Ruthless Read Online Free PDF Page B

more coffee.
    Groaning, Jess pushed her aching body off the floor. There was a time when her body wouldn’t have grumbled so at being abused this way. Evidently that time had passed. These days she felt every ache and pain of getting the job done. She cut herself some slack—she’d had almost no sleep in the past forty-eight hours. She and Lori had hefted old case file boxes until they were ready to drop. Mainly… she was just weary of running in circles to stop Spears, and now this case that had baffled BPD for three decades was active again.
    No use whining. What she needed was coffee. At the counter she twirled the nifty display rack until she decided on a blend of coffee, then she popped it into her single-cup brewer. She stretched her back and shoulders and promptly changed her mind. What she really needed was a long, hot bath and then a serious massage. A hot, sweat-inspiring series of images flashed through her weary brain. Dan making love to her… showering together… more lovemaking.
    Her achy body, along with her sluggish pulse, reacted instantly.
    The way she felt tonight, they wouldn’t even have to take their clothes off. A good neck rub would work just fine for sending her over the moon—no pun intended.
    That was the problem. Whenever she and Dan spent too much time alone—and she was weak, considering this insanity with Spears—they ended up breaking the rules of their working relationship. She was happy with where she’d landed careerwise. Dan had made her a good offer—one she hadn’t been able to refuse. But that made him her boss. For propriety’s sake rules were essential. Their personal relationship could not interfere with work. And until they worked out where exactly that relationship was going, flaunting it publicly was a huge no-no. The last thing either of them needed was for anyone in the department to latch on to the idea that she’d gotten the job because of their personal relationship or that she got any sort of preferential treatment
ever.
    Case in point: his incessant need to protect her. She was a big girl. A deputy chief, for heaven’s sake. She could protect herself just like all his other deputy chiefs. Still, she was no fool. Eric Spears represented a serious threat. Just last week, she’d gotten a state-of-the-art security system installed along with nifty little motion sensors on the stairs leading up to her door. Add to that the top-of-the-line deadbolt and the Glock she kept under her pillow, and no one was getting near, much less into, her apartment without her knowing it and their regretting it.
    God, how could her life be such a hot mess? Her lover was her boss. Her biggest nightmare was some malignant narcissistic freak who got off on torturing and murdering women,and now she’d gotten another admirer pretty much just like Spears, only this one targeted helpless children.
    And that didn’t even count the stone-cold reality that she was days late on her period—which was the reason she was having coffee instead of wine—or the scary-as-hell fact that her sister was suffering from some weird health issue the doctors couldn’t yet diagnose.
    With all that going on, how in the world could she be standing here fantasizing about neck rubs from her boss/lover? Not to mention if she was pregnant—she cringed—that would mean Dan was a father.
    “Oh God.” She rubbed at her skull with her fingers to relax the tense muscles there.
    Everything was out of control.
    The decadent smell of a gourmet dark blend called caramel drizzle helped put those unpleasant thoughts out of her head. The warm mug felt good in her hands. There wasn’t time right now to worry about personal problems. She had a very old, damned cold case to solve.
    “If we’re lucky it’ll stay cold,” she grumbled.
    Feet shuffling across the wood floor, she refused to consider the other option. If something had roused this killer’s evil urges, he could be planning to strike again.
    “One