Something About Harry(71)

Add in the effort to work the numbers swimming before his eyes and his mind’s eye straying to Mara, naked and supple on top of him, and he was losing the fight.

His eyes fell on the oval-shaped, silver-framed picture of Fletcher and Mimi with his sister—smiling, laughing, happy, making his heart feel like a heavy weight in his chest. For all the hardships they’d endured as they attempted to bond, he loved them, wanted to understand how he could help them heal.

Hearing Wanda say they missed him reminded him he needed to get things in order—for them. If he did nothing right from this point on, he’d do right by them if it was the last thing he did. He was sick with worry about their safety and determined to do whatever he had to in order to keep them safe.

But how, when the unknown entity was still at large, and worse, it was unknown? They had next to nothing. The person responsible for kidnapping the kids and Carl was a woman with “swingy” hair like Mara. According to Mara’s texts, it wasn’t Astrid. There was nothing swingy about Astrid anyway. She was just gloomy.

So who? Why?

He’d been chewing on potential suspects all day long. If it wasn’t Astrid, who’d become the likely suspect due to her Mara fixation, then who’d go to such lengths to make their displeasure about he and Mara known in this format?

He gripped the pen he used to sign invoices. Couple that with trying to find a way to get his old life back, with absolutely no luck, and he was doomed to never concentrate again.

In order to get things right, he needed to find a way to reverse this. No one thought it was possible, but then, who thought it was possible for Mara to make baby juice?

Anything was possible as far as he was concerned, now that he’d seen what he’d seen. Demons and vampires and werewolves were just the tip of the iceberg, baby.

“Yeah, no shit, man! She’s a hot piece of ass. Can’t believe Emmerson was the one who nailed her.”

Harry’s head shot up, his fingers gripping the pen he held. His eyes searched the small cluster of desks in front of him, mostly empty due to an afternoon break, and zeroed in on Lloyd Beecham and Gary Lingfeld.

In short, of the two, Lloyd was the asshole. He used women like he used his overbearing cologne: liberally and without any sort of discrimination. They were nothing more than a depository for his limp dick to find solace.

Both were werewolves, a trait he still couldn’t believe he was capable of assessing.

And if he didn’t like the smug asshole before, he sure as hell didn’t like him with Mara’s name on his lips. Yet he stayed seated in his chair, forcing himself to focus on numbers and block out the voices.

“She’s got an ass I’d tap so fast, it’d beg for mercy,” Lloyd bragged, his snicker rubbing Harry’s nerves raw.

Harry’s pen snapped in two, bits of the fallout flying across his desk. He fought a snarl, gripping the edges of his desk. He cracked his neck, considering a good hard workout tonight after work. Just to relieve the unbearable tension in his muscles.

For a moment, Lloyd and Gary’s voices became muffled. But then, they drifted back to his highly attuned ears, crisp and sharp.

One more word . . .

“You’d better shut the hell up, Lloyd. If boss man heard you talkin’ about his sister like that, he’d eat your sorry ass for breakfast,” Gary warned, his chair squeaking as he began to roll back to his desk.

Harry’s eyes narrowed in the direction of Lloyd’s smug face, his throat squashing a low grumble.

Lloyd guffawed at the idea Keegan would kill him. “Please. Keegan Flaherty’s all talk. He should be grateful I’d pork her. Even though I don’t get it, nobody else seems to want to. Why else was she single for so long?”

Motherfucker.

And that was it. It was the last semi-functioning, almost rational thought he had. Before he’d even realized he was doing it, he’d done it. And he didn’t just do it a little, he went all the way. Best news? He didn’t stumble once on his way to kill Lloyd.

Lloyd was up against a wall with Harry’s fingers digging into the flesh of his throat until it compressed and turned red beneath his grip. Desks had been scaled; papers, calculators, files, assorted lunches, and Gary were all knocked over like bowling pins in the process, but he hadn’t fumbled once.

“Were you talking about my girlfriend, Lloyd?” He gripped his neck tighter, jamming his face in Lloyd’s, begging him to give him a reason to kill him. “My girlfriend? I sure as hell hope not, limp dick, because if you were, I’d have to kill you.”

Lloyd collapsed against the wall, his lean, spray-tanned face going pale as he held his hands up to signal his surrender. “Dude! We were just bullshitting. You know, just us boys. Calm down, man!”