by Anne Marsh
Right. Like he’d voluntarily park his ass inside a cop car.
“Get in. I’ll give you a ride home.”
When hell froze over. Did he look like he wasn’t capable of getting himself home? “I’ve got a perfectly good bike.”
“I’ll bring you back out tomorrow if you want, but you’re done driving for tonight. Sit.” Then she touched him. Her hand on his shoulder was gentle but firm, pushing him down toward the leather seat. He let her have his way, his legs bending and his ass planting where she wanted him.
He thought about protesting, but he was out of words. Plus he figured she didn’t want to hear any excuses. Right now, right here in her car, it was all about doing things her way. Which meant he sat on the seat, boots still on the edge of the highway because he couldn’t bring himself swing his feet inside and capitulate entirely. Their motors ticked, cooling down, because he’d pushed too hard, too fast. While he tried to empty his brain of coherent thought and the damned memories, she went around the other side and got in the driver’s seat.
He looked over at her. “You ever lose anybody?”
He’d have bet the answer would be no. She looked too young, too in control. Instead she knocked him onto his ass again.
“Yes.” Her stark, one-word answer held plenty of pain. “My father worked union jobs as a longshoreman at the Port of Los Angeles. A container fell and crushed him when I was eight. My mother worked her butt off cleaning offices, but that meant we never had money for rent in a nice neighborhood. When you grow up in the barrio, you lose friends and neighbors. Two cousins joined the gangs.”
She mimed a gun firing with her left hand.
“Other people I lost to the streets. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation holds more than one person I know, and they’re not coming out.”
Her faint accent grew stronger as she ticked off her list of the dead and the missing, the sweet, lilting cadence of a Los Angeleno reading a casualty list.
He had his own list, one that he carried around his head. A list that had been topped by Ben Marshall, who’d caught a bullet from a rooftop sniper and who had been displaced by Will Donegan. Unexpectedly, tears prickled at his eyes, goddammit. He punched the dashboard. Once. Twice. He wasn’t crying over this. He was alive. Will wasn’t. He needed to suck it up and get on with fixing what he could for Abbie Donegan.
Deputy Sheriff Hernandez watched him calmly, her hands relaxed on the wheel.
“You should arrest me,” he said. He could hear the savagery in his voice, a mix of desperado and fuck you she shouldn’t, couldn’t ignore.
She shook her head. “Arrests aren’t fixing this. Close the door and fasten your seat belt.”
“The only place I take orders is in bed, sweetheart.” He knew he’d crossed a line from flirting to outright crass, but he was feeling mean and nasty. Since Deputy Sheriff Hernandez had been nothing but sympathetic, maybe she’d rethink her new no arresting the asshole policy. Her nametag caught the light as she turned toward him.
M. Hernandez. How come he didn’t know her first name?
“What’s the M stand for?”
Instead of saying “None of your goddamned business,” she smiled, a humorous quirk of her lips that blindsided him. He’d always thought she had a permanent stick up her ass, at least when she was out in public. “Mercedes. You ought to like that, given your love of speed.”
“That’s a mouthful.”
She shrugged. “That’s what my mother named me. I didn’t get a vote.”
“Mercy. Mia. Sadie. Guess I can’t call you Mimi since we’ve already got one of those in Strong.” He swung his legs into the car and leaned back in the seat.
“You can call me Deputy Sheriff Hernandez or Deputy Hernandez. Ms. Hernandez if your brain is really hurting. Three choices. Take your pick.”
Fuck. His eyes burned. Crying at the funeral had been off-limits, although the women in the church had done plenty. SEALs didn’t cry. Look at Kade Lawson. The man had endured months of being tortured by enemy insurgents, and he didn’t cry. He cursed. Kicked shit. Joey needed to be more like that. Instead, he was trying not to cry in the front seat of a police cruiser like he was five years old again.
He punched the dashboard reflexively, driving his knuckles into the hard surface. Welcoming the sharp bite of pain and the feeling of his skin splitting.
“Beating yourself up isn’t going to help,” she said calmly, like she didn’t mind sitting next to a crazy man in her cop car. “You’re bleeding for no reason.”
He looked down, and surprise, surprise, she was right of course. His knuckles were bleeding. He’d left a smear of blood on her dashboard too, and he’d bet bodily fluids were not her decoration of choice. He’d have to clean up before he went. Still, she didn’t look pissed off or even concerned. Instead, she sat there calmly beside him like they’d just happened to occupy the same pew at church and nothing bad could possibly happen. He should be scaring the shit out of her. She should have tased his ass and tossed him in the back where the criminals went. He’d seen and done things she had no conception of, and even if he’d done them with Uncle Sam’s tacit blessing, it didn’t make the memories any easier.
She turned to look at him. “You were there, weren’t you?”
He hadn’t been where he needed to be, and that was the truth. He’d been in the canyon while Will Donegan had been dying just outside the protective walls. He should have gone out and brought the man in instead of lying down inside his shelter. He should have done something. Anything.
Instead of saying any of that, though, he settled for the obvious. “I was.”
“You’re a jumper. Why were you working with the Big Bear Rogues?”
His deputy sheriff was full of questions tonight.
“Don’t you have to Mirandize me before you interrogate me?”
She gave him The Look, the one that said he’d better cut it out and give her what she wanted. Would she look the same way if he were teasing her in bed, forcing her to wait for her orgasm? He had no idea where that thought had come from, but now that it was firmly planted in his brain, it was all he could think of.
“The hotshot team had a few men out for the holidays, and I had nothing else to do. So I filled in.” While he enjoyed the hell out of smoke jumping, it wasn’t a three-hundred-sixty-five-day-a-year gig. The forest fires that required the Donovan Brothers jump team happened mostly during the peak of fire season, in the summer months. His garage and rebuilding bikes only took so much time, so helping out the hotshots had filled a few more hours.
“The winds shifted unexpectedly, the fire flared up, and the flames cut off our exit points before anyone could respond. We headed for a canyon that we’d designated as our fallback safety point, and then we broke out the portable fire shelters for insurance.”
“What happened to Will?”
He’d screwed up and lost a good teammate. That was what had happened. He couldn’t fix it, either, so he was trying to outrun it. Talking definitely wasn’t part of his plan for tonight.
“We were running, and it was smoky as hell.” He heard his voice from a distance, spouting excuses. Shut up, he told himself. Mercedes Hernandez didn’t really want to hear this. She’d asked to be polite and because she was a nice woman making nice, polite noises. Now she’d put the car in drive, and this evening would be over.
“The newspaper said he tripped and snapped his ankle.” She made no move to turn the key in the ignition.
“I didn’t notice. I got inside the canyon, I popped my shelter, and I hit the ground. I didn’t notice.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said.
He appreciated the lie, but it was. No man left behind. That was the golden rule on the battlefield, and he’d failed.
“It was quick.” He stared forward, out the windshield. The headlights lit up the patch of roadside, and everything was either bright or pitch black. There were no gray or blurry edges. Three seconds could be an eternit
y, and Will had suffered through it alone, so quick wasn’t enough.
Mercedes was talking again, and he meant to listen because he wasn’t that much of a bastard that he’d ignore what she had to say to him, but his throat was tight and—fuck—his eyes stung. He was not going to lose it and cry. But the headlights’ beams blurred, and he dug his fingers into his thighs, needing something to hold on to.
Soft fingers wrapped around his. “It’s okay.”
He had no idea what she meant because nothing was okay about this, but instead of questioning her, he squeezed the shit out of her hand. She didn’t complain. If anything, she held him tighter. She smelled good—he noticed that much, sitting so close to her—and hitting the car again suddenly seemed like the best idea he’d had in a long time. Why was he here, when he could be riding down the road, leaving all this shit behind him? His cheeks were dry—that was good—but then one drop escaped, and he’d have given anything for a do-over.
But life didn’t issue do-overs, not for tears and definitely not for good men who’d tripped at the worst possible moment.
Mercedes cursed in Spanish, and then she shifted, easing across the seat to wrap her arms around him. He let her pull him into an embrace, planting his head on her chest like he was a goddamned baby. He should pull back. Or kiss her. Rock her world with pleasure. Hell, even getting out of the car would be better. At the very least, he’d still have his dignity. He didn’t move. Her service revolver dug into his side. He could disarm her, hurt her... and she trusted him.
Imagine that.
He swiped the fucked-up tear off his cheek, hoping she hadn’t seen. Her arms tightened, though, and he was busted in more ways than one. He was one hell of a SEAL. A thirty-second hug might have been okay, but he let her hold him up for minutes as time sped up. Slowed down. Fuck. Had she held him as long as the three minutes Will Donegan had taken to die, heat baking him, fire searing his lungs? She didn’t say anything. Thank God. Just rubbed his back—and how humiliating was that?—while he did the rough inhale, exhale because he didn’t cry. Ever. She smelled like roses. It wasn’t the perfume he’d have expected from Ms. I Lay Down the Law, but she smelled pretty pink. He didn’t know police officers were allowed to wear perfume. Or maybe he’d just been arrested by the wrong people. He’d been arrested by military police for drunk and disorderly once. Not his finer moment.
Finally, he got it together, reined in his runaway thoughts, and shoved upright. If he’d been more of a man, he would have looked her in the eye and said something meaningful. He would have said thank you or I appreciate the shoulder or any one of a dozen things the Hallmark people had spelled out for dumbasses like himself in the card aisle. Instead, he stared out the windshield and said the first thing that popped into his head.
“I’m going home.” He reached for the door handle.
She shifted back to her own seat. “I could give you a ride,” she said.
He didn’t want to leave his bike by the side of the road—and he needed to pull himself together. If he hadn’t been falling apart like a pussy, he’d have taken her up on the offer just to spend more time with her, because there was something about his deputy sheriff that intrigued him. Nice wasn’t what he deserved tonight, so he opened the door.
Her sigh echoed in the car. “Tell me you’re okay.”
He flashed a grin he didn’t mean. “Scout’s honor. I’ll even drive the speed limit.”
1
By four o’clock, semi-twilight surrounded the jump team’s hangar. The sun headed south for the winter in February, turning the mountains and roads pitch black by six o’clock. Not that Joey was out on the roads. Nope. After last night’s highway dash and encounter with Deputy Sheriff Hernandez, he was making a command appearance at the hangar owned by Donovan Brothers. Jack, Evan, and Rio had built a crack smoke jumper team out of former military men—and one woman—and then decided to shift their base of operations to Strong, California, when the three of them had met and married local women.
He parked his truck outside the hangar, counting vehicles as he headed for the entrance. One motorcycle. Two pickups. At least the audience for tonight’s ass-chewing would be on the smaller side. Since procrastinating wouldn’t solve his problems, he strode inside and looked around. Bingo. Halfway across the hangar, Rio bent over an engine block, mechanical bits and pieces strewn around him.
Joey laid in a course, trying not to trip and kill himself on the stuff lying everywhere. Rio likely wanted to commit murder, so depriving the guy of the pleasure seemed mean. Since it was the off-season, the hangar currently housed two choppers, the DC-3, and several enormous mountains of engine parts, unsorted gear, and chute packs. Pulaskis, tony tools, and chainsaws had been stacked haphazardly against the walls. Someone had started clearing out the cache and taking stock of what they’d need for summer. The place smelled like motor oil, canvas, and smoke, which was perfect. He didn’t need that flower and cinnamon shit that came in the air freshener cans at the store.
“You got arrested last night?” Rio Donovan lifted his head and glared at him as soon as Joey was in yelling distance.
He thought of what had happened last night. Grief was a fucked-up thing, but he was pretty certain that none of what Mercedes Hernandez had done qualified as an arrest. She’d put him in the patrol car, sure, but then she’d held him.
While he cried.
That portion of the night’s events was definitely high on his shit to forget list. Grown men didn’t cry, and SEALs sure as shit didn’t squeeze out a tear. They hit stuff, raged, cursed. Anything but break down in the front seat of a patrol car while the woman of their dreams watched. It was humiliating. It was also, he hoped, a secret between the two of them. He suspected she wasn’t the kind of woman who gossiped wildly, but he also knew women talked to their girlfriends. And girlfriends talked to their husbands, so... the question really was: how friendly was Mercedes with Rio’s wife?
“I got pulled over. There’s a difference.”
Rio made an obscene gesture. “You’re splitting hairs, my man.”
“In fact, I didn’t even get a ticket,” he said virtuously.
Rio eyed him. “Mercedes Hernandez pulled you over, and you got away without a ticket? She’s never let me go.”
The deputy sheriff’s speed traps had caught almost every member of the jump team at least once. As far as Joey knew, Gia was the only one who had avoided getting caught.
“What can I say? I’m a lucky bastard.”
“What did you say to her?” Rio wasn’t ready to let Joey’s escape go yet.
“I was my usual charming self.”
Rio didn’t buy it. “Jesus. Do I need to worry about a sexual harassment charge now?”
While Rio went off on a rant about Joey’s stupid behavior, Joey let his mind wander. He posted his own bail and paid his own tickets, thank you very much, so he had no idea why Rio felt the need to ride his ass. It wasn’t like his boss qualified for choirboy himself. Rio had gotten up to plenty of trouble before he’d decided to settle down with the jump team’s only female member. Joey opened his mouth, but Rio gave him a look, not done yet with the lecture, so he shut it. He didn’t have any excuses anyhow.
“You have to stop,” Rio concluded, like it was that simple. “I’m putting you on notice.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re off the team if you keep accumulating speeding tickets. Don’t get arrested, or you’re off the team. Ninety days in county jail. A thousand bucks. And two points on your license. That’s the price tag if Mercedes Hernandez decides she’s done ticketing you and moves on to you have the right to remain silent. Nine tickets in two weeks is eight tickets too many. Slow down.”
“You moonlight as a lawyer?”
So what if going fast made Mercedes notice him? He looked at it as ensuring her job security. He made sure she always had someone to chase. Him. And if he liked the way she looked, well, that was secret number two, right up there with the bawling
like a baby one.
Plus, fighting fire made sense. Don’t let Strong burn up. The mandate was nice and clear. He’d read crap in magazines where scientists argued that some fire was a good thing. Fine. He didn’t really give a shit about their theories, just that when he jumped out of the plane the battle lines were clearly drawn. Everything was black and white, both in the air and on the mountainside. When he jumped, there was no question he was fighting for the right side—or that the bad guy was, in fact, bad. No gray shit. No regrets. Not jumping would suck. He opened his mouth to protest the sentence, but Rio cut him off.
“Law school of Google. You’re lucky she hasn’t filed charges.” Rio straightened up. “Now tell me you heard me.”
Loud and clear.
“I heard you.” He just didn’t plan on slowing down. No big deal. He’d just have to avoid getting caught in the future, which was a bummer because he loved the expression on Mercedes Hernandez’s face when she pulled him over.
“Tell me this isn’t the way you go about getting a date, because we’re not in middle school anymore.”
Joey grinned. He couldn’t help it.
Rio cursed. “Stop tearing up the pavement. Take it to a track. Find a new hobby. Use your words and not your gas—ask the woman out on a fucking date.”
***
Mercy had no idea where Joey Carter thought he was going or why he needed to get there so fast. Déjà vu. It was past midnight now, and he’d switched out the bikes, but otherwise they were looking at a repeat of two weeks ago, when she’d pulled him over for riding like a madman after Will Donegan’s funeral. It was getting ridiculous. She’d given him three speeding tickets, and every time he just grinned and shoved the paper inside his jacket or—her personal favorite—into the back pocket of his jeans. She definitely liked looking at his butt, which was another problem she could add to the list.
Officer of the law, she reminded herself.
Man with a death wish.
Chocolate and peanut butter went together. She and Joey? Not so much.
