Free Lucky Charm by Valerie Douglas

was sitting on the bed as he’d last seen her, as comfortable and natural in her nudity as if she were the pixie she appeared to be. That picture wouldn’t leave his mind any time soon, he knew, nor at the moment did he want it to. How could any sane man want that?
    Not beautiful but pretty and although he wouldn’t dare refer to anyone with that direct gaze as perky, there had been a sense of lightness about Ariel O’Donnell. That sweet smile had come to her lips easily and the brightness in her eyes had been innate. Those lovely blue eyes, sparkling at first and then shadowed, haunted him.
    As he stripped for the shower, he noted with some bemusement that simply thinking about her was enough to have gotten a rise out of him. That moment when she’d shifted her hips to take him in seared through him and he responded automatically to the memory of that tight, heated wetness surrounding him. He groaned and was grateful for the soap. It wasn’t difficult, as the hot water flowed over him, to remember how her sweet body had risen up around him, had arched and shuddered beneath him.
    One thing was certain, this hotel didn’t have their temperature settings on the hot water set too low but the heat was a blessed relief to some of his muscles. Leaning against the wall of the shower he just let the water run over him.
    Everything still seemed vaguely unreal, as if some important part of his life had disappeared, the way it had when his mother had died. Something vital had disappeared, an essential piece of who he was.
    It was still hard to wrap his mind around the idea that Bill was dead. Just the concept that his old buddy was gone seemed unbelievable even a week later. The idea that he’d never hear Bill’s voice on the other end of the phone say “Hey, Matty,” wouldn’t penetrate. He kept waiting for his cell phone to ring with Bill on the other end bragging about a goal that Will had made at soccer, or inviting him to his annual summer barbecue or Christmas party.
    They had been friends since grade school, he and Bill. That left a big gap in his life.
    A mugging, the cops said. That’s how they thought Bill had been killed.
    According to them the assailant had gotten carried away and killed Bill by accident. Bill’s wallet had been empty, his watch and wedding ring were gone.
    Not possible. Matt knew that. Not a mugger. Bill hadn’t gotten that soft.
    He and Bill had taken some specialized training while they were in the Rangers. Maybe Matt had found more use for it after they’d gotten out but when they were horsing around there was no doubt Bill remembered. The moves had still been there. Maybe he’d lost his edge a little but not so much that some hopped-up junky could have taken him.
    It had taken someone like those boys last night to take Bill down.
    The thugs had to have been watching, waiting for Matt, Bill’s wife Penny and the kids to leave the house to arrange for Bill’s funeral. It was no coincidence. Moments afterward, they’d broken in and stolen every bit of electronics in the place. They’d also stripped Bill’s office of almost every scrap of paper.
    Everything except his blotter and the trashcan full of Bill’s random doodlings.
    More than anything else, those doodles had tipped Matt off that there was more going on here than anyone knew.
    It had wrenched at him then, in the first pangs of grief, as he looked at the blotter covered them.
    Bill had doodled whenever he was thinking on the nearest scrap or piece of paper. Once he’d doodled on the last page of Matt’s thesis when they’d shared a room at college. At the time, Matt had been pissed.
    The phone call and Bill’s doodles had given Matt a direction, someplace to look and had only been confirmed when Matt had gone to Bill’s office to get his personal effects. His office had been stripped, too, of everything except his blotter.
    The doodles, though, had survived. They were everywhere. At Marathon Corp., there had been a doodle