Читать книгу Deadly Temptation - Justine Davis - Страница 9

Chapter 4

“Who’d have thought it?” Logan murmured almost under his breath.

“Thought what?” Liana asked, finally coming out from behind the desk. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a light green sweater that hugged her curves without being blatant, just as he would have expected. Part of that girl-next-door thing, he thought, along with the sweet smile and the big blue eyes.

“I should have known,” he said hastily, veering off a path he didn’t want to travel. “The woman who did what you did that day in the bank isn’t one to shy away from a losing fight.”

She frowned. “You’re the one who took that crazy guy out.”

“I couldn’t have done it if you hadn’t put yourself in his line of fire and rolled that chair at him.”

He knew he’d never forget that moment. They’d been huddled in a corner, him pulling his off-duty weapon from its ankle holster, assessing the situation and looking for a way out, her exhibiting an odd combination of fear and anger. One bank customer was already dead, and he’d known there would be more bodies if he didn’t do something. The thought that one of them might be this beautiful, innocent, girl-next-door type was more than he could take.

When he’d whispered to her to stay down, that he was a cop and he was going to try for the suspect, she’d turned those big blue eyes on him with a level gaze that had surprised him.

“Would a distraction help?” she’d asked.

He’d tried to keep her from doing it, but she wasn’t having any of that. The suspect had fired again, this time wounding a teller, and he’d known he had no choice. He quickly edged to the corner of the counter, then nodded at her. A split second later she’d scrambled forward to shove a heavy office chair out into the suspect’s path, drawing his attention and his fire; the back of the chair was shredded by high-velocity rounds. In that instant Logan had stood and taken his one chance to down the shooter in the bulletproof vest, a shot to the head.

“You were the only one there who had the nerve to do something. They should have given you that medal.”

“I stayed mostly behind the counter,” she said, her tone pointed. “You’re the one who stood up and gave him a shot at you to get him before he killed anybody else.”

“And if I’d done it better, I wouldn’t have ended up in the hospital for three weeks.”

“That’s not what your lieutenant said,” she retorted. “He said your shot was perfect. It was just bad luck that the robber was able to keep firing as he went down.”

Logan winced inwardly even now, eight years later, remembering the wild spray of bullets from the automatic weapon as the killer collapsed on the bank floor. He hadn’t even realized he’d been hit until Liana had reacted, going pale and leaping toward him. He’d been startled when she’d touched him, only understanding when she shouted at someone to call for paramedics and he saw blood flowing over her fingers. His own blood.

“I thought you were dying,” she said softly, as if her thoughts had followed the same track as his. Maybe they had; you didn’t go through something like that without having the events seared deep into your memory.

“If you hadn’t slowed down the bleeding, I might have,” he said, voicing the gut-level knowledge he’d carried since that day.

“I wish I could have done more.”

“You did more than anyone.” It flashed through his mind then, the moments after he’d realized he was going down, the moments when he had thought just what she had, that he was dying. He remembered her holding him, whispering encouragement, telling him help was coming as his blood soaked her summer dress. “You stayed with me.”

Her expression changed, as if she was surprised he found that even worth remarking on. As if there had been nothing else she could possibly have done. For her, perhaps there hadn’t been.

“I remember you talking to me,” he said. “When everything started fading away, I could still hear you.”

He regretted the too-telling admission the moment the words were out. But then she gave him a soft smile that warmed him ridiculously and made him forget everything else.

“I didn’t even know your name. That was the strangest thing, all I could think of was that I didn’t even know your name.”

He heard the catch in her voice, as if she were feeling an echo of the emotions of that long-ago day. Another memory sliced through his mind then, of looking up at her as he lay on the bank’s cold tile floor, feeling everything slipping away. She’d been crying. For him, a stranger, tears had been streaming from those blue eyes.

He tried to shake off the image, but it clung stubbornly. The effort made his voice gruff again.

“We never got around to that.”

“No, we didn’t.”

They had chatted, though, in the surface way two people in line did when things were moving slowly. He remembered thinking that he’d always preferred blondes, like Lisa—the name barely stung anymore now—but a redhead like this would make any man look twice. She wasn’t flashy, or blatant, but had the quiet kind of beauty that lasted.

It had only been afterward, when he’d been flat on his back in the hospital wondering why he was still alive, that they had really talked.

“How’s your father?” she asked.

Startled, he said more bluntly than he should have, “Dead.”

She paled, then pink color rose in her cheeks. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” he said quickly, “I am. I didn’t mean to say it like that. You just caught me off guard.”

As quickly as that she accepted the apology with a nod. “What happened?”

“Cancer. Pancreatic. Five years ago. He was diagnosed and then gone in six weeks.”

“Logan, I am so sorry. He seemed like a nice man, when I met him at the hospital.”

Nice wasn’t a word he’d have used often about his old man—they’d butted heads too often—but he knew Charles Beck could be charming when he chose to be. And he’d apparently chosen to be to Liana Kiley.

“He…liked you, too,” he said after a moment.

And that, he thought, was the understatement of the century. He’d never forget his father coming into his hospital room after meeting her and saying, “Now there’s a woman!” And he’d continued with comments like that, suggesting any man who didn’t snap up a woman like Liana was a fool, until Logan had finally told him to shut up about it, and her.

He’d written it off to his father’s dislike of Lisa—he’d said from the beginning that she was all show and no staying power, and had, maddeningly, been proven right—and been even more determined to make his relationship with Lisa work. For all the good it had done him.

“It’s just as well,” he muttered. “At least he’s not here to see his only son go down in flames.”

“He wouldn’t believe it, either,” she said firmly. “He was so proud of you.”

He smothered a snort of disbelief. “Proud? Not hardly. He gave up on that the day I told him I was going to be a cop instead of stick around and run the family construction business.”

“Logan, he was proud of you. He told me so.”

He blinked. “What?”

“He told me that he’d been horribly disappointed at the time, but that he had to admire you for standing up to him and going after what you wanted.”

“He…told you that?”

“He did.” She reached out then, put a hand gently on his arm. “And that he’d come to be very, very proud of you. He was afraid you were going to die before he had a chance to tell you.” She frowned then. “In fact, he did tell you. I heard him talking to you as I left the room.”

“I don’t remember.”

“It was only the third day. You were pretty out of it.”

And you were still there, he thought, while my supposed fiancée couldn’t be bothered. Not once did she set foot in that hospital room.

He quashed the thought; Lisa’s desertion was old news. She’d passed it off, the few times she’d called him, as a pathological hatred of hospitals. He’d let it go, telling himself he understood. But he’d seen the looks in the eyes of his fellow cops, when they realized the woman he’d been living with and was set to marry hadn’t even visited him when his survival was in doubt.

“How’s your mother?” he asked hastily, feeling a bit ridiculous talking about such things but needing to get his mind out of the old rut. “And your little brother?”

“Not so little anymore,” she said with a smile. “He’s a freshman in college now.”

He remembered the antsy boy at the awards ceremony. He’d guessed he was about ten or eleven, and apparently he’d been right. He’d commented then on the age gap between them, and Liana had laughed and called him their parents’ excuse for teasing her unmercifully; it had taken them fifteen years to recover from her enough to try again, they’d always told her.

“Mom’s doing as well as she can, I think,” Liana answered his first query then. “She’s on her annual Christmas trek to visit my aunt in Iowa. Mostly she leads a quiet life, her garden, her friends, and she works part-time at the library. She still misses my father horribly.” She gave a sad little smile and lowered her eyes. “You don’t lose a hero and go on easily.”

He knew she wasn’t exaggerating about the hero part. Her father, James Kiley, had indeed been just that, a hero hailed across the country some twenty years ago when he’d risked his life and suffered burns that scarred him for the rest of his days pulling survivors out of the inferno of a plane crash.

“You lost him, too,” he said softly, something in that sad smile reaching a part of him he’d thought numbed for good.

She looked up at him then, and he saw the shimmer of unshed tears. “Yes,” she said. “And he left me forever wondering about the nature of such men, who would die for people they don’t even know.”

She didn’t add, “Like you,” but he heard it as clearly as if she had. And it hit him then, hard.

So that’s what this is all about. She’s got a bad case of hero-worship, because of what happened that day.

The realization that there was a simple, concrete, understandable reason for why she wanted to help him made him relax a little. This, at least, was more comfortable than the tangle of confused feelings he’d been wrestling with since Tony Alvera had unexpectedly dropped her name back into his conscious thoughts.

What wasn’t so comfortable was the small, niggling sense of disappointment he felt.

Liana didn’t know quite what to think. She’d assumed her visceral reaction to seeing his photograph in the paper was simply shock at the accusations against him. Whenever she’d thought of him—and that had been all too often—she’d assumed the rush of feeling that flooded her had been gratitude. Spiked, she had supposed, with a healthy dose of the admiration she always felt for anyone who had committed the kind of heroics he had, but nothing more complicated than that.

But now she wasn’t sure. He hardly cut a heroic figure now; he looked tired, edgy and beaten down. He hadn’t shaved for a couple of days, and with hair now down almost to his shoulders he looked like a biker in that leather jacket, or perhaps a bad-boy rock star the morning after a wild night. Hardly her type. And yet she couldn’t help wondering about the way her pulse leaped, and how the air in the room had seemed thinner from the moment he’d walked in.

“Liana,” he said, and she took a quick breath at the sound of her name in his voice. “Look, I appreciate the thought, but there’s really nothing you can do.”

“Me, maybe not. But don’t underestimate Redstone. I did a lot of homework before I took this job. You wouldn’t believe some of the things Redstone Security has accomplished, the criminal cases they’ve cracked while working on their own cases.”

“I’ve heard,” he admitted. “It’s why they get more cooperation from cops than any other private security firm you could name. But this is different.”

“Why?”

“This is pure drugs and money. Somebody with resources or sources is gunning for me, and it’s going to take heavy police work to get out from under.”

She studied him for a moment. “And who’s doing that work? From the sound of that article, the department is already convinced of your guilt.”

A grimace flickered across his face, and she knew she’d struck home.

He feels betrayed, she thought.

She doubted someone who hadn’t been part of that kind of brotherhood could ever really understand what it was like. She’d watched, during those days in the hospital after he’d been shot, and marveled at the constant changing of the guard; there had been at least one cop there every minute of every day. She’d commented on it to one of them, a gray-haired veteran who had smiled wearily when she’d brought him a cup of bad hospital coffee.

“We bleed blue,” he’d said quietly. “No matter who or where or how, when one of us is hurt, we all are.”

Her voice was soft, gentle when she said, “I would have thought, after what I saw in the hospital, that they’d be lining up behind you to help.”

The harsh laugh he gave held more than a touch of bitterness. “You’d think,” he muttered.

“There must be some who don’t believe you’re guilty.”

“Probably. But nobody wants to get close to a dirty cop. It might rub off.” He rubbed his eyes. “To be fair, some did believe in me, in the beginning. But there’s so much evidence now, even I’d doubt me if I didn’t know.”

“Don’t you have…a partner or something?”

He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “We’re a small department. We pretty much run solo. My bad luck. If I had a partner to back me up, they’d know I didn’t do it.”

“And the cops investigating you think you did.”

He lowered his head and rubbed his eyes, and she wondered if he’d had any sleep at all since this had all come down. “Seems that way.”

“Then you need help. All you can get.”

His head came up. One corner of his mouth quirked in what appeared to be bemusement. “You’re determined, aren’t you?”

“I’m not the scared weakling I was eight years ago,” she said.

“You may have been scared,” he said softly, “but you weren’t weak. You acted, which was more than anybody else in there did.”

“So let me again. Maybe Redstone can help, and they won’t hurt.”

“I’m not sure even the all-powerful Redstone can help,” he said, sounding suddenly exhausted.

A voice from the doorway cut across the room like a low rumble of thunder.

“Don’t count on that.”