God, he was gorgeous. Soft, dark hair that made me want to run my fingers through it again and again, pushing it back from those deep blue eyes. Just a touch of dark stubble on his cheeks and a full lower lip and strong jaw that made it impossible not to think about kissing him. It went beyond the sexual. The attraction was soul-deep and dangerous, the sort of feeling that makes the fact the other person is your nemesis irrelevant. Maybe it’s the sort of attraction you only get when they’re your nemesis.
My brain finally kicked in. He’s a cop, you idiot!
But it didn’t make any difference. His eyes were locked on me just as firmly as mine were locked on his and I felt myself catch my breath. I could feel the layers of Jasmine burning away as those blue orbs pinned me, fixing me against the wall of the alley as hard as if his hand was on my chest.
I swallowed. All I had to do was keep quiet and he’d be gone in a minute.
“Paramedics are right behind us,” said Ryan. “Who was here? Who saw it?” He stopped beside Clarissa and Natasha. “Were you here?”
“No,” they both said in unison.
“I was here,” I heard myself say. And then wondered what the hell I was doing.
He came closer, and his size was even more formidable close up. I could feel my breathing notching faster and faster. The attraction was coming from somewhere deep inside me, deeper than even my own thoughts and feelings probed, down in the dark waters beneath Jasmine. What the hell?! No guy had ever made me feel like this! I was aware that he was staring at me, and in a very un-cop-like way. What was worrying was that I was staring back just as hard, my eyes flicking between those eyes, that mouth, that broad, curving chest—
“Okay,” he said. “I have a couple of questions, while it’s still fresh in your mind.” I had time to focus on his voice, this time. How low it was, and how serious. A voice you listened to, if you knew what was good for you. One of those guys who speaks quietly, because he doesn’t have to shout. His voice just carried, and every word made my whole body hum and sing like a plucked string.
The paramedics arrived and started checking Dan. Ryan moved a step closer and, even though he was a cop, I didn’t take an instinctive step back. I felt as if I was frozen in place, pinned.
“So you were walking together when it happened?” he asked.
He was keeping his gaze resolutely on my face, which was more than most men would manage given the dress I was wearing. But I could feel the heat pulsing down through my body just the same. He was looking at me in a way I’d never been looked at before, seeing beyond all the surface sparkle and perfume I used to distract other men. And that was very, very dangerous, given what lurked inside me. But I couldn’t look away. It was difficult just forming words, with those eyes on me. Control yourself! He’s a cop!
I forced myself to answer him. “I was sort of leading the way,” I said. “He was checking his wallet, to see if he had enough money. I think that’s why he got jumped.”
Ryan looked at Dan. “And I’m right in thinking he’s not your husband or boyfriend?”
The words were coming easier, now. He didn’t seem cruel or cold, like the other cops I’d met. I smirked at his question—Dan had a boyfriend himself. “That’s right.”
“Okay. So the two of you were just about to, ah…”
I looked at him blankly. God, he was almost painfully gorgeous. He reminded me more of a medieval knight, ready to take off someone’s head with a sword. Noble, and yet with that edge to him. The dark knight of the round table. For the first time, I saw him glance down at my pale cleavage, at my long lengths of thigh exposed by the dress. It was like being lit up by a laser, the heat throbbing and pulsing, flowing inward to my core. He’s a cop! Remember he’s a cop!
He tried again. “You were—you know—just about to…” He sounded almost embarrassed.
I frowned. I still had no idea what he was trying to hint at.
Ryan sighed. “He was jumped as the two of you were about to complete your business?”
I was lost in his eyes, so it took a few seconds for it to register. “WHAT?!” I asked, horrified.
He didn’t even flinch. “It’s okay, miss—you’re not my concern tonight. Some other night, I might have to run you in, but right now I’m just trying to establish what happened.”
I gave two little disbelieving huffs of air and then my voice went so high with anger that it was almost ultrasonic. “I AM NOT A HOOKER!” I screeched. “Why would you think—” I looked down and saw my tiny dress and long fur coat. “I’m an actress!”
Ryan just looked at me. “Uh-huh.”
Karen butted in. “Um, she actually is an actress,” she said, stepping forward.
Ryan looked at her, then looked at Nat and Clarissa. “And I suppose they’re actresses, too?”
“Oh, no,” Karen told him. “They’re ballerinas.”
The anger flared up hot and bright inside me…but, as it reached my brain, it started to sink back down again. Now that I replayed my words in my head, coupled with being in the alley and the ridiculous outfit I was wearing, I couldn’t really blame the guy. And he was so insanely hot that even him mistaking me for a hooker was sort of hot, in a twisted way. So I wasn’t actually mad, once the initial outrage had died away.
But the anger had done something important. It had snapped me out of my daydreaming about him. It had reminded me that he was a cop and I flushed with shame at how stupid I’d been. What the hell had I been thinking?! That I’d give him my phone number? That we’d somehow wind up dating? A cop?!
So I glared at him and let him think I was furious. I could see he was sorry for his mistake. He even tried to apologize, as I got into the ambulance with Dan and Karen, but I didn’t let him. I spent the next week telling Karen and Nat and Clarissa over and over how annoyed I was.
But at night, Ryan haunted my dreams.
***
I saw him again when Connor had gotten into a fight to protect Karen from some creep who’d groped her. Ryan and Hux showed up to break it up and managed to keep Connor out of jail. I stayed back as much as possible, avoiding looking at him. Trying to will my heart to slow down every time I felt him looking at me.
And then, when I’d watched Connor kiss Karen for the first time and aww-ed along with Nat and Clarissa, I went home, I slammed the door behind me and, without even taking off my clothes, I leaned my back against the door, shoved my hand up under dress and brought myself to a breathless, shuddering orgasm thinking of him. The guy I wanted. The guy I could never have.
Part of the attraction was that he was just so...physical. Yes, there was the muscle and the fact I wanted to run my hands over every damn part of him, but it went beyond that. He was big and solid. Real. The opposite of being an actress who spends most of her time in her own head. And he wasn’t all talk, talk, talk. In fact, he didn’t say much at all—he was kind of silent and gruff. When he did say something, it was in that gorgeous, heart-stopping deep voice, but mainly he seemed like the sort of guy who’d forget the platitudes and just wrap his arms around you. After dealing with over-thinking, chattering actors all day, that sounded like heaven.
He was like a rock I wanted to cling to but, instead, I had to push him away.
***
And then he started to drive past Fenbrook every Thursday lunchtime.
Sometimes I’d dare to glance around and see him, and sometimes I’d let him drive past and then try to glimpse his face in the driver-side mirror. Always distant. Because that’s how it had to be.
Except this time, as I heard the car speed toward me, the siren wailed, and immediately every muscle tensed because for years, that noise meant run.
Chapter 4
Jasmine
Now
I spun around and saw him staring at me through the windshield.
“Ryan?!” I asked.
“Yeah.” I felt that warning flicker in my chest. He’d gone tense, and I knew what that meant. I wasn’t Karen, sitting in a practice
room with a guy who was clearly crazy about her for months on end, flatly denying it. I knew he liked me. But he didn’t like the real me. He liked the fantasy woman I’d constructed.
I had to give him that—give him his fantasy woman—or he’d know something was wrong. But just a little taste. Keep him at arm’s length, tongue-tied and off balance. That was the only safe place for him.
“Did I do something wrong?” I gave it just a hint of sexy innuendo, enough that he’d wonder if he was imagining it. I wanted him uncertain. If I vamped it up too much, he might do something crazy like ask me out, and I didn’t want to have to turn him down. But too little and he might see through Jasmine, see through to—
We locked eyes and, just for a second, it got out. That painful, desperate need for him, the need to be loved, to be held—hell, to be fucked.
It hit me, for the first time, that while it was Jasmine who was sensibly keeping him at a distance, my feelings for him were coming from right down deep. From the old me. From Emma. A ripple went through my entire body, starting at my helplessly locked-on eyes and going all the way down to my toes. My breathing sped up. My eyes went wide—
Stop it!
And, like a curtain coming down, Jasmine was back. The flirty one. The confident one. The screen siren. Ryan was talking and I tried to focus on something other than how kissable his lips looked.
“Nope,” he said, “I was just—”
I smiled and he lost his thread. God, this felt so cruel! I didn’t want to be toying with the guy’s feelings! But what was I meant to do: yell at him? Tell him I had a boyfriend, or was a lesbian?
“He just wanted to say ‘hi’,” his partner, Hux, said.
I glanced at him. I’d always liked Hux. I didn’t like to think of Ryan out there on his own, on the streets. Knowing that Hux had his back was reassuring.
Stop it! I told myself again. You act like Ryan’s your boyfriend but you barely know him!
I had to bring this to a close. Gently push him away by overloading him. I leaned down so that I could look into the car, fully aware of the view this gave Ryan.
“I heard that song on the radio,” he said, his eyes glued to my boobs. “Karen and Connor.”
“I know!” I couldn’t stop myself grinning. “They’re doing great!” Karen had really come out of her shell since she got together with Connor. In fact, I mentally referred to it as BC and AC, now: Before Connor and After Connor. And the money they were making from that track was enough that Connor didn’t have to feel like the scruffy urchin to Karen’s privileged princess anymore.
“So,” said Ryan. And then silence. And more silence. And more. Oh God. Was he going to ask me out? Please don’t let him ask me out. Please, please, please. Because if he does then I’m going to have to say no, and if there’s one person on this earth whose heart I don’t want to break, it’s his. He deserves a real person, not a fake one.
Chapter 5
Ryan
To my relief, the radio blared into life. “All units, all units, report of a break-in at 412 Brybecker—”
I grabbed at the mic like it was a life preserver. “Four seven, we’re close. We’ll take it.”
Hux gave me a look. “We’re not that close.”
“Sorry,” I said to Jasmine, and I really was. Sorry I was just some schmuck in a patrol car when I needed to be a young George Clooney, or maybe a musician, or just a goddamn millionaire, like that one who’d wooed her friend Natasha. “We have to take this.”
“We don’t have to—” said Hux.
I silenced him by hitting the lights and siren. Jasmine jerked upright, taking her hands from the roof, and I floored it.
I could feel Hux’s eyes on me as we screamed down the street. “Brybecker is nowhere near us.”
I shrugged.
“You just didn’t want to have to talk to her,” Hux told me.
“Let it go.”
Hux chuckled, but not unkindly. “You’ve already humiliated yourself with her. How much worse could it get?”
I wanted to close my eyes tight in embarrassment. That freezing cold night when I’d first met her, in the alley. I’d assumed she was a hooker. Unsurprisingly, she’d gotten mad.
“Anyone could’ve got that wrong,” I said tightly.
“No,” said Hux. Even now, the memory of it made him rock with laughter. “Just you.”
We blasted through an intersection. I eased off on the gas a little, because it wasn’t like there was any real emergency. It would be thirty minutes of nodding sympathetically to the poor guy who’d had his place ransacked and then telling him to keep an eye on the pawnshops.
“I just don’t get it,” Hux said, for about the five hundredth time that summer. “I mean, I know she’s smokin’ hot. If I was twenty years younger—”
“You’re not twenty years younger,” I said pointedly. Hux—Pete Huxington, but everyone called him Hux—was old enough, wise enough and annoying enough to be my dad. And, okay, warm and generous enough, too. But not right at that precise moment.
“Hell, even so,” said Hux. “I’d sure like to make a movie with her.”
“Hux!”
“What? I’m just sayin’, some Hollywood heartthrob’s gonna get to do a bedroom scene with her. What’s that Italian guy’s name? Favio-something. Him. And everyone’ll be like, ‘Oh, are they acting or is it real?’ Then she’ll marry him and get one of those combo-names, like Brangelina.” He paused and took a bite of a donut. “No, wait. Not with Favio. She’d be ‘Famine’.”
My knuckles were white on the steering wheel. “Is there a point?”
I swerved around a corner and the donuts slid across the box on Hux’s lap. He hooked one on a finger and took a full quarter out of it in one bite. He’d long since grown used to my driving. Plus, for Hux, nothing interrupted donuts. We could have been in a full-on guns-blazing high speed pursuit and he’d still have found time for an original glazed. “My point, Kowalski, is that you need to shit or get off the pot.”
“You’re the master of romance, Hux.” We turned onto Brybecker and I started searching for the address.
“You’re...what? Twenty five?” he asked.
“Twenty four.”
“Whatever. Too young to be fixated on some girl you’re never gonna ask out. Do it, or forget about her.”
I pulled up outside the house. “I can’t,” I said. “And I can’t.”
Hux sighed and clambered out of the car, then patted his gut with something between sorrow and pride. “All your angst,” he told me. “That’s what it is. I’m comfort eatin’ on your behalf. How is that fair, huh? You mope and I put on weight.”
He drew me into a headlock as I got out and we horsed around for a moment, one eye on the house in case the owner came out and demanded to know why two of NYPD’s finest were acting like school kids. But that was Hux all over: older, wiser, and still a kid at heart. He’d mentored me through the academy after my dad died, and then we’d partnered up when I graduated. He drove me crazy, but I loved him.
“Come on,” he said at last. He climbed the steps to the door and knocked. “Let’s get this over with. Then you can get back to Jas—”
The bangs were so close together, they sounded like one noise. Everything else in the street seemed to go deadly silent in their wake. Hux took a stumbling step backward down the steps, and then another, and then he tumbled backward onto his ass. That’s when I saw the holes in the door, and the blood soaking through Hux’s shirt.
The door burst open. A guy jumped down the steps: my height but half my weight, his clothes hanging from a skin-and-bones body, the gun still in his hand. He gave me one wide-eyed look of terror and sprinted away.
I was still rooted to the spot. I drew my gun just as he disappeared around the corner. Every nerve in my body was jangling, my chest clenching painfully tight around my heart. I was overwhelmed with a sense of wrongness. Hux couldn’t get shot! He was Hux! I was the idiot who fucked up all the time and did dumba
ss things like getting shot.
I ran over to him. He was gulping at the air like he was trying to bite off a piece. Blood had already soaked his shirt and a lake of it was spreading out beneath him. It hit me that he was going to die, and that I should be screaming “No! No! Stay with me!” like you see in the movies, but I just stared into his eyes and he stared into mine and then he was gone.
Chapter 6
Jasmine
One Month Later
I was one shoe short. Literally. I’d only discovered the second one was missing when I already had the first one strapped on, so now I was staggering around the apartment with one leg three inches longer than the other. I had maybe three minutes to find it and get out before I crossed the line into being seriously late to class.
I could have just worn a different pair, of course. But Jasmine wouldn’t compromise. Always looking good was a part of her...and therefore me.
I looked under the bed for the third time and then tried the wardrobe again. Bathroom? I hop-walked there. Nope. This was getting ridiculous, now. There were only so many places it could be.
The apartment was by far the nicest place I’d lived since coming to New York. After the seedy motel and the roach-infested first apartment, I’d spent a few weeks sleeping on Karen’s couch—okay, technically that was the nicest place I’d stayed, but it wasn’t mine. Then, when Connor moved in with Karen, I’d moved into his drafty but homely little place for a glorious rent-free month until his lease ran out. Between that and the time on the couch, I’d finally been able to save some money and get this place—a small but warm little nest where I wouldn’t get stabbed or beat up or eaten in my sleep by hungry roaches. Money was tight but, if I was careful, I could just scrape by. I’d even managed to furnish the apartment with some flea market rejects: posters of Hollywood sirens, some old-fashioned mirrors, and lots of throws everywhere: dark green that looked good against my flame-red hair. The bedroom was a particular favorite. I’d gone for a full-on seduction vibe, with black sheets, an iron bedstead, and fake red satin staple-gunned to the wall in thick, shining ripples. It looked like a Parisian prostitute’s boudoir, which I figured was perfect.
Acting Brave (Fenbrook Academy #3 - New Adult Romance) Page 3
