“You’re going to make me come,” Reese gasped.

Tory stopped.

“Oh Christ,” Reese moaned, her entire body stiff and quivering.

She clamped her hand around Tory’s wrist inside her boxers and tried to press Tory’s fingers where she needed them. “I can’t.”

“You can.” Tory kissed Reese’s damp temple, then her eyelids, then her mouth, infinitely tender. “Trust me. I know what you need.”

“Okay. Okay,” Reese said breathlessly. She forced herself to relax her grip on Tory’s arm. “Did I…hurt you?”

“Oh, sweetheart, no. Never.” Tory’s head pounded with the effort not to move, not to climb on top of her, not to push inside her. She pressed her forehead to Reese’s shoulder, shaking with need. “I want you so much.”

Reese wrapped her arm around Tory’s shoulders and tried to turn her onto her back.

“No,” Tory said quickly. “No no no. You are not taking charge, Sheriff.”

“Let me please you.”

“You do.” Tory dipped into Reese’s wetness and massaged her clitoris. “This pleases me.”

Reese rocketed toward orgasm. Her hips bucked under Tory’s fingers. “Close to coming. Close. ”

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“Mmm. I feel it.” Tory sped up—circled, pressed, stroked and squeezed. She listened for the hitch in Reese’s breathing, waited for the sudden stiffness beneath her fingers, and then she stopped. Reese broke out in a sweat and moaned against Tory’s breasts. She started, she listened, she stopped. Again and again.

“Beautiful,” Tory breathed as Reese trembled in her arms. Reese was so close now her clitoris never softened, even when Tory stopped touching her. She took her hand away completely and caressed Reese’s abdomen. “I love you.”

“Please, I need you.”

“I need you.” Tory kissed her gently, a brush of lips, a soft caress of tongue and teeth. “I need you more than I will ever be able to show you. But I’ll try.” She slipped under Reese’s boxers again.

“This time,” Reese groaned when Tory resumed stroking. “Need to come this time. Please don’t stop this time, baby.”

Tory kissed her forehead and picked up speed. “All of it, darling.

Give me everything.”

Reese’s body bowed, her breath halted in her chest, and Tory took her surely and certainly to the edge, and beyond.

v

Bri cruised past Reese and Tory’s darkened house, slowing to check that no one loitered around the driveway or in the neighboring yards. “Everything looks quiet around here.”

“The guy is probably miles away by now,” Carter said to her new partner. Bri had been quiet since they’d met at the station house.

After a short briefing, Bri had palmed the keys to the cruiser on their way out, and Carter didn’t even consider asking to drive. Right now, her first night on the job, all of her experience meant nothing. Not in the delicate hierarchy of her new posting. She didn’t mind needing to earn her stripes, and she didn’t mind not driving. She preferred to ride shotgun because she could watch the streets more carefully. Given a choice, she’d rather walk the streets than ride them, but right now, she went where she was told.

“Yeah. It doesn’t make sense he was local,” Bri muttered, slowly heading west on Commercial. In the East End, the galleries and restaurants were all closed for the night. As they drew closer to

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MacMillan Wharf, activity picked up. More people on the street, making the rounds of the bars and clubs along Commercial and tucked away in narrow alleys. “You’d have to be crazy to break into the sheriff’s house!”

“Can’t rule out that possibility,” Carter said quietly. “Crazy, I mean.”

“Yeah. I hear that.”

“So what’s the routine?” Carter asked.

Bri shot her a glance and then looked back to the street. She was used to riding with Allie. They had a rhythm. They didn’t have to talk about what they’d do, how they’d handle a situation when they took the call, how the shift would spin out. Thinking about it now, she realized that she’d kind of fallen into the role of shift leader, not because Allie wasn’t capable, but because Allie really didn’t care who was in charge.

And that suited Bri fine. She couldn’t take any of that for granted with Carter, but it seemed as if Carter was handing her the ball. “We’ll cruise for a while if no calls come in, and then when the bars start to close, take a walk through town. Check for trouble.”

“Drunk and disorderlies?”

“We can always count on a few fistfights, some lewd and lascivious that’s so in-your-face we can’t ignore it. Once in a while a drunk gets rolled and we’ll need to get the EMTs out.”

“Much trouble with DUIs?”

Bri nodded. “Yeah. We’ll need to head out to Six when the ones who aren’t staying in town start heading back up Cape.”

“And there’s what, one other car out?”

“Smith and one of the seasonal guys—Girelli. They’ll mostly stick to the highway and out around the beaches. Since the storm, there hasn’t been much action out that way, but we’ve had problems with boats bringing drugs in.”

“For a sleepy little town, there’s a lot going on here,” Carter remarked.

Bri laughed and then quieted abruptly as the radio crackled.

“Charlie five, copy?” the officer manning the desk back at the station asked.

Carter grabbed the mic. “Charlie five, go ahead.”

“Auto burglary—parking lot at Bradford and Standish. Female motorist needs assistance.”

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“Charlie five, affirmative. Suspect in the vicinity?”

“Negative. Requested motorist wait with vehicle—break…”

“Go ahead.”

“Gray Lexus, Massachusetts license Victor Bravo three-sevenone.”

A lead weight dropped into Carter’s stomach. “That’s Rica’s car.”

Bri leaned forward, flipped on the sirens and light bar in one fluid motion, and floored the gas pedal.

v

Ash wasn’t sure why she’d come out to the Pied. She hadn’t had more than a few hours’ sleep a night in almost two weeks and had logged over ten thousand miles driving up and down the eastern seaboard from one devastated area to another. But sleep wasn’t what she wanted. Her head buzzed with stress and her skin tingled with restless energy, so she’d changed into a navy shirt and jeans and sought out the one place where she might find a diversion. She’d never been much of a drinker, but she seemed to be leaning on alcohol a lot lately to soothe her nerves and dull the constant low-level ache of loneliness that threatened to mushroom into the unrelenting pain of despair. When she thought about it, which she tried not to, the last eight months had been pretty much a blur. She worked as much as she could, until she was physically exhausted and mentally too weary to think about the direction her life had taken. When work wasn’t enough to keep her from questioning the decision she’d made, she tried to block out her unhappiness with transient trysts. Frantic couplings in no-name motels with women whose faces all ran together. There hadn’t even been much of that lately because she couldn’t muster enough interest to pretend she cared about the women she was with, and she couldn’t tolerate the self-loathing in the morning. Even a one-night stand deserved to be seen.

“Is this seat taken?”

Ash looked up from her beer at the slight, curvaceous blonde in the very short skirt and low, tight top who stood with one hip canted and a smoldering look on her face that said she knew exactly how sexy she was. She had to be a dozen years younger than Ash, if not more,

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and the irony was not lost on her. The same twelve years separated her and Allie. Shaking her head, Ash said, “The seat’s free, but you don’t want to sit here.”

Surprise flashed across the blonde’s delicate features and she tapped one manicured nail on the tabletop. “What makes you think so?”

“I’m halfway drunk and I can’t offer anything except a quick fuck and good-bye in the morning.”

Laughing, the blonde pulled out a chair and sat down. She was braless and when she leaned toward Ash her pert round breasts swayed invitingly. “So you think you’ve got it all figured out? What makes you think I want any kind of fuck?”

“My apologies.” Ash lifted her beer bottle and when the woman reached out to take it away, she let her. “I’m afraid my conversational skills are impaired at the moment as well.”

“What about a dance? Can you manage that?”

Ash frowned and focused on the music. “If it doesn’t get any faster.”

“If it does, we’ll pretend we don’t notice. My name is Lisa.”

“Ash. Ash Walker.”

Lisa stood and held out her hand. “Then come along, Ash Walker, and dance with me.”

v

Allie waved to the women on the door at the Pied and some of the locals she knew as she made her way through the late-night crowd toward the bar. She hadn’t been out in weeks. The last woman she’d dated had gone and fallen in love with someone else. As every weekend rolled around, she’d kept telling herself she’d go out, relax, find a woman to play with for a few days or a few weeks, but she hadn’t.

She’d always found something else she needed to do that kept her from spending a night with a stranger. And before those few weeks with Deo Camara, who was the first woman since Ash she’d thought she might be able to get serious about, she hadn’t been to bed with anyone for a few months. So to say the last six months had been a dry spell was an understatement. She was twenty-three years old and she liked sex, and

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even more than that, she liked to wake up to the feel of a woman in her arms. She was lonely and she was horny, and she was tired of being both.

Flynn was easy to pick out, leaning against the bar. She wasn’t wearing her navy blue EMT jumpsuit now. Taller than Allie by a head, with her thick blond hair slicked back from her strong, bold face, she looked lean and sexy in tight black pants, a white open-collared shirt, and black motorcycle boots.