Page 41 of Done Dirty

“Good night, Doug,” Jack interrupted.

Doug grinned. “Good night.”

The office was quiet. Just the two of us.

“Do I want to hear whatever that story was?” I asked.

“I’m sure Ben inflated it,” Jack said. “But probably not.”

“Your reputation precedes you,” I said, moving toward him. “Lucky me.”

His hand touched my waist and he drew me in close. I wrapped my arms around him and pressed close.

“I got all that out of my system,” he said, kissing the corner of my mouth softly. Then the other corner. And finally the middle. “Now I get to focus only on you.”

Then he kissed me deep and I moaned into his mouth. When he pulled back we were both breathing heavy.

“We have a long day tomorrow,” he said. “You need your rest.”

“Then I guess you’d better work fast.”

“Sweetheart,” he said, lifting me against him so my legs wrapped around him. “If I learned anything from my past it’s that there’s a benefit to working slow. I’ll show you.”

I tightened my legs and nipped at his bottom lip. “I bet I can change your mind.”

He walked toward the stairs, suddenly in a hurry. “That sounds like a challenge.”

By the time we reached the third floor, the case was the last thing on my mind.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

My alarm went off at six, and I slapped at my phone in hopes of hitting the snooze button. Jack never does that. It’s a fundamental difference between us that I’ve stopped trying to correct.

I lay there for a minute in the dark of our bedroom and listened to the house wake up. From the third floor in the early morning you could hear the rush of the Potomac and the birds going at it in the tree line just before the sun came up. The sheets smelled like Jack and like sex and like the end of a very long night, and my whole body was pleasantly sore in all the right places.

I was early in my second trimester, and for some reason everything was louder than it used to be. The morning light through the tall windows was brighter than it needed to be. Smells were stronger. I’d read that pregnancy heightens the senses and had been skeptical until I started smelling coffee from two floors away.

The shower was already running hot and the bathroom was filled with steam. Jack had turned it on before he went downstairs, which meant he hadn’t gotten up too much earlier than I had.

I stepped inside and let the water hit my back and shoulders. I stood there for a moment in the steam, the bathroom warm and close, the smell of Jack’s shampoo still hanging in the air from his own shower. Despite the last couple of months—the early stages of pregnancy, the morning sickness, the violence and danger our last big cases had brought, and the destruction of the funeral home—I felt at peace.

I got out and toweled off and caught my reflection in the mirror and made the mistake of really looking.

It wasn’t dramatic. I wasn’t showing in any way a stranger would notice. But I knew my own body, and there was a softness low on my stomach that hadn’t been there before, a slight roundness I couldn’t explain away as anything else. I stood there for a moment with my hand flat against my own stomach, feeling the warmth of my skin under my palm, and thought about what it meant that I still felt at peace with it.

I pulled on black pants and a black-and-white striped sleeveless top. The top was tighter across my chest than it had been the last time I’d worn it. I raised my eyebrows at my own reflection. The girls had apparently decided to make themselves known. I’d always wanted breasts.

I put on mascara and called it done.

Jack was at the kitchen table with his phone to his ear when I came downstairs. He raised his brows in acknowledgment and I went over to the espresso machine. All I had to do was punch the button and the beans ground themselves and made me a fresh cup. Even I couldn’t mess it up.

I waited for the mug and leaned against the counter. Jack was still on his call, so I used the time to dial Richmond. The tech picked up on the second ring and I asked him to run specific tests for testosterone and performance-enhancing steroids. I thanked him and hung up.

Jack was already off his call. He was leaning against the counter with his coffee mug, watching me, and there was a slow smile at the corner of his mouth that told me exactly what he was thinking about.

“Good morning,” he said.

“You could’ve woken me up the fun way,” I said.