It was the kind of look a man would get once and then fight and die to have aimed his way on a regular basis.

Fuck him.

Fuck him.

“What the f**k was that?” he clipped and she blinked but that look didn’t leave her face.

“What?” she whispered.

“What… the f**k… was that?” he ground out.

“I –” she started, blinking again, but he didn’t let her continue.

“Don’t do that shit again, Faye,” he growled, took a step toward her and pointed in her face. “Do not do that shit again.” He dropped his hand but put his face where his hand had been and kept growling. “I don’t know what bullshit game you’re playin’, following me around, suddenly everywhere I am. But straight up, I’m not playin’ it. You got some romantic idea I’m a wounded soul you can heal with…” he shook his head and flipped out a hand, “your limited charms, think again. I already told you, I do not want your concern. I do not want your company. And I do not want your inexperienced bullshit fumbling. Trust me, I had in my bed the master at that shit and she got nowhere. And you, just now, got as much as you’ll ever get. Get this in your head, Faye, all I want from you is for you to leave me the f**k alone.”

He didn’t allow the look on her face to register. He didn’t know what was happening with her. What he did know was, for her sake, he had to make his point clear. And if that meant being a dick, he had to be a dick.

So he was a dick.

He turned around and prowled to the door.

But at it, he braced, turned back and looked at her. He ignored the pain back in her features and the fact that it was magnified to such an extreme, if he wasn’t set on ignoring it, honest to Christ, it would have brought him to his knees.

“You get a book, you call Frank Dolinski. I’ll brief him, he’ll be your point of contact from now on,” he informed her, turned, yanked open and strode through the door, through the Station and straight outside where he walked to his truck.

And while he did this, he didn’t give one f**k that Jon’s eyes followed him the whole way nor did he care what that would mean tomorrow would bring.

Chapter Three

Drift Away

You’re giving up?!?!?

I stared at the message box on my computer and sighed.

Yes, I was giving up. A week ago, Chace had laid it out. I didn’t get it. I wasn’t experienced enough to know. It felt for a good while there, when his arms were around me tight, his lips locked to mine, his hand in my hair, that he was into kissing me…

Kissing me.

And oh, my, fraking Lord, what a kiss.

And to be that good, it seemed he had to be into it. Into me. Like Lexie said. Way into me in a hungry heart, longing, soul destroying if you can’t have it, put your life on the line to get it kind of into me, well, into me.

Then I suddenly wasn’t in his arms and he was making it perfectly clear he was not into me.

Not at all.

Not even a teeny, tiny bit.

And I had a wise father who liberally shared his wisdom, a wise mother who shared her wisdom through deed rather than action and I also had a Master’s in Library Science.

I was no dummy.

I got it.

So I was giving up.

I lifted my hands to the keyboard and typed to my on-line friend Benji, We weren’t getting anywhere anyway.

We were! He typed back. It has to be someone in The Elite who hired the hit. And we’ve already discovered some of the players! The money behind the corruption. The money that paid for a clean hit. We have to keep digging.

I’d met Benji on a forum celebrating everything that was the new Battlestar Gallactica, or, as Benji called it, “The best television show fraking ever.”

I disagreed. I loved Battlestar Gallactica but Firefly was by far and away the best television show ever which made its mid-season cancellation an act (I thought) of sacrilege. Fortunately, they made a movie about it. And also fortunately, Nathan Fillion moved onto another awesome show, Castle.

But nothing topped Firefly.

Nothing.

Years ago, Benji and my relationship had gone off-forum and grown so I’d introduced him to my other on-line friend SerenityWash. I’d met her on a Firefly forum and that was her screen name. Me thinking she was a “her” was the fact that she could perv on Nathan Fillion for hours in a way that I wasn’t sure but I thought could not be g*y-love. Serenity and I were friends, close. We’d “known” each other years and we messaged each other all the time, talking about life, jobs, family, thoughts, feelings, emotions but I didn’t know her real name, her gender, where she lived or anything tangible about her. All of this she gave hints at but at the same time guarded like it was a State secret. So I never knew if the hints were real or if she was trying to throw me off-track.

SerenityWash was her screen name, the name of the spaceship in Firefly, “Serenity”, plus her favorite character from the show, “Wash”.

Benji’s screen name, by the way, was “AdmiralAdamaforPresident”. Seeing as this was a pain in the behind to type out, I’d made him give me his real name. And I knew he was a man since he perved on Number Six from that show in a way no woman could.

He’d also told me his full name was Benjamin and I didn’t know any girls named Benjamin so I was thinking his gender was not in question.

Over the years, I’d kept them up-to-date on the goings-on in Carnal. I’d also shared my long-distance, unrequited love for Detective Chace Keaton. They’d gotten interested, especially when things heated up and finally exploded. That included the news that Misty Keaton was dead and her husband was free to be, they hoped, with me.

They’d stayed interested, maybe unhealthily, and talked me into doing the same. And the unhealthy part about this was that they were both good at computers. They lived on the fringe of society, devoted themselves to on-line communities and geek television. They were always gearing up for then rabidly attending any geek convention that came their way. They also indulged in such other pursuits as, say, hacking and amateur sleuthing.

This also led me to my middle of the night trip, one of many, to the scene of the crime. I, of course, had no clue what I was looking for. Serenity, of course, watched Bones and told me you could catch a murderer by examining dirt. I didn’t have three doctorates in entomology, botany and mineralogy like the fictional Jack Hodgins did on that show, nor did I have a space age lab to take a sample to be tested, so I had no idea what they expected me to do with the dirt at Harker’s Wood. I did, however, live in Carnal and, head in a book, fingers on a keyboard with on-line friends, eyes trained to geek TV or not, I still knew a lot of the bad guys seeing as they were police and made their presence smotheringly known. So this also meant I knew most of them were idiots. And idiots couldn’t commit murder and get away with it.

So up to Harker’s Wood I went when no one could see me. I looked around, combed that wood so thoroughly that by now I knew it like the back of my hand.

But I never found anything.

I also, like Benji and Serenity, never gave up.

Until now.

I hadn’t shared the recent events because both of them were openly hoping that our activities would reach a desirable conclusion, make Chace take notice of me and then, promptly, fall head over heels in love with me.

Obviously, this wasn’t going to happen.

So now it was time for us to stop trying to do what we were never going to do anyway. Even if Benji had hacked into the Carnal Police Department’s computer server and Serenity had somehow managed to hack into and follow along with conversations and text messages on more than a dozen cell phones.

And what we were trying to do that we’d never do was find Misty Keaton’s murderer.

Furthermore, even before the recent unpleasant and confusing (but unfortunately, for several beautiful moments, also excruciatingly exciting) Chace Encounters, I was getting worried.

This was because Serenity was turning up names that my own lame, internet searches showed were wealthy, powerful people. Big money. Old money. Judges. Businessmen. Politicians. Powerbrokers.

Serenity was convinced that the now dead ringleader of a dirty band of dirty cops, Arnold Fuller, had these guys in his pocket. And Serenity was convinced that even though Fuller was very dead, a man like him couldn’t yank the chains of men like that unless he had the goods on them. And last, Serenity was convinced that these goods did not die with Fuller.

They were out there.

She also thought that if we found Misty’s murderer, we’d find this. In the brouhaha that followed Ty Walker’s exoneration and the exposure of corruption in Carnal, none of this came out.

So Serenity was convinced there was another shoe that would drop and the best way for a shoe to drop without causing any damage was to aim it yourself.

As you could imagine, this did not fill me with glee. It didn’t even fill me with trepidation. It filled me with the desire to run screaming from this pet project and never look back.

Alas, Benji and Serenity were dug in. Fortunately, Serenity’s real identity was hidden so far behind a wall of her computer cunning that it was likely no one could hack it. And Benji lived in England so, hopefully, the long reach of Colorado money and power wouldn’t extend that far.

But I was done. Chace had called my charms “limited” and my kiss “bullshit fumbling” so I wasn’t actually done. I was done. I didn’t want any reminders of him. Luckily, I worked in the library, a building, to my knowledge, he’d never stepped foot inside of in thirteen years. And since I was the only paid employee at the library, I figured it was safe to say he never had and therefore never would. And I wasn’t going back to the diner. I was also giving up La-La Land coffee. This stunk. Shambles and Sunny’s coffee was awesome and Shambles’s baked goods were to die for.

But these were the only times my path could cross with any regularity with Chace Keaton’s so until the burn of his words faded away, I was avoiding them.

Benji and Serenity, I couldn’t control. They were adults (I hoped) and they were far from stupid. Maybe less involved in the real word even than I was but not stupid.

And for my part, I’d just keep warning them.

Benji, we weren’t, I typed. And I’m not comfortable with what we’re uncovering and you shouldn’t be comfortable with it either. It’s really none of our business. Things are good in Carnal again. I have a strong feeling, a very strong one, we should let this sleeping dog lie.

But what about Chace? Benji typed back and I closed my eyes.

Then I opened them in order to lie again.

He has a girlfriend.

What!?!?!?!

I pulled in a breath and kept lying.

Yeah. I saw him with her the other day. They look really close. She’s super pretty.

OMG! Why didn’t you say anything?!?!?

I just needed some time to give up a dream.

Oh Inara (this, by the way, was my screen name because Nathan Fillion’s character was in love with Inara’s character on Firefly – actually my full screen name was Inara000 since there were a gazillion Inaras out there) don’t say that. Is this thing new with him? Maybe it won’t work out.