Friction (Red Hot Private Eye, Novella, Vol. 2) (2 page)

Mateo knew that technically he should have waited to move into Raiza’s office until after the Monday morning meeting, where Dominic and Cristal were going to announce all of the new changes. But he had thought that she might take it better if she didn't hear the news in front of ten sets of prying eyes. He knew Raiza. She would need time to process it.

She stood and crossed the small room, quickly heading towards the door.

“Where are you going?” he asked with a smile in his voice.

“To talk to Cristal,” she replied shortly, anger as evident in her voice as it had already been in her body language.

She's the one who approved the move,” Mateo said lightly, “If that influences your decision about whether to go and talk to her. I mean, maybe you're just going to thank her for giving you such a fine-ass office mate. I know that's what I would do if I had walked in this morning and seen all of this,” Mateo gestured at his face and body, “sitting up in my office.”

This piece of information got Raiza to stop in her tracks. When he was done talking, she pivoted on her heel and crossed her arms as she turned her head and met his eyes, just in time to see him give her a huge wink. He
was slammed with the same overwhelming feeling he always experienced when her large golden brown eyes looked into his. Desire.

“She did?” Raiza asked suspiciously.

It was asked more as a challenge than a question, and was probably meant to be rhetorical, but he decided to confirm it anyway.

He nodded, “She sure did.”

“What happened to your office?”

“Well, since I shared a space with Dominic, and he is now an owner, the general consensus was that he should have his own office.”

“Cristal shares an office,” she snapped back.

“Not anymore. She moved into Red’s old office.”

Raiza stood still, seeming to be assessing the ramifications of the information he had just shared with her. He waited, letting her work it out in her own time.

“Why didn’t one of the guys in my department move in?” she asked suspiciously.

He lifted an eyebrow, barking out a short laugh, “They're terrified of you. From what I hear, Jerry practically peed himself at the mere mention of it.”

She tilted her head and placed her hands on her hips. Damn those hips, he had wet dreams about those hips. “They are
not
scared of me!”

“They are,” he stated simply.

“They respect me and like me. I’m always fair,” she seemed a little hurt at the implication that her team was afraid of her. He hadn’t expected that.

“As a supervisor, yes.
Absolutely! As an office mate? Come on. Do I really need to remind you of Kim? That poor girl barely lasted a month.”

Her sexy, full lips turned up slightly at the corners and he could tell that although she was genuinely bothered at the thought that her team was afraid of her she was amused to think they would be scared to share an office with her.

“She lasted two months and six days, for the record. And ‘that poor girl’ was a basket case. Her leaving had nothing to do with sharing an office with me.”

“Really?” he questioned lightly as she moved back behind her desk, apparently giving up the notion to go confront Cristal about his presence in her sanctuary.

“Really,” she confirmed.

Mateo watched as she sat down at her desk and turned on her computer.
What was her computer's name again? Greg or Gopher...something with a ‘G’
.

“So what about Ken, Samuel, Trent, Laura…”

She lifted her hand in dismissal, “They all had issues, none of which had anything to do with me.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” he said, “but that doesn’t change the fact that people aren’t lining up to volunteer for the risk.”

She leveled him with a stare that was equal parts question and challenge, “You’re here. So...what? Did you draw the short stick or lose a bet?”

“No, I volunteered,” he heard his voice get a little gravelly as he said it. That always happened when he
got turned on, he couldn’t control it. Most of the time it worked in his favor. Most of the time women ate it up. He didn’t think this was going to be one of those times.

Her eyes widened, and she finally looked intrigued. “OK, I’ll bite,” she said warily, “Why?”

He leaned forward in his chair and rested his elbows on his knees. He raked his hands through his hair. He shouldn’t say what he wanted to say, even though it was the truth. He needed to keep things professional, especially now that they were going to be working in such close proximity.

Screw it. He
wasn’t big on doing what he
should
do. Fortune favors the bold.

He stood and crossed to her desk, setting his
hands down, he leaned forward. She looked up at him, surprised, as he began to speak from that vantage point.

“Sharing an office with you,” he
began, his voice more ragged than ever, “seeing you all day every day...in my book, that’s not losing a bet. That’s winning the fucking lottery.”

Her breath hitched and she licked her lips. Damn, he wanted to lick those lips.

“Meeting time!” Cristal announced as she flung open the door.

Raiza quickly stood, her sudden motion knocking the tape dispenser
off of her desk. Mateo reached out and caught it before it crashed to the floor. After replacing it on the desktop, he noticed that Raiza moved it about an eighth of an inch to the left and straightened it.

He shook his head.
OK, so maybe all the office gossip about Raiza being OCD held a little truth
, Mateo thought.

“Am I interrupting something?” Cristal sounded more than a little amused.

“Nope,” Raiza said briskly as she grabbed her iPad and purse and brushed past Cristal in her hurry to leave the room.

Mateo's eyes automatically traveled to the sway of her hips. He honestly
hadn’t meant to look at her ass as she exited; he had really tried to break himself of that habit. But, damn...it really
was
one fine ass.

Cristal cleared her throat, reminding him of her presence. He snapped his gaze up to meet hers as she asked faux-innocently, “Enjoying the view?”

Mateo had initially looked up expecting to see one very pissed off Cristal, but instead she just smiled and shook her head before heading out of the office. Just as the door was about to close, she shot one last parting remark through the remaining crack, “I gave in to your near-constant pleas to move into this office with my best friend, Mateo. Now, you kids better behave in here.”

He looked around the small room and immediately only saw it in terms of a collection of surfaces that he wanted to “behave” with Raiza
on. The desks, the walls, the chairs, the floors...he sighed. Damn. What had he gotten himself into?

Raiza finally started to feel her heart rate return to normal as she sat in ‘her’ chair (third one on the left side) for the Monday morning meeting. Normally, Cristal sat beside her but seeing as she was now a partner at the agency, Raiza assumed that she would be seated with Dominic at the head of the rectangular table.

As the Red Hot staff shuffled into the room, the buzz
was all centered on the Thrive Therapy offices and what pieces of information everyone had gleaned. The staff were all trying to fit those individual pieces together to complete the puzzle.

As she tilted her head to see who was speaking in hushed tones in the hallway, she saw a plain clothes detective, who was the epitome of tall, dark, and handsome, just outside the conference room huddled closely to Cristal. Dominic appeared out of nowhere, stepping beside Cristal as he possessively placed his arm around her waist.

Raiza shook her head. It was like a dog marking his territory. Cristal, however, didn’t even seem to notice and continued her conversation without missing a beat, gesturing to Dominic then back to tall-dark-and-handsome. Raiza assumed she was making introductions. Raiza noticed the look in the detective’s eyes as he took note of Dominic’s protective stance. He took a step back, then, to include Dominic in the briefing.

Cristal and Dominic had been stuck living together as husband and wife in an undercover operation a few months back and had been inseparable ever since. Raiza was glad for both of them. They deserved happiness.

She felt a tug at her heart. She wouldn’t mind a little of that kind of happiness coming her way. Not the fall-madly-in-love kind that her friends seemed to be experiencing; she wasn’t under any kind of delusion that that kind of love was possible for her. Nope, she would just like to have maybe a friends-with-benefits situation…as long as the benefits were 'light you on fire' H-O-T!

Dominic and Cristal made their way into the room with the detective following behind. The room quieted as everyone took their seats. Raiza realized that this would be the first meeting that Red was not running. He had officially handed over the reins of the agency last week. After doing so without any kind of grand
fanfare he immediately packed up and headed down to Cabo San Lucas on a fishing trip.

An ache formed in her chest. She was going to miss seeing him around every day. Red was the only father figure Raiza had ever had in her life. She had lived with her Grandma until she passed. That had happened when Raiza was eleven. She had then spent her pre-teen and teen years
being shuffled around from relative to relative. Her mother had suffered from drug addiction and she had never known her father.

She had a big family, lots of aunts,
uncles and cousins. There was never a shortage of places to go. However, she never stayed with one family more than a few months before they would ship her off to another.

The nomadic lifestyle did not give her a sense of belonging. In fact quite the opposite had occurred. She was the outsider with no hope of fitting in.
No real support system to rely on.

Until Red.
He had given her a chance when no one else would. When she was initially hired at Red Hot she had been a bait girl, which basically entailed her tempting and catching cheating husbands. But she immediately realized that undercover work was not something she could do on a long term basis.

There was no control, no structure when you were undercover.
And even though the agency always went to great lengths to ensure all of their agent’s safety in the field, it was still too unpredictable for Raiza’s peace of mind.

So Raiza had decided that if undercover
wasn’t what she wanted to do then she needed to find out how else she could be indispensable to the agency. She had begun coming into the office when she was off the clock. For months, when she hadn’t been out on assignment, she was at the agency, learning every angle of the business. She had known she belonged here, she just hadn’t found her niche. She had quickly learned that the tech guys liked to talk about their work and surprisingly she understood what they were talking about.

After a few months immersing
herself in their virtual world, she had asked Red for a transfer to the Cyber Division and within six months she had been promoted to head of the department. She loved her job, loved the people she worked with. They were her pseudo-family.

“Ok, if everyone could please find a seat,” Dominic directed.

As Raiza looked around, she noticed three new faces. First, detective tall-dark-and-handsome from the hallway. Second a young girl, probably early twenties, blond with huge green eyes. Raiza assumed that she was the new girl that Cristal had brought on for undercover. Last was a tall guy that was built like a house. He had that 'ex-military' look, so it was probably safe to assume that he would be security/undercover.

Cristal cleared her throat as she stood next to Dominic at the front of the room, “All right, guys, let’s get started. We have a lot to go over.” Everyone quieted down, giving Cristal
their full attention.

“First up I would like to introduce Detective Pearson, he has a few things he’d like to say.”

The detective stepped away from the wall he had been standing against. “Hello, everyone, as Ms. Hart mentioned my name is Detective Pearson. I am here regarding the investigation of the break-in and homicide at Thrive Therapy. I am going to need to interview each of you within the next twenty-four hours, if possible. I will be using the room across the hall to hold the interviews. There will be a sign-up sheet next to the door. Please fill in your name, next to the time that is convenient for you. Are there any questions?”

Ty, who was in the security/undercover division, spoke up, “What can you tell us about what happened next door?”

“As of right now it looks like a robbery gone bad. We think the victim caught the assailant in the act. There were signs of a struggle. The victim looks to have expired due to a single shot to his chest.”

“You said it was a robbery gone
bad. What was stolen?” Ty followed up.

“That’s all that I am at liberty to divulge at this time. When we have more information to give you, I will pass it along to either Mr. Charles or Ms. Hart and they can fill you in.”

As the drool-worthy detective finished non-answering, Ty's phone rang and he excused himself to go and take the call.

After the door shut behind Detective Yummy, Dominic stood, “Alright, people so let’s do everything we can to help the police in this investigation. I don’t know about all of you, but I don’t like the idea of something like this going down in our backyard.”

Cristal added, “At this time, law enforcement only wants to interview each of us, but you know the drill—if anyone sees anything or remembers anything pertinent, make sure to let Dominic or I know, we will be in constant communication with LAPD until this is resolved. Like Dominic said, this all happened in our backyard, which is a little too close for comfort.”

“Moving on we have a few announcements,” Dominic again took the floor, “First off I would like to introduce you all to the two newest members of the Red Hot family, Alyssa Cane and Christian Samuels.”

The two newbies stood, Christian nodded his head once in way of greeting, Alyssa lifted her hand and gave a small half-wave, they both sat back down.

“Christian will be working in both undercover and security, and Alyssa will be starting off in our cyber division until she gets some self-defense training, then she will be rotating between cyber and undercover.”

Raiza realized that the path Alyssa would be taking was the exact opposite of the one that she herself had walked down at the agency.
Well, to each his—or in this case her—own
, she thought.

“Raiza,” Dominic interrupted her inner-musings, “Starting tomorrow, Alyssa will be shadowing you.”

Her eyes automatically cut to Cristal’s. Her ‘so-called’ friend! So, not only had they decided that she would be sharing her office, they had also decided to add 'babysitting' to her list of duties.

Lovely.
Just lovely.

Cristal looked her straight in the eye, employing her patented Cristal-move by showing absolutely no emotion.
That’s fine. Cristal didn’t have to
do
anything for Raiza to know that she knew this was all B.S. She couldn’t wait till this meeting was over so she could have a heart to heart with Miss Cristal Hart.

Dominic continued, “We have several new cases. Kristie Parks has hired us for security and electronic recon; she has been receiving some unsettling e-mails. Ethan, I want you to take lead on security. Why don’t you bring Christian with you to do the prelim, show him the
ropes.”

Raiza thought that was an odd choice. Usually when there was anything to do with security and virtual surveillance, Mateo was the obvious go-to
guy, seeing as he worked both divisions. She shook her head. Oh well, not her call. Maybe Dom and Cristal were just trying to shake things up a bit. Or maybe, since this would be such a high profile case, due to the fact that Kristie Parks was the current reigning bubblegum pop princess among the tween set, they wanted both security and surveillance to have their own lead.

“And Jerry,” Cristal interjected, “You will be taking lead on the virtual side of the case. I want you to find out anything you can about where those e-mails are physically coming from.”

Hmm, normally the case would have been given to Raiza, and as head of the department, she would have distributed it accordingly. She wasn’t quite sure why there was a break-down in the chain of command. She certainly was going to find out though. She had a sneaking suspicion that she wasn’t going to like the answer.

“Ty, you and Eliza will be working a workman’s comp case. There is some undercover involved, details are in your inbox.
And, finally, Raiza and Mateo, you will be working a cheating spouse case. Please stay after and we’ll brief you on the specifics,” Dominic said as he motioned for Cristal to take the floor.

As Cristal spoke about the personnel changes, mainly explaining the office mate musical chairs that
was happening, Raiza mentally checked out of the meeting. She was trying to calm herself down from the craziness of the day, and it was only 10:15 am. How in the name of Prada would she be able to make it through the rest of the day standing?