Lena made a face. “Brody.” Then she skimmed a hand through her hair. “While I couldn’t care less whose kid he is, he’s had a rough time of it. But I think getting in trouble might do him a world of good. Sometimes that’s what people need to get their heads out of their asses—a good hard knock across that head. And he’s getting worse.”
She paused, cocking her head. “So … you didn’t file the report, did you?”
“Shit. Are you psychic?” Ezra kicked at the floor. “No, I didn’t file the damn report, but it didn’t have a damn thing to do with Prather. That idiot can shove it sideways for all I care. But Nielson asked that I let it go, this one time, and I agreed, on the provision that somebody talk to him.”
“Somebody will, if the sheriff said so. He’ll probably get Remy to do it.”
Remy. He ran his tongue along the inside of his teeth, trying to ignore the burn of jealousy at the sound of the guy’s name on her lips. Didn’t matter—so she’d dated him. So he’d probably gotten to put his hands all over that nice, long, sleek body … oh, fuck, he was so into self-torture.
She gestured him inside. “Why don’t you come in? It’s too damn hot for me to stand here with the door open. Come on in and we’ll talk about lunch.”
As he stepped over the threshold, he passed close enough by her that he could feel the heat of her skin. Smell her—she smelled like peaches.
Peaches … man, he loved peaches.
You’re a fucking goner, he thought, brooding. He came to a stop in the middle of the foyer. The floors were gleaming gold hardwood, devoid of any area rugs.
“So …” Lena murmured. “About lunch.”
She brushed past him and headed into the living room.
He trailed after her into the room. It was large and airy, almost stark in its simplicity. A couch against one wall, an overstuffed armchair that flanked a fireplace, and an entertainment system along another wall.
Lena settled in the big chair, curling her legs up, loose and easy. Trying not to stare at the way her dark nipples pressed against the cotton of her tank, he moved to study the entertainment system. The TV was a smallish flat screen, but there was an excellent sound system and a pretty extensive collection of DVDs.
Crossing over to them, he studied the movies, curious.
Each of them was marked with a label that had a series of raised dots—Braille?
“You like movies?” he asked, glancing back at her.
“I love movies,” she said, that faint smile on her lips. “I can’t see the action, but I can hear it. What I can’t see, I just let my imagination fill in for me.”
“There’s something to be said for an imagination.” He crossed over to the couch and settled down, watching as she tracked his movements. He stretched his right leg out in front of him and automatically rubbed his thigh.
“Your limp—you mind if I ask what happened?”
Startled, he glanced at his leg and then up at Lena. “You can hear me limp?”
“Your gait is uneven. I can hear that.” She shrugged. “If I’m being nosy, feel free to tell me. I’ve always much preferred people ask me things if they’re curious rather than just stare at me and wonder. I tend to do the same thing.”
“No. You’re not being nosy—well, yeah, you kind of are, but I don’t mind.” Frowning, he looked at his leg. He didn’t mind her being nosy. He didn’t mind telling her he’d gotten shot in the leg. But the rest of it was harder—talking about Mac was harder.
Although if he was going apologize, ask for a chance to try things over, yeah, if she did ask, he needed to be able to explain … something.
Slowly, he said, “I took a bullet six months ago. That’s why I’m on leave.”
She was quiet for a minute. “Six months seems an awful long time to be out. Was … was it bad?”
He shrugged and then scowled. Shrugs, nods, all the normal body language people used wasn’t exactly going to work with somebody who couldn’t see it, right? Sighing, he rubbed his hands over his face and said, “Bad enough that I had to take some time off—I’ve had two surgeries, physical therapy, all that crap. It’s not bad enough to keep me from going back.”
“I get the feeling you’re not sure if you want to go back,” she said softly.
Blood … blood on his hands …
An image of Mac’s face flashed before his eyes and he waited for that breath-stealing pain, that slow, insidious wash of guilt.
The pain was there, a quick jab, square in the heart. The onslaught of guilt didn’t threaten to cripple him this time, but still, it was enough to leave him tied into hot, greasy knots.
The blood … shit, the blood.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. He covered his face with his hands, grinding the heels against his eyes, trying to drive those images from his head. Mac—hearing her laugh, remembering how many hours she’d spent at his side, the nights she’d spent in his bed.
Put it away.
Fuck, he had to put this away—had to. How could he even hope to have a chance with Lena when he was letting the guilt over Mac eat at him like this? Put it away, he told himself. Now.
If only it was that simple.
Shoving to his feet, he paced over to the window and stared out into the front yard. Bright bursts of flowers grew around the big oak and in a flower bed in the center of her yard.
“I’m not sure,” he finally admitted. “All I ever wanted was to be a cop, you know? Even when I was a kid. Didn’t really understand why then, although as I got older, I started to. It was just there, inside me. I wanted to make a difference. Help people.”
Then he sighed, rubbed at his neck. Tension settled there and the promise of a headache whispered at him. “But sometimes when you try to change things, help people, you learn things you’d rather not know. I’m still trying to come to grips with something I learned. If I can’t do that, I can’t go back. And I’m still trying to figure out if I want to.”
Lena was quiet for a moment and then, softly, she said, “If I’m being too intrusive here, tell me to shut the hell up. Was … was there a woman involved in this?”
“A … what makes you ask that?” Ezra asked, his voice rusty and tight.
“Something in your voice. Instinct. I don’t know. And the fact that you didn’t outright say no when I asked just now tells me I’m right.” She drew a leg up and rested her knee on her chest. “Ezra, I like you. A lot. And yes, I know we’re tossing this ‘friends’ line back and forth, but I also suspect you know as well as I do there’s something more than ‘friends’ between us, or there could be.” She licked her lips and asked, “Am I right?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Then tell me the truth here. If you’re pining over some woman you lost back on your job, I need to know. I’m not interested in playing with some guy who’s on the rebound.”
He laughed—it hurt, like he was choking on broken glass. “Rebound. Shit. Trust me, what I am is not rebounding. I can tell you that the last thing I had in mind when I came here was falling for somebody. The last thing I wanted was to meet somebody … you. You, this, hell, it just sort of happened.”
Sighing, he turned around and rested his back against the wall, staring at the floor without really seeing it. “I had a partner. Her name was Mac. MacKenzie. We’d been together for close to three years. We …”
Sighing, he reached up and rubbed the back of his neck. “We were lovers. It’s not exactly the ideal situation, but we weren’t planning on getting married. It was another one of those things. It just happened. We were friends, we understood each other, liked each other. We were compatible.”
“Friends with benefits?” Lena offered.
“Yeah, I guess.” He smiled halfheartedly. “She was one of my best friends. At least I always thought she was. The last year I was on the job, we’d been working this one job—theft ring. We’d get close, and then boom—nothing. Over and over and over.” A muscle throbbed in his jaw. There was only so much he could tell her—only
so much. Too much was classified, some, he still didn’t remember.
Fumbling for the words, he haltingly continued, “I had suspicions that there was a cop involved. Proving it, though, that was damn near impossible and I … well …”
“It was Mac.”
Tearing his eyes away from the floor, he looked at Lena’s face. “Yeah.”
“That’s … hmmm.” She paused, pursed her lips. “Well, that’s bad.”
Reluctantly, he smiled. “You’re a master at understatement, gorgeous, you know that?”
“Well, I was going to say, that’s so beyond fucked up, but I was trying to be polite.”
“ ‘Fucked up’ describes it pretty well, though,” he muttered.
“Is she in jail?”
Jail.
Blood. The blood.
Shit. Images flashed through his mind—the crime scene photos—why in the hell had he looked at those? Mac’s lifeless face, her eyes in that death stare, forever imprinted on his memory.
“No.”
“No? Why in the hell not?” Lena demanded.
“Because she’s dead.” Ezra turned away and stared out the window. He couldn’t see the colorful bursts of flowers now. Couldn’t see the vibrant green of the grass or the cool shade cast by the trees.
He saw an alley, the echo of a memory.
“She’s dead, Lena. The reason my leg is all fucked up is because she shot me—I took two bullets in the leg—I don’t remember her shooting me, I don’t remember shooting her, but I did and when I shot her, I shot her dead in the heart and killed her.”
He said it so calmly, so matter-of-factly. He could have been giving her a weather report, Lena thought. Except the weather forecasters often got more excited about their reports.
But there was an underlying tension in his voice, and she suspected there was a world of pain hiding inside him.
All of a sudden, his retreat a few weeks ago made sense.
A lot of sense.
“Damn, Ezra. When you said you’d gone through some rough shit, you weren’t kidding, were you?” Lena said softly.
He was silent, but she hadn’t exactly been expecting a reaction.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
“No.” There was a heavy, tired sigh. “Technically, I shouldn’t. But even aside from that, it’s not even possible, because I don’t remember. The doctors don’t know if I’ll ever get those memories back. I’d had a tail—a couple of Internal Affairs cops following me—and pretty much everything I know about that night is based on what they saw.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Hell, you didn’t do anything.”
“No. But it hurts you. It hurts you a lot.” She nibbled on her lower lip and then slipped off the couch, crossing the floor to stand beside him. Lifting a hand, she held it out until her fingers brushed against his back. Moving her hand up, she rested it on his shoulder—and tried not to think about that very nice back. A long, ridged line of muscle. Nice, nice, nice …
Comfort, not seduction, Lena.
“For some reason, us humans are prone to feeling guilty when we shouldn’t. You ever noticed that?” she said, lowering her hand to her side before she gave in to the urge to let it roam where it would.
“You think I shouldn’t feel guilty for killing my partner?” he demanded.
“Oh, I can’t comment on that … although, if it was me … well, I’m fond of life. While I might regret that it was necessary, I think I could kill in defense of my life,” she said, shrugging. “But that’s not what you’re feeling guilty about, or at least that’s not the majority of it. If it was a guy, or even a woman you weren’t sleeping with, would you have felt so guilty?”
Silence. Just silence.
“I don’t think you would,” Lena murmured. “Ezra, this weighs on you, I can tell, and I don’t want to make it worse. You cared for her, I know. But have you ever wondered if maybe she … encouraged a physical relationship just for a reason like this? To make it harder on you if you ever found out what she was doing?”
He blew out a hard breath. “Shit. Yes, I’ve thought of it.”
“Could she have done that?”
“Yes,” he said, the word rough, raw, and slow, like she was dragging it out of his chest with a rusty hook.
She turned to him and reached up, rested a hand on his chest. His heart bumped against her hand, a strong, steady beat. “You did your job, Ezra, and you did it despite the fact that it cost you a lot, on a personal level. Don’t let her take anything else away from you.”
She would have gone back to the couch then, but before she could, he caught her hand.
“You know, for somebody who can’t see anything, you sure as hell see a lot.”
“You’d be surprised at the things you can learn about people when you don’t rely on what you can see.” She shrugged. “But there wasn’t really anything complicated about this … it just sounds like something a woman would do, you know?”
He rubbed his thumb along the inside of her wrist. “Why a woman?”
“It’s manipulative.” Lena grimaced and shrugged. “That sounds terrible, I know, but it just sounds … well, like a female ploy. No great psychology feat there.”
He was still stroking her wrist and it was doing mad things to her pulse. Lena disengaged as casually as she could and made her way over to the couch, sitting back down. Even getting away from him didn’t help much. Damn it.
He was getting to her, way too fast, way too much.
No wonder he’d pulled back.
“I can’t say I don’t understand, but you shouldn’t let what she did tear you up so much, Ezra. You deserve better than that,” Lena said quietly.
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Ezra muttered.
“Sorry. You’ve already got me thinking you’re a nice guy. You’re stuck with it.”
“A nice guy.” Pushing aside the dark thoughts, or trying to, he turned around and studied her. “I wouldn’t be so sure of that, beautiful.”
Crossing the floor, he sank down on the ottoman in front of the couch and studied Lena. Nice guy? If he was a nice guy, would he be sitting there and mentally undressing her?
As she shifted on the couch, one of the straps of her tank top drooped down over one shoulder. Through the thin, white cotton, he could see the dark circles of her nipples all too clearly and if he was a nice guy, if he was any kind of gentleman, he’d put some distance between them and stop staring at her.
Screw being a nice guy. Screw being a gentleman.
“Are you so sure I’m a nice guy, Lena?” he asked, hoarsely.
“Ahh …” She wiggled around on the seat and then lifted a hand, tugging the strap of her tank top back up.
Under the material of her shirt, her nipples were hard, peaked and pressing against the fabric. His mouth was all but watering.
“You’re staring at me again,” she said, softly. She blushed and folded her arms over her chest, hiding those small, round breasts from his view.
“How can you tell?”
She scowled and hitched a shoulder up. “I just can. I can feel it—don’t tell me you’ve never had the feeling that somebody was looking at you, even if you couldn’t see them.”
“I’ve had that feeling plenty. Does it bother you?”
She licked her lips and he muffled a groan, watching that pink tongue slide over her lips and wishing she’d do that to him. She could lick any damn thing she wanted on him.
“I’m not sure,” she said, and her voice was hesitant. She nibbled on her lower lip. “If we were really just friends, it would probably confuse the hell out of me, because I don’t have too many friends who stare at me the way you seem to.”
“I sure as hell hope not.” He wanted to see her eyes. He didn’t give a damn that she couldn’t see him, he needed to see her. Needed to look into that blue-ice gaze. “I’ve got to be honest here … I really, really planned on giving the ‘friends’ thing a try, but I don’t think
it’s going to take.”
Her breath hitched in her throat. “It doesn’t seem to be taking very well, does it?”
“I don’t want to be your friend … or at least I don’t want to be just your friend.” Reaching out, he laid a hand on her leg, just above her ankle. She tensed, but didn’t pull away. “Does it bother you that I like to stare at you?”
“If I said yes, would you stop?”
He flexed his hand, traced his thumb along the back of her foot. “Yeah. It would take some work, but I’d quit.”
“What if I said I didn’t want you touching me?”
He tensed. His stomach knotted, something ugly and bitter burning in the back of his throat. Slowly, he pulled his hand away and stood up. Hell, was he really that screwed up in the head that he’d been reading her wrong?
“Then I’d quit.” The burn of hunger that had boiled inside him from the first time he’d seen her turned to ash, left him feeling cold inside. Yeah, he wanted her. Thought she’d wanted him back—he’d acted on the belief when touched he her, but now he had to wonder—
Fuck. Just get the hell out, okay? Made a big enough fool of myself already. His leg felt a hell of a lot stiffer than it had a few minutes ago and he scowled, listening to the sound of his own footsteps as he headed out of the living room.
“Ezra.”
He paused in the doorway and looked back. She was still sitting on the couch, her face turned toward him. She was blushing, that soft pink glow along her cheeks, down her neck, disappearing under the low neckline of her tank top.
He tore his eyes away, made himself stop looking, even though he couldn’t keep himself from wondering just how far down that blush went. “What?” He stared at the door, hands fisted inside his pockets.
“I didn’t say I don’t want you touching me. I just asked what you’d do.”
Slowly, he turned around. Narrowed his eyes.
She straightened on the couch and then slid her legs down, rose to her feet with that slow, easy grace. Ezra watched as she reached for her dog and rested a hand on Puck’s head, murmured something too low for Ezra to hear. The dog settled on the floor, resting his head on his paws as he watched his mistress.
If You Hear Her: A Novel of Romantic Suspense Page 16
