Con Man: Complete Series Box Set: A Bad Boy Romance (4 page)

T
he first rays
of sunlight fought their way through the venetian blinds, and I narrowed my eyes as if they were personally affronting me with their presence. Once I was done visually berating the dawn, I turned back to the computer and searched the name I'd already typed in a half a dozen times last night.

The same files came up, though I didn't know what I'd expected to have changed. Wasn’t that the very definition of insanity? Repeating the same actions over and over again, expecting different results?

I let out an aggravated sigh and rested my head on my hands. I practically had all the articles and files memorized by now. I didn't need to look at them to know what they said. What they confirmed.

Broderick Murray, my childhood best friend and first real love, however unrequited, stared back at me. The picture in his file matched the image I'd managed to pull from the security footage, and I was sure the people at the museum would be able to identify him as Jack Wright.

Seeing him as an adult would've been a shock no matter how it happened, but seeing him like this? Knowing that he was a criminal? It hurt more than I would've thought it could.

We'd been next door neighbors since we were little, constant companions for as long as I could remember. I was pretty sure it started when I let him borrow my pink crayon in kindergarten. He'd broken his and wanted to draw pigs on the farm he was illustrating. I'd hardly ever used my crayons so I'd ended up just giving him the whole pack. In return, he'd given me the picture.

From that point on, we'd become practically inseparable, even when boys teased him for hanging out with a girl, and the girls teased me about having a boyfriend. We'd stuck up for each other, protected each other.

He was a few months older than me, which meant right now, he was twenty-seven while I was still twenty-six. When we were younger, he always lorded those few months over me. I'd always acted like it bothered me, but it hadn't. As a child, he'd seemed like a big brother.

Until one day, he hadn't.

I wasn't entirely sure when I'd gone from thinking about Bron – the nickname I'd given him rather than calling him by his actual name – as family to thinking about him as something more. All I knew for sure was that at some point, Bron had gone from the pudgy, shaggy-haired kid who I'd defended from bullies to a tall, beanpole of a freshman who was actually kind of cute.

Of course, his appearance had never really mattered to me. It'd been the trust, the feeling that anything was possible when we were together. But I'd had my insecurities. I'd grown young, towering over most boys well into high school. I'd been awkward, too skinny. I hadn't really come into my own until college, well after he and I had gone our separate ways.

He might've returned my feelings despite all that, but I'd never given myself a chance to find out.

When we were fourteen, just before his birthday, a man broke into Bron's house while he and I had been camping. My dad had come to get us, his face white, hands shaking. He'd taken us to the hospital then, and he'd told us there that Bron's father had been killed during the robbery. Bron's mother had made it to the hospital, but she died in surgery just a few hours after we got there.

I'd held him when he cried.

We'd taken him back to our house then, but social services had come to get him the next day. I'd told him as he was being led to the car that we'd see each other in school, and things wouldn't change.

Except they had.

The day Bron walked out of my life, everything else fell apart.

Not more than two hours after Bron left, Dad got a call from a friend who'd told him that their company had lost their pension. From there, it'd come out that Dad had invested our family savings with the same man. We'd lost everything.

Things only snowballed from there.

Mom and Dad fought constantly, and Bron was nowhere to be found. I'd asked all over high school, and even biked to the police station, but nobody would tell me anything.

After two weeks, I'd come home from school to find my mother gone. Eventually, Dad and I found out that she'd run off with an investment banker. I hadn't seen her since, and I'd never even considered using my FBI connections to find her. She left me, and that was all I needed to know.

Bron had never called, never come back to school. When my father started drinking heavily, all I'd wanted was to talk to my best friend. But he was nowhere to be found.

Then, a month after my fifteenth birthday, Dad put a bullet in his head. He'd left me a letter saying he just couldn't deal.

So I'd gone to live with my great-aunt in Detroit, knowing that I'd never see Bron again. And a part of me had been angry enough at him for not making contact that I was glad.

Now that I had the police reports in front of me, I didn’t feel much better. It had taken me hours of searching through the unorganized archives to get a hold of his parents' case. I'd been out of the city before it'd gone to trial, but the thieves had been convicted.

Bron had been at the trial, and I'd almost cried at the picture of him I found in a newspaper article. Him standing there, wearing an ill-fitting suit, his expression angry. His name wasn’t in the newspaper, but the article itself had identified Bron as a ward of the state.

I'd figured out long ago that he must've been put into foster care. He hadn't had any other family. I just hadn't understood until I was much older that he'd probably been put in a different school district, which was why I hadn't seen him again. The only thing I still didn't have an explanation for was why he'd never tried to contact me after that day.

I put in a request for his case file from social services and hoped they could tell me how my friend – the boy who'd once stayed up with me to watch for a meteor shower even though it was pouring rain – had turned into the kind of man who could waltz into a museum and steal millions of dollars’ worth of art.

I hadn't even thought about him in years, but the thought of him like this broke my heart.

“Agent Melendez! I thought I gave you strict orders not to spend the night here.”

I raised my head to see Colman giving me a disapproving look.

“It’s too soon for you to be pulling double shifts here. I don’t need a bright new agent suffering from burn out.”

It was possibly the first one hundred percent professional thing he ever said to me, so I decided to honor it with an actual apology. “I’m sorry, Agent Gau. I just got caught up in this lead I was chasing.”

He cracked a smile, reminding me that he could be a bit charming when he wasn’t being an obnoxious ass. I supposed he would've had to know how to turn it on at some point, or he would've been out of a job a long time ago.

“Turn up anything good?”

I shook my head, unwilling to rat out Bron just yet. Besides, all I had was my opinion that the man in the reflection I saw was the boy I'd once known. I'd need more proof than that before I could identify him.

“Well, go home, shower, take a nap. I’ll see you around noon.”

I nodded and shakily stood from where I had been huddled at my desk for hours. Every muscle and joint in my body protested the movement after being in the same position for so long. I tossed my coffee cups in the trash, grabbed my jacket, and headed out.

By the time I walked the half mile to my shoebox of an apartment, the chilly air had woken me right up. I took one look at the front door of my building, then one at my car that hadn’t budged in at least a week. Less than two seconds later, I had my keys out and was warming up my vehicle.

My destination? The CPS office. I didn't feel like sitting around forever and waiting for someone to call to tell me that the files I wanted weren't available.

Besides, a little badge flashing never hurt anybody.

Newly determined, I stepped on the gas, channeling my inner Benita. While I liked to think I could never quite reach her level of recklessness, I was far from timid behind the wheel.

When the receptionist did finally appear from wherever she'd hidden until her official start time, I then had to fill out a visitor’s log, then be escorted through approximately one million file cabinets lining the halls like some sort of fortification,
then
finally be introduced to a harried-looking woman in charge. And it didn’t end there. She then took me down to the archives, which had approximately two million
more
filing cabinets.

It was in that dark, cramped, dusty room that I was informed that I could probably find what I needed somewhere in the mess, but it wasn't guaranteed. Then she wished me luck and my one-woman search party for the files I needed ensued.

Minutes ticked by, then hours, and I searched desperately for any scrap of what could have happened to my best friend. I knew I needed to get back to work by noon, but I couldn’t just leave empty-handed. I knew what I had seen on that security camera, and I needed to figure out this whole thing before anyone else did.

And then, finally, I found it. Misfiled in the wrong 'M' drawer, I pulled out two blue folders stuffed with yellowing paper. I quickly navigated my way out of the depressing pseudo-basement, brushing what felt like layers of dust off of myself as I went. Nodding goodbye to the receptionist, I tried not to look like a half-terrified, half-giddy school girl. In my hands were the answers to questions I'd forgotten for a decade.

The emptiness in me that I usually filled with work, work, work gnawed at my consciousness. Perhaps this was why I'd always felt like something was missing? Because I'd lost him without explanation?

My shaking hands tore into the folder as soon as my car door closed. I couldn’t risk reading it at the station and having Benita find out. I read the case worker's notes first. She'd described him as withdrawn, moody, but also said that his responses hadn't been unexpected considering the circumstances. She'd recommended that he not have any contact with anyone from his past until the people who'd killed his parents had been found – as per the suggestion of the detectives investigating the case.

Now I knew why he hadn't called at first.

I moved on to the rest of the file. As expected, I saw thorough notes about Broderick’s first placement. They looked like a nice couple, but only a few weeks after Bron had been placed, the husband had developed cancer, and their three foster kids had to be relocated to different homes. Bron had been sent to a group home and had stayed there for quite a while before getting into a fight with one of the other kids. They had both been deemed threats to the other and moved.

The next house he'd been assigned to had caught fire, and there'd been rumors of his involvement, though he'd denied it. At the next house, his arm had been broken, but he'd refused to say how. Three weeks after that, he disappeared. The subsequent missing person and runaway reports were half-hearted and vague. He'd been fifteen in an overloaded system, and there'd been no one to look out for him.

I closed the files and closed my eyes. I was now almost completely sure that Bron was the man in the security footage. It'd only take some digging into his criminal history to confirm it.

I was walking a fine line between betraying someone who'd once meant the world to me, and a career that I'd pursued to make things right.

Shaking my head, I willed away my tears. Whatever the answer to my dilemma was, I doubted I would find it in the CPS parking lot. Besides, I needed to take a shower before Gau got wise to my extracurricular activities.

I knew one thing for certain. Coming here had opened Pandora’s box, and I needed to prepare myself for everything that was almost definitely going to come tumbling out.

I
sipped coffee
, staring out the window at what I was fairly sure was the building devoted to the FBI white-collar crimes and fraud division. It actually hadn’t taken much research to discover the address. I supposed the white-collar division didn't really have as much to worry about as the ones that dealt with organized crime or things like that, but there were still plenty of criminals like me who didn't have my abhorrence of violence.

I shook my head and forced myself to focus my thoughts. I was trying to see if I could catch sight of Karis as she went in. Not that I knew what I would do when I
did
see her.

It had been more than a decade since I'd last seen the gangly girl from my childhood. The girl who'd given me my nickname, the nickname I'd never been able to give away. She'd been my best friend; the one person I'd always known would have my back. Then, as we'd gotten older, the friendship I'd felt for her had begun to change into something more.

I hadn't exactly known when it first happened, when I'd first noticed that my always very-skinny friend was suddenly not as skinny anymore. And her legs had seemed to grow and grow. As I'd dealt with my voice cracking, and my own growth spurt that made my knees ache, she'd grown prettier each day.

From the time I was twelve, I'd gotten into more than one fight with boys who talked about her, then had to lie to her about why my knuckles had been bruised or bloody. And it never mattered why they'd talked about her. If they'd been mean, I wanted to defend her. If they'd been complimentary, I’d gotten even angrier. They'd had no right to think about her that way.

She'd been mine.

My everything, my world.

And I'd never gotten the chance to tell her that. I'd waited for months, paralyzed with worry that she wouldn’t feel the same way, that if I asked her out on a date, I'd lose her friendship. When I finally decided to tell her, I'd wanted to do it in a special way. So I'd asked her to go camping with me.

I'd been getting ready to tell her when her dad had shown up.

And my world had been destroyed.

Because of what happened to my parents, some shrink decided that I needed to cut ties with my past, or at least keep my distance for a while. By the time I'd finally gotten away and ridden a bike back to our neighborhood, her house had been boarded up with a weathered for sale sign posted in the front lawn.

She'd disappeared.

I'd asked around, but all anyone could tell me was that her mother had run off, her father had killed himself, and she'd gone to live with a relative that no one knew.

That was the moment I'd stopped caring about anything. Everyone I'd ever loved was gone. All that was left was heartache.

But now she could be here – right here – and I had to see her. Talk to her. I needed to know if she'd felt the same way back then.

If she felt anything for me now.

If I felt anything for her.

And that was why I was staking out her work. Granted, I had no idea if she was in the field or not, but I didn’t care. I would sit and wait at the charming café across the street, pretending to be a college student like many of the other patrons. A graduate student, obviously, but just some hard-working kid like all the others. It was probably the worst possible thing I could do, but I couldn't find it in myself to walk away.

Luckily, I didn’t have to wait long. Just a bit before noon, the FBI agent I'd once known as my best friend came stalking down the sidewalk outside the café. She stood at the corner, waiting for the light to change, and I used the time to absorb as many details about her as I could. The curly hair, those cheekbones, the legs that seemed to go on for ages.

I lifted the book I was reading, although I was really using it to shield my face in case she suddenly decided to look into the building. I was fairly certain I hadn’t left a trace of evidence behind, but if Karis was half as smart as I remembered, she might've been able to think of something I hadn't.

Emotions I hadn’t felt in a long time begin to creep up from the tidy little box I'd shoved them into. Suddenly, the whole world was just about this tall, beautiful woman who could very much put me away, but could also be someone...special.

The past was closer than it had ever been.

The way she tapped her foot while she waited to cross reminded me of her chronic impatience when she waited for the microwave popcorn we'd made every Friday night for years.

The harried expression hanging about her eyes echoed back to how anxious she'd always gotten when she was behind on her self-made homework schedule.

Then the past caught up with the present when she strode across the street, far more confident than the girl I'd known, reminding me that she was a federal agent who was investigating a case, and she could, right now, be chasing a lead that could end up with me behind bars.

And that was when I realized that the Karis I'd known and loved would never have approved of what I did, of who I'd become. She'd have been ashamed of me. We'd both had our parents taken from us under shitty circumstances, but she'd taken what had happened to her and used it to make the world a better place. And here I was, daydreaming about some dramatic reunion, when in reality, any meeting we had would no doubt end with me in handcuffs.

Anger welled up in me. This woman had just appeared like a ghost from a past I thought I'd long buried, only to stay beyond my reach. It was infuriating. I supposed that after so many years of playing the grifting game, I was used to getting what I wanted, but in this case, I knew it was impossible.

As she disappeared into the building across the street, I stood. I knew without a doubt that woman had been my first love, and I was about ninety percent sure I still had feelings for her.

I was also one hundred percent sure that she was permanently out of my reach.