Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 68459 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 342(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68459 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 342(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
Ellodie, in her hospital uniform, likely worked at the same hospital as Hollis.
Though since their scrubs were different colors, I imagined that they were in different departments.
Ellodie did look familiar…
“Ma’am,” the woman checking out the lane said to the woman in front of us with the fifty items or more. “This is a fifteen item or less lane. You can’t bring that much here.”
The woman stiffened. “I’m already here.”
As in, just check me out.
The two women behind her snorted, causing the woman who couldn’t follow directions—or apparently read—to look over her shoulder. “I will fight you.”
Hollis’s brows raised.
Ellodie pushed her cart backward. “Listen, lady, we know that you’re entitled, but sometimes the world doesn’t revolve around you. Just move to the other lane.”
Hollis snickered behind her hand.
I was going to have to break up a fight.
I just knew it.
“If you two don’t get your shit together,” I said between clenched teeth.
The badge on my hip was digging into her ass, and before the woman could retaliate for Ellodie’s words, or Hollis’s laughter, I stepped out from behind her and allowed her to take me in. The gun on my hip. The badge on the opposite side.
Her posturing was quick to deflate.
“Yes, sir.”
Then she was gone.
When we were out in the parking lot, I waited with Hollis.
“What are you doing?” she asked as she waved goodbye to Ellodie.
“Making sure both of you get into your cars without getting into any fights.” I sighed.
Hollis chuckled, but waited while we made sure Ellodie got to her car—which was funny enough a Toyota Corolla like Hollis’s, but ran much rougher.
The moment she was out of sight, I helped Hollis into the seat with her ice cream, and we drove back to her apartment.
“Since you have the day off tomorrow,” I said as I carried the groceries through the front of the building. “How do you feel about coming over to my place?”
She bent over, and suddenly the stupid little lights on her Crocs that I thought were just decorative turned on, lighting up the path in front of her.
It was by far the cutest thing I’d ever seen in my life.
She went up the steps, lighting the way as she went, and she answered. “As long as you have a bed that I can melt into for hours on end.”
I thought about my apartment, then laughed. “Yeah, that’s about all I have.”
It was as I was gathering up my files on the coffee table that she stopped where she was beside me, her eyes narrowed. “That.”
She pointed at the dead woman from a few nights previous. “I’ve seen her recently.”
“On the news,” I muttered, pissed about how her photo had been plastered everywhere by the two asshole employees.
“No, not there,” she said as she studied it. “I think at the hospital.”
My brows rose. “When?”
Hollis tapped her cheek. “Let me think about it?”
I did as she asked and we gathered her overnight bag, two pints of ice cream, and headed toward my place.
I was in desperate need of washing my clothes, had a stack of things that I needed to check out with the builder tomorrow, and a desperate need to fall into bed for eight hours after sleeping so shitty for three nights in a row.
It was just as well that she was thinking away beside me, because I got two phone calls back-to-back as we were driving the twenty minutes to my place.
One from a detective in another precinct with a possible connection on my train death, and the other from my lawyer friend.
After the assurance that she’d take a look at the papers Hollis had been served, we hung up.
“Still over there thinkin’, darlin’?” I teased.
She looked over at me, then popped the top on the carton of cookie dough ice cream and started to lick it.
My dick thickened in my pants.
“I don’t think it was at work,” she said as she frowned. “I swear all of my cases this week were car wrecks. But…”
She trailed off and kept licking her ice cream.
She did that until we walked into my apartment, and I procured her a spoon.
She went to town on her carton of ice cream, and I started a load of laundry as she took a look around my place.
A lot of my stuff was in storage.
With me building a house, I’d decided not to renew my lease. So the only thing that I really had left since that lease was up at the end of the month was my bed, washer and dryer, and kitchen utensils.
I was just finishing up when she carefully set her ice cream down, then looked at me with wide eyes.
“That night, at the club, when you forced me to leave?” she whispered.
“Yeah?” I asked.
“That was the night I saw that woman. She was talking to Taite when Alana El Dorado walked up,” she said. “That’s where I know her from. She was dressed in a black number that night. Very sparkly. I thought it was the cutest dress ever, so I made note of it. And she had this long black hair that looked blue in the overhead lighting.”