and Jess too. They’re bonuses for him that might even be why he picked me. I trained my boys and they’re good at what they do. We’re a great team. So if he beats me, he doesn’t just beat me. He beats an entire team. Men, real men in his estimation. Typical alphas, who, once he takes us down, will make him leader of the pack.”

“Will he…” God, I didn’t want to think it, much less say it. But I had to know the answer. “…get frustrated and target you or one of the twins another way?”

“That would be a cheat. I matter to him. Jace and Jess do too. Alice didn’t matter. She was a laboratory mouse. An experiment. What he did to her was gruesome, but inexpert. Malorie didn’t matter. She was a pawn, important to the game, but easily expendable. Though, this isn’t chess. He’s not guarding his king by sacrificing his queens. This is a duel. He thrusts, I’m supposed to parry, until he forces me to thrust, and he parries.”

One could say he had a definite handle on that.

But this brought us to something else I wanted to know about.

“What do, um…Jace and Jess…do?”

“I think you realize there’s not a soul on this planet who won’t open up to one of them.”

I blinked.

“They’re the best investigators, and interrogators, I’ve ever come across. And I don’t take credit for that. They just had that in them. I was a decent investigator. I can get a bead, and I’m a trained profiler, so I didn’t suck at interrogating, but I’m intimidating, and that never helped. Profiling was my gig. I found a home in it, for better or worse. But you got a witness who doesn’t want to talk, Jace or Jess will get them comfortable. You sniffed out your last line of inquiry and are stumped, Jace or Jess will look at what you got and find three new trails to go down. I taught them what I know, and they just ran with it in ways I’d never guess. It’s fuckin’ uncanny.”

I was careful when I asked, “Why don’t they become police or follow in your footsteps and join the FBI?”

“Because they make four times as much as consultants than they would if they had a badge.”

I raised my brows. “So they’re twenty-seven-year-old investigative hotshots with utterly no official law enforcement training or experience?”

“You can spark a kid’s curiosity in a lot of ways, Larue,” he replied. “My father used to make me explain Confucius quotes to him. He’d get pissed and shout at me if I didn’t understand it. ‘A lion chased me up a tree, and I greatly enjoyed the view from the top.’ Great quote. Two lessons. Be calm and get in a good position to reflect on your problem. Above all, stay positive. Or think of your competition like lions, use them to drive you to the top, and take time to revel in your success. No way I’m gonna figure that out when I’m nine.”

Nine?

I winced.

“‘If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room,’” Bohannan continued. “I did the same thing with my boys. I didn’t fire Confucius at them and make them explain it to me. I taught them Confucius, and that there were other great minds out there they could learn from. And in teaching them, I made them hungry to learn. They learned. They keep learning. And they know, when they’re the smartest in the room, they need to find another room.”

“So you figure one day, they’ll leave you,” I noted quietly.

“I hope one day they will, so they can keep learning. And keep helping people.”

“Outside multiple betrayals, a divorce and a decade and a half, there’s another reason I’m over my ex,” I told him.

Knowing what was coming (he could hardly miss it, but also, I was suspecting he was kind of a genius, so he wouldn’t), he started sliding back down on the bed, again taking me with him.

“Yeah?” he asked. “What’s that?”

“I’m kinda falling in love with another guy,” I told him.

He rolled us so he was on top.

“I know him?”

“He’s the smartest one in the room.”

His nostrils flared.

His head dropped.

He kissed me.

Later, when we were both naked, and he was moving inside me, slowly, his mouth on mine, one of my hands in his hair, the other one clenching his ass, my knees high, my thighs hugging him, I understood my man, who was good with both actions and words, was giving me actions now.