Free Need Me by Cynthia Eden Page A

office.”
    They didn’t speak again until their little group was inside Ethan’s office. A place that was filled with fancy leather furniture. Devlin’s sweeping gaze took note of the giant screen that took up a whole wall. He saw that a desk was near the far right of the room, and a computer waited on top of it.
    “Let’s just save some time,” Devlin said as he crossed his arms his chest and inclined his head toward the computer. “Put the flash drive in and show me the contents,
now
.”
    Ethan glanced over at Julianna.
    “I know she took it.” Did he look like a moron? “What I don’t know is why she ran straight to you.”
    Ethan shook his head. “Oh, Devlin, I’m afraid you have this all wrong—”
    “No.” Julianna’s voice was sharp. “He doesn’t. He has it all right.” She moved to stand in front of Devlin. “I took the flash drive from you.”
    She sounded…miserable. Guilty.
    “But don’t even think…” Now her finger jabbed into his chest. “Don’t think that me having sex with you had anything to do with the flash drive.”
    “Oh, shit,” Ethan muttered.
    Devlin caught her hand. “How the hell am I supposed to think anything else?” She’d wanted the drive. He’d had it. She’d—
    “I wanted you. I still want you. That house was hell for me. Being with you there, I was breaking free. Of Jeremy. Of his cage. I was
living.
You gave me so much pleasure…” Her breath shuddered out. “What we did had nothing to do with the flash drive, I swear it.”
    He stared at her. Devlin wanted to believe her but… “You never had a meeting with Sophie.”
    She shook her head. She didn’t try to pull her hand from his. “I had to meet Ethan.”
    Why did it just feel as if someone had shoved a knife into his heart? Not someone—her. “Who is he to you?”
    “Someone I owe.”
    “That answer isn’t going to cut it, baby. I want the full truth from you, and I want it now.”
    Ethan sat down behind his desk. His leather chair squeaked. “Why do people always run around demanding the truth? They don’t really want it.
You
don’t want it, Devlin. You want to go around, living in your happy bubble and pretending that bad things don’t happen.”
    Bullshit. He squeezed Julianna’s hand, then stepped around her, directing his attention on Ethan. He didn’t let her go, though. He wasn’t sure if he could.
    So how fucked up am I?
    “I know bad things happen,” Devlin snapped.
    Ethan looked him up and down. “Because your parents were some of those…bad things?”
    Devlin fired a quick glance at Julianna.
    “What?” Ethan drawled. “You want all her dark secrets, but you don’t want to share your own? I can dig into a person’s past, too, you know. And yours was so easy to obtain. I mean, when two people go on a spree like your folks did, it does tend to make the news. They killed—was it four? Five people?—before the cops took them out. They were on drugs, right, and—”
    “They were high for most of my life.” He couldn’t look at Julianna right then. Not when he talked about this part of his life. “I don’t remember them any other way. They were young and they were wild and they didn’t care about anyone but each other.” He sure hadn’t thought they ever cared about him. But his grandmother had. She’d taken care of him. Tried to protect him.
    Until his parents had died. Gone out in their blaze of glory. And the people from DHR had come to take him away from his grandmother. Suddenly, they’d decided she was the unfit one.
    “You swore not to be like them, right?” Ethan’s fingers tapped on his desk. “Your buddies Chance and Lex—they went off to be true blue soldiers, but you were different. You stayed here. You got a job with the FBI.”
    Julianna’s hand jerked in his grasp and she tried to pull away. He didn’t let her go.
    “You’re with the FBI?” Her voice came out as a high squeak. “You—you can’t be!”
    He shrugged. Julianna was