“I need you to be safe,” I said, desperately.
She shook her head. “You don’t get to do that, Cade. You don’t get to decide what I need and then act on it without my input.”
I ran my hands up the length of her arms. “I need you to be safe. If anything happened to you—”
“Nothing is going to happen to me,” she yelled.
I let her go. “You don’t know that. I can’t risk it. You need to go back to Seattle. Someone is out to destroy us, and until the club gets this thing figured out, we’re all in danger.”
“Then we’re all in danger together, Cade. I’m not leaving.” She looked me in the eye, her brown eyes fierce. “Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me you fucked her and I will leave.”
I could lie.
I could tell her that I fucked Sandy. But in that moment, I knew it was a lost battle.
“I didn’t touch her. But, Indy—”
“Shhhhh…” She stepped closer and placed a finger across my lips. Then she kissed me and my body weakened against the touch of her mouth on mine.
“Come back to the clubhouse,” I breathed, holding her tightly against me.
She looked up at me, and slowly, she nodded.
CADE
The plan was to get her to leave me. To get her as far away from here as possible. But fuck my plan. Fuck pushing her away. Fuck everything. When I thought she was gone for good, and knowing she hated me, it was torture.
Pure fucking torture.
So I locked the door and spent the day in bed with my girl. Holding her. Loving her. Making her come time and time again, because God knows I was so damn addicted to her I just couldn’t stop making love to her.
When the pounding came on my door, the interruption couldn’t have been more badly timed. Just as the taut tension in my belly uncoiled and released an explosive euphoria through my body and out of my cock, a violent pounding rattled on my bedroom door.
Waiting for the pleasure to recede, I growled and collapsed against Indy.
“Go away!” I barked.
But the door vibrated with another round of knocking.
“Get out here, brother,” Caleb called from the other side of the wall.
Indy squirmed beneath me and grabbed the bed sheet to cover her nakedness. Reluctantly, I climbed off the bed and put on my boxers, opening the door and coming face to face with my brother’s anguished face.
“What?”
“They’ve found a body out by the water tower.” Caleb’s eyes were dark, uneasy. “It might be Freebird.”
I didn’t need to say anything. Indy was coming with me if I liked it or not.
“Do you think it’s Freebird?” she asked as we drove toward the water tower in her new SUV.
“There’s a good chance. Buckman said the body had been there for a while, so identifying him by sight wasn’t an option. But they could see it was an adult male with long, dark hair.”
After Caleb told me about the discovery of the body, I rang Buckman. We paid money so we could make these types of phone calls. And because money passed over the table to the medical examiner’s office in the guise of generous donations, it meant that when we turned up at the crime scene, Zachariah Sumstad wasn’t going to turn us away. As long as we respected the rules of crime scene contamination, of course.
The Destiny water tower was on the edge of town, at the junction of two watermelon fields known as No Man’s Land. For as far as the eye could see, the beautiful landscape stretched onwards, the dark green fields a stark contrast to the vibrant blue of the sky. It used to be a popular hangout for local teens, they’d come out here to climb the tower and drink their beers and smoke their joints. The view from the top was incredible. It swept past the Destiny borders and out toward the fringes of Humphrey. But after a girl fell to her death a few years earlier, the access via the stairs had been blocked.
When we arrived, Buckman greeted us. Over his shoulder, I saw forensic technicians dressed in dark blue jumpsuits crawling over the crime scene. It was a hot afternoon and the air was ripe, and it was obviously getting to Buckman because he had a handkerchief over his nose.
When Bull and Caleb pulled up, they joined us.
“Who found the body?” Bull asked.
“A county worker performing a monthly check of the water tower. Said he could smell it as soon as he stepped out of the van.”
The smell was violent, and after a few minutes of shifting on her feet, Indy rushed away to throw up.
“Is it Freebird?” I asked, turning to watch Indy as I spoke.
“We won’t know until the autopsy.”
“Any visible signs of trauma?” I turned back to look at him.