by Ranae Rose
Officer in Pursuit
Lock and Key, #3
Ranae Rose
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This book is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places and events are products of the author’s imagination and are in no way real. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Officer in Pursuit
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2014 Ranae Rose
Cover model photo by: Jenn LeBlanc / Illustrated Romance
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Officer in Pursuit
Lock and Key, #3
Secrets are what Kerry has lived and breathed for the past three years, and those secrets may kill her, if she’s not careful. Her new life in a coastal North Carolina paradise is haunted by her past and ruled by her number one goal: to not be noticed. Even if that means denying her attraction to Officer Grey Morgan, who’s set his sights on her beyond any doubts and despite all odds.
Grey has spent his summer in pursuit of Kerry, but what he doesn’t know is that nothing with her is as it seems and loving her comes with a price.
What she doesn’t know is that there’s no risk he won’t take, and no way he’ll let her fight her demons alone.
Dedication
For J.
CHAPTER 1
Kerry jumped when her phone chimed. The text message notification broke the spell of her house’s silence, reminding her that the magic of being behind locked doors was imperfect.
She held her breath, swiped a finger across the screen without reading the message preview, frozen in her curled position on the couch. Like peeling off a Band-Aid, this was something best done as quickly as possible. The sooner she got rid of this anxiety – a reaction so deeply ingrained it was automatic – the better.
Warm weekend coming up, the message read, everyone wants to hit the beach. Wear something sexy for once – Grey is coming.
The message was from Sasha. Kerry was too relieved to feel anything else, even exasperation.
Okay, let me know where and when we’re meeting, she replied.
I mean it about wearing something sexy. It’s almost October – this might be your last chance this year to show off in a bikini.
Kerry didn’t do bikinis, and didn’t bother replying. Sasha knew, and this wasn’t the first time they’d had this conversation.
Her phone chimed again. Wanna go shopping?
No.
You know, there’s such thing as playing too hard to get.
I’m not playing. And I’m not wearing a bikini. Just drop it.
Sorry, can’t. As a true friend, it would be wrong for me to let you keep wearing tankinis. You have the body of a gymnast! Why work out constantly if you’re not going to show it off?
No. Just no.
A few silent seconds slipped by, and Kerry kept her eyes on her phone, watching to see whether it would light up with another stubborn reply from Sasha. It was stupid, but every time her phone rang or chimed, she was afraid she’d find a message from him – or worse, answer and hear his voice.
When another text came through, it wasn’t him, and it wasn’t Sasha. It was Grey.
Heat blazed a trail across the bridge of her nose, unfolding like butterfly wings across her cheeks. Sasha’s messages haunted her thoughts.
Yes, she knew Grey was attracted to her – despite her dowdy tankini – but that didn’t mean she was going to start sashaying around like Sasha and seduce him on the beach. She might fantasize about Officer Grey Morgan, who looked so hot in uniform, but that was as far as she dared to take it.
You up for the beach this weekend?
She read and re-read Grey’s message, as if some hidden meaning might present itself.
Yes. Sasha just invited me.
Great. I’ll be there. Wanna get breakfast first?
Is everyone going? She typed it before letting herself think, and was immediately hit with a sense of regret. What was the alternative – that he’d just asked her on a date and she’d been too dense to realize it?
I could invite them. If you want.
Her heart actually skipped a beat as her finger hovered over the screen. She wasn’t meant for this: flirting on the phone or – God forbid – in real life. For some reason, Grey didn’t seem to realize that.
Still, she indulged in a quick mental rundown of all the things she liked about him: his amazing body – a buffet of suntanned muscles – and dark eyes that always sought out hers, his fun personality. He was so unbelievably easy to be around – when she was with him, it felt like the Earth’s gravity hardly touched her. That was the clincher, the thing that really made her like him. Unfortunately, it was also the thing that made them totally incompatible.
Not that she was looking for a guy, period, but Grey was the last person who’d be happy with someone like her. Fun wasn’t exactly her middle name, and she was self-aware enough to realize that.
Breakfast sounds good. She hit send before she could tack something stupid onto the end, then regretted it. He probably thought she was trying to be coy, or cold. She wasn’t sure which one was worse.
Okay. Nine o’clock at that café on Seaside Ave. The one with the shark cookies.
You mean Sea Glass Café? The place was popular, mostly because it was one of just two cafés in the small town of Cypress. It also served iced sugar cookies shaped like sharks, which were a big draw for kids, and apparently Grey.
Yeah. See you there.
He didn’t say whether he planned to invite anyone else.
Kerry didn’t ask, either – didn’t have the chance to – because the sound of a vehicle in her driveway immobilized her where she sat in the center of the couch, one foot wedged between two cushions.
The motor hummed the way motors did when a car was barely moving, creeping to a halt. The soft pops and snaps of stray stones being crushed came from outside the Cape Cod she rented just beyond town limits, and the small sounds echoed like gunfire in her mind. She could see the vehicle in her mind’s eye – a three ton steel predator cutting through the night, headlights searching for her shape beyond the veil of her living room curtains.
Her heart pounded so hard it hurt, the beat throbbing in her temples, giving her a headache. She looked back down at her phone, forgetting all about Sasha and Grey’s texts. What about the call before that – the one from the unknown 606 number?
606. Eastern Kentucky. A call from what had once been home. Maybe, just maybe, a call from him.
If he’d managed to discover her phone number, he might know other things about her, like where she lived. And if he’d found that out, he’d show up on her doorstep, she had no doubt.
Was that him now? The thought latched onto her, biting with brutal staying power.
The phone slid out of her hands, hit the floor with a bang. The battery fell out, and the plastic case flew free, failing to keep its promises to protect the phone. Instantly, her heart rate spiked, rattling her pulse points with painful percussion as a coppery taste filled her mouth.
She scrambled for the pieces, glad for an excuse to stay low to the floor, away from the windows. Frantic, familiar thoughts chased their way through her mind. What if it was him – what if he broke in somehow before she could get her phone back together, or before the police arrived, even if she did manage to call 911?
Should she get her gun – the one she kept under her bed?
No. Her hands were shaking so badly that she couldn’t even
put her phone back together. If she tried to fire a weapon, she’d probably shoot herself or send a bullet flying into a neighbor’s home. The realization dawned on her like a cold sun, and she had to choke back a groan.
She broke a nail on the crappy phone case, dropped the phone again. Maybe she’d broken it. If so, there was no way she could call for help. She didn’t have a landline. She hadn’t wanted one, because home phone numbers could be looked up so easily. Having just a cell phone had seemed safer. But had her precautions been enough?
The purr of an auto engine had turned her peaceful evening into a waking nightmare. As she struggled with the scattered pieces of her phone, a sense of déjà vu overwhelmed her. She knew this feeling from her dreams, the ones she woke up from drenched in sweat. She couldn’t call for help. All she needed now to completely turn the scenario into one of her nightmares was for the lights to stop working.
The thought filled her with genuine terror. At the moment, an electrical failure seemed possible, even likely despite the fact that she was up to date on her utility bills and the house’s wiring had been redone just four years ago.
She thought again of the Glock 17 beneath her bed, the one she’d sacrificed nearly two weeks of pay to buy three years – a lifetime – ago, even though she hadn’t been able to afford it. The gun store owner had tried to talk her into something else, something small and pink and girly she could put in her purse. She’d walked out with the Glock and a stash of hollow point ammunition.
Now she knew: she wasn’t prepared to use a weapon, no matter how reliable it was. She was too broken, even after all this time. Suddenly, her years of metamorphosis seemed more like years of scraping by. Surviving. Never really changing.
She was aware that it was pathetic, but her panic left her little emotion to spare on that fact.
The snap of her battery being wedged back into her phone echoed through the whole house, and then there were the agonizing seconds of waiting for it to restart, blaring the little jingle some faraway marketing department had mandated, as if she didn’t know what kind of phone she used.
Finally, it was ready, the screen glowing with a snapshot of the sun rising over the Atlantic Ocean. She punched in a 9 and was so relieved to find that the phone worked that she probably would’ve collapsed, if she hadn’t already been on the floor.
She was about to hit 1 for the second time when reality caught up with her.
What the hell was she doing – calling 911 because a car was turning around in her driveway?
She lowered the phone.
Making her way to the window was like forcing herself to wade through a sea of half-dry cement, but she did it anyway, made herself lift up the corner of a curtain and peek out.
A sedan was pulling away from the curb on her side of the road, colorless and generic in the night. The red of its taillights burnt in her field of vision, and she barely registered a Virginia license plate.
Just a lost tourist. Plenty of Virginians vacationed on the North Carolina coast. She told herself that over and over as she sank back down onto the floor, breathing a sigh of tentative relief.
“Riley County 911. Where is the location of your emergency?”
A voice rose from inside Kerry’s tightly-curled fist, and a new type of horror dawned on her.
“I misdialed,” she said, pressing the phone to her cheek. “I’m so sorry. I misdialed.”
Her voice was staccato, all breath and breathless at the same time. She hung up quickly, embarrassed that anyone had heard her speak that way, even if it was just an anonymous 911 dispatcher.
Her mouth was still filled with the metallic taste of adrenaline, and she could feel her heartbeat radiating through every fiber of her being, a physical manifestation of what a fool she’d been. This wasn’t the first time something ordinary had plunged her into an unjustified panic, but it was the first time she’d dialed 911 by accident. She’d thought she was getting better, finally growing into her role as an autonomous, independent woman. But then…
Well, the past few months had shaken her up. She’d watched her best friends rub shoulders with death at the hands of men they’d never known, men whose paths they’d stumbled across by association. If they couldn’t be safe, how could she – a woman who had every reason to look over her shoulder – ever be?
It was a question she dwelled on as she retreated to her bedroom, locking the knob behind herself and then securing the sliding bolt she’d picked up at the local hardware store. Her single bed beckoned her, a lonely symbol of her independence. As soon as she sank down onto the quilt, her phone rang.
It startled her, and so did the name displayed on the screen. Grey. Was he really calling – now of all times?
She let it ring again twice, hoarding those few seconds in an attempt to pull herself together. When she answered the call, her voice sounded better than it had during her accidental 911 call.
Which wasn’t saying much.
“Hello?”
“Kerry. Is everything all right?”
“Yes. Why wouldn’t it be?”
“You didn’t answer my text. I thought maybe—”
“No. Everything’s okay.” After her idiotic 911 call, she didn’t need the added embarrassment of remembering why Grey might think an unanswered text was an indicator of trouble.
She didn’t mention the missed call, either – to anyone else, it would probably seem harmless.
“Okay. If you say so. Have you been running?”
“No.” She consciously tried to steady her breathing, focusing on the diamond lap pattern of her quilt, angular blue and white shapes repeating over and over. She ran her fingertips over the age-softened cotton and instantly felt far away, drawn out of her coastal Carolina home by an uneasy nostalgia.
The quilt had been made by her grandmother and was one of very few things Kerry had brought along when she’d left home, when she’d fled to the coast and started a new life. She wasn’t particularly attached to the thing, but she’d been dead broke at the time and had brought it as a matter of practicality, unable to afford simple things like a new bed set.
“You sound like you have.”
“It must be the connection.” The lie rolled off the tip of her tongue, a self-protective mechanism. No way was she telling Grey about what an ass she’d just made out of herself.
“All right. I don’t mean to be a bother. After everything, though… I was worried. Thought maybe you could use someone to talk to.”
Oh, she’d talked to Grey all right. On that nightmarish day, the one when she’d walked away from Wisteria, covered in ash. He’d been the one to guide her away from the house, hold her hand and drive her home. She was grateful for the kindness he’d shown her, but also deeply embarrassed, in the same way she would’ve been if she’d knocked back a bottle of wine and then blabbed all her deepest secrets to someone.
Horror had acted as a truth serum. She’d cried in front of him, had stood in his presence, emotionally eviscerated by not being able to save her best friend from what had seemed like certain death. And she’d come so, so close to telling him everything.
She’d never told anyone before – still hadn’t.
Now, every time she saw him, her reaction was to clamp her mouth tightly shut, her lips sealed by the uncomfortable feeling that she’d gone too far – said too much. Grey didn’t deserve to have all her crazy dumped into his lap. She was better than that – or at least, she could fake it when she was around other people.
No one had to know about her late night 911 freak outs.
“Kerry?” He sounded a million miles away.
“Yeah?”
“You haven’t said anything in about a century. The only reason I knew you were still on the line was because I could hear you breathing. You sure you’re all right?”
“I’m sure. I just spaced out. It’s late, and I’m tired.”
“I won’t keep you on the phone then. See you Sunday.”
“Is that when we’r
e all going to the beach?”
“It’s gotta be – I have work Saturday, and so do Henry and Liam.”
“Okay. I’ll see you then.”
“Nine o’clock. Sea Glass.”
“Right.”
“And Kerry?”
“What?”
“It’s going to be okay. They’re gone now – the Levinsons, I mean. They’re not going to hurt anyone else.”
“I know.” A twinge of guilt fired through Kerry. Grey obviously thought she’d been mentally scarred by the past summer and the Levinson Brothers’ reign of terror. And maybe she had been. But that wasn’t what this was about. She couldn’t blame her faults on those two psychopaths, no matter how twisted they’d been.
Grey was just saying goodbye when a noise echoed through the house – Kerry’s small, locked-up world. She made a sound deep in her throat, drew a ragged breath she knew Grey heard.
“What is it?” His voice was different now. Not his usual easygoing tone – demanding. Concerned.
“There’s someone knocking on my door.” She tried to sound like her heart wasn’t beating hard enough to bruise her ribs from the inside out. She wouldn’t drop the phone this time – she wouldn’t.
“Are you expecting anyone?”
“No. It’s the middle of the night.” Okay, so it was only ten o’clock, but it was dark. Who went around knocking unexpectedly on people’s doors at 10 pm in Cypress?
If it’d been daylight, she would’ve consoled herself with thoughts of cookie-selling Girl Scouts or a kid going door to door looking to earn money mowing lawns. Hell, even a religious crusader would’ve been a relief. But with the sun tucked away and the moon shining stark and silver down on her little rural neighborhood, all she could think about were ax murderers and burglars, prison escapees. Or worse: him.
“Don’t answer if it’s someone you don’t know.” For all his talk about everything being okay, Grey sure sounded on edge. That made Kerry feel a little less crazy, but it certainly didn’t dispel her fear.
