Sophie Oak: Lost in Bliss

He rapped his knuckles across the peeling paint on the door.

“Cam? Cam, let me in. I’m not going away, and I can see that your bike is parked outside. I know you’re in there.”

“And I should care about that, why?” Cam shouted it through the door.

“Because I’ll tell you what you want to know. I brought the files and everything.” Rafe felt infinitely weary. He’d wanted to avoid talking to Cam about this because he didn’t need anything else tugging at his conscience.

“I don’t want to know anything. I’m good. You could get in some serious trouble for sharing that file with me. I hope you catch the bastard.”

Rafe was about to protest, to start to coax Cam out of his shell.

He’d known Cam for years. When Cam felt slighted, he could hold on to it like a baby clutching a prized toy. But he was also tenacious as a pit bull. Cam should be drooling over new information about the man they had been hunting for years.

Four years before, they had made a deal. It had been almost a year after Laura had walked out of her hospital room leaving behind nothing but a note that told them a simple goodbye. They had killed themselves, splitting their time between trying to catch the Marquis de Sade and trying to track their wayward lover. Neither one of them had had a decent night’s sleep. It had been time to make a deal. Rafe stayed on at the FBI to keep on top of the case, and Cam had devoted himself to finding Laura. Cam had started a private investigations business, but it was almost entirely funded by Rafe. Cam had also started writing a software program that scanned the Internet not only searching for any mention of her name, but more importantly, looking for her face.

Cameron Briggs was not a man who gave up. Unless he’d found a much bigger prize.

“You motherfucker, you found her.” Rafe pounded on the door.

Just like that, his guilt raged into red-hot jealousy. Rafe was not about to let Cam waltz away with information on Laura. Laura was his, damn it. His.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Rafe heard the unspoken “sucker” in Cam’s shouted words. He lifted his leg and gave the piece-of-shit door separating him from his ex-partner a well-placed kick. The door itself held, but it cracked up the middle. Cam stared at him through his now ruined door.

“You’re an asshole, and you’re replacing that door.” Cam reached out, and after two loud clicks, the door swung open.

Rafe wasn’t about to feel bad about the door. “Where is she?” Cam’s mouth became a flat, stubborn line. A long huff of breath came out of his chest, and he pointed to a table in the tiny kitchen.

“Colorado.”

There was a printout of a newspaper article on the table. It was a copy of an article from the Lifestyle section of a Denver newspaper.

He couldn’t miss her even though she was surrounded by other women. Laura Rosen. He could still remember the day she’d walked into the Bureau. He’d known the moment he’d laid eyes on her that she was the one.

Unfortunately, Cam had felt the same way.

Unfortunately? Was it really so bad? At the time, it had felt that way. At the time, all he could think about was how enjoying a three-way with his partner and his soul mate would affect his career. There wasn’t a single sitting Bureau chief openly involved in a polyamorous relationship. At the time, he’d been willing to fight his best friend over her. At the time, he’d been willing to throw her under a bus to get ahead. Oh, he’d told himself he was helping her, but he was really only thinking of himself.

Yep. The guilt was back.

“She’s calling herself Laura Niles. Why does Niles sound familiar?” Rafe asked, his finger tracing over the picture. He wanted to touch her, to assure himself that she was real and alive and whole.

“Her grandfather’s name was Niles. Niles Rosen. She loved that old man.” Cam stood at his side, his arms crossed over his chest.

Rafe looked at the man he’d once been closer to than his own brother. Cam looked tired. There was a set to his shoulders that Rafe recognized as defensiveness. Cam stood there in the tiny piece-of-crap kitchen, a big, unmoving block of wood.

Cam had come to the office to tell Rafe he’d found Laura. He’d run through the building with this printout in his hand, and when he’d found Rafe, he’d walked in on what Cam had to assume was a betrayal of the worst kind. No wonder Cam hadn’t met him at the pub.

He had to play this carefully if he didn’t want to get his ass kicked.

“Stefan Talbot.” Rafe whistled as he glanced over the article.

“Who the fuck is Stefan Talbot?”

Rafe felt a grin come and go. That was Cam. Despite the fact that he was built like a linebacker, Cam was a nerd. He was far more into his computers and watching bad sci-fi movies than art. And Cam couldn’t care less about society and powerful people. “He’s an artist.

My mother has one of his works. He’s very reclusive. Supposedly he lives in a weird little town in Colorado. And, according to this, Laura is in his wedding party.”

“What the hell is she doing in some backwater small town?” Cam asked. His shoulders had relaxed slightly as he stared at the photo.

“Hiding. From the Marquis de Sade. From the Bureau. From us.” Laura had a lot to run from. “But if he’s back, then he could have seen this, too.”

“Yeah, nice to fill me in on that.” Cam’s eyes had sunken back into his face as though retreating. “I must have missed the message you left. You know how it is when your social life is as active as mine is. Oh, wait. That’s you. So, you too busy kissing the brass’s ass to give an old friend a call?”

Cam was firmly pushing a whole bunch of Rafe’s buttons. “Cam, please hear me out.”

“I don’t know what the fuck you think you can say that would make me care.”

How did he put this? Rafe had been thinking about this every minute since last Tuesday when he’d gotten word of the new victim.

“I’m going to be flat honest with you. We found the body a couple of days ago. We’ve kept it very quiet. I was worried about you. I remember what happened the last time you were on this case. I remember the drinking and the fights. I remember you nearly died on that damn bike. When we found that girl, do you know what I saw when I looked down at her? I saw you. I saw you falling into bad habits and getting your ass killed.”

“And that would matter to you?”

What the hell was he supposed to say to that? The asshole wouldn’t give him an inch. “I give a shit if you die, Cam. You couldn’t handle it the first time. I wasn’t about to send you down that path again.”

“I couldn’t handle it?” The words came out clipped, each bitten off through clenched teeth.

Rafe had tried to give him an easy way out. Cam was too damn stupid to take it. “You know you couldn’t. You punched another special agent in the middle of a briefing. You wrecked your bike twice. You got arrested for public intoxication. I’m not bailing your ass out again.”

“I wasn’t asking you to.”

“Oh, is that what this is about?” Rafe gestured around the room that seemed to serve as Cam’s kitchen, office, and bedroom. The whole place was covered in computer equipment. Wires and cords ran along the floor like thick vines. There was no rhyme or reason or organization to the place. Rafe wouldn’t be surprised if Cam just opened a window to pee. “You don’t want to have to ask me for money?”

“No, I don’t. I’m sick of living off you.” Cam’s booted feet widened to a predatory stance.

Rafe was so sick of Cam’s insecurities. He’d put up with them for years. Rafe had never been able to convince Cam that he didn’t give a shit that he’d grown up in a trailer park. It was Cam’s problem. Not Rafe’s. “You weren’t living off me, you stupid, overly proud prick. It wasn’t charity. You were working to find her. We agreed to this deal.”