by Anne Calhoun
This was his problem, his mistake. He’d fix it, because the department’s reputation and her life depended on it. He held out his keys to Sorenson. “Change Luke’s bed for me, would you?”
Without a word she took them, then crossed the grass to the front door. “She needs a minute, sir,” he said to his lieutenant. Hawthorn gave him a level look, but walked over to the driveway, giving them some privacy.
Matt scanned the street again, then opened the door and crouched down to put himself on her level. “Eve. Come inside,” he said, keeping his voice low.
She met his gaze, her eyes red-rimmed and shiny with tears but the same flat agate green as Caleb’s. “We can talk about this—”
“Don’t say another word,” she said. “I’m in no mood to talk about any of this. Detective Dorchester.”
His rank and name hit him like a slap. She wasn’t wounded, or destroyed. She was furious.
He shut his mouth and stepped back.
She unfastened the seat belt and got out of the car, her gaze taking in the one-story house, Matt’s Jeep in the driveway, the ramp covered in all-weather green turf. She looked at him, arms around her torso, iPhone in hand, shoulders hunched. “The accident … that was all true?”
He said nothing, just nodded. Without another word she walked past him, up the ramp, through his front door, everything from the ramrod straight spine to the controlled, even steps saying she’d never trust him again.
Inside the house Sorenson was adjusting the comforter on Luke’s bed. Eve waited in the foyer, as close to the door as she could stand without being outside. When Sorenson came out, the old sheets bundled in her arms, Eve turned sideways to slide between them, into the room. Then she closed the door in their faces.
Sorenson gave him a wry, eloquent shrug of her shoulders. Matt took the sheets from her and tossed them to the bottom of the basement stairs. They convened with Hawthorn in the kitchen.
“Strategy?” Hawthorn asked.
“We’d better not do anything until we’ve discussed the situation with her,” Sorenson said.
“Excellent point, Detective Sorenson,” Hawthorn said, and Matt braced himself. The LT used name and rank primarily when he wanted to make himself crystal clear. Hawthorn fixed his unblinking, all-seeing gaze on him. “I can see you’re exhausted, Detective Dorchester, so we’re not going to discuss this now, but I expect a complete, detailed, written accounting of your actions from the moment you set foot in Eye Candy up to and including the shooting. Because, as your partner so logically pointed out, right now the odds of Ms. Webber continuing to assist this investigation land somewhere between ‘Fuck, no’ and ‘I’m going to watch while my brother escorts every news outlet in town up the department’s ass with a grappling hook and a Maglite.’”
In that tone, statements required a response. “Yes, sir.”
“We’ve got her. We need to use her. She’s still our only link to Murphy, Detective. Fix this.”
Direct orders always demanded a response, even if he didn’t have the slightest fucking clue how he’d fix any of this. “Yes, sir.”
“We’ll meet here tomorrow,” Hawthorn said, and looked at his watch. “Christ, later today. Eighteen hundred hours.”
Matt locked up behind them, checked all the windows, then walked back down the hallway to brace his arm on the wall next to Luke’s closed door and listen for … he didn’t know what for. Some sign of her mental state. Some sign of life. For all he knew she’d crawled out the window and started walking.
Silence inside. He put his free hand on the knob because while Eve’s style was to march out the front door hurling grenades as she left, she might never want to see him again. The air was thick with thwarted emotions, and the sexual tension that had been simmering away between them since the moment he walked through Eye Candy’s front door.
Situational awareness smacked him like the shock wave from a bomb blast. From that moment his standard operating mode of don’t react had begun to fail, strands popping, tension cables buckling under the pressure. With the evening’s events, the last cable lashing down everything he didn’t want to feel and didn’t want to know about himself snapped.
He’d fallen for Eve Webber. He’d fallen for the woman who’d fallen for his lies, the woman who made him remember all kinds of things he didn’t want to remember.
Who he’d wanted to be.
How far he was from that man.
How thoroughly fucked the whole situation was.
Back to the wall, he slipped down until he was sitting on the floor outside her room, rested his forearms on his knees, and let out a soundless exhalation. Then he made himself sit there in the dark, listening to her sit in the silent darkness, until he heard a rustle of sheets and creaking bedsprings. He still didn’t move. The doors were hollow core, not solid wood, so he could hear her breathing, short, tense inhales, all but inaudible exhales. All this frustration and anger and treachery had to go somewhere. He knew that from long experience, from losing his parents, watching Luke’s childhood disappear into surgeries, physical therapy, a constant stream of adjustments to a world not made for disabled teens. He had to find a way to help her deal with what he’d done.
In her office she’d been moments away from hurling the stapler at his head. He could work with that. Plates. He’d pick up some secondhand dishes and let her go to town on them.
Only when the breathing evened out and deepened did he push himself to his feet and walk the rest of the short hallway and into his room. He pulled off the Eye Candy T-shirt, took his service weapon from his gun safe and put it on the nightstand with the rest of his arsenal, and eased onto the bed. Every muscle in his body ached, and the backs of his eyes prickled. From exhaustion, or so he told himself.
He should have been out cold in seconds. Instead, sleep was a long time coming.
* * *
Eve opened her eyes not to pale blue cinderblock walls and blackout shades but to posters of human anatomy and physiology renderings, and Sports Illustrated swimsuit models. A desk with a simple shelving unit above it sat in the corner. Standard-issue cream vinyl blinds covered the windows, and leaf-pattern shadows twitched and shimmied on the blinds.
This was not her room.
She closed her eyes, and opened them again. The room remained exactly as before, therefore she must not be dreaming. That meant that her skin-crawlingly humiliating memories of the night before were also real. She rubbed her eyes, then looked at her iPhone. Three forty-two p.m. Out of habit she scanned Facebook and Twitter. Nothing about the shooting. Thank God.
She had a pounding tension headache and her eyelids felt like they’d been abraded with sand. Emotion knotted into a ball in her gut, the strands of fear and anger and anxiety and agitation tightly wound with hunger and something equally primitive she didn’t want to acknowledge in the hot light of day.
The whole day promised to be awkward as hell, so she got to her feet, wincing when her body told her exactly where she’d made contact with the linoleum in her kitchen. The shoulder that hit the bar stool throbbed dully. iPhone still in hand, she rubbed the shoulder and wondered if she had enough ibuprofen in her travel bag to get her through the weekend.
Standing up put her gaze level with a simple wooden shelf holding a college education’s worth of textbooks and a framed family photo. A father, in suit and tie, hair cut brutally short. A mother in a green dress with a white collar, a smile on her face, tension in the lines around her eyes. A boy, a young man, really, standing rigidly behind his father, his expression an unconvincing copy of his father’s. A younger boy, seated between his mother and his brother, and wearing the only exuberant smile in the group. Both boys had their mother’s unruly chestnut hair. The younger boy must be Luke. Therefore the older boy was Matt, his expression already shuttered, dark.
She gazed at it until the voyeuristic feeling became too strong to bear, then set it down. Wedged deep between a stack of car magazines and another of biology and chemistry te
xtbooks was another photo, visible only to the person who spent long hours at the desk.
The photograph was of a man dressed in fatigue pants, laced-up boots, and a khaki T-shirt. Forearms braced on his thighs, he sat on a cot in the middle of a large tent. The color scheme was an unrelenting khaki camouflage except for the wreckage of a package wrapped in red and green elf paper and the incongruous Santa hat on the man’s head. He held one of the earliest iPod models up for the camera and a broad, delighted grin stretched his face. Eve mentally added unruly chestnut hair and wrinkles around the eyes, subtracted about twenty pounds of muscle from the broad shoulders, and recognized Matt, a decade younger.
“Who are you?” she asked the picture. It didn’t talk back. If she wanted answers, she’d have to open the door and get them.
First she stepped across to the bathroom where she took care of basic necessities, washed her hands, then splashed some water on her face. She looked in the mirror after she dried her face and hands, saw anger still simmering just under her skin. Hiding in the bedroom in a sulk wasn’t her style, and it also wouldn’t solve any of the very large, very pressing problems they faced.
The house was a basic ranch, with living room, dining room, and kitchen at one end, bedrooms at the other. She was in the bedroom closest to the living area. At the end of the hallway she peeked into the two rooms at the end of the hall and found a complete home gym in one. The wall between the two bedrooms held a beautifully made shadowbox with some patches inside, stripes, rows of commendations, dog tags, service medals. While she couldn’t identify what hung in front of her, she’d seen similar boxes before, in houses of parishioners who’d served in the military.
The other room held a straight-backed chair, a simple wood dresser, and a queen-sized bed on a frame. An Eye Candy T-shirt hung over the back of the chair. A clear jar two-thirds full of change sat on the dresser, along with some haphazardly folded receipts and a worn brown leather wallet. Another set of dog tags dangled from one corner of the mirror; from her position in the doorway Eve could see the stamped name DORCHESTER MATTHEW R. and his date of birth. Seeing his full name like that, Matthew rather than Matt, gave him yet another identity, this one in a family life she knew nothing about. There was no quilt or blanket on the bed, and the rumpled sheets looked like they still held the warmth of the body that slept there.
His body.
She backed out of the doorway and turned resolutely to the living space. A navy plaid sofa and dark green recliner crowded around a large television on a self-assemble stand with an Xbox and some games underneath. Hundreds of CDs and a few paperbacks lined the shelves around the TV. Hardwood floors extended down the hall, through the living room, and disappeared into what Eve assumed was the dining room. More of the basic eggshell blinds hung in the windows, angled to let in a little late afternoon light without anyone being able to see in. To her left the living room opened into a tiny dining room with a nice maple drop-leaf table.
She came up short in her hesitant explorations, because the man she now knew was Detective Matthew R. Dorchester occupied the table’s far end. He wore jeans and a chocolate brown polo, his damp, rumpled hair curling against the collar. Chestnut stubble covered his jaw, but the shadows visible under his eyes yesterday were gone. A cup of coffee steamed by one hand, the newspaper open to the Sudoku and crossword puzzles in front of him. He had a pen in the other hand. He tapped it against the table several times before setting it down.
The silence stretched out, thrumming with tension, anticipation, and something darker, raw. The house was small and warm, despite the air conditioner she heard grinding away from the backyard. Another truth. He did need a new AC.
Eve felt a hot flush ease up her neck to her cheeks as the red hot anger blended with something else: white hot lust. Daylight following a solid night of sleep hadn’t lessened the sexual current flowing between them.
She stopped in the arch between the living and dining rooms, and folded her arms. “I can’t decide if I should apologize for coming on to you or slap you for playing me.”
He sat back. “Don’t slap me. Looks great in the movies but it’s ineffective as hell. If you want payback we’ll go down the hall, tape up your hands, and I’ll teach you how to light me up.”
That’s not how I want to light you up …
“Tempting,” she said, “but I’ve never hit anyone before and I’m not about to start now.”
More silence, then he got to his feet and shoved his hands into his pockets. “How are you?”
Telling him the truth was a point of pride now. “I’m sore,” she said bluntly. “My whole right side hurts from getting tackled. My shoulder really hurts where it hit the bar stool. I’m scared. Terrified, actually. I haven’t eaten anything in twenty-four hours, so I’m starving, or possibly sick to my stomach from fear. And I’m really, really angry at you.”
He gave her a wry smile. “One thing at a time. A shower will help with the sore muscles. There’s ibuprofen in the bathroom cabinet. Don’t take it on an empty stomach. I’ll make something to eat. Then we’ll deal with the rest of it.”
She blinked a couple of times, not expecting an eminently practical response to her tangle of emotions rocking in her stomach. “Okay,” she said, because what else could she do?
“What fits in the rock star diet?” he asked.
“Fuck the rock star diet. I want comfort food,” she threw over her shoulder. After grabbing her bag from the hallway, she stopped in her room to plug in her iPhone to charge, then took her makeup bag into the bathroom. There were two dark blue towels and an economy-sized bottle of ibuprofen on the sink. She shook out four. The droplets spattering the walls and grab bars in the shower stall, the water temperature running hot immediately, and a damp towel hanging over the sliding doors all served to heighten the sense of intimacy she wasn’t sure she wanted to feel. He’d showered before her.
Of course he did. He lives here.
Her stomach did a little flip-flop at the idea. She stayed under the hot water, rolling her shoulders and stretching until her muscles eased a little. The room was steamy when she got out, the foggy mirror hiding her face as she brushed her teeth. A towel wrapped around her body, she scuttled into Luke’s room to change into a pair of jeans and a tank top.
She returned to the dining room to find a thick cheeseburger on a plate. His place was empty, and she gave a startled gasp when he materialized out of nowhere, a full plate in one hand and a bag of potato chips in the other.
“Sorry,” he said.
“I’m jumpy,” she answered, her voice shaky, rising.
“Eat,” he commanded gently. “Food will settle your nerves.”
He’d be lucky if she didn’t hurl it back up on the wood floor. Just to be polite she sat down and bit into the burger, but when the food hit her tongue she ate with an almost embarrassing haste, slowing down only after she got half in her stomach. She reached for a handful of chips, then ate the rest of the meal at a more reasonable pace.
“Better?” he asked when she reached for a second round of chips.
She nodded.
“Took some ibuprofen?”
“Yes.”
“That leaves terrified and angry,” he said, businesslike in his approach.
You may not like him very much right now, but don’t underestimate him, she thought. Based on the picture in Luke’s room, he’d dealt with worse than this. Despite the warm, cocoonlike air of his house, tiny tremors still rolled through her, but her brain wasn’t thinking about fear anymore. Her body, thrumming under some basic delight at being alive, wasn’t thinking at all. “I’m less frightened,” she said slowly.
“Food and sleep go a long way to settling nerves after something like that,” he said. “But you’re still angry.”
“Furious,” she said, because that had to be what was slowly twining itself along her nerves, humming in her skin with an ever-increasing intensity. “Intellectually I can twist my brain around the argument tha
t you were just doing your job. Emotionally…”
He didn’t move, simply sat still and solid in the face of her reaction. In that moment she understood why Matt Dorchester ended up carrying the worst burdens of everyone around him. Because he could.
“I’m angry with whoever shot at both of us.” Most definitely. She could easily separate that strand of emotion from the twisted knot inside her.
“We will get them.” He said the words without inflection.
“I’m angry with you for lying to me. I’m angry with myself for falling for it.”
He leaned forward, braced his elbows on his knees, hands loosely clasped, then looked at her. “Don’t beat yourself up over it. You had no reason to suspect I was anyone other than Chad Henderson.”
She looked at him. “That doesn’t make me less angry, Matt,” she said, testing his real name in her mouth. “You can make this all business, just doing your job, but to me it feels more personal than that. Were you faking everything?”
No movement. No reaction on his face, just a long silence during which she sensed more than saw him battling his emotions. “Protecting you was my only priority.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“I wasn’t faking anything.”
His voice would be her undoing. She folded the paper towel he’d handed her to use as a napkin into halves, then quarters, smoothing down each fold. Avoiding his eyes, because looking at him only intensified whatever was simmering deep in the pit of her belly. Desire, electric and thrumming in the warm air of his house, was intensifying with every passing moment.
“So you were attracted to me and you used that attraction to keep me close.”
“It was the best way to make sure you were safe. Later, I wanted…” He stopped, drew in breath. “I wanted something I shouldn’t want. Something I can’t have.”
