Black On Black (Quentin Black Mystery #3) Read Online Free PDF

to get a drink of water while he collected his thoughts before returning to me.
    He walked out of the bedroom and shut the door.
    I was lying there for quite awhile before it dawned on me that he wasn’t coming back.

Three
    GONE

    HE LEFT THE next day.
    We’d only been back in San Francisco for three days. Two nights and three days.
    At that point, I still hadn’t even talked to any of my old friends about what happened over there, in Bangkok. Hell, I’d barely left Black’s apartment.
    He hadn’t really either, other than to exercise and go to his offices next door.
    The only time I remember us leaving through the ground floor revolving glass doors together had been the second day, when we went out to dinner at Scoma’s on the pier. We’d decided to walk there, strolling by the water where we could. We kissed a few times too, even held hands, watching the sunset turn everything pink and dark red and orange as we watched pelicans and seagulls dive-bomb for fish.
    On that third day, the day he left, I’d been rinsing shampoo out of my hair inside Black’s shower when I heard the door buzzer.
    I froze.
    I even remember thinking how overblown my reaction was.
    It made me realize how much I’d been hiding in there with Black, how unwilling I’d been to rejoin the real world. It also made me realize how weirdly possessive I’d gotten with him...   and truthfully, how paranoid. Only after all those things crossed my mind did it occur to me to wonder how I’d heard his door buzzer at all.
    Black must have a speaker in there somewhere, meaning the bathroom.
    Given how Black was, I don’t know why that fact would even give me pause. He was totally the type to wire his place up with tech crap.
    Either way, the buzzer didn’t go off again.
    I had to assume Black answered the door. The fact that he did it quickly didn’t surprise me, given that I’d found him asleep on the couch in his living room when I wandered out of his bedroom that morning.
    I came out of the bathroom about ten minutes later to find him staring at a thick manilla envelope that lay on the dark blue comforter that covered his bed. He’d already opened it. The address side was down, so I couldn’t see who it was from. I couldn’t even tell if it had been mailed to him or hand delivered. From the thickness of it, a lot was crammed inside.
    I was still watching him look at it when his phone buzzed on the dresser.
    I jumped at the sound, but he didn’t so much as glance at it. Rather, he just stared at the padded envelope, a frown etched on his sculpted lips. He was shirtless, wearing only dark pants, but for once that wasn’t distracting me.
    Well, it wasn’t distracting me very much.
    I stood there for a few seconds more, watching his face as I used one of his towels to rub the excess water out of my hair. The phone stopped ringing for a few seconds.
    Then it started up again.
    Black still didn’t move.
    “Are you going to get that?” I said mildly.
    Jumping, he glanced at me, his expression bordering on guilty––caught, at least. When I motioned towards his phone with my chin, raising my eyebrows in question, he wiped the expression away. Smiling, he looked me over in his bathrobe.
    “No.”
    “No?” I said, smiling back.
    “Fuck no. I’m not answering my phone when you’re standing there naked and wet under my robe.” He held out his arms, motioning with the fingers of both hands to come to him.
    It made me laugh. I knew he was distracting me of course, but at the time, it seemed like a small thing to let go. Since I’d been wary about his reaction to me, given the night before, I’d also been relieved.
    Mostly though, I let it go because I thought it would only be temporary.
    A few hours maybe, while he sorted through whatever he wanted to say to me about what was bothering him. I figured he had to be close to talking to me by then, given what he’d said the night before. He’d admitted we needed to talk. He made it sound