She turned that over on the drive back to Frank’s, examining it from different angles the way she examined everything. The dinner. The wine. The conversation. The sex.
Especially the incredible sex.
And the vague thought that leaving Pine Ridge might not be as easy as she’d first thought.
32
SHE’S THE ONE
PATRICK
He knewthe moment Morgan pulled away. How could he not? Her warm, supple body had been fitted against him all night. The absence of it was as jolting as being doused with a bucket of ice water.
Every cell in his body screamed at him to pull her right back into bed with him and continue where they’d left off. Three times hadn’t nearly been enough.
Alifetimewouldn’t be enough.
He finally got it. Finally understood what his grandfather, father, and uncles had been instilling in him and his cousins their whole lives. That there was only one right one for a Callaghan man, and when you found her, everything changed.
He’d suspected Morgan was hiscroie. Now, after being inside her body, there was no doubt. She was it for him.
But just becausehe’drecognized the truth of it didn’t mean thatshedid.
That was another truth he’d picked up from listening to his dad and uncles. Those who hadn’t been raised on the concept ofcroies—especially women—found it hard to accept such a connection existed outside of romance novels.
They did accept it eventually, but not always easily.
He lay there for a moment, forcing himself to remain exactly where he was, feigning sleep as he listened to her quietly slipping into her clothes and padding softly down the stairs. Only when he heard the front door open and close did he get out of bed, then watch, unseen, as she got in her car and drove away.
The countdown to when he would see her again had officially begun.
For now, however, he had to give her the space and time to process. Even if she wasn’t familiar withcroies, there was no doubt that last night had been something special.
He looked at the rumpled bed—the one they’d made an absolute mess of—and stripped the sheets. Not the pillowcases though. Those would remain so that when he laid his head on them again, her scent would be there.
After pulling on sweats and a hoodie, he tossed the bedding into the washer and went downstairs to make coffee. If he couldn’t spend the day making love to Morgan, he might as well make himself useful.
Industrial sized mug of coffee in hand, Patrick went into the library-slash-soon-to-be-office and got to work.
He traced the shell company that owned the LLC that had registered Varro’s car as far as Wilmington before he hit the usual wall of nested entities designed to exhaust a casual investigator.
Patrick was not a casual investigator. He’d grown up in his father’s shadow and had mastered digital tracking before he’d hit middle school.
He went back in through the filing dates, cross-referencing incorporation timelines against two other companies Riley had flagged while uncovering Varro’s identity, and found what he’d suspected: the same registered agent appeared across all three entities under slightly different names. It was a common enough trick, but downright sloppy, when you knew what to look for.
The registered agent pointed to a law firm in northern Virginia, one with a clean public face and a confidential client list. But two of its named partners had appeared in a 2019 federal court filing. Not as defendants, but as witnesses in a case involving the misappropriation of federal contracting funds. It had been settled quietly. The partners had walked away.
Patrick sat back and considered the implications.
This wasn’t a local operation with local reach. This was an organization with federal contracting connections, legal infrastructure, and an arm long enough to manage an ME’s office call rotation in Philadelphia. Long enough to send a man after a woman who’d been assigned the wrong case, then asked questions about a crime scene when things didn’t add up.
He documented everything, built the file with the same systematic care he applied to everything, then sent the full package to Riley.
She called forty minutes later.
“We were right about Moretti,” Riley said by way of greeting. “He’s assigned to anything that connects back to these entities, and whoever fills in either doesn’t look hard enough or doesn’t look at all.”
“Until Morgan.”