Remember Me (12 page)

Bren and Lily will be home tonight. How could I endanger them like this? How could I have screwed up so badly? I nearly got caught. I touched a
body
.

I hold on to the kitchen counter and take three deliberate breaths. I'm overreacting. There's no need to panic . . . yet. I know he has my license plate number. I don't know how long it will take him to trace it—depends on his skill set or his connections and either one could take a while.

So for now, I'm good.

I just don't know for how long.

My legs give out and I end up on the floor, slumped up against the bottom cabinets. Dimly I'm aware that I'm leaving dirt everywhere. I need to change, but I'm scared to go upstairs. I'm scared he's already here, waiting for me.

I tuck my knees under my chin. Oh, God, I am in so much trouble. Not just me. Bren. Lily. If he traces me to my sister—

There's a soft whump as the garage door turns on. My stomach rolls. The garage. I didn't check the garage. I scramble forward, land on both knees as my mud-slicked feet shoot out from under me.

The door scrapes open.

“Wicked?”

Relief turns my bones mushy. It's Griff. Holding a pizza. He stares at me so long I think he's going to turn around and leave. Then, suddenly, he's at my side. His arms are around me and I shouldn't plaster myself against him—I'm muddy, bloody, maybe even crying—and I can't let him go.

“What're you doing here?”

“I finished early. I wanted—the
hell
, Wick? What happened to your head?”

“I . . . fell. In a hole.”

“What?” Griff's face wads up. He touches his fingers to the cut above my eye. “Wait. Back up. Start from the beginning.”

I can't. I have no idea what to say. Everything I can think of will only piss him off and I'm not even sure I know where the beginning is. When I caught Todd? When Carson said I wasn't finished?

“Jesus, your skin feels like ice.” Griff wraps his hands around mine. He's right. The thought of telling him the truth has hollowed me, left nothing but chill.

“I was working the job,” I say at last.

“Same one as before?” Griff's rubbing my arms now, hard. Bits of dirt scatter onto the floor. “Tracking down Bay?”

“I broke into his house to plant the sniffer.”

Griff's hands stop.

“Someone else was there—someone who wasn't Bay or Ian. I ran and he ran after me.” The words are hurtling out of me now and I have to put both hands on the floor to keep myself from collapsing. “I don't know who he is or what he was doing there. I think he's going to figure out who I am. He found my car. Saw the license plate.”

“And you thought he was coming through your garage door. You thought I was him.”

I nod.

“Did you check the house? The security system?”

More nods. It's all I can manage.

“You need to get out of those clothes. You want help up the stairs?”

Do not say yes. Do. Not. Say. Yes.

“Yes.”

Griff looks away, his jaw flexes once. “You want me to wait outside the bathroom while you shower?”

My fingers curve into the kitchen tile and I have to concentrate on breathing so I don't think about what I want to say and shouldn't.

Doesn't matter because all that comes out is, “Yes.”

I start to stand, but Griff tucks me into him, lifts me so I'm pinned against his chest. “Griff, please, it's not—”

“It is.”

Griff stalks up the stairs, puts me down outside my bathroom, and goes inside to crank the hot water. Steam fills the room and I follow him, lean against the vanity counter, shivering, as he piles fresh towels near the shower door.

“I'll get you some clean clothes and try to wipe up the mud downstairs,” Griff says, drying his wet hands on the backs of his jeans. “You don't want Bren finding it. Move, okay?”

I stare at him.
Move?

Oh, because I'm in his way. He wants to leave.

I want him to stay. I put one hand on Griff's chest, feel his heartbeat. I take my other hand and lock the door.

13

Griff retreats a step. “What're you doing, Wick?”

Wick. Not Wicked. Which is what this is, isn't it? I want Griff. I want his mouth, his hands. I want him to hold me so I stop shivering.

“I—” I kiss him. It's not pretty. He's too tall. I have to tug him down to me, and when I do, he hesitates and I nearly sob. Please don't let me have damaged this too.

“Please,” I breathe. His hands find my jaw, my cheeks. He smoothes back my hair, and my skin warms like always. How can everything be so wrong and he stays so perfect?

“God, you're so—” Griff groans against my hair and the way his voice turns rough feels like want.

I tug at his shirt, yanking it over his head and leaving muddy handprints across his chest. I'm not being careful.

Neither is he.

His hands work my jeans loose. They crumple at my feet and he lifts me out of them. We stumble into the shower together and I yelp when the hot water hits my skin. Griff pivots, pins me to the wall. His fingers knot in my hair, angling my head for another kiss.

His mouth covers mine and I'm gone. My arms loop around Griff's neck and he lifts me to meet him, pressing my shoulders into the wall. I love this. I love how he takes me out of me, until the water hits the dirt and suddenly all I can smell is mud and decay and I gasp.

“Wicked.” Griff loosens his grip and I stare dumbly at him, hearing a whistle in my head that makes my body go cold. Water sluices down his face, tiny droplets catching in his eyelashes. “Slow down.”

I can't. He's begging me to stop, but his hands are telling me how I'm wanted, how I'm powerful.

Like what happened to me didn't really happen.

I choke on my sob so it doesn't emerge in a scream. Tears crowd my eyes and I push away from him.

I'm not going to cry. I'm not going to cry.

I'm already crying.

In front of Griff. Oh, God.

It's coming out in big, ugly gasps now, bending me in half and driving my knees to the tile. I can't stop. I'm crying for Chelsea and for me.

Because I don't want to do this anymore.

I end up sprawled at Griff's feet, and when he gathers me close, I want to die. This is not how I want him to see me.

This isn't how
I
want to see me. Griff holds my head against his chest so our breathing comes down together. It's almost enough to make me feel like I've survived it.

Until the GoPhone vibrates on the counter.

I fumble with a towel before picking it up. The screen is smeared with mud, making the incoming call barely legible. Carson.

Griff sees it too. “Whoever it is can wait.”

“It can't—it's Carson.” Now I'm the one who retreats, shuffles around to separate our clothes. When I pass him his T-shirt, all I can see is how my muddy fingers made the fabric look bloodstained.

Griff catches my hand and something wordless snakes between us. He wants to talk. I want to disappear. I can't believe I fell apart. Well, I
can
believe it. I wish I hadn't.

Because it feels like I just changed everything.

The phone buzzes again and Griff looks at me, the air between us wrapped with everything he will not say: Don't answer, don't put Carson first, don't do this. And I have to and I'm not and I have no choice. It looks like I'm putting Carson first and I'm not. I'm putting Griff and Lily and Bren first by keeping Carson at bay. I should explain that.

I angle the phone against my ear instead. “Yeah?”

“Where are you?”

“Home. I had to check the security system.”

“We have to talk.”

“Tell him to screw off.” Griff moves toward me and, without thinking, I shy away, stopping myself too late.

“Wick? Are you there?”

I keep my eyes trained on Griff. “Where do you want to meet?”

“My house. In an hour.”

I should probably pretend I have no idea where Carson lives. Definitely shouldn't reveal I scoped his place once because I thought it might be useful information.

“Fine,” I say, and disconnect, tossing the phone onto the bathroom counter. I stare at it so I don't have to meet Griff's eyes. “I have to meet Carson. His house. It's a few minutes from here.”

“I'll go with you . . . if you want.”

Of course I want. I should be ashamed of how grateful that makes me. I start to tell him anyway and stop. Instead, I pull up my chin.

“I'll clean out the Mini,” Griff says, studying the wall above my head. “If it's half as muddy as you—”

“You don't have to protect me.”

“I couldn't if I tried.” He walks out, leaving the bathroom door wide open.

Run after him. Apologize.

No way.

I scrub one hand over my swollen eyes. He makes it sound like I enjoy this shit, like I go looking for it. It's not like that. It's
not
.

I open my mouth to tell him it's not about what I might ruin. It's about what I
will
save. Too late though—Griff's feet have already hit the stairs. I'm alone. This isn't the happily ever after he signed on for, but this is who I turned out to be.

 

Carson doesn't live
in Peachtree City proper. He's probably fifteen minutes outside the city limits. It's a small house at the end of a long dirt road, bordered on three sides by thick trees that rise up like broken teeth. The odds of anyone seeing us are next to nil. Even so, Carson still makes us park the Mini well behind the house.

Griff pulls the keys from the ignition, and as he reaches for the car door, I reach for him. “Griff.”

He's already walking away, the lines of his shoulders sharp under his faded T-shirt. Carson waits at the door and, silently, we all pile into the living room, where Carson collapses on a swaybacked couch and helps himself to the bottle of Jack propped on the coffee table.

“Classy,” Griff says.

Carson pauses, plastic Solo cup at his lips. “Don't be a smart-ass. I'm only here long enough to shower and get something to eat.”

“That's getting ‘something to eat'? I must be doing it wrong.”

“Again, don't be a smart-ass.” Carson's voice rises and, next to me, Griff tenses, his feet push into the floor. It makes Carson smile.

He switches his attention to me. “Tell me how you got in.”

“Rear window. Second floor.”

“How'd you get out?”

“Same way.”

Carson scrubs one hand along his jaw. “What I don't understand is why the security guards left. I sent two officers up to Atlanta to question—”

“It looked like they were called away.”

“Go on.”

I grip the couch cushions under my knees, suddenly very, very aware of Griff watching me. “I was on the bike path. It looked like one got a text or maybe a visual voice mail. He showed it to the other and they left.”

Carson swirls his drink around as he thinks about that. “So what does that mean?”

“It means your killer has someone on the inside of the security firm,” Griff says.

“Or,” I counter, “it means we're dealing with another hacker.”

Both of them look at me. Carson's interested. Griff's . . . shuttered.

“Security firm like that,” I say slowly, trying out the words. “They don't make mistakes. Their people don't just wander off. They get orders. They're told what to do, and whoever told them was someone they trusted and knew.”

Carson sits up. “Or they
thought
it was someone they trusted and knew.”

“Exactly. Getting into Barton and Moore's main computers would be really freaking hard. Getting into a supervisor's cell phone and accessing his people from that cell phone? Easier.”

“Anything else?” the detective asks.

“What about the . . .” I close my eyes. Open them. I'm afraid of what I'll see in the dark. “Bones I found? How did you explain it?”

“Body was reported by an anonymous tip.” The detective digs around in his jacket, pulls out a plastic baggie. Inside, there's a dark square of something and Carson flicks it onto the coffee table, where it lands with surprising weight.

It's a wallet.

Carson pushes the baggie around so I can see the girl in the dirt-stained license smile at me. “You know who that is?”

I shake my head. The plastic is so stained I can't make out much of the face, only the long blond hair.

“That is—
was
—Kyle Bay's girlfriend, Lell Daley. You uncovered her body.”

Next to me, Griff stiffens. Even through my jeans, I can feel how his muscles stand up like rope.

Carson leans off the side of his couch and sifts through a box of files on the floor. He pulls a set of folders onto his lap and flips through a few, flicking a couple of pictures onto the coffee tabletop. “According to her mother, the girl”—Carson taps the face of a girl with honey-blond hair, her skin almost Crayola orange from fake tanner—“eloped with Kyle Bay a few years ago.”

I recognize Kyle at once. Dark hair. Deep-set eyes. There's a sneer at the corners of his mouth like he's trying—and failing—not to laugh at you. It's so much like his dad I scowl.

“They were both eighteen so it's not like anyone could do anything,” Carson continues. “Mrs. Daley was thrilled with the marriage.”

“The Bays weren't?”

“That would be my guess. The real question is, when did she die? According to her mother, she eloped four years ago.”

“Somehow I don't think she made it that far.”

“Agreed.”

We watch each other for a moment and Carson breaks first, reaching for the bottle again. He doesn't pour another drink, but he studies the liquid like he wants to.