And it still looked sexy as sin on her.
“Come here.” He held out a hand, his wedding band glinting in the soft glow of his desk lamp. When she set her hand in his and he pulled her onto his lap for a kiss, he thought, not for the first time, that he was the luckiest S.O.B. alive.
Leah drew back and soothed her thumb down the crease between his brows. He’d been noticing more and more of those creases in the mornings when he gazed into the mirror to shave. Around his eyes. His mouth. His forehead. He looked more like his father every freakin’ day. Luckily, he hadn’t started losing his hair yet like Pop, but it still made him feel old, especially when his wife was as hot at twenty-nine as she’d been at eighteen.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Is the Patterson case bothering you?”
“No.”
One brow arched the way it did when the kids told a lie, and she gave him a dubious expression.
“Yeah, okay,” he admitted, “it’s bugging me.”
His last case, a local hostage situation involving a girl named Sylvia Patterson and her ex-boyfriend, hadn’t had the same happy-ever-after as the Van Amee case, ending in a murder-suicide.
“But not how you’re thinking,” he added. “I did everything in my power to save that girl. It wasn’t enough, but that’s part of the job. You accept it and move on. You have to or you’d drive yourself insane with guilt.”
“Like Marcus did,” Leah said.
“Yeah, like Marcus.” He sighed. “I am sad the girl died, but dwelling on it won’t change that, so I’ve put it out of my mind.”
“Then why are you sitting here in the middle of the night, looking up”—she leaned over to get a peek at his computer screen—“whatever it is you’re looking up. Is that in Spanish?”
“Yeah.”
She blinked. “When did you learn to speak Spanish?”
“I can’t speak it,” he said. “I can read it okay, enough to get the gist, anyway.”
“Huh. Just when I think you can’t surprise me anymore. What are you reading about?”
He hesitated for a heartbeat before answering, “The EPC.”
She huffed out a breath. “That’s what you’re still hung up on? I thought the Van Amee case was one of your success stories.”
Not really his. It was Gabe’s, Marcus’s, and the rest of their team’s. If it wasn’t for them, he had no doubt Bryson Van Amee would be dead and Jacinto Rivera and Rorro Salazar would be in the wind somewhere, millions of dollars richer. Okay, technically Rorro was still in the wind, but the little shit wasn’t considered much of a threat since the supposed brains of the operation, Jacinto, was dead.
Except, Jacinto wasn’t known to have brains, was he?
Man, his head hurt. Danny shut the laptop with a slap of his palm and rubbed his temple.
“Honey,” his wife soothed and laid her head on his shoulder. She smelled good, like the raspberry body wash she used. “Let it go. That case was a win. I don’t understand why you’re still obsessing over it a month later. This isn’t like you.”
“God, Lee, I know. But the whole thing stinks and I can’t figure out where the smell is coming from.”
“Okay.” She scooted off his lap, grabbed the ottoman from in front of his easy chair across the room, and sat on it cross-legged so that she faced him. “Maybe you need a fresh nose.”
Danny smiled. “Have I shown you lately how much I love you?”
“No, but we can get to that later.” She gestured a c’mon motion with her hand. “Lay it out for me, G-man.”
“All right.” He opened the laptop and called up the Word file he’d been keeping since the end of the hostage situation. Then he laid it all out for her. Everything from the abduction of Bryson Van Amee in front of his apartment right on through to the rescue by Gabe and his men.
“Everything we know about Jacinto Rivera says he was a thug, plain and simple,” he told her. “He couldn’t have masterminded something as sophisticated as rigging a limo with ether gas to knock Bryson unconscious. Someone had to have been pulling his strings, but according to the website I was reading, the EPC has denounced Jacinto for the ransom attempt and claims no responsibility.”
Which was not their modus operandi. And that was bugging him.
“They like people to know they are capable of snatching anybody from anywhere,” he continued. “Angel Rivera likes propagating that reputation, but yesterday, again according to that site, he publicly disowned his remaining family.”
“Wait, wait.” Leah raised her hands to stop him. “‘His remaining family.’ Are you sure that’s what it said? You didn’t mistranslate?”