by Lauren Layne
Still stunning. But different.
Luc didn’t break eye contact with the gorgeous brunette in front of him.
She was a couple inches shorter than his six-foot-one even with her high heels, but somehow she managed to give the impression that she was looking down at him.
Ava tugged again with her hand, and Luc tentatively released it, searching for the passionate woman he remembered. Instead, all he saw was icy reserve.
This wasn’t the wild, don’t obstruct my rights Ava. This was polished, TV-ready Ava.
He felt the loss more acutely than he should for a woman he didn’t even know.
They continued to hold each other’s gaze until Brinker broke up the moment. “Moretti, you were on traffic duty? I had no idea police royalty stooped that low. Were you grounded?”
Brinker laughed at his own joke, and Luc forced a smile, finally releasing Ava’s hand.
“Well, Officer,” Ava said with mocking respect, “it looks like you’ve come a long way from trying to impede on New York citizens’ First Amendment rights.”
Her voice was all sweetness and honey, but since Luc had a sister and a string of ex-girlfriends, he recognized her tone for what it really was: sugared venom.
He felt a strange surge of relief that she still had sharp edges beneath that tidy outfit and perfect makeup.
Luc moved a half step toward her, pleased that she didn’t move back. “Tell me, Ms. Sims, where in the Bill of Rights does it permit citizens to park next to a Stop sign, in front of a No Parking sign, just three feet from a fire hydrant?”
She rolled her eyes, which up close, he could see were warm honey brown. “Yes, thank God you were there at that moment to keep the city safe. I mean, just where would we be if you hadn’t been there to stop the local media from getting a shot of the mayor leaving a fund-raiser!”
He opened his mouth in anger. Maybe he wasn’t so eager to see the passionate version of this woman after all. She may think the laws were frivolous, but they were there for good reason. He stood by every ticket he’d ever written. He stood by the laws behind them.
She held up a hand before he could respond, her expression all mock outrage. “Wait. Did you never get my thank-you note? I so wanted to express my gratitude for you putting a stop to my life of crime.”
“Well here’s your chance to thank me,” Luc said, ignoring her sarcasm. “It would also be a good time to apologize for physically assaulting an officer of the law.”
Okay, so assault was a strong word. But she’d touched him. He definitely remembered her touching him.
Her eyes narrowed. “Never happened. You’re confused. Must be the sugar-high from too many doughnuts.”
“You shoved me,” he exaggerated. “And I seem to remember a threat…”
She cut her eyes over to Luc’s boss. “Did Officer Moretti hit his head when he dove into the river to save that little girl? He seems to be disoriented.”
Disappointment spiked through Luc at her reference to that damned river incident. She’d seen the damned YouTube video. And if she’d seen that one, she’d probably seen the other.
Luc froze as realization rolled over him.
That’s why she was here.
The pieces fell into place slower than they should. Had he not had a half-mast boner he would have caught on earlier. She was here for superhero Moretti, not parking-ticket Moretti.
Three years ago, Ava had obviously been a hungry-for-the-story journalist, but if her prissy clothes were any indication, she’d moved up the ranks quite nicely. Luc was guessing that these days, Ava Sims spent a lot more time in hair and makeup than she did chasing after fund-raiser photo ops.
Brinker took a sip of his coffee before dropping the bomb that confirmed Luc’s fears. “CBC wants to run a special on you.”
Luc didn’t even hesitate. “No.”
Ava’s eyebrows lifted. “It’ll get national coverage. You’ll go from being locally famous to being a household name across the country.”
Her tone implied that Luc should be doing cartwheels at this development. She had no idea just how wrong she was.
“Oh well, in that case!” Luc said, letting his voice go excited before dropping back down to a monotone. “No fucking way.”
Ava Sims didn’t even flinch.
Captain Brinker broke in. “Listen, Moretti. You know that if it was up to me, you’d be doing the Bronx beat where maybe that pretty face of yours would see some action, not being paraded around like you’re the best thing since Batman. But this directive is above me. The order’s coming all the way from the top.”
Pissed, Luc shook his head. “This isn’t what the NYPD is about. We don’t grandstand.”
“You do when a cop with a Hollywood-heartthrob face can’t resist putting himself in front of a camera,” Ava said, checking out her manicure.
Luc resisted the urge to snap that he didn’t want those fucking cameras capturing his every move. That if he could go back in time, some sort of dire accident would have happened to every one of those damned camera phones.
“We need the good publicity, Moretti.” Captain Brinker’s tone was serious now, and Luc knew why.
The NYPD wasn’t exactly in good standing with the people recently.
Three months ago, an officer in uniform had shot an unarmed homeless man. The officer had claimed self-defense and mistaken identity of a weapon, but it wasn’t enough to stave off the damage.
Trigger-happy cops made people nervous.
The officer had been suspended, and the NYPD had made promise after promise to implement additional training, but it hadn’t done much good. Cops were getting a lot more boos than accolades these days.
Apparently, the higher-ups had just found the ultimate form of damage control.
And Luc was the sacrificial lamb.
“Shit,” Luc muttered, realizing there was no way out of it.
Immediately on the heels of his irritation was just the slightest surge of fear.
Fear that Ava Sims would go digging back to November two years ago when Luc had learned, firsthand, the dark side of being a cop. A dark side where good officers died and little girls in pink dresses went missing.
Luc rubbed a hand over his face and forced the thought back where it belonged. Far, far away from the prying eyes of Ava Sims.
Letting a journalist get to him was one thing. He’d be damned before he’d let her get to Shayna Johnson.
Correction: to the memory of Shayna Johnson. And he wasn’t letting her get at Mike’s memory either. He didn’t know why he’d been spared the media attention when it had all gone down two years ago, but he was damned grateful. Luc wasn’t about to let the legacy of two good people be tarnished now.
Ava Sims reached out and gave his arm a smug little pat, either oblivious or indifferent to Luc’s inner turmoil.
“We start Monday. What time do you get to work?”
“Sorry?” he said.
“Your workday. When do you start?”
He shook his head. “Why does it matter? Don’t you just tell me what day and time to show up at your studio?”
She rolled her eyes. “We can’t just have three hours’ worth of face-to-face interviews in cushy chairs. This is an inside look at America’s Hero.”
“Hold on now,” Luc said, his irritation escalating to panic. “Three hours? And America’s what?”
“America’s Hero. It’ll be the name of the series.”
Oh sweet Jesus.
“Now hold the hell on,” he said. “There’s not going to be a series. Just ask me a few questions and be done with it.”
Her grin had gone beyond smug to full out gloating. “It’s already been approved. It’ll be a three-hour special, divided up over three nights. Pretty standard.”
“Standard, my ass,” Luc snapped. “How the hell are you going to stretch four minutes of amateur video into three hours?”
Ava gave an expectant look at the captain, who cleared his throat nervou
sly before explaining. “Ms. Sims and her team will be shadowing you for a while, Moretti. A day in the life of a New York’s Finest, and all that.”
“Just think, two whole months together!” she said with a mockingly bright smile meant to annoy him. “Won’t that be fun? You can show me all the lives you’ve saved with those parking tickets.”
Luc was too busy grinding his teeth to reply. Ava dug something out of her purse, slapping it against his chest before sweeping toward the door in her sexy high heels.
“See you on Monday, Officer.”
Luc swallowed against the surge of panic. He couldn’t do this. He wouldn’t do this. It was one thing to be a local hero. Another thing entirely to become a “household name” as Ava had indicated. The last thing Luc needed was an even brighter spotlight on him, shining in places that should remain in the dark forever.
“I don’t like it either,” Brinker said gruffly, displaying a rare perceptiveness. “But I can tell you right now, there’s no point in fighting it. Your father’s replacement made it clear that this was an order. Not a request.”
Fuck. Fuck. If he were Anthony, or even Vincent, he would have pushed back. Would have shoved his principles down Brinker’s throat, superior or not.
But Luc wasn’t his brothers. Luc wasn’t a hotheaded hotshot. And he had far too much respect for the NYPD to pull a tantrum.
He would do his duty. He always did his duty. With pride.
Still, he couldn’t stop the groan of dread in anticipation of what lay ahead. Luc glanced down at the crumpled piece of paper that Ava had thrust at him. There was a coffee stain in one corner, and something that looked like lipstick smeared across the front, but there was no mistaking what he was looking at.
It was a three-year-old parking ticket.
She’d never paid it.
CHAPTER THREE
Outside the precinct, Ava made it only a block and a half before necessity demanded that she stop.
With a quick glance to make sure he wasn’t following, she ducked off into the alcove of an apartment building entry and made the exchange that nearly every New York career woman was well acquainted with:
The shoe swap.
Out of her roomy I-can-fit-my-whole-life-in-here handbag came the beat-up flip-flops from Target.
Into that same handbag went the black stilettos. Also from Target.
Ava inhaled gratefully as her toes wiggled in happy relief at being freed from the pinching patent leather nightmare.
She’d have happily sent her gritty contacts the same way of the high heels (far, far away), but she’d very deliberately left her glasses at home today to avoid such temptation.
Prime-time news anchors didn’t wear glasses.
Of course, they didn’t wear their hair in messy ponytails either, but that didn’t stop Ava from pulling her hair—in which she’d spent half an hour creating loose, hair-sprayed curls—into a messy pony.
By the time she made it to the van, she looked a lot less This is Ava Sims, reporting for CBC news and a lot more, well, Ava Nobody Sims from Darrington, Oklahoma.
Luckily, the man waiting for her didn’t care.
Mihail Petrov was leaning against the CBC van smoking a cigarette, his severe features schooled into their usual indifference even as sharp blue eyes took in every detail of Ava’s appearance.
He blew out a long stream of smoke, and she stifled the urge to remind him—again—of the hazards of smoking. Mihail didn’t do friendly advice. Unless he was the one giving it. And even then, it was rarely friendly.
But she loved him anyway.
“Knew you wouldn’t make it,” he said, gesturing with his cigarette from her bare toes to messy hair that was completely at odds with her prim pencil skirt and no-nonsense blouse.
“I made it long enough,” she said, elbowing him aside so she could pull a bottled water out of the cooler they kept in the van.
“So they’re going for it?” His slight Bulgarian accent made this sound more like a statement than an actual question.
“They didn’t really have a choice.” Ava tipped the bottle back and took three large gulps. “This meeting was a formality more than anything else. This BS story was handed down from the top on both sides, apparently.”
“Huh,” Mihail grunted. “So they weren’t excited about it?”
“No,” Ava mused, tapping her fingernails against the water bottle. “They weren’t.”
Which she found surprising. Ava had yet to encounter anyone who wasn’t secretly thrilled to be at the center of attention, even when they threw up token protests.
And she would have thought a cop at the bottom of the NYPD food chain should have been a sure bet for delivering an, “aw shucks, I’m just a regular guy, but if you really think it’s a good story…”
But Ava’s reporter instincts told her Luc Moretti’s hesitation had been real. And actually, hesitation was too soft a word. He’d been pissed. And something else too. She tapped her fingernails more slowly as she replayed the encounter.
For a split second Ava could have sworn that Luc Moretti looked…scared.
But of what? The man had gone above the call of duty and was getting recognized for it. She could see him being embarrassed. Maybe annoyed. But scared…
Something was off there.
Ava took another gulp of water.
But on the plus side, his reaction to her had been everything she’d secretly hoped for.
As much as Ava was dreading this bogus, fluff-piece of a story, she had been looking forward to seeing his face when he saw her again. She only wished she would have stayed behind to see his livid reaction to that unpaid parking ticket she’d thrust at him.
Ava grinned at the thought. She wasn’t even sure what had prompted her to bring the ticket along in the first place. As much as she enjoyed pushing people’s buttons to get at what made them tick, this move had been risky, even for her. But she’d done plenty of Googling to see just how bad an unpaid ticket was.
And in the end, she hadn’t been able to resist needling him. She too-well remembered all that righteous indignation three years ago. Getting under the skin of what had to be the most upstanding cop on the planet was a delicious prospect.
And he’d let her walk away, so she must have at least been partially right about being able to get away with it.
Then again, Luc probably didn’t know that the unpaid ticket was no one-off fluke. Her eyes flitted to the back pocket of the passenger seat, which was bulging with small bits of paper. At least half of which were likely parking tickets for this very van.
Mihail watched the direction of her gaze before giving a little smirk, correctly reading her mind. “Freedom of the press, baby.”
Welllll…
As Officer Moretti had so sanctimoniously informed her during their heated altercation three years ago, freedom of the press didn’t exactly dignify breaking traffic laws…repeatedly.
But such explanations would go unheeded by Mihail. He’d been in the U.S. for almost twenty years, and a citizen for over half that thanks to a tumultuous marriage to a Queens-born bartender, but he was known to be a bit innovative with his interpretation of things like the Constitution and the law.
“Where to now, babe?” Mihail asked, flicking his cigarette to the pavement.
Ava put the cap back on her water bottle and rolled her shoulders. “Let’s head back to the station.”
Mihail’s eyebrows lifted. “You never want to go back to the station.”
Ava pulled down the visor and looked at the mirror there, checking for lipstick on her teeth. Yup. There it was. A rosy smear across her perfectly straight (thanks, orthodontics), perfectly white (thanks, network-sponsored whitening sessions) teeth.
She snapped the visor back up in irritation. She kept waiting for the day that looking perfectly put together became effortless. She’d been waiting a long-ass time.
“Yeah, well, it’s not like I want to go back to the station,” she griped to Mi
hail. “But this story is the big-time. I knew when they gave it to me that it would mean more face time with the higher-ups.”
“So you think this is it?” he asked.
“Hmm?” she asked, distracted.
He lifted an eyebrow. “You know, it. The story.”
“It better be,” she muttered.
Mihail gave her a look, and she knew he was dying to start their usual argument. But for once he managed to bite his tongue, and instead of picking a fight, he pulled out one of his ever-present gummy worms from the bag in the middle console. He chewed grumpily.
Ava’s relentless quest to be a CBC anchorwoman was the one area where she and Mihail didn’t see eye to eye. It was cliché, and she knew it. The small-town Midwest girl dreaming of the bright lights and fame in the big city.
But she’d been chasing the dream since she’d moved to New York at twenty-two.
She wasn’t going to stop now.
Even if a little part of her sometimes whispered that it wasn’t her dream.
Ava started to bite her fingernail, then jerked her hand away when she realized it would chip the manicure she could never seem to keep looking fresh for more than twelve hours.
“Have you called your parents yet?” Mihail asked.
“Not yet. Tonight, maybe.”
“I’m sure they’ll be excited.”
“Don’t,” she snapped, catching his emphasis and knowing what it implied. Mihail had only met her parents once (disaster), but he’d heard enough phone calls over the course of his and Ava’s friendship to have formed a strong opinion on her family.
To his way of thinking, it wasn’t Ava’s dream that had her chasing the anchor chair. He thought it was her parents’ dream. With maybe a dash of pressure from her talk-show-host sister and foreign-correspondent brother.
Maybe he was a little bit right. A little bit.
In the same way the Moretti family was NYPD royalty (she’d done her homework), the Sims clan was broadcast journalism royalty. Or so her father had declared.
Her parents had been co-anchors in Darlington back in the day, and apparently the popular husband-wife team had been slated for bigger things in New York.
