Guilty

by Karen Robards

  It was the scritch of the doorknob turning.

  Kate recognized it with a thrill of horror even as her head slewed in its direction. It was coming from the door to the backyard, and as she was still standing at the sink it was perhaps five feet to her left. For a moment her gaze was riveted on the brass knob, which was just barely visible through the gloom. She wouldn’t have been able to see it at all if it had not been for a thin little sliver of moonlight slanting through the window above it.

  But she did see it, and her breath caught as she watched: It was turning back and forth impatiently.

  Someone’s trying to break into the house.

  She registered it incredulously.

  Her heart leaped into her throat. Her blood ran cold.

  Her stomach dropped.

  Then she realized that she could no longer see the night sky through the window. And the reason she couldn’t see it was that a huge black shape—a man; she could make out the outline of his head, his shoulders, his arms—was standing on the other side of the door blocking out the stars, trying to get into her kitchen, trying to get to her.

  Chapter 16

  KATE SCREAMED like a banshee.

  Screaming, she leaped away from the sink, bolting for the living room.

  “Kate!” Braga met her in the doorway. She ran into him, colliding full-tilt with his solid body, which didn’t give an inch despite the considerable force of the impact, and would have bounced off if he hadn’t grabbed her upper arms to prevent it from happening.

  “What the hell . . .”

  “A man . . . at the door.” She was panting with fear and exertion. “Just now . . . there.”

  Pulling an arm free, she pointed at the back door.

  “Stay here.”

  Braga let her go and leaped toward the door, pulling his gun from his shoulder holster as he moved. Just before he reached the door the refrigerator blocked her view of him, but she could hear the whoosh of the door being jerked open, followed by Braga’s quick footsteps on the small wooden deck and a rush of cool night air.

  It has to be Mario. He’s sending people to break into my house now. To deliver another message? Maybe to get physical so I know he means business?

  Her knees gave way without warning at the thought of what might have happened had she and Ben been alone, and she sank down abruptly to sit cross-legged on the hardwood floor.

  This can’t go on.

  Residual adrenaline sent her heart to fluttering. Her pulse raced. She tried to consider the possibility that maybe this had nothing to do with Mario, maybe it was just a garden-variety burglar or psycho intent on committing a random crime, without success. But the timing was too pat. She wrapped her arms around herself to ward off the cold, then realized her teeth were chattering and clenched them to stop it.

  I’ve got to find a way to make this go away.

  Braga came back inside, closing the door behind him. Kate heard the click of the lock being thrown. Then he came into view around the refrigerator, a tall, dark silhouette with a gun in his hand. As she watched, he holstered the weapon, sliding it beneath his jacket and out of sight, then came walking toward her through the shadows.

  Now that it was over, her racing pulse started to slow a little.

  Thank God he was here.

  He stopped just a couple of feet away and stood with his hands at his waist, looking down at her. “Nobody there.”

  She shook her hair back from her face and met his gaze. “Somehow I knew that.”

  Unclenching her jaw and keeping her voice steady had required some effort, but she thought the results sounded laudably normal.

  “Are you sure . . . ?” His voice trailed off.

  She nodded. Then, because she wasn’t certain he could see the gesture in the dark, she clarified. “That there was a man trying to get in the back door? Oh, yeah.”

  “Did you recognize him? Was it the same guy who was out in the yard earlier?”

  “No, I didn’t recognize him. And since I never got a good look at the other guy, I don’t know. It could have been.” She thought about it. The general size and shape matched well enough, as far as she could tell. “Maybe. Or maybe not. I just don’t know.”

  “I fell asleep on your couch,” he said. “Why didn’t you wake me up when you came back down?”

  She shrugged. “You seemed tired.”

  “I was.”

  Reaching into his jacket pocket, Braga pulled out something that fit in the palm of his hand. With it being dark and all, she wasn’t quite sure what it was until he flipped it open and it responded with a soft blue glow. Then she knew: his cell phone.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Calling it in.” He was already pushing buttons.

  “Somebody will . . .”

  “Please don’t.” Her voice was sharp.

  “What?” He stopped pushing buttons and looked at her. “Why?”

  She took a deep breath and decided that the soothing effects of a couple of lungs’ worth of oxygen had been overrated as a calming device, because she still felt as shaky afterward as a drunk doing a field sobriety test.

  “Because it won’t do any good. They won’t find anybody. And I’ve been at the center of so much”—she groped for the word—“turmoil these last couple of days that I just can’t face any more right now. So please. Let it go. As a favor.”

  Braga looked at her a moment longer without saying anything, then closed his phone with a snap and returned it to his pocket.

  “We need to talk.” His voice was grim.

  “You keep saying that. I still haven’t figured out why, exactly.”

  He grunted by way of a reply, then reached a hand down to her with the obvious intent of helping her to her feet.

  “Come on. Upsy-daisy.”

  Kate looked at that hand for a moment, and made a monumental effort. She gripped it and felt its warm strength close around her own clammy palm. Then he was hauling her up and she was going with the flow until she was upright again. Almost upright, that is. Her knees sagged, and she sagged, too, stumbling forward a little in an effort to regain her balance.

  “Hey.”

  His arms came around her as she lurched into him, and for a moment, just a moment, her hands flattened against his shoulders and she rested against him, using him as a support. He was tall and solid and felt unmistakably masculine. His arms were hard and strong around her waist. Her cheek lay against the soft cotton of his shirt, and beneath it she could feel the firmness of his muscles, the warmth of his skin. The faint smell of Downy fabric softener reached her nostrils. She recognized it because it was the brand she used herself.

  She was conscious of a sudden strong urge to stay where she was for a very long time. To burrow her face against his shoulder and wrap her arms around his neck and just cling. To let somebody else carry the burden of taking care of things for a while. The thing that had struck her first about Braga, above and beyond his good looks, of course, was his aura of being the calm, competent center in the midst of a storm. From the moment she had first laid eyes on him in courtroom 207 when Rodriguez had had a gun to her head, she had never doubted that Braga would do everything he could to get her out of there alive. He was suspicious of her now, and she was rightfully wary of him, but still she had absolute confidence that as long as he was with them he would keep her and Ben physically safe.

  Sometimes—just every now and then—it would be good to have somebody else to lean on.

  The thought appeared out of nowhere and resonated with surprising force through her entire being. Since Ben’s birth, she’d had to be strong and smart and resourceful for the both of them. How wonderful would it be to just lay down the burden for a while? To know that there was someone else around to be strong and smart and resourceful for them, too?

  As in “Someday my prince will come”? Yeah, right.

  As she had learned the hard way, she was the only person she could count on to take care of her and Ben.

&
nbsp; And she was four kinds of a fool to even begin to let herself daydream about anything else.

  “You okay?” His voice broke the spell.

  “Fine.” Reluctantly, she pushed away.

  “You always fall into someone’s arms when you’re fine?”

  “It’s been a rough couple of days.”

  “Tell me about it.” His voice was dry. His hands rode the sides of her waist, light but protective, as if he wasn’t entirely sure she wasn’t going to collapse on the floor again.

  Which, frankly, neither was she.

  “How’s your brother?”

  She was still standing much closer than she should, with her head tilted up so that she was looking into his face. The soft incandescence from the living room just touched him, while she had her back to it. Her inquiry elicited the slightest of sudden frowns, but there was a touch, too, of what she thought was ruefulness about his eyes and mouth as he looked down at her.

  “Recovering.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “Me, too.” His grip on her waist tightened fractionally. She could feel the size and strength of his hands through the layers of her sweatshirt and T-shirt all the way to her skin. His eyes, black in the gloom, moved over her face. There was something in them. . . .

  Kate’s eyes widened in surprised response, and her heart picked up the pace again, but for an entirely different reason. There was suddenly—what? A flicker of heat, a kind of chemistry?—sizzling in the air between them.

  It hit her—she was attracted to him. And he was attracted back.

  Oh, no. No, no, no.

  “So, you want to tell me what’s going on here?”

  He spoke before she could even begin to process all the reasons why developing a thing for Braga was such a bad idea. Whatever might or might not have been struggling to life between them, his question, asked in a hard, impersonal, cop kind of voice, killed it stone-cold dead.

  And thank goodness, too.

  She stiffened. “We’ve been over this.” Her voice had hardened to match his.

  His face was now as hard as his voice. His hands dropped away from her waist.

  “How about we go over it again?”

  She turned away from him, wrapping her arms tighter across her chest to ward off the chill that she couldn’t seem to shake.

  “How about we don’t?” She tossed the question over her shoulder as she padded toward the living room. “It’s late. I want to go to bed. Do you mind?”

  He was behind her. “You’re not worried about your visitor—oh, sorry, one of your visitors—coming back?”

  Okay, he had her there. Yes, she was.

  “I have a gun.” Unloaded, in a gun safe in a drawer in her room. With the bullets stored separately. As a mother, she considered such precautions an absolute necessity. But in practical terms, it made actually snatching up the gun and using it in an emergency problematic. “And I know how to use it.”

  “Believe me, I’m well aware.” There was a dry note to his voice. It took Kate a second before she remembered she was supposed to have shot and killed Rodriguez. Like it or not, that lie was now part of what everyone—colleagues, friends and acquaintances, police, the general public, Braga—now thought they knew about her.

  So be it.

  “I’ve been taking care of myself and Ben for a long time.”

  She was striding across the middle of the living room now, heading for the front door, meaning to show him out and be done with this. As soon as he was gone, she had already decided she would go straight upstairs, check on Ben, go to her room, retrieve and load her gun, and sit up in a chair for the rest of the night with it, just in case. Probably the man who’d tried to break into the house wouldn’t be back. Probably even if he’d gotten in he’d meant only to frighten, not harm, her as a way of underlining the message Mario had sent earlier.

  But with Ben’s safety on the line, too, that wasn’t a chance she was prepared to take.

  “Mom.” Ben’s sleepy voice calling from the top of the stairs stopped her in her tracks. Braga stopped, too, right behind her. She could feel him just inches behind her back. “Is everything all right?”

  “Everything’s fine, sweetie.” Regaining her composure, she walked to the foot of the stairs and looked up at him. He was standing at the top, just outside his open bedroom door, wearing his favorite blue pajamas with rockets on them, his face flushed with sleep. Even as he looked down at her, he was rubbing his eyes with one fist. This was her baby, her little boy, and her heart swelled with fierce love for him. Whatever it took to keep him safe, she would do. “What are you doing up?”

  “I thought I heard you scream. But I was so tired it took me a long time to get up.”

  Kate’s blood ran cold at the thought that if Braga hadn’t been there, Ben might have gotten up to find her at the mercy of whoever had been trying to break into the house. If he had the brains to realize Ben was her most vulnerable point, the thug might well then have turned his attention to her son.

  “It must have been a bad dream,” Kate said firmly.

  “Go on back to bed. I’ll be up in just a minute.”

  Ben yawned. “Okay.”

  And he turned and went back into his room. A beat passed in which Kate remained standing at the foot of the stairs looking up, and then she heard the distinctive creak that meant he had climbed into bed.

  She looked at Braga.

  He was standing where she had left him, about eight feet away, almost in the middle of the small room. His hands were thrust partway into the front pockets of his pants. His hair was ruffled, his chiseled jaw was dark with stubble, and his eyes were tired. And he looked totally fed up with the situation in which he found himself.

  Their eyes met. She was waiting to open the door for him until she was pretty sure Ben was once again asleep—the way the child had looked, she estimated that would take just a couple of minutes, max.

  Then he jerked his head at her as if to say “come here.”

  She frowned. But she moved away from the stairs and toward him. There was, she saw, a grim twist to his mouth. When she stopped in front of him, their eyes met again. He rocked back on his heels a little.

  “What?” she asked. It was an impatient near whisper.

  “How about I stay the night?”

  Her eyebrows went up. He had shocked her. “What?”

  He didn’t look any too thrilled about what he was suggesting. By now—a moment after the thought hit her brain—she was guessing—assuming—it wouldn’t be for sex.

  “It’s already after midnight. By the time I get home and get to sleep, it’ll be closer to one a.m. I could sack out on your couch, go home in time to shave and change for work.”

  A beat passed in which they stared measuringly at each other.

  “Why would you want to do that?” she asked at last.

  “I don’t like the idea of leaving you and the kid alone.” His lips tightened. “That’s twice in one night somebody’s tried to get at you. What is it they say? Third time’s the charm?”

  Kate didn’t say anything for a moment. Much as she hated to admit it, she didn’t like that idea, either.

  “It’s nice of you to offer,” she said at last, grudgingly.

  By not turning him down, she was, in effect, accepting, and they both knew it.

  “You’re welcome.” His tone was dry. His eyes slid over her. “You look beat. If you’ll toss me down a blanket and a pillow after you get upstairs, we can both get some sleep.”

  Kate hesitated. Letting him sleep on her couch just felt like a really bad idea. But she was so tired, and so scared, and having him in the house would make all the difference to how the remainder of her night went.

  And then maybe, if she got some decent sleep, tomorrow her head would be clear enough to allow her to figure some way out of this.

  Still, she hesitated.

  “There were reporters out in front of the house this morning from about seven on, waiting for me
to come out and head for work. If they show up tomorrow, having you spend the night might cause more problems than it solves.”

  At the thought of the kinds of stories that would go around in that case, Kate practically shuddered. Even if “the heroine of courtroom 207 sleeps with the detective who tried to save her” angle didn’t make the newspapers or airwaves—and surely it wouldn’t—local reporters knew the Philly legal and law-enforcement communities well. Gossip about her and Braga would spread like wildfire. She didn’t know how he felt about that, but as one of the low prosecutors on the totem pole at the DA’s office, she definitely didn’t need it.

  He grimaced. “I’ll be out of here long before seven, don’t worry.”

  “I usually get up at six. I could wake you.”

  “I imagine I’ll already be up. Look, go on to bed, would you? I got everything at this end covered. Quit worrying.”

  Worrying was one of those things she was really good at, even when life was normal, but he couldn’t know that. Pursing her lips, looking at him consideringly, Kate knew there just wasn’t much else to say. The truth was, the idea of having him under the same roof was so tempting it was impossible to turn down. She wasn’t going to argue anymore. She was going to go upstairs and go to sleep, secure in the knowledge that at least she and Ben were safe for the rest of the night.

  “All right, then. I’ll just go get some things for the couch.”

  With that she turned and headed for the stairs. When she came back, loaded down with a pillow and a couple of mismatched blankets and a set of Ninja Turtle sheets—the only twin-sized sheets she had that were clean—he had taken off his jacket. With just a couple of steps to go before she reached the bottom, she faltered, looking across the room at him. He had his back turned to her, and his shoulders looked very broad in his white dress shirt. The black straps of his shoulder holster stood out sharply against it, and she was reminded—as if she needed reminding—that he was a cop. He had an athlete’s narrow hips and a great butt—had she really expected anything else?—that was small and tight-looking in the navy slacks. His head was tilted slightly forward, and she could just see the clean angle of his forehead and cheek and jaw. His hands were at chest height in front of him, moving in such a way that she thought he might be unbuttoning his shirt. Her breath caught at the thought, and she stood there on the second step from the bottom without being able to move or say a word while, with no warning at all, a rush of awareness of him as a totally hot guy engulfed her. Once again, to her total dismay, she felt the unwanted pull of sexual attraction.