“First, breaking and entering,” he said in chiding tones, his gaze shifting to the laptop. “And now, tampering with evidence.”
Lucas was instantly bristling with anger, his arm wrapping protectively around Mia’s shoulders.
“A pleasure to see you too, Cooper,” he drawled, his tone deliberately condescending.
Detective Cooper’s lips thinned. Clearly working on a Sunday had put him in a sour mood.
Or maybe Lucas was responsible for the mood.
He was pretty good at pissing people off.
“What are you doing here?” the detective demanded.
Lucas shrugged. “I could ask you the same question.”
Mia lifted a hand to press it against Lucas’s chest, grimacing at the feel of his tense muscles. “Lucas,” she murmured in a soft warning.
The lawman narrowed his gaze. “Would you like to have this conversation downtown?”
Mia hastily intervened. “We aren’t breaking and entering.” The last thing she wanted was Lucas spending the night in jail. “I have a key that Tony gave me when he first moved in, and the permission of his brother to be here.”
“Why?”
Lucas once again was the one to answer. “She was hoping to find a small memento to remind her of her childhood friend.”
The detective deliberately allowed his gaze to roam over the cramped space where the three of them were huddled together.
“And she just happened to stumble into a hidden room?”
“What are the odds?” Teagan mocked.
Mia swallowed a curse. Like things weren’t difficult enough without Lucas’s friends trying to annoy the detective?
“Burt told me the cops were finished with the condo,” she said, hoping they could get out of the place without being shot.
Detective Cooper glared at Teagan before reluctantly answering her question. “We’ve completed our search.”
“But you kept it under surveillance?” Lucas demanded.
The detective nodded. “We did.”
Mia furrowed her brow. The cops had deliberately told Burt and his family the condo had been cleared, but they kept a watch on it? Why . . .
“This was a trap?” she breathed as realization hit.
Detective Cooper shrugged. “I was interested in who would show up.”
She tilted her chin, angered that they’d been spied on like they were suspects.
“We have every right to be here,” she stiffly informed him.
The detective nodded toward the panel that Teagan had pushed aside to reveal the hidden space. “Did you know about this?”
Mia gaped at the man in disbelief. Did he think she was some sort of pervert who liked watching her friend have sex?
“Of course not,” she snapped. “I’ve never been here before.”
Detective Cooper arched a brow. “So you won’t mind handing over the computer?”
She jerked. So that was it. He thought she was on the sex tapes. And that she’d snuck in to erase the evidence.
“Now, look here, you—”
“She was a friend to Tony, not his lover,” Lucas interrupted, tightening his arm around her shoulders.
Detective Cooper carefully studied her angry expression. Was he trying to determine if she was lying or not? Apparently satisfied, he turned his head toward Teagan. “The computer.”
Teagan leaned down to grab the laptop and with one graceful motion was stepping forward to shove it into the detective’s waiting hand. “It’s all yours.”
“Shouldn’t you be trying to discover who broke into Mia’s house?” Lucas chided. “As far as I can tell, you haven’t done a damned thing to locate the intruder.”
Detective Cooper leaned forward until he was almost nose to nose with Lucas. “I’m a homicide detective, not a patrol officer.”
Lucas refused to back down. “Someone tried to kill Mia. Are you trying to tell me it’s not your case?”
“Do I tell you how to do your job?”
“You don’t need to,” Lucas snapped.
Without warning Teagan was grabbing Lucas by the arm and steering him through the narrow opening. “Yeah, I think that’s our cue to take off.”
The detective stepped back, his face reddened with annoyance. “Good choice.”
“Come on, amigo,” Teagan urged when Lucas tried to dig in his feet.
Mia did her own part by pushing at Lucas’s back, managing to get him out of the closet and headed from the bedroom before he glanced toward his friend at his side.
“Did you get a copy?” he asked in a low voice.
Teagan patted his pocket. “Got it.”
“Good.”
They headed downstairs where Max was waiting along with three other men who were all dressed in suits with scuffed shoes. Detective Cooper’s fellow officers.
The men of ARES, along with Mia, left the condo, not bothering to lock the door behind them as they headed across the parking lot.
“We’ll meet back at the penthouse,” Lucas commanded, grabbing Mia’s arm to firmly place her in the passenger seat of his car.
Teagan shrugged as he jumped into Max’s SUV and they quickly pulled away.
Lucas started the engine, but instead of following his friends, he turned in his seat to study her with a worried gaze.
“You’re shaking.” He switched on the heater, then reached out to lightly touch her brow with the tips of his fingers. “Do you need to see a doctor?”
Mia instantly felt her shivers ease. It wasn’t the warm air that was blowing out of the vents. Or even relief at being out of Tony’s condo.
It was Lucas’s gentle touch and the knowledge that someone actually cared whether or not she was okay.
“No. I’m fine.” Her lips twisted in a wry smile. “It’s just been . . . a shock.”
“Yeah.” Lucas glanced toward the condo. “When Teagan traced the money connection from Vicky to Tony I thought he must have been helping the woman with some shady business deals.” He shook his head. “It never occurred to me that she was his sugar mama.”
Mia studied Lucas’s profile, her gaze unconsciously tracing the perfect line of his features.
“What money trail?”
“She paid his bond to get him out of jail when he was younger,” he explained. “And now I assume she must have been giving him the cash for his rent.”
Mia once again discovered herself floundering. She’d never actually considered who’d been responsible for getting Tony out of jail. Actually, it seemed that she hadn’t given much thought at all to her friend and his hidden life.
“I had no idea,” she rasped. “Why did they keep it such a secret?”
Lucas snorted. “Do you really think Vicky Fontaine would want anyone to know that she was climbing between the sheets with Tony Hughes?”
Mia winced, vividly reminded that she’d been considered an embarrassment by the St. Clair clan.
“No. I suppose not,” she muttered.
He frowned, as if sensing he’d managed to hurt her. “Mia—”
“Still, it’s not like Tony to be able to keep his mouth shut,” she interrupted, pulling away from his fingers, which were stroking down her cheek.
Now wasn’t the time to rake over their past. They had to figure out if Tony’s connection to Vicky had anything to do with his death.
Lucas allowed his gaze to roam over Mia’s face, clearly wanting to press her for an explanation for her sudden retreat. Then, with a grimace, he let it go.
“Tony never gave any hint?” he instead asked.
“None.” She glanced toward the nearby lake. This hushed, middle-class suburb was so . . . traditional. Not at all the sort of place where Tony would want to live. Which made her wonder if it’d been his choice or Vicky’s. She wrinkled her nose at the thought of her childhood friend feeling trapped in a relationship where he was nothing more than a nasty secret. “I knew he worked for the Fontaines when he was in high school, and it’s possible he did s
ome handiwork for her even after he graduated, but he never talked about her,” she said.
Lucas’s jaw clenched, his eyes growing distant, as if he was recalling the past. “Damn.”
“What?”
“After Tony was kicked off the football team everyone expected him to leave school, but instead some mystery donor arrived to pay his tuition so he could graduate with the rest of us.”
She gave a slow nod. She’d gone to visit Tony in juvie, expecting him to be devastated at the loss of his scholarship. He’d been so proud of attending Hale Academy with the rich kids.
But instead of being upset, he’d been cocky and defiant, and brazenly certain everything would work out.
“I remember,” she murmured. “You think Vicky wrote the check?”
He held her gaze. “Who else would?”
She started to give a nod, only to freeze as the words truly sank in.
“They surely weren’t . . .” She wrinkled her nose again. It was hard enough to imagine Tony and Vicky as lovers now, let alone when he’d been a wild teenager and she’d been a young, sophisticated pillar of society. “Together back then?”
“It happens.”
Perhaps sensing she needed time to process the disturbing thought of Tony being seduced by the older woman, Lucas put the car in gear and pulled out of the parking lot.
* * *
Lucas opened the door to the penthouse. The scent of warm bread and corned beef teased at his nose, making his stomach rumble. Clearly Max and Teagan had made a pit stop at a local deli. A good thing. It’d been hours since his last meal and he was fairly certain there wasn’t a damned thing to eat in the place.
On the point of leading Mia toward the appetizing aroma, he abruptly reached out to wrap an arm around her shoulder as she stumbled and nearly fell. Glancing down, he grimaced at the pallor of her face and the shadows beneath her eyes.
Of course she hadn’t told him that she was clearly exhausted. He might have thought she was vulnerable.
And Mia Ramon could never be weak. At least not when he was around.
Careful to keep his tone light, he steered her across the living room toward the attached suite.
“You have to be exhausted,” he murmured. “You should lie down for a while.”
“I couldn’t sleep. Besides, I’m fine,” she predictably argued, only to ruin her stubborn insistence when her body trembled with weariness.
Resisting the urge to scoop her off her feet and tuck her in bed, he reached out to rub her bottom lip with his thumb. “Then at least take a hot bath.”
She studied him with open suspicion. “What are you going to do?”
“We need to check through the computer files that Teagan managed to download.” He gave a humorless laugh when she wrinkled her nose in disgust. He didn’t blame her. The thought of spending hours watching Tony have sex with Vicky Fontaine was . . . disturbing as hell. “Yeah, you might want to give that a miss.”
She flattened her lips. “You won’t try to leave me out of the loop if you find something?”
He hesitated before he answered. There was a part of him that wanted to refuse. She’d been through enough. He wanted her to concentrate on regaining her strength while he figured out who was trying to kill her.
But Teagan’s warning was still fresh in his mind. If he didn’t include her in the investigation, she would go out on her own.
And that was unacceptable.
“No, I won’t leave you out of the loop.”
Perhaps sensing his reluctance, she narrowed her gaze. “You promise?”
“I promise.” Leaning down, he pressed his lips to her brow, then, grabbing her shoulders, he turned her toward the bedroom. “Take your bath and I’ll bring you something to eat.”
There was a second when he thought she might continue her demands for reassurance before she wearily headed through the door. He waited until he heard the bathroom door close before he was jogging into the suite to the kitchen.
Teagan and Max were finishing up their dinner as he entered. Lucas’s stomach growled as Max tossed him a sandwich, and quickly unwrapping it, he took a large bite of the toasted rye bread and the thick slabs of corned beef.
Yum.
“Did you convince her to rest?”
“Temporarily.” He nodded toward the computer that Teagan had already set up on the kitchen table. “We need to get through those tapes before she joins us.”
“On it,” Teagan said, polishing off his bottle of water and moving to take a seat in front of the computer.
Lucas swiftly demolished his sandwich and reached into the fridge for a beer. Twisting off the top, he downed half the bottle in one long gulp as Teagan downloaded the videos.
Standing behind his friend’s chair, he watched as the image of Tony’s bedroom flickered onto the screen, but less than five minutes later he was sharply turning away to pace toward the glass wall that overlooked the river.
Darkness had descended, but the clouds had at last parted to allow the moonlight to shimmer off the water. With a small sigh, Lucas leaned his forehead against the window.
“Are you okay?” Max asked, moving to stand beside him.
Lucas shook his head. “Not really.”
Max reached out to lay a hand on his shoulder. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Heaving a sigh, he turned to meet his friend’s worried gaze. “Every time I think I might get answers I end up with more questions.”
“That’s not entirely true,” Max argued. “We know that Tony wasn’t quite the loner that we first thought.”
Lucas released a sharp laugh. It wasn’t that he’d ever believed that Tony lived like a monk, but he’d assumed his old friend must have used prostitutes when he wanted a little companionship.
Who the hell would ever have suspected he was conducting a secret affair with a woman twice his age?
“Craziness,” he muttered, considering what they’d managed to discover during the day. “You know, Vicky Fontaine’s name seems to be a recurring theme,” he pointed out.
“True,” Max agreed. “She was obviously Tony’s lover.”
Lucas nodded. “And Teagan discovered that she was his private ATM.”
Max arched a brow. “Really?”
“Yep.”
“And she wants to buy Mia’s land.”
“Desperately,” Lucas agreed, trying to connect the dots in his mind.
Unfortunately, he still couldn’t make sense of it.
At least not when it came to Tony’s murder. Or why someone was trying to hurt Mia.
Granted, Vicky might have been furious if Tony had threatened to expose their love affair, but that was hardly a reason to kill him. And if she wanted Mia’s land, then it wouldn’t make sense to want her dead. It wasn’t like Vicky would be in Mia’s will.
Lucas frowned, belatedly recalling he hadn’t asked Mia what actually happened to her property if she died.
“Is there any other connection?” Max asked as Lucas remained locked in his dark thoughts.
Without warning there was the scrape of a chair against the tiled floor as Teagan abruptly rose to his feet. “I might have something,” he said.
Together, Max and Lucas rushed back into the kitchen, watching as Teagan shut down his computer and grabbed his leather jacket, which was tossed on the counter.
“What is it?” Lucas demanded.
“It’s just a suspicion right now,” Teagan warned, heading out of the kitchen and crossing the floor to the front door. “I’ll know more when I run it through my equipment.”
“You’re leaving?” Lucas growled, following behind his friend.
“I need to get to Houston,” Teagan said in absent tones, his mind clearly occupied with what he’d seen. “I’ll be back when I manage to clean up the images.”
Lucas muttered a low curse. “At least show me what you’re looking at.”
Teagan pulled open the door, glancing over his shoulder at Lucas. “Nope. I don??
?t want to get your hopes up. It could turn out to be nothing.”
Lucas clenched his hands at his side. It was that or give his friend a good shake.
“Dammit, Teagan—”
“I’ll miss you too, sweetie,” Teagan interrupted with a mocking grin. Then his attention shifted to Max, who’d moved to stand at Lucas’s side. “Take care of him.”
“You got it,” Max promised.
With a nod, Teagan pulled open the door and disappeared from the penthouse.
“He’s the most aggravating bastard I’ve ever met,” Lucas breathed as the door snapped shut.
Max laid a hand on his shoulder. “And one of the best friends I’ve ever had.”
A wry smile twisted Lucas’s lips. “Amen.”
Chapter Eighteen
Taylor stood at her doorway, peering at the dark sedan parked next to her curb. She’d easily recognized the car. It belonged to Detective Cooper. Which was why her first instinct had been to call and make sure that Mia was okay the second she’d caught sight of the vehicle. Now that Lucas had promised Taylor that her friend was comfortably asleep in bed, her initial stab of fear had been replaced with a tingle of anticipation.
It was stupid.
She should go back inside and ignore the lawman. If the detective had a genuine need to see her, then he would have come to the door and knocked. Or more likely, he would have called and demanded that she drive to the station to answer questions.
Instead she found her feet moving forward, carrying her along the driveway and around the back of the car. She halted next to the driver’s door, waiting for him to roll down the window.
“Detective Cooper,” she murmured, barely able to make out more than a vague outline of his face and the fact he was still wearing his white dress shirt and tie.
Which meant he’d spent the day working.
“Brian,” he softly corrected.
Her lips twitched at his stubborn insistence. “Brian.”
“That’s better,” he murmured.
She leaned forward, trying to see his expression. “Justin told me there was some stranger lurking out here,” she said. “I almost called nine-one-one.”
“Next time don’t hesitate,” he chided. “You can’t be too careful.”