One Night With You: A Fatal Series Prequel Novella (The Fatal Series) (2 page)

“Long day at the office, made longer by an endless detail in the broiling sun.” Sam cracked open a bottle of water and chugged it down before reaching for another one. If she was going to be expected to drink any more alcohol tonight, she needed to rehydrate.
 

“Want to get a pizza?”

“I’d love to, but Angela talked me into going out, so I have to go get ready.”

“Where’re you going?”

“Some party she was invited to. Apparently, there’s a guy involved.”

“Ahh, I see. Where’s the party?”

Sam shrugged. “No idea. I’m just along for the ride. Better hit the shower and get my act together. She’ll be here soon.” As Sam trudged upstairs, she thought about how interested Peter always was in what she was up to. She wasn’t sure if he was interested in
her
or just naturally curious. He was cute in a boyish sort of way, with sandy hair and blue eyes that lit up when he laughed.
 

Since their other roommate, Dave, an associate gunning for partner at a local law firm, was hardly ever home, she’d shared many a pizza and night in front of the TV with Peter and had begun to think of him as a friend.
 

Sam spent more time than she should have standing under the cool water in the shower and had to rush through the hair drying and makeup portion of the program. She hated being rushed and didn’t look as good as she could have, but so what? This was Angela’s big show. Who cared how she looked?

Because she didn’t care, she turned off the flat iron and decided her hair could be wild and curly tonight. Normally, she hated the wild curls, but she couldn’t be bothered with the effort it would take to tame them. The summer sunshine had added blonde streaks to her toffee-colored hair, which was currently longer than it had been in years. Who had time for haircuts between work and the extra details she regularly signed on for to pay off her student loans?

It was all she could do to get five hours of decent sleep every night. Sam’s philosophy was you’re only young once, and paying off the staggering debt from college and graduate school was a top priority. Of course, it didn’t hurt that all her volunteering for overtime made her look good to the brass. She’d made detective a year earlier than she’d expected and now had her eye on the rank of detective sergeant in a few years.
 

Naturally, she’d heard a few rumbles about favoritism after she earned the gold shield, but Sam tried to ignore that crap. So what if her dad was the deputy chief? She knew—and he knew—that she’d worked her ass off to earn that promotion. No one had given her anything she hadn’t deserved. Even though she respected him more than anyone in the world, it wasn’t always easy to be Skip Holland’s daughter in that department. People held him in very high regard and had equally high expectations for his daughter. It was a lot to live up to, but Sam was equal to the challenge.

Wearing a short summer skirt, a lightweight top and sky-high heels that made her feet scream for mercy, Sam eyed her bed and wished with every fiber of her being that she were a less faithful sister. She wanted nothing more than to slide naked into that bed and blast the air-conditioning for the next eight hours. But it was not to be.
 

A horn blaring in the street let Sam know Angela had arrived. “Here goes nothing.” She grabbed her purse and headed downstairs, her feet protesting every step of the way. “See you later,” she called to Peter on the way out.

“Have fun. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“Very funny. I’ll be back before that can happen.”

“I’ll keep your spot on the sofa warm.”

“Excellent.” Sam rushed out the front door into the oppressive humidity and felt her hair get bigger in just the few seconds it took to get into Angela’s car.
 

This was going to be a long night.

Chapter 2

“Why’s the creep watching you leave?” Angela asked, eyeing the house suspiciously.

“What?”

“Peter. He’s in the window watching you. He gives me the willies.”

“You’re being ridiculous. He’s my friend.”

Angela pulled the car away from the curb and hit the gas. “Your friend who wants you bad, if you ask me.”

“He does not. He’s a buddy. That’s all. He’s got a girlfriend.”

“Have you met her?”

“Not yet.”

“You haven’t seen the way he looks at you when you’re not looking at him. It’s creepy. Tracy thinks so, too.”

“So you guys have been talking behind my back about me and my roommate?”

Angela made an erratic lane change that had the driver of the car behind them laying on the horn. “Well, yeah, of course we have.”

“How about you get us there without getting us killed?” Sam asked, holding on to the handle above the passenger door.

“Don’t be so melodramatic.”

“You’ve got cop courage.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“You drive like a maniac because you can drop my name or dad’s to get out of a ticket.”

“Whatever. I’d drive like a maniac even if you guys weren’t cops.”

“Lovely. Where is this party anyway?”
 

“Somewhere in Georgetown. I have the address in my purse. Now, back to Peter the creep. I think you should move out of there, and so does Tracy.”

“Please tell me you didn’t share those thoughts with Dad.”

“We haven’t. Yet.”

“Don’t. I don’t need him on my back. It was bad enough when he insisted on running background checks before I could move in there. I’m twenty-eight, for crying out loud, and a cop in my own right. Why do I need my daddy checking out my roommates?”

“Because you’ll always be his baby girl no matter how old you are.”

She thought of their conversation earlier in the bar and knew Angela spoke the truth. “Why doesn’t he treat you and Tracy that way? It’s bizarre.”

“Come on, Sam. You know you’ve always been special to him.”

“You guys are, too.”

“We know that, but we always belonged to Mom. You were his.”

Sam couldn’t deny that either. She and her dad had shared a special bond all her life, and she’d gone out of her way to make him proud. She’d never forget the tears in his eyes the day she took the oath as a member of the Metropolitan Police Department. “Still, that doesn’t give him the right to micromanage my life.”

“Try telling him that.”

“I have told him that. A thousand times. He just smiles and goes about minding my business for me, so please, for the love of God, do not mention to him that you and Tracy think Peter is creepy. A, it’s not true. And B, I don’t need the aggravation.”

“We won’t say anything to him, but you need to keep an eye on Peter. Something about that guy rubs me the wrong way.”

“Good thing then that you don’t have to live with him.”

“I still don’t get why you didn’t want the extra bedroom at my place. It would’ve been just like old times.”

“Right, with you minding my business in addition to Dad. That’s just what I didn’t need.”

“That’s so not true! I wouldn’t have bothered you.”

Sam let her withering look speak for itself. Angela and Tracy had been mothering Sam since the day she was born.
 

“I wouldn’t have! You should move in with me. I don’t like you living with that guy.”

“That guy has been nothing but nice to me, and I’m not moving out of there. I signed a lease for a year, and I’m staying put.”

“Suit yourself, but don’t tell me I didn’t try to warn you when it turns out he is, in fact, a creep.”

“I won’t.” Sam watched her city go by in a blur as Angela darted in and out of unusually light DC traffic like a seasoned stock car driver. Having a cop riding shotgun definitely gave her permission to drive like a lunatic, knowing the ticket wouldn’t stick if they were pulled over. “So when did you hear from Spencer?”

“It was the funniest thing! I was at work today, and he came in for a meeting with one of the partners. I’d forgotten how hot he is and how much fun we had during my break from Johnny the asshole. I definitely let a good one get away when I went back to Johnny, so when he asked if I wanted to get together, I said I’d love to. He’s got this party tonight with his college friends, so he asked me to meet him there.”

“And thus my plans for the evening were changed, too.”

“Oh, stop your whining. You had nothing better to do.”

“Right, just a bath and eight hours horizontal.”

“
Boring
.”

“Sounds like heaven to me. I’ve been working like a demon lately. I’m freaking exhausted all the time.”

“You don’t have to pay off all your loans at once, you know.”

“I want them off my mind.”

“If you kill yourself doing it, what good will it do?”

“I’m not killing myself, but I was looking forward to a night at home.”

“I already get that I owe you for the rest of my life for coming tonight, but how much do you want to bet that tomorrow you’ll be thanking me because you had such an awesome time and met so many incredible people?”

“I’ll take that bet. Twenty bucks?”

Angela held out her hand. “Make it fifty.”

Sam shook her sister’s hand. “You’re on. Be prepared to pay up this time.”

“Yeah, yeah. Why break with tradition?”

The party was as awful as Sam had expected it to be, full of simpering women and men on the make, getting loaded and looking to hook up with any random vagina. It reminded her of the two fraternity parties she’d been talked into attending in college, both of them hideous experiences she tried not to think about—ever.

Now, as a badge-carrying police officer, it was nearly impossible to attend events like this and not view them through a law enforcement lens. It wasn’t her place, she told herself, to bust the two guys smoking pot in the kitchen or to run a check on the white powdered substance she noticed on the nose of another loser.
 

If she wanted to be a total asshole, she could’ve called it in and had the place raided, which would get her out of here and home to bed. But she couldn’t do that to Angela, who’d been so excited about connecting with Spencer again. Seeing Angela excited about anything had Sam refraining from making the call, but she couldn’t bear to breathe the pot smoke coming from the kitchen.
 

She went through sliding doors to a huge deck that was full to overflowing with more bodies.
Is this thing strong enough to hold this many people?
Sam would bet money she was the only person on the deck wondering about its structural integrity. The rest of them were too busy drinking and boasting and bullshitting and generally trying to score.

How had she managed to skip this entire phase of her upbringing? She’d gone from high school to adulthood in the blink of an eye, when her mom left her dad for another guy the day after Sam, their youngest child, graduated from high school. Shit like that causes a person to grow up quickly. Plus, she’d never been one to suffer fools easily, and this party was chock full of fools.
 

A few of them were good-looking. She’d give them that. Many of them were also well dressed, having come directly from work. But the packaging didn’t make them more appealing. It only made their behavior seem more vapid, since some of them clearly had careers and something to lose by acting like frat boys after hours.