by Sarah Grimm
Her voice broke, her hands continued to shake as she shifted through the photos before her, unconsciously separating those depicting his life from those of his death. The latter she shoved aside.
“He was a good man, loyal and honest, a good friend. He only had a handful of close friends, but the ones he had could count on him for anything. He was always coming to my rescue.” Her hands stilled, her voice wavered. “This time it got him killed.”
As difficult as tears were for him to handle, Justin decided he would prefer them to her all-too-focused gaze and stony expression. He feared for her, the way she denied her grief, buried it inside. Feared that her reluctance to allow emotion to break through, her obvious belief that such things were a weakness, would lead to her undoing. How far would she push herself in her quest to prove her strength? How much more could she handle before she broke?
And when she did, would she allow him to help her put the pieces back together?
Did he want her to?
“You are not to blame for what happened to him,” he assured her.
She raised a trembling hand, pressed it against her temple. “I know that. In here, I know that.” Her hand moved to cover her heart. “It’s here, that hasn’t gotten the message yet.”
Unable to resist any longer, he reached for her. He bit back an oath as fingers of pain rippled down his side at the exact moment Paige pushed herself further into the corner of the couch, just out of his reach.
“Don’t. I can’t hold myself together when you look at me with compassion. I can’t hold myself together if you touch me. And the only thing I have left that I am absolutely certain about, is the need to hold myself together.”
“You don’t have to hold yourself together.”
“I do. If I fall apart, everything around me falls apart. When that happens, he wins. He can’t win, Justin.” She closed her eyes against the tears glittering there, pressed her fingers to her lids. “He can’t win.”
His throat tightened. He wanted to comfort her, to pull her against him and hold her. She sat not three feet away from him, looking as if she might shatter like glass if he touched her.
His hands far from steady, he raked them through his hair and stood. He needed to shift his focus off the woman before him and onto the case, the insight she could give him into the mind of Leroy St. John. “What was he like on the job?”
She opened her eyes, blinked with surprise. “The job?”
“As a narcotics detective. What was he like on the job? Do you know?”
“He was more than a cop—”
“I need to know, to understand the man on and off duty.” And he needed her to tell him. If he ever hoped to break her from the nightmare she remained trapped in, to solve the homicide and give back her life, he needed to understand the victim. Since St. John’s good-for-nothing partner provided no answers, Paige would have to. “Do you know his partner, Jon Brennan?”
“No.”
Odd, Brennan’s quick exit today, inferred they knew each other. “You’re sure?”
“Lee grew distant after Rick’s death. He was there for me when I most needed him, but only if I called him. At the time, I’d been too caught up in my own pain to wonder about his distance. I always assumed that like me, he needed time to heal. Then, I moved away. I have no idea who Lee partnered up with after Rick’s death.” She pushed her hair out of her face, twisted it in one fist and tossed the mass over her shoulder.
Momentarily distracted, Justin watched it tumble and spread across the back of his couch. The image of all that cinnamon-brown hair spread across his sheets, draped across his chest sprang to life inside his mind. Blood pooled in his groin. He fisted his hands against the fierce, urgent need that threatened to engulf him.
Blinking, he struggled to pull air into his lungs. “And your knowledge of St. John’s work habits?”
“Are all second-hand, told to me by someone other than Leroy.”
“Preston?” He didn’t wait for her response. “Tell me.”
She stared down at her hands, gripped in a white-knuckle clench on her lap. “He had great instinct, but no real talent for gathering evidence. He tended to jump the gun. He’d be right, more than nine out of ten times, but he wouldn’t always have the proof to back it up. Rick always said Lee didn’t have the right stuff to be a cop.”
“Yet Preston remained partnered with him.”
“Leroy St. John was the type of guy you wanted covering your back because he was always calm. I don’t know how much truth there is to the other things Rick said, but I do know that for fact. No matter the situation, Lee remained composed. I always wondered if their Lieutenant partnered them on purpose.”
“What do you mean?”
“They were total opposites, Rick and Leroy, in every aspect imaginable. Lee believed in people. He was dedicated, loved what he did.”
“Rick Preston didn’t?”
Eyes closed, she shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about Rick.”
“Paige.”
“No, Justin!” Her lips were pale, her eyes bleak as she propelled to her feet. She swayed once before regaining her balance.
“I know it’s painful.”
“You have no idea.”
Every instinct he had screamed to tread softly. It would take a blind man not to see that she was hanging on by a thread. Her eyes appeared darker than normal, filled with torment. Something inside him shifted. Something sharp. Painful.
Her gaze swept over the coffee table where the photographs remained. In spite of her denial, she sucked in a deep breath and began to speak, her voice lowered to a pitch he had to strain to hear. “Rick Preston was charming. People liked him. If you asked around, everyone was Rick’s friend. But no one really knew him, not even me.”
Justin set his jaw. He rubbed at the back of his neck as his muscles began to tighten. He could see her remembering. The way her gaze turned inward, the way her eyes seemed distant. Something in her tone told him he wouldn’t like what she had to say.
“Rick could charm the spots off a leopard. Slick, and incredibly smart, he could ease his way into new situations—make everyone believe he was their newest, most trusted friend and walk away unscathed. He never let anyone get too close, never showed himself. Not even to me.”
The tumble of words caught him by surprise. The more she said, the less he wanted to hear. She’d once loved this man, given her heart to him? Twin feelings of rage and jealousy twisted his stomach muscles into a nasty, clenching knot.
“You don’t have to do this, Paige. Not tonight.”
“He was arrogant and moody. He’d shut down, shut me out completely, and then tell me to stop overreacting when I broached the subject. He controlled me like a master puppeteer and I let him. By the time I came to my senses and realized I couldn’t marry him, that I couldn’t spend the rest of my life as the woman he molded me into, it no longer mattered. Someone killed him.”
She was peeling away some of the layers, and finally Justin could see exactly what fueled Paige’s need to stay away from him. Without knowing all the details, he’d naturally assumed that it was her fiancé’s violent death that caused her hesitation. He’d been wrong.
“I’m not that woman anymore, Justin.” Her voice strengthened, her shoulders straightened. “At least, I keep telling myself I’m not. Then I look at you and I want.”
The air became heavy, hard to draw into his tight lungs. “What do you want, Paige?”
“I look at you and I want.”
“Me.”
“Yes.”
Blood pounding, he walked to stand before her, curled his hand around her upper arm and drew her close. “Paige.”
Her fist came up to settle in the center of his chest, creating a barrier between them. “Do you know how much that scares me? I look at the gun and the badge and I remind myself what it was like—the secrets, that whole part of his life that he kept hidden from me. I look at you and I force myself to remember Rick.”
<
br /> His temper spiked, but he managed to keep his voice even. “I’m not Rick.”
“Aren’t you?”
“I would never expect you to be anyone but who you are.”
“Because you don’t want anything from me but sex.”
Her cool, matter-of-fact tone caused him to flinch. He wanted to argue against the cold, crass way she summed up his interest in her but couldn’t. After all, he’d told her exactly that just a few hours ago.
Paige sighed. “It’s not what you want from me that makes you similar. It’s how you define yourself.”
She shifted minutely so he had no choice but to drop his hand, then she stepped away from him. She spoke with quiet, but desperate, firmness. “I’m not that woman. I can’t be.”
Chapter Ten
Paige leaned against the doorjamb, steaming mug of coffee in her hand, and studied the man across the living room. Barefoot, dressed in jeans and a San Diego PD T-shirt—her only indication he had moved at all since the evening before when exhaustion and heightened emotion drove her to bed—Justin sat in the center of the couch. Late-morning sunlight slanted through the front window, emphasizing the circles of fatigue that ringed his eyes, the shadow of beard stubble across his cheeks. His thick hair was mussed just enough to make her fingers itch to smooth it.
Although the newspaper lay open to what from her vantage point appeared to be the classifieds, he didn’t seem to be reading. In fact, he seemed preoccupied, as if he couldn’t see past the thoughts running through his mind to focus on the words printed on the page before him. Or notice her studying him.
She’d told him about Rick.
Slowly, in an effort to cool the too-hot liquid, she raised her mug to her lips and blew softly. Last night, he had pushed her for answers and she’d given him the cold, unadulterated truth. Then, like a wounded animal, she’d gone off to lick her wounds.
In the light of day, after a night of deep, dreamless sleep that erased the mind-numbing fatigue that had plagued her for days, she felt stronger. The wall around her memories of Rick had crumbled. The pain those memories invoked, ebbed. Sleep brought about mental clarity, as well as the ability to face what just yesterday all but crippled her.
She was not the woman she had been three years before. She knew what she had to do. The time had come to face the facts. Since the day she’d first felt the warmth of Justin’s touch she’d told herself he wasn’t what she wanted. She couldn’t handle his job. Couldn’t risk getting involved with him. But it seemed she already was. She could continue to make excuses about why she felt about him the way she did, but deep down she knew it was all a lie. It wasn’t fear that kept pushing her into his arms, but something far more powerful.
She was falling in love with Justin Harrison. The acknowledgment tightened her throat, gave her heart a jolt. Even so, she needed to face it. To deny her feelings would change nothing, not the pain of her past or the uncertainty of her future. It wouldn’t clear her present confusion. She wasn’t a fool. She knew better than to delude herself into believing a future existed for them. It didn’t. In the end, he would leave her.
Shattered.
Broken.
Staying away from him seemed like the logical thing to do. She needed some time, space to do some thinking. But with a killer out there, somewhere, wanting her dead, space was not an option.
Biting her lip, she tried not to think about the next few days spent in his house. She never sat idle for long, especially not when she worked through a problem. So the thought of days spent in his company, with nothing to keep her busy, unsettled her. If only she had thought to pack her camera. Even her digital could have provided enough distraction to keep her thoughts off her growing desire for the man not ten paces from her.
She closed her eyes and worked to purge thoughts of him from her mind. It didn’t help. Every breath she took drew the warm, male scent of him deeply into her lungs. If anything, her closed lids worsened her present situation. Without external stimuli, her mind brought back how desire darkened his eyes when she told him she wanted him. Heat climbed through her system, spread down to her breasts. Her pulse beat thick and fast.
Paige jerked her eyes open and forced the image from her mind. Only to find Justin focused on her.
“You look well rested.” His eyes traveled from the top of her head, down to her painted toenails and back again. “How do you feel?”
She forced her breathing to even out. “Better than I’ve felt in days.”
“Good.” His fingers took up a drumming rhythm against the closed file folder just off to his right. “Look, I want to apologize for last night. I pushed you pretty hard.”
“You were just doing your job.”
“Yeah, my job.”
His grave tone and averted gaze had her frowning. “What’s wrong?” When he didn’t immediately respond, she continued, “You look tired, Justin. And you’ve been staring blindly at that same page of the newspaper since I came out of the bedroom.”
“I’ve been going over the case most of the night. Looking for something, anything I might have missed the first thirty times.”
“Did you find anything?”
“I wish I could say I had. About two this morning I finally accepted the answer is not here.”
Several moments passed as she considered what he meant. “Where does that leave you?”
His sigh was audible. He pushed both hands through his hair leaving it even more messed and standing on end, then dropped them to hang between his knees. “Spinning my wheels. Going nowhere fast.”
Paige crossed to the couch and sank into the corner, leg tucked beneath her. She dropped her gaze to her still-full mug. “Where does it leave me?”
Good question, Justin thought, and just one of the many he’d spent the night contemplating. Unfortunately, it was also one he hadn’t found an answer to. He settled his hand over hers, felt the air between them warm and shift when she linked her long, slender fingers with his. Color tinted her cheeks. The faintest shadow of desire flared in her eyes.
She wore a pair of those jeans with the waistband that sat below her navel. Her shirt hugged her small breasts and ended just above that waistband, teasing him with a glimpse of pale flesh. With her feet bare and her hair hanging loosely, she looked comfortable, at home in his living room. A thought he should have found unsettling but didn’t.
A hot ball of need settled in his stomach. He needed to decide just what to do about Paige Conroy. And fast. He wanted her physically, but was he ready for something more, an emotional relationship? Did he even know how to go about having one?
“Justin?”
Somehow, the warmth of her hand in his stole his ability to think straight. The unique smell of her, mixed with the soap from his bathroom, sent his head spinning. He fought the urge to drag her into his arms, to touch her, taste her.
Because desire was there, clouding his logic, he took a quick, mental step backward and removed his hand from hers. He busied himself with the task of refolding the newspaper and placing it aside, deliberately ignoring the flood of questions in her eyes.
She blinked once, curled her hand back around her mug. “When I awoke this morning, I realized I’ve been too busy pretending this isn’t happening to me to give much thought to what you said to me the night Leroy was killed.”
