I needed a shower. I needed condoms. I needed a car.

Damn it, damn it, damn it.

I was at Riggs Auto alone when her text came in. Luke usually gave me a lift to and from work since we worked the same hours, but he’d had somewhere to go and he’d left early. Which meant I had no way to get where I was going unless I took the bus, which would take nearly an hour.

You know where I live. I’m home, and I’m naked.

When he’s only had one sex session in his life—one stupendous, incredible sex session—a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. I opened the cash drawer and took out enough money for a cab. I knew that most people took Uber these days, but credit cards are hard to get when you’re a con, as are the latest phones with apps. So I used my five-year-old phone to call a taxi so I could pay the driver in cash. It wasn’t stealing this time because I’d repay the money.

I had the driver take me home to the guest house, because I was hoping Luke would be home by now so I could take his Charger. But as the cab pulled away, I realized the driveway was still empty except for Emily’s old Tercel. The thing only ran because Luke spent a lot of hours maintaining it—which was a sign of devotion if I ever saw one—but it did, in fact, run. If she’d lend it to me, I could get to Tara’s.

First I went into the guest house, showered in record time, and changed into clean clothes. Tara had had to put up with me once without a shower, and I wasn’t doing that to her again. I grabbed some of my brothers’ condoms from the bathroom drawer and put them in the pocket of my leather jacket. Then I locked up and walked to the main house to work on Emily.

She answered my knock at the back door—I only ever came to the back door so that she and Luke would know it was me. She was wearing jeans and a loose flowered top, her natural blonde hair tied messily on top of her head. “You can just come in, you know,” she said, giving me a smile.

I liked Emily. Her mother was one of Westlake’s most prominent cops—one of the force’s only female cops, a woman so good at her job that she’d moved up the ranks. It should bother me to be so closely connected to someone so high in the Westlake PD, but Nora Parker’s rank meant she knew who I really was. I’d never met her, but I knew she knew, which was why she left me alone. This was the strange kind of cat-and-mouse game you play when you’re a confidential informant—some cops know, some don’t, and no one is allowed to talk about it either way.

Emily—and her fraternal twin sister, Lauren—had always been known as one of Westlake’s good girls when we were all growing up. Beautiful, popular, good grades, the kind of girl who dated football players. At eighteen she’d stopped dating football players when she met Luke, and they dated in secret until Emily left for college. When she came back, she worked it out with Luke and now they were publicly a couple. If Emily ever took flack for being with a Riggs brother, she never let on. The way she looked at my brother made my stomach hurt with envy, but it also made her good folk in my opinion.

“We’ve had this conversation,” I said to her. “I’m not going to just walk in. This is your house.”

“It’s your house, too, remember?” Emily said.

“It isn’t,” I replied. Really, she was never going to get me to budge on this. “Besides, I could walk in on something embarrassing.”

“We’ve had this conversation,” Emily said, shooting my words back at me. “We’d come up with a warning system if something embarrassing is going on. But Jace, you should come to the house if you want to watch TV or raid the fridge or something. Or just hang out.”

I shook my head. “I’m fine in the guest house.” I was. After getting out of prison, the guest house had been pretty fucking great. And Luke and I had never actually hung out—none of us Riggs brothers did that. Try it, a voice in the back of my mind said. Maybe you’d like it. But I’d have to be a different guy to do that. A guy who didn’t have hangups and intimacy problems and all the other baggage I was carrying around.

“I came to ask a favor,” I said.

Emily’s eyebrows rose. I never asked favors, and she knew it. “What is it?”

“I need to borrow your car.”

She tilted her head. “For how long?”

I scratched my chin, wondering how long I would be. Who was I kidding? “Overnight,” I said.

Her eyes went wide, and immediately she started calculating. “You need to go somewhere overnight.” She crossed her arms. “And it’s so important that you’re willing to knock on my door and ask me a favor, which you never do.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“It’s that brunette,” Emily said, fixing her woman’s laser gaze on me. “Tara Montgomery. The one who was looking for you.”

I pushed my hands into my back pockets. “No comment.”

“I take it she found you that night,” Emily said.

“No comment,” I repeated.

“Was that her car I saw parked here on the weekend?”

“Possibly.”

“You like her?”

“Define ‘like,’” I said.

“Does she like you?”

“You’d have to ask her that.”

Emily bumped her fist lightly against the doorframe. “Damn it, Jace Riggs, you’re like a brick wall. This is important. She was really pretty. Are you two a thing?”

I sighed. “Yes. But we won’t be a thing if I don’t get to go see her. Get it? Just give me a break here, Emily. Come on.”

Emily groaned and sagged against the doorframe—she’d always been the dramatic type. “Jace, I don’t know how you do it, but you’re adorable. Adorable.” She disappeared into the house and came back with a key ring, which she tossed at me. “Take it,” she said. “It needs a good crank to start. If it idles too long, it sometimes dies. And the wipers are fussy, you have to flick them like five times.”

“Thanks,” I said, meaning it.

“I want to meet her. Again. And I’m telling Luke.”

Jesus. So much for privacy. Well, I was willing to sacrifice it.

I gave her a salute and left the back porch, headed for the driveway. I didn’t need directions. For the first time in my life, I knew exactly where I was going.