Colby Velocity Read Online Free Page B

entrance, but the sidewalk outside was fair game as long as one wasn’t a reporter. If any of the old staff remained, she might just get inside. But she wasn’t betting on it.
    â€œI can’t confirm that he’ll make that standing appointment today, considering what’s happened,” Jean advised, her tone somber.
    That was all Kendra needed. “Thanks, Jean. I owe you.” Kendra closed her cell phone and gazed triumphantly at the man waiting across the table. “I can catch him around three.” The club was barely twenty minutes away. Arriving ahead of schedule wouldn’t be a problem. In fact, it might work to her advantage.
    â€œI’m impressed. The secretary must remember you more fondly than her boss does.”
    Jean Brody had no children of her own. The sixty-year-old and Kendra had bonded very closely, but even that bond had never breached the woman’s loyalty to the senator. What she had given today was a confirmation of something Kendra already knew. It was their mutual respect that kept Jean off Kendra’s list of persons to interrogate. As well as the knowledge that no amount of persuasion would prompt the secretary to speak ill against Castille. She was a rare breed.
    â€œYou could say that, yes,” Kendra said in answer to her partner’s assessment.
    Rocky made an agreeable sound and resumed his monitoring of the street outside the wall of plate glass that ran the length of the diner’s storefront. He was slightly out of his element but he hadn’t let that cloud his attitude.
    Kendra studied the man seated across the table from her. She didn’t yet have a complete handle on his thought process regarding the case of her connection to the players. That he continued to act cooperatively went a long way in easing her concern about working with him. Not that he was a bad guy, he absolutely wasn’t. But he was a former Equalizer and the merger with the Colby Agency had been a difficult pill to swallow to some extent for JimColby’s entire team. Most of the bumps were behind them now.
    That her attention, despite the current situation, settled on the usual details about him annoyed her, but it was what it was. An unexpected attraction that could not be allowed to proliferate.
    Rocky was tall, heavily muscled. Coal-black hair and unsettlingly vivid blue eyes. Everything about him somehow refuted his background. Reared and educated in Tampa by medical professional parents, he dressed like a cowboy—sans the requisite hat. From the first time she’d met him she’d fully expected the man to drawl out a “yes, ma’am” to match that swagger of a champion that attracted the eye of every female he encountered—including Kendra’s. When he walked into a room he owned it, insofar as female interest was concerned.
    As if she’d made the statement out loud, her partner swung his gaze back to her.
    She rerouted her thoughts. “I left a voice mail for Wayne Burton.” Keep going with the details. Rocky had been in the restroom when she’d made that call. “He’s a contact in D.C.’s homicide division I reached out to on occasion…before.” Before she’d recognized the writing on the wall and the hard cold fact that she was not cut out for this world. And before she’d tried a relationship with him that couldn’t have fit in a million years. “I’m hopinghe’ll agree to brief us on the path the investigation is taking at this point.”
    Those startlingly blue eyes searched hers a moment as if looking for the motive behind her words. “A reliable enough contact you have reason to believe he would go out on a limb to give you a break in a potentially sensitive and high-profile case?”
    Rocky wasn’t asking about reliability. What he had actually asked was had she slept with Wayne Burton. His eyes confirmed her analysis. “Yes,” she said,