This was the start of something. He could feel it. He knew it in his bones. He didn't need science or logic to test this. Just waking up with Lucas in his arms was enough to cement it as fact.

Jayden gazed at him, almost disbelieving that he was still here.

Lucas had done what he'd said he would. He went home, got spare clothes, then came straight back to Jayden's and stayed the night.

Here.

In his bed.

Jayden half couldn't believe it, and half couldn't believe his luck. He honestly never thought he'd see the stranger from Portland ever again. Like, that was the entire appeal of an anonymous hookup right there. But it had been so hard to shake Lucas from his memories that having him here, now, made it seem like that whole year had been nothing more than a brief pause. A moment for them to catch their breath in.

Now that they weren’t fucking, now Jayden was able to look at him fully, he could see the detail in the tattoos which sleeved his right arm. They were beautiful, a web of brambles and roses, so detailed that he could see thorns on the stems, and stamens in the flowers.

"Are you watching me sleep?" Lucas murmured. He hadn't moved an inch.

Jayden gasped in surprise, then scowled and shoved gently at his shoulder. "Obviously not, 'cause you're awake."

"Damn you and your logic." Lucas' lips twitched into that wry smile of his, and his eyes drifted open.

God, they were breathtaking. Deep, dark, all warmth and love.

Jayden swallowed and sat up quickly.

They had that spark, that chemistry which was undeniable and irresistible. But that was just lust.

This had become more, though. While Jayden wasn't looking, while he was worrying about death threats and getting shot at, while he was begging Lucas to fuck him and to stay the night, something else had happened.

Lucas had walked right on into his heart and set up home there, hadn't he?

"Jayden?" Lucas sat slowly. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah." He said it slowly, but it felt true, so he said it again with a smile. "Yeah. I'm okay. Sorry, I just went all introspective for a minute there. How about you? Are you okay?"

"Oh yeah." Lucas' smile finally cracked wide, and lit his eyes from within. "I'll have to figure this out so far as work goes, but... Yes. I'm okay."

Jayden laughed and threw arms around him, kissing him quickly. "Awesome. We better get out of bed, then!"

"Or we could stay in it a while longer." Lucas' hand slipped beneath the sheets and stopped on Jayden's thigh. One finger brushed softly against his balls.

Jayden gasped at him. "Oh my god. I need to pee. But after that, I am coming right back to bed! Don't go anywhere!"

He jumped out of bed and almost ran to the bathroom.

Yeah, he was falling hard.

And it was good.

How they managed to be showered and dressed by the time the morning shift change took place was anyone's guess, but Jayden wasn't gonna complain. If any of the team thought it strange that Lucas was here so early they didn't say a word about it, and they went through the day's plans as usual.

Jayden was finally able to catch up with his attorney Alan and have the meeting that had been knocked on the head two days ago. It wasn't a game-changer. They never were. But it was necessary to keep updated both ways, so Jayden and Lucas explained in detail the shooting attempt and subsequent new death threat, and Alan took the lead detective's business card from them so that he could liaise directly.

Jayden had also built some outdoors time into his itinerary today after discussing it with the team in the morning. It would be good, he felt, to show whoever was trying to kill him that he wasn't afraid, but he was also cautious about heading into populated areas just in case anyone else got hurt, so in the end they went for a jog through Central Park then stopped off at a pharmacy for some snacks and sodas. He maybe went overboard on the chips and dips. And ice cream. And the juices. Especially when he realized the team wouldn't carry any of it for him because they had to keep their hands free.

He had to reprimand himself as he walked the couple of blocks home surrounded by his human cushion. Having people around him was starting to affect the way he thought. That he'd even imagined for a moment that these people could carry his groceries for him told him he needed to maybe have a long hard think about himself when he got home.

Probably with the aid of the ice cream in one of the bags.

"You're a chemist, right?"

Jayden licked his fingers clean and eyed Lucas. "Biochemist."

"So you know that-" Lucas pointed to the bag of chips in the crook of Jayden's elbow "-isn't real food. It doesn't even have nutritional value."

"Salsa's made of tomatoes," he countered. "Therefore it's totally healthy."

Lucas looked like he might be about to argue, but thankfully the phone rang to tell them that Jo-Ann had arrived, and he switched back to professional before she even emerged from the elevator.

"Okay," Jo-Ann said as she sat at Jayden's desk and pulled out her laptop. "I got some of the security footage, talked to the mailroom folks, did a little math. Found your guy."

Jayden perched one ass-cheek on his desk and turned so he could watch the screen, whereas Lucas stood the other side of Jo-Ann, leaning over her shoulder to watch.

To Jayden's dismay, all the footage showed was a USPS driver handing over two sacks full of mail and the mailroom staff loading them onto a cart to take back to the mailroom.

Jayden sighed. "I guess it was too much to ask for a courier to have brought it."

"At least we know this way that a courier didn't, though," Jo-Ann reasoned.

"Right," Lucas agreed as he straightened up. "The postmark isn't being faked. Whoever sent these has gone to a mailbox or counter and sent it themselves."

"But there's gotta be like a hundred mailboxes and counters around the area of this postmark. There's no way we can find out which one." Jayden crossed his arms. "And if it got dropped into a mailbox, doesn't all that mail get sent to an office, and that's where the postmark is added? So we're really looking at a needle in a haystack situation here."

"I'm sorry," Jo-Ann agreed. "I'll add this to your Dropbox, though. Maybe the police can use it?"

"It's worth passing on to them," Lucas said. "Thanks, Jo-Ann."

"Any time." She sat there and copied the file across, then waited for it to synchronize. "The NYPD will have to involve the USPIS if they're gonna try to track down where this got mailed from, and that could take a while. What're you planning while the wheels of bureaucracy turn?"

Jayden exchanged a look with Lucas, then blinked at Jo-Ann. "Planning?"

She laughed. "You aren't gonna try and tell me that you'll be sitting on your hands waiting, right?"

Lucas shook his head. "True. We just need to find other avenues of investigation to pursue." He raised a huge hand to rub his jaw as he paced away from the desk. "I guess we start at the most basic question. Why would anyone want you dead?" He raised his gaze to Jayden as he turned back to face him.

"Honestly?" Jayden shook his head. "Nobody would. I haven't hurt anyone-" He cut off at Lucas' raised brow. "Okay, point taken. Someone out there might think that I hurt them."

Jo-Ann looked between them, but she said nothing.

"But if it's someone who wants me dead for something the company's done," Jayden reasoned, "then surely they wouldn't want me to stop what I'm doing?"

Jo-Ann nodded. "They do seem to want you to back away from the company altogether," she said. "So maybe instead we should be asking who would benefit from either you backing away, or your death? Because they seem happy with either outcome, unless their assassin missed intentionally."

"Well, I mean..." Jayden tailed off as he applied logic to her question.

He didn't like the answer he came up with, but no matter which way he approached the problem the solution always seemed to come up the same way.

"Everyone on the board," he sighed.

"Walk me through that," Lucas said.

Jayden pushed away from the desk and sauntered around it to drop into the chair which faced it. It occurred to him as he looked toward Jo-Ann and Lucas that having a huge wooden desk in his massive penthouse apartment was such a dick move. Who set aside an entire room as an office when they didn't even have a job?

No. That wasn't the way to think. He leaned forward and drew his chips and salsa closer, then began dunking while he thought out loud. "Okay. We already talked about how, if they all agreed on these price hikes behind my back, then me getting my job back will throw a spanner in the works there. I'd have full access to the corporate accounts, I would be able to go digging and maybe even start impeding their greed."

"But you can't guarantee they even think you would," Lucas reasoned.

"I mean, they must know." He chewed and swallowed a chip, then dunked another. "Why else would those meetings have been called without me? So, me failing to return - or me dying - would benefit every last one of them. They'd have full control of the company and never have to worry about me turning up to their meetings again."

"That's not strictly accurate," Jo-Ann mused.

"Huh?" He chewed and met her eyes, then sighed. "Right. The shares."

"Which would pass to your mom if you died, since I'm gonna guess you don't even have a will, least of all one which leaves your shares to anyone?"

Lucas hissed softly. "You don't have a will?"

"Dude I'm twenty seven years old. Who has a will at twenty seven?"

"People who need bodyguards," Lucas grumbled.

"He has a point," Jo-Ann said. "You should get on that. But until then, it goes to your mom. So she also benefits."

Jayden blinked at her. Bile rose along with his anger, and he pushed the chips away. "You're accusing my mother-"

"Nobody's accusing anyone," Lucas cut in firmly. "You're the scientist here. Tell me your mom wouldn't receive those shares on your death."

He blinked again, then licked the chip dust from his fingers about as passive-aggressively as he could as his anger turned into a sulk.

They were both right. A good scientist didn't force the facts to fit their hypothesis, they checked their hypothesis against the facts.

"She would," he huffed.

"Right, and what did Sherlock Holmes always say?" Lucas smiled grimly.

"You did not read Sherlock Homes books!" Jayden stared at him. Former Navy SEAL, heavyweight Bodyguard, amazing fuck, none of it screamed 'lover of detective fiction'.

Lucas snorted at him. "Don't need to. Every show ever quotes it like it's the Bible. Once you eliminate the impossible whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth, right?"

"You know Sir Arthur Conan Doyle based Sherlock Holmes on a doctor he knew, right? Holmes was the first real fictional example of the scientific method in action. The police were only just learning to apply that kind of thinking to solving crime during the Jack the Ripper case. Rational thinking and logic were fashionable in the late Victorian era, side by side with spiritualism." Jayden brushed his fingers against his jeans as he leaned back in his chair.

"I didn't know that," Lucas murmured. "But we can't eliminate your mother as a suspect, can we?"

Jayden rocked his jaw in irritation. He couldn't even bear to think that his own mom might be remotely connected to all of this. If he applied a probability to it, that probability was negligible at best, but Lucas was right. It wasn't zero.

"No," he huffed. "We can't."

"Okay, so we start there." Lucas crossed his arms. "We look at everything surrounding your mom, because then we can eliminate her as a suspect and focus on the board. It's better to get that out of the way so we can concentrate, rather than have it hang over us like a cloud. Meanwhile, you use your shareholder status to force a board meeting, and we can grill them too."

"I did tell her I'd see her this weekend," Jayden muttered.

Jo-Ann closed her laptop and stood. "Sounds like time for me to go."

"Thanks, Jo-Ann." Jayden stood so he could walk her to the exit. "I'll let you know how it goes."

Jo-Ann chuckled at him and patted his arm. "I suspect so long as nothing flattens the Upper West Side this weekend, it'll have gone just fine. You know your mom would never hurt you."

"Yeah. Stay safe."

He knew.

But Lucas was right. They needed facts.