Dirty Secret (22 page)

“I should get some for Claudia, flowers or balloons,” I mumbled, looking down. I was still wearing the Dr Pepper shirt, its hem soaked up with dried blood. My jeans were speckled in places, and while I didn’t remember falling to the lawn, I must have, judging from the ground-in grass stains on my knees.

“Maybe without ‘Congratulations’ on them, though,” Jae said softly. “Unless getting shot is something like a McGinnis skills test. I can’t see you getting a lot of employees if they have to be shot at least once in order to work for you.”

I couldn’t hold back a laugh. It sounded rusty and painful, but it was still a laugh. “Sometimes I forget you’ve got a sick sense of humor.”

“I use it sparingly,” he said, nodding. “It makes it more special.”

“Oh, it’s special all right,” I agreed. “Hey, did you talk to Bobby?”

“Yeah, he’s coming by in a bit.” Jae shuffled his feet and jerked his head toward the smokers’ circle. “Come on, keep me company.”

We kept to the far side of the area, straddling a bench so we could face each other. He drew out a
kretek
and lit it, pulling a mouthful of fragrant clove smoke into his lungs. I stared at him until he shifted uncomfortably under my gaze, but still he said nothing, shooting me an odd glance once in a while.

He was still the exotic creature I’d first seen at his relatives’ house. A quiet, conflicted young man who, I’d since learned, laughed softly and cuddled a miniature furry tornado to his chest as he worked on his computer. Looking at Jae still took my breath away, but now I could see the man beneath the beautiful exterior. He didn’t use words to tell me what he thought, usually letting small things speak for him, like a morning cup of coffee waiting for me when I stumbled into the bathroom before heading to work. I understood the wildness inside of him, that driving, passionate need to prowl through dark and abandoned places, to capture pieces of art only he could see.

It was that deep passion he drew on when he took me inside of him, sometimes riding my hips and bruising my shoulders with his clenching fingers. It ran in him, unseen by most, and I was humbled to be included in the tiny circle of people he let in.

“Don’t ever change,” I murmured, leaning forward to kiss him before he could take another drag on his clove. “Just be you.”

“I have to change,” he said, returning my kiss with a fierceness that made my heart beat faster. “But it’ll be for the better. For us both.”

“Thought I’d find the two of you out here.” Bobby broke the moment, and Jae ducked his head, suddenly aware we’d kissed out in the open where people could see him.

Bobby put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. He’d grabbed spare clothes from someplace, probably the back of his truck, because the bright blue shirt had JoJo’s gym logo emblazoned across the front of his chest. Tossing a plastic grocery bag at me, he said, “I brought you something to change into.”

“Huh.” I held up a gray shirt bearing the same logo. “We’ll be twins.”

“It was all I had.” Bobby shrugged. “Wear it with pride.”

I pulled the bloodstained shirt off and shoved it into the bag. The small bandage across my back where the bullet grazed me pulled as I moved, but for the most part, it was the least annoying of my past wounds. I used a few of the baby wipes Bobby tossed into the bag to clean off any smears left on my belly, smiling reassuringly at Jae when he frowned at my bare torso.

“Just that line on my back. Promise.” I shook out the shirt. “The rest isn’t mine.”

“Didn’t I tell you not to get shot?” he said, pursing his lips in disapproval. “I think I distinctly said,
do not get shot
.”

“It was a crease,” I protested. “That doesn’t count. You got creased. Remember?”

He grunted at me, unconvinced by my argument. Taking one last drag, he exhaled a plume of smoke, then extinguished the rest of his
kretek
. “Do you want something to drink? The vending machines have iced green tea.”

“That’ll be great.” I snagged his hand before he could leave. “Thanks, babe. For being here.”

“Of course I’m here,” he said, giving me a look that told me he thought I’d gone mad. “Claudia is your
nuna
. Where else would I be?”

“Can I get a coffee? You know, me? The person who saved his life?” Bobby shouted after him. Jae waved the air without looking back, and I chuckled at Bobby’s sigh of exasperation. “It’s like I don’t even exist.”

“I’m fine with that.” I grumbled when he hit my shoulder. “Dude, not there. Bullet, last month. Remember? Fuck.”

“Yeah, sorry,” he apologized, but it didn’t look like he meant it. “You’re so much of a mess, I don’t even remember where I can slap you. How are you doing?”

“It’s a fucking shock. I’m going to kill the person who did this.” We were the only ones out in the cancer zone, but the air was still thick with the musty smell of cigarettes. “I’m glad you came. Thanks.”

“Not a problem.” He shook off my gratitude with a smile. “I spoke to the hospital admin lady. They’ll put Claudia in a private room. I told her you’d pay for it.”

“Fuck, I didn’t even think about that. Thanks. It’ll be better for the family. They’ll want to hover.”

“Again, not a problem. You’ve had other shit on your brain,” Bobby replied. “The cops want to talk to you again.”

“Yeah? Why?” I couldn’t imagine what else I could tell them. We’d spent more than a couple of hours going over my involvement with Trey and hadn’t come up with a single reason someone would want me dead.

“They found the car. Someone on your street wrote down the license plate number,” he said softly. “It’s a rental.”

“Okaaaaay.” I drew the word out. “I still don’t know anything else.”

“They’re wondering if maybe you’ve got a Korean lover, or something,” he said, his eyes shifting to the hospital entrance where Jae was just coming out, carrying a bag and a paper coffee cup. “The gun was in there, along with a bunch of papers in Korean. There’s also photos, Cole. Of Shin-Cho coming out of your house. They asked if you were cheating on someone. I told them about Jae….”

“This was not Jae,” I spat at my best friend. “There’s no fucking way this is Jae.”

“I don’t think it is, kid,” he said, holding his hands up in surrender. “But I do think it’s connected to what you’re working on. Someone wants you dead, Cole. Someone who knows you’re poking around in Dae-Hoon’s shit. We have to find out who was driving that fucking car before they finish what they started. No matter how much you piss me off sometimes, the last thing I want is to see you dead, Princess. The last fucking thing I want.”

Chapter Fifteen

T
HE
place shouldn’t have looked the same. Not by any means. But with the exception of police tape flapping in the late night breeze and the dark gouges in the white paint of the porch pillars, the building pretty much acted like nothing happened.

There were a bunch of beeping machines in a nearby hospital that would tell a different story, but the building couldn’t give a shit.

I was tired and emotionally worn out. Claudia’d been moved to ICU with a tentative relocation to a private room in the morning. The family chased me out, promising to tell me if anything went south, but the doctors reassured us she was fine, and her vitals were strong. The only thing I was scheduling was waking up in the afternoon, and maybe crawling downstairs to get something to eat. Depending on the hospital, I’d hit up Claudia for a visit once they let people in to see her.

There was a message from a Detective Wong on the machine when we got home. I listened to it for a few seconds, then walked away, letting the soft-voiced cop drone on while I hunted for a beer in the fridge. Behind me, Jae made himself a cup of hot tea, leaning against the counter to watch me shuffle around the kitchen.

“Are you okay?” he finally asked. I turned to face him, the beer bottle touching my lips.

“I think I’m too tired to think,” I admitted, taking a swig of Tsingtao. “My hair is yawning.”

“You should eat something,” Jae reproached. “All you’ve had is tea and that beer.”

“Beer’s a grain. Like whiskey’s oatmeal.” He snorted, and I downed half the beer, then dumped it down the sink. My stomach was gurgling, and the back of my eyelids felt sticky with sand. “Babe, I’m not hungry. Really. I think I just want to fall over.”

Neko took offense to us lying down on the bed, and took off for parts unknown in the house. I doused myself long enough in the shower to soap up and rinse the hospital smell off me, then crawled under the covers. The lights were still on, and Jae was in the bathroom, brushing his teeth.

That was the last thing I remembered before I woke up screaming.

As nightmares went, it was a good one, very well directed and starring a well-rounded cast of nearly everyone I loved, past and present. An odd inclusion was my actual mother, something I’d never experienced before. I’d barely thought of my mother, Ryoko, much less dreamed about her being featured in my own private Valentine’s Day Massacre.

I couldn’t wake up from what I was seeing. No matter how hard I tried. Carefully walking through the dead and dying, I went from body to body, looking at the remains of faces I had in my heart. Finally stumbling upon Jae-Min, I bent over to cradle his head. His dark eyes opened and looked up at me, trusting and vulnerable in pain.

That's when I brought my Glock up to his temple and blew his head away.

Screaming probably wasn’t a strong enough word for what I was doing when I jerked up out of the nightmare, but I wasn’t being particular. I just needed to audibly expel the horror and hatred I had inside of me when I came out of the darkness.

“
Agi
! Cole-ah.” Jae was frantic, running his hands through my hair, then cupping my face. “I’m here. It’s okay. Just a dream,
de
?”

It took a long minute before I could speak, and my heart pounded, trying to break free of my body. Jae left for a second and came back with a bottle of cold green tea. Urging me to sip at it, he kneeled by my side until the shakes were gone and I could look at him without closing my eyes.

“Fuck.” I needed to learn another language. Something stronger than Korean or English because, from what I could tell, neither had good enough curse words. I needed something that sounded foul and spitting with some guts to it.

“Do you want to talk?” he asked softly, as if speaking too loudly would send me off the deep end again.

I shook my head and reached up to touch his face. He’d turned on the sconces framing the window above the headboard, and their soft light cast his face into golden planes and deep blue shadows. His lashes brushed my thumbs when he blinked, tickling my skin.

“You are one of the best things that has ever happened to me,” I whispered.

“Better than pizza and beer?” Jae teased.

“Better than whiskey and bacon,” I reassured him with a gentle kiss.

Jae’s smile was half-shy and mostly erotic. The black-winged angel who’d first enticed me shone through the worried young man who’d held me until my world righted itself. Now, Kim Jae-Min had other plans for me besides comfort.

His fingers were warm on my belly, roaming along my rib cage and feathering the scars he found there. He touched other places, other things, and any thought of sleep crept away. My cock thickened when his palm grazed over my hip bone, and I reached for him, wanting to pull Jae closer in.

He wasn’t having any of it just yet. Stretching his arms out over his head, Jae worked his shoulders from one side to the next, that sensual, secretive quirk still on his lips. Naked, he was a thing of beauty. Lean, hard muscles moved under his pale, flawless skin with the barest shadow of hair under his arms and between his legs. I knew the landscape well enough, a silken dream to touch with hidden spots of musky velvet I liked to lick, because he squirmed under my tongue.

“Sit up. With your back against the headboard,” Jae whispered. I must have looked at him like he was more than a little bit crazy, because he kissed me on the corner of my mouth. “Move.”

The sheets were hot, and damp from my sweaty thrashing, so they stuck to me as I slid up. The sound of a familiar drawer opening made my mouth water, and despite the aches along nearly every inch of my body, I found I needed Jae around me.

Good to know he was thinking the same thing.

Jae wasn’t one for preambles. Foreplay was a few rough kisses and maybe some fondling. He played dangerous games sometimes, trusting me not to overpower him and just take what I wanted. It was what he was used to. Our gentle lovemaking confused him, but he found himself liking it. And then there were times when he needed to take, and be taken. For Jae, it seemed to connect us on some level only he understood. It’d taken him only a few weeks to learn it was okay to go slowly sometimes.

Apparently, this wasn’t one of those times.

He straddled my thighs, leaning in to place his mouth on mine. I had to work for the kiss, drawing out his encouraging moans with supple licks of my tongue. The faint light from the sconces made his body gleam, and I stretched my arms out to touch his shoulders, skimming my palms over his tender skin. My calluses caught on his smoothness, roughing his ivory skin to rosy patches. Nuzzling his throat, the scruff on my chin left behind a thicker burn, marking him as mine.