by Lisa Ladew
Mac thought for a long time before he spoke. “I don’t think so. It’s all she knows.” The room was silent for a long time before he finally was able to say what he was thinking. “But what now? Assuming we ever find her. Assuming I can get her to come back with me, what then? Am I gonna have to tell everyone to hold on to their wallets while she’s around?”
Bruin snorted. “That would be hilarious. Imagine if she just stole shit from people. Like your chief.”
Mac smiled. “Maybe.” The smile dissolved. “But they won’t trust her.”
Bruin sat up straighter and twisted in his seat to look Mac in the eye. “I’ll trust her.”
“Why?”
“Everyone has some good in them. No matter what.”
Mac shook his head slowly. “She does. She really does. I can sense it. Smell it. Feel it when I touch her.”
Bruin bobbed his head. “See? It doesn’t matter what she’s done.”
Mac felt the stranglehold on his heart tighten, not loosen. “But it does. What if she has to go to jail?”
“Come on, Mac, she’s part of a battle for humanity. No one’s going to let that happen.”
Mac clutched at the couch cushion beneath him. He could see that. If she’d really only stolen from criminals, no one was going to be in any hurry to make her pay for it. “But what if she won’t stop?”
Bruin didn’t even sound worried. “She will. She just needs a good reason. You’re her reason.”
The door that no longer locked slammed open and Rogue strode into the apartment, eyes locked on Mac, her face an angry mask, her hands balled into fists, her shoulders and hips tight. She stopped two feet in front of him, and he imagined he could see steam coming from her ears, like in a cartoon. The old lady outfit was gone, and she was dressed all in black. Long black leggings, a black long-sleeved shirt that hugged her curves, and simple black boots. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, the ends curling around her face. Fuck, she looked good, even when she was angry. His cop brain took in the slight bulges at her inner forearms and the slim black pack around her waist, like something a jogger would wear, barely big enough to hold a phone and some keys.
Mac scrambled to his feet, so damn glad to see her he had the impulse to drop to his knees and hug her around the waist. But she wouldn’t have it. Wouldn’t have him. Instead, he waited for her to start chewing on him. He would take every bit of it, gladly.
Bruin stood up, too, slowly edging away from Rogue. “Ah, Mac, I’m going to head out for a little bit. You, ah… good luck with your handful.” He edged farther away. Mac kept his eyes on Rogue, who was staring at him like she wanted to mow him over, maybe throw him out a window. Bruin cleared his throat. “You need any help with bad guys with guns, or flamethrowers, or bombs, or whatever, you just yell.” Mac nodded, his eyes still on Rogue.
Rogue finally noticed Bruin. She turned her anger on him and Mac could see him shrink from his peripheral vision. She mocked taking a step at him, shouting “Boo!”
The look on Bruin’s face was classic, and at any other time, Mac would have laughed. He had six or seven inches on Rogue, at least a hundred and fifty pounds, but he knew damn well it wouldn’t help him with her.
Bruin hugged the wall. “Ok, just call me, you’ve got my number.” And out the door he went. Mac didn’t blame him. It was easy to face off with a man. You yell a little, maybe you fight. You kick ass or you get your ass kicked, and then it was over. But with a woman? They stored mean shit up like acorns, always knowing exactly what to say at exactly the time it would hurt the worst. And even if they hit you, you didn’t hit them back. Even when they were tough or deserved it. You never won a fight with a woman, so the smart males didn’t even try. They stood there and took whatever the lady wanted to dish out, or they ran.
Once Bruin was gone, Rogue didn’t even look around her place, giving Mac the suspicion that she already knew exactly what they had done there. Like she’d been watching them from somewhere. Watched them break in the door, go through her stuff, call the locksmith to open her safe.
“How dare you?” she shouted, her scent a flat, harsh orange-yellow. “You had no right.”
Mac pulled his badge out of his pocket, knowing it was a stupid thing to do, but it was better than not saying anything. He held it out. “This gives me the-”
She hit the back of his hand with the palm of hers, sending the badge flying across the room. “I’m not talking about you as a cop. I’m talking about you as someone I had a-a.” Her expression clamped down even harder, and she whirled on her back foot, moving away from him, pacing around the room.
“A what?”
She stopped and exploded at him, hands raised up to shoulder level as she gestured at him. “A connection! That’s what. How dare you come into my house and go through my shit when you’ve done nothing but try to tell me there should be something between us! It doesn’t work that way.” She stepped right back up in his face, dropping one more word between them. “Princess.”
She was hurt? So she was trying to hurt him? Shit, he still couldn’t keep his big mouth from popping off. “A connection? Is that why you left me in the woods? Refused to tell me your name? Snuck out the bathroom window? Is that why you’ve got a car full of your stuff somewhere close by and you’re about to take off and I’m never going to see you again?”
She didn’t say anything, but the way her face went all cool and smooth gave him all the answer he needed. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Put that in your connection pipe and smoke it.” Lame-ass thing to say. He blamed all the time spent with the fucking bear, talking about bee’s elbows.
His brain was mush-ifying, and someone had to be to blame.
Chapter 29
Rogue had had enough. Enough of this asshole and his hairy friend. Enough of men in general. Enough of… all off it.
She stuck a finger in his face. “I’m not playing any more games with you, dickhead. Tell me what you want from me and let me go on my way. I was wrong. There’s no connection here. If you aren’t going to arrest me, then get the hell out of my house. And if you are going to arrest me, maybe you should call someone else in to do it. You don’t have issues, you’ve got whole damn subscriptions, and frankly, I’m sick of that magazine.”
Mac sank down on the couch, his face crumpling. He put his fingers in his scruff that was quickly turning to beard and scratched, his eyes sorrowful. “I wish things were different between us.”
The yearning in his voice got her attention in a way nothing else would have been able to and she felt some of the anger leak out of her body. She kept her guard up. The only reason she was here was for the pendants hidden behind the drywall in her bathroom, and the two things in her safe. Once she got them, she would figure out another way to get away from him.
They’re his, you know, a voice in her head told her. No way. They weren’t his. But she was supposed to reveal them to him. Knew he was the cop from her visions. Fuck, if she hadn’t been having those fucking fugues and fantasies, would things be different right now? Maybe. Maybe she wouldn’t be so on guard with him.
He tried to catch her eye. “You really need to know some things.”
She held up a hand, staring down at him. “I don’t want to hear it.”
“I know you don’t. But you’ve got to.”
Rogue shot him a nasty look, then stuck her fingers in her ears, pulling them out, then stuffing them in again. She popped them out. “Only if you hold me down while you force-tell me.” She knew she was being childish but she couldn’t help it. Something about him brought it out of her. He wasn’t speaking, so she quit it.
He sighed. “I really wish we could do the whole normal thing.”
She sank down on the couch next to him, half wanting to hear what he was going to say. “Yeah, what would that look like?”
Something hopeful came into his face. He leaned closer to her, probably unconsciously. “What’s your favorite thing to do?”
That was easy. �
��Jump out of stuff. Jump off of stuff.”
He went absolutely green. “You’re kidding.”
She hid a smile behind her hand. She was still pissed at him. Had never been more pissed at a guy in her life. But she liked to see him off balance. “Nah. I’ve been doing it since I was little. The higher the better.” She’d been doing somersaults and rolls off park structures in the city since long before parkour was cool.
He nodded slowly. “You were amazing on that rock in Yosemite. Got a lot of finger and arm strength.”
She eyed him. “If you don’t like heights, why were you there?”
His eyes narrowed. “How do you know I don’t like heights?”
She pointed at his face, drawing a circle around it in the air. “It’s all written right there.”
“Oh.” He took a deep breath and leaned back. “My boss made me go. He was mostly fucking with me, I think.” He looked back at her. “But I’m glad I was there. I’m glad I met you. I still think about you all the time.”
Reaaallllly? Lie, or truth? She made a face. “Like I believe that.”
His expression became earnest. “Seriously. I remember everything about it. You were wearing tight shorts and that pack around your waist. Something in it poked me one time when you came down. I remember thinking that I should tell you to take it off, but I didn’t because you were the one who knew what you were doing. You also had on a purple paisley sports bra. The muscles in your back would flex when you moved from hold to hold and I remember wishing you didn’t have it on so I could see all of your back. You were like… a model up there. Someone people would pay to take pictures of.”
Rogue felt a blush stain her cheeks. She clamped down hard on her emotions, knowing that probably made her cheeks redder.
He kept talking. “I also remember thinking that you weren’t ever gonna fall and I wasn’t ever going to get to touch you. When you finally did, there was just a moment when I thought you’d done it on purpose. Like maybe you wanted me to touch you. But I know you were just that good. All your falls were that controlled.”
Rogue felt more heat blast into her cheeks. She had fallen on purpose. Every time but once.
He looked down at her boots. “How’s your ankle?”
Oh, right. She’d scraped it on an outcropping the one time she’d fallen for real, and lost a long stripe of skin. She pulled her pants up to show him. “That was a long time ago, so it’s fine. Just a bit of a scar.” He frowned when he saw it, like he didn’t like that she’d been hurt. She remembered how distressed he’d been. He’d taken off his shirt and cut a huge slice out of it to wrap tight around her ankle and stop the bleeding, and hadn’t wanted her to get back up on the rock.
She had to stop thinking about that. She jumped up. “That’s not even my best scar.” She pulled up her shirt, showing him the twisted one that looked like a river along her side, courtesy of misjudging a leap from a building and landing on a fence. He winced. “And one here.” She pulled up her sleeve, showing the back of her wrist and being careful not to reveal the knife on the other side of her arm, even though she’d seen him notice it already. That scar was shorter, but wide, the injury had been a real gouge all the way to the bone. A fight with a guy who’d thrown a hunk of scrap metal at her when she was sixteen and living on the streets, after Uncle Kevin had died and before she’d gotten her shit together.
Mac reached out and touched the scar with one finger, a pained frown on his face. His hand looked strong, veiny, and his finger was warm and soft. She tore her eyes away, snatched her arm away, then sat back down, as far away from him as she could get. “What about you? Let’s see ’em.”
He shook his head, confused.
She rolled her eyes. “Your scars. Come on, you’re older than me. I know you don’t jump off of stuff, but you’re a cop. You’ve gotta have some bullet wounds hidden somewhere, or some knife slices…?” Shit. She’d sliced him up and the very next day there had been no scar. Her friendly reminder that she was smack in the middle of some weird shit. He was looking at her intently, and he opened his mouth, about to say something but she shook her head and plugged her ears. “Sorry. Forget I asked. I really don’t want to know.” She waited for all the emotions to cross his face. Irritation. Frustration. Acceptance. He leaned back against the couch and put his hands behind his head, waiting for her to take her fingers out of her ears.
When she did, he shook his head, as if to say he wasn’t going to tell her what she didn’t want to know. “Ok, then that’s what we’d do. If that’s what you like to do, we’d go climb something, or you could jump off something. Maybe I’d pack a picnic lunch. Sandwiches. Drinks for when you were done. We could eat next to a lake where the air was sweet and the ground soft. We could talk about… stuff. Stuff you like to talk about. Music. Movies. Knives. Fights. You could tell me what it’s like when you jump off of something and fly through the air.”
Rogue could almost see it. She could almost want it.
Mac turned toward her, his expression full of something dangerous.
She jumped to her feet again. “But that won’t ever happen. Don’t forget you’re not here in my apartment because I want you to be here. Things aren’t different between us. They are what they are, so let’s get on with whatever comes next, mkay?”
Chapter 30
Rogue tested the door handle in the back of the truck they were in, then rolled her eyes when it wouldn’t open. No wonder they’d made her sit in the back. Window? Nope, she couldn’t get it to lower, either. She bet she wasn’t getting any bathroom breaks anytime soon, either. But at least she had her stuff. She’d managed to sweet talk Mac into letting her go into her bedroom alone, but only after she’d showed him that the window in it was nailed shut.
She had the pendants, she had her sister’s Swiss Army knife, and her book, the knife and pendants stowed in the flat pack around her waist, the book shoved in her back pocket. She had the cash from the safe, and she had her phone, and that was it. When she got away from Mac, she’d be leaving straight from Serenity, fuck going back to Chicago. It would be hard to do without any I.D., which she’d left in her car, which was sitting in a paid parking lot in Chicago, but she would figure something out. She probably wouldn’t be making it to Australia anytime soon, but if she could just get out of Illinois…
The two men in the front seat were tense, Bruin especially. She eyed the back of his earlobe and considered flicking it just for something to do, but decided against it.
She leaned forward. “Fuck, we really gotta drive back? You cops don’t have a helicopter stashed somewhere?”
Mac shook his head. “No way am I ever getting on a helicopter again.” He looked at Bruin. “We rode into Ella and Trevor’s wedding in one. It was awful. Way worse than a plane.”
He flashed a look over his shoulder at her. “Trevor is my boss at the Serenity PD. He met Ella last fall. They-”
Rogue cut him off. “What are you telling me for? I’m not your friend. And I’m not interested.”
Bruin winced and looked out the passenger window. Mac shut his mouth and ground his teeth together so hard she could hear his molars squeak. Good one.
But then Mac pulled over. Right there on the side of the highway, into the breakdown lane, making them all swerve in their seats. He slammed on the brakes, threw the truck in park, got out, and ripped her door open, staring at her, his eyes accusing. “You don’t want to go with me, fine! We’ll go where you want to go. Anywhere. I’ll even leave the b-Bruin behind. If that’s what you want. You and me, against the world, Rogue. I’m game. I’ll defy my boss, my upbringing, everything I know, and I’ll go with you. You won’t let me tell you why I have to do this, but I’ll be damned if I let you make me feel like I’m doing something wrong anymore. This sucks that I have to do this to you, but if you weren’t so goddamned stubborn, you would be with me willingly.”
Her heartbeat slowed down and the rest of the world fell away, the cars whizzing by them at 70 mph nothin
g more than an insignificant buzzing. When she spoke, she almost didn’t recognize her own voice. “You know my name.”
“I do.”
He didn’t tell her how he knew and she didn’t ask, even though she burned to know if he knew what she was. What she did. And if he still wanted her anyway.
She took in a breath and let it out before she spoke again, never breaking eye contact with him. “What if I say I’ll never willingly take you with me? Not even to the grocery store.”
He made a face, like she couldn’t have hurt him worse, but his eyes were still harsh. “Then we’re both doomed.”
He slammed the door shut and went back to the driver’s seat, pulling out his phone and calling someone as he put on his seatbelt and looked for a break to get back into traffic.
Someone answered on the other end of the phone, and Mac spoke, his voice tight and flat, his answers to the other person’s questions clipped short.
“We’re coming back.”
“She’s with me.”
“No.”
“My house. I need you to have someone board up the windows from the outside.”
“Yeah, all of them. Bruin and I can watch the exits, but she’s sneaky as fuck.”
“No.”
“Because she won’t listen.”
“Yeah. Ok. Tell them not to get close.”
“No, he’s fine. It hasn’t bothered me yet.”
“I don’t know, maybe because he’s a-because of who he is.”
He sighed. “I have no fucking idea.”
“Yeah, bye.”
Mac hung up. For Rogue, the silence in the cab of the truck in the aftermath of that phone call was almost as painful as him calling her sneaky as fuck.
***
Mac pulled up in front of his house. Rogue recognized it from the day she’d followed him here. She closed her eyes, not even sure how many days ago that had been. Three? Four? Less?
Mac got out and opened her door. For a brief moment, she contemplated making him pull her out. Just complete and total disobedience on her part, but rejected it. She was pissed off at him, but if he put his hands on her, she would like it, no matter how or why it was done. She slid out and stood there, refusing to look at him.
