Some Kind of Hero

by Brenda Harlen

  “At the end of the whole process, he sat me down and talked to me. He didn’t lecture, he didn’t preach. He looked me in the eye and talked to me. It was weird,” he said, shaking his head a little at the memory. “It was the first time in my life I could remember someone talking to me instead of at me, and listening to what I had to say.

  “Not that I had much to say,” he admitted. “I was too tough, too cool, to make any excuses for my behavior. Especially to a cop.”

  He shook his head. “And then he did something I’ll never understand.”

  “What was that?” Riane uncapped the thermos and poured lemonade into two plastic cups. She passed one to Joel, took a sip of her own.

  “He took me home with him. I was a juvenile delinquent on the fast track to a life of crime, and he opened up his home to me like some kind of invited guest. Hell, I could have cleaned the place out while he was sleeping.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  Joel shook his head again. “No. And I guess he knew I wouldn’t. In any event, I only wanted someplace to spend the night. Just until I figured out where I was going the next day.”

  “How long did you stay?”

  He grinned. “Four years.”

  “And that’s why you became a cop.”

  “He was a great cop. It was never just a job to him. He believed in truth. He fought for justice. He made me believe.”

  Riane smiled. The way he’d talked about Max, with genuine admiration and reluctant affection, made her realize how important this man had been to him. He’d become, whether Joel realized it or not, the father he’d never known.

  “Max was there when I got my badge. It was the happiest day of my life.”

  Riane smiled. “He must have been very proud of you.”

  “He was,” Joel agreed. He picked up his cup, drank deeply.

  She saw the cloud come over his eyes, knew the joyful memory had been supplanted by one less pleasant. She waited silently for him to continue, not willing to pry into his painful memories but wanting him to share the rest of the story with her.

  “He was there the day they took away my badge, too,” he said at last.

  “What happened?”

  “I was working undercover in a drug importation and distribution center, compiling the evidence we needed to shut it down. I had the names of suppliers and local dealers, shipment dates. Everything was carefully logged and checked and double-checked. I was careful.”

  He shook his head. “Not careful enough. We thought we’d zeroed in on all the key players, but we’d missed one. We’d never considered that the game couldn’t have gone on as long as it had without somebody on the inside.”

  “A cop?” The words were blurted out before she could stop them.

  “There was a cop,” he agreed. “But she’d been under suspicion for a while. My investigation confirmed her involvement. It was the judge we didn’t know about.

  “I still don’t know what they had over him,” Joel mused.

  “He was independently wealthy, from a prominent family in the community. But for some reason, he was in their pocket.”

  “What happened?” she prompted.

  “We went to him for a warrant, after a big heroin shipment had come in from Colombia. I knew exactly what was there; I’d helped unload it. But the judge wasn’t convinced of the veracity of the affidavits I’d sworn. He asked to see me personally, to verify the information.

  “Of course, he’d already notified Zane Conroy. Conroy was—is—the head honcho of the syndicate. And although the judge eventually signed the warrants, by the time they were executed, everything was gone. Every single shred of evidence was gone. We didn’t find so much as an empty baggie.”

  Riane flinched at the barely suppressed anger in his tone.

  “And that wasn’t the worst of it,” Joel told her. “Somehow the media got wind of the investigation, the screwups, and focused on my role in it. Undercover Cop Turncoat the headlines claimed. It was all crap, of course, but it created enough of a ruckus that I was suspended pending investigation into the matter.”

  “Is that when you quit?”

  “No. I waited until the investigation was complete, until internal affairs had concluded that I’d been a victim as much as anyone, and then I quit.

  “Through all of it, Max stood by me. He never believed any of the accusations made against me. He was the only one. His confidence meant a lot to me, and I needed to prove that it wasn’t misplaced.” He dropped his gaze, set aside his empty plate. “Max died a few weeks before the investigation was complete.”

  “I’m sorry,” Riane said gently.

  Joel just shrugged.

  “What happened to the judge who compromised your case?”

  His eyes darkened, his mouth thinned. “Nothing.”

  “He’s still on the bench?”

  “No. He retired shortly after the investigation fell apart.”

  “And that one case destroyed your confidence in the system,” she guessed.

  “It made me realize that there isn’t one system,” he told her. “We pretend there is. We promote the ideal of ‘justice for all.’ But the truth is that the laws are applied and interpreted differently for different members of society.”

  Riane frowned, but didn’t dispute his statement.

  Joel finished his glass of lemonade in one long swallow.

  “Now it’s your turn,” he said.

  “My turn for what?”

  “To share the events that decided you upon your course in life.”

  “I’m not sure I know what that course is,” Riane admitted. “I’m supposed to start work at my father’s law firm in September, but I can’t seem to envision myself drafting partnership agreements and corporate memos for the rest of my life.”

  “What do you want to do?” he prompted.

  She sighed and began packaging up the leftovers. “I want to concentrate on the camp. Increasing our funding, expanding our capacity, improving our programs.”

  “Then why are you considering anything else?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I feel I owe it to my parents to use the education they gave me. Which is ironic, when I think about it, because they’ve never pressured me to do anything I didn’t want to do.”

  “No suggestion to follow your mother’s footsteps into politics?”

  Riane shook her head.

  “I imagine you’d be well suited for the role, though,” Joel said. “After all, you grew up in the public eye.”

  “Mostly I grew up in unknown countries. I was thirteen when my parents left the Foreign Service to come back to the States. That’s when my dad opened his law practice and my mother ran for office. It was hard at first,” she admitted. “I was used to being with her almost all the time, and suddenly there were all these other demands on her. But it got easier as I got older, when I started to understand the importance of what she does.”

  “What about your father? Does he ever feel like he’s in her shadow?”

  Riane was genuinely surprised by the question. “Of course not. He’s always been supportive of her career.”

  “It sounds like they have a good relationship.”

  “The best,” Riane agreed. “She wouldn’t be half as successful as she is without his support.”

  “Is that what you’re looking for with Stuart—a husband who will support your career ambitions?”

  “It’s a valid consideration,” she said, hating that she sounded so defensive. She snapped the lid back on a salad container, set it inside the basket. She reached for the plate of cookies, but Joel’s hand on hers halted the motion, forced her attention back to the intensity of his deep blue gaze.

  “What about passion?” The heat in his eyes, the low timbre of his voice, were enough to heat her blood without any discussion of passion.

  She tugged her hand away, covered the plate of cookies. “What about it?”

  “Was it a consideration?”

  “I don’t s
ee how that’s any business of yours.”

  His lips curved in a slow smile. “I’ve seen you together,” he reminded her. “You generate about as much heat between you as a subzero freezer.”

  “It’s difficult to be demonstrative when your every move might be recorded by the media,” she responded coolly.

  Joel seemed to consider her statement for a moment, then he shook his head. “I might buy that explanation…except that I’ve kissed you.”

  Damn it, she did not want to be reminded of that kiss. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  His eyes glinted with challenge. “You’re a passionate woman, Riane. You need a man who can elicit your passion, share your desire.”

  Until she’d met Joel, she’d always believed herself to be rather dispassionate. Even with Cameron, she’d wanted to want him more than she really did want him. Frowning at the memory, she put the plate of cookies in the basket, picked up the bowl of strawberries. Joel deftly plucked a ripe berry from the top, popped it in his mouth.

  “Mmm. These are fabulous,” he said.

  Riane tried to focus her attention on gathering up the remnants of their lunch, but the unadulterated pleasure in his voice stirred something inside her. Passion? she wondered, feeling a little bewildered and a lot intimidated by the depth of her reactions to this man.

  “I used to want to fall in love,” she told him, surprising herself with the admission. “I wanted to know the deep, abiding, forever kind of love my parents share.”

  “Why are you using the past tense? You can’t have given up already.”

  She shrugged. “Love isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be.”

  “That’s a rather cynical statement for a woman of twenty-five years.”

  “Twenty-four,” she corrected stiffly.

  Joel grinned, and Riane’s pulse leaped.

  “Respect and affection are more important, more enduring, than some elusive emotion glorified through Saint Valentine.” She had respect and affection with Stuart, and if their relationship lacked the passion she’d sampled with Joel—well, there were more important things than passion.

  “I can’t disagree with you,” Joel said. He reached for another berry, but this time, instead of biting into the juicy fruit himself, he offered it to her.

  Riane shook her head.

  He skimmed the deep red berry over the curve of her bottom lip. It was cool and fragrant and she had to clamp her lips together to prevent herself from accepting his offering. She refused to be drawn into whatever seductive game he was playing.

  “But don’t you think it’s possible to have it all?” he asked, the warmth of his breath caressing her cheek. “Respect, affection and passion?”

  She averted her gaze, unable to respond. Unwilling to say anything that might betray the longing in her heart.

  “Does your passion scare you, Riane?”

  She cleared her throat. “I’m not…”

  Whatever words she’d intended to utter in protest strangled in her throat when his lips touched the pulse beating erratically at the base of her jaw. It was a feather-soft caress, not even a kiss, but the brief contact jolted her heart as effectively as a fully charged defibrillator.

  “You’re not what?” he prompted, his breath warm on her cheek. “Were you going to deny your passion—or your fear?”

  She swallowed, struggled to find the words she’d lost, but he nipped at her earlobe. She couldn’t deny that she was afraid. In fact, she was terrified. Not of Joel, but of the feelings he evoked. Feelings she didn’t know how to respond to, didn’t dare even acknowledge. It was the acknowledgment of this fear, however, that mobilized her. She pulled away abruptly, away from the tempting lure of his lips, away from her own desires.

  “You need an outlet for all the passion churning inside you,” Joel said. “And Stuart isn’t it.”

  “And I suppose you are?” she asked coolly.

  “We connect on a very basic level, sweetheart. You can’t deny that.”

  “Maybe not,” she admitted. “But I’m not going to throw away my future for a few nights in your bed.”

  “It would be a mistake to marry Stuart.”

  “Why do you care?” she demanded.

  “Because I care about you.”

  “I’m not naive enough to believe I’m anything more than a diversion for you while you’re in West Virginia.”

  He was silent for a long minute, then he said, “That might have been true at first. It isn’t true anymore. I do care about you, Riane.”

  His words, as much as the emotion evident in his tone when he spoke them, unnerved her. She’d deflected a lot of masculine overtures in the past several years, although substantially fewer since her involvement with Stuart had become public knowledge. But one thing she’d learned in averting such advances was that it was easier to do when there weren’t emotions involved. And in that moment she knew that her emotions were already involved. To what extent she wasn’t certain, but she wasn’t about to risk having her heart broken.

  “I’m not going to sleep with you, Joel.”

  That slow, sexy smile spread over his face again, and her heart practically melted into a puddle at his feet. “If I had you in my bed, I wouldn’t waste a single minute of the time sleeping,” he promised her.

  “Well then…” She felt her cheeks flush as her mind immediately conjured all-too-vivid images of what they might be doing rather than sleeping. And the warmth in her face quickly spread to other parts of her body. “You should know that I have no intention of ending up in your bed, either.”

  “It’s going to happen, Riane.”

  The unwavering confidence in his voice annoyed her. Taunted her. Terrified her.

  “That kiss we shared was—”

  “It was a mistake,” she interjected quickly. Frantically.

  “Maybe it was,” he agreed. “It was also like dropping a match in a pool of gasoline—fiery, explosive, irreversible.”

  “My mother always warned me not to play with matches,” she said lightly as she resumed packing up the rest of their dishes.

  “Do you think she’d warn you about me?”

  She managed a smile. “Aren’t you the kind of guy all mothers warn their daughters about?”

  Joel grinned. “Do you always listen to your mother?”

  “Always.”

  “And yet, you were just as much a part of that kiss as I was.”

  “It won’t happen again,” she assured him.

  He linked his fingers with hers, tugged her a little closer.

  “It would be easy enough to prove you wrong,” he taunted softly, his mouth hovering mere inches above hers.

  Riane was mesmerized by the intensity in his eyes. She blinked, forced herself to look away. “I should be getting home.”

  He smiled, as if her response was exactly what he’d expected.

  “Soon,” he agreed. Then he pulled her braid over her shoulder and started to unfasten the elastic at its end.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I like your hair loose.”

  “I like it tied back,” she countered.

  “Too bad,” he said, already unwinding the interwoven strands.

  There was something strangely intimate about his fingers sifting through her hair, something incredibly erotic about the touch of his fingertips against her scalp. Then he slid his hand to her nape and clutched a handful of hair in his fist, tilting her head back. “Yeah,” he said softly. “This is just how I pictured it.”

  “Wh-what?”

  “How you’d look when I kissed you.” Then his mouth came down and took possession of hers.

  His kiss stole what little breath she had left, silenced her soft sigh of pleasure. Her eyelids fluttered, closed; her hands moved instinctively to his shoulders, held on. His tongue touched her lips, and they parted willingly, eagerly. The heat that he’d stoked with that first kiss continued to build inside her, filling her with a sense of warmth and anticipation sh
e’d never felt before.

  Then he stroked her tongue with his, and the fire flamed hotter. She tried to breathe, but his scent filled the air, intoxicating her. His fingers untangled from her hair, traced slowly down her spine to the bottom of her T-shirt. When his hand dipped beneath the fabric and his palm splayed against her bare flesh, her skin felt seared by the touch.

  She gasped, shocked by the flood of sensations coursing through her. She leaned into him, needing his strength to keep her upright as the world tilted. She arched as his fingers skimmed over her rib cage, the curve of her breast. She felt her nipple pebble, straining against the lacy fabric of her bra. Tremors coursed through her, hot, pulsing. When his thumb brushed over the aching peak, she gasped with shock, with pleasure.

  She made no protest as he laid her back on the blanket, covering the length of her body with his own. She could feel the throbbing of his arousal between her thighs and the answering, aching heat that pooled inside her.

  Joel had said she needed a man who could elicit her passion. What he didn’t know was that he was the only man who ever had. And whatever resolutions she’d made earlier about not becoming involved with him scattered like so many remnants of last year’s dried leaves in the brisk spring breeze.

  Then the snap of a branch echoed in the stillness like a gunshot, shattering their idyllic paradise. Riane pushed him away, gasped for breath.

  “I seem to have a knack for choosing all the wrong places,” Joel commented wryly as he dragged a hand through his own hair.

  “Maybe it’s a sign.”

  “Of what?”

  “A reminder that we shouldn’t be doing this.”

  “Are you still going to deny that you want this?”

  She shook her head. “No. But wanting something and getting it are two separate issues.”

  He grinned. “I won’t put up much of a fight.”

  “If it was just sex, it would be easy,” she said. “But as much as I’d like to, I can’t fall into bed with a man I barely know.”

  “So get to know me.”

  She laughed softly. “I’m not your type of woman, Logan. I’m looking for more than a night or a week.”