Читать книгу Once a Hero - Lisa Childs, Lisa Childs, Livia Reasoner - Страница 9

A chuckle at the shocked expression on her face rumbled in Kent’s chest, but he suppressed it. Instead he moved up behind her, then closed his hand around her fingers holding the dart.

“See?” he said as he lifted her hand and guided the throw. “A bull’s-eye is right between the eyes.”

“My eyes,” she muttered. As the dart pierced the paper across the bridge of her nose, she winced.

“Your chin and ears are five points, your mouth and cheeks ten and your—”

“I get the idea,” she interrupted, tugging her hand free and stepping away.

He hadn’t realized he was still holding her. Or that Billy’s mom had left them, to return to the others. Maybe it was good he wasn’t out in the field anymore. His instincts were not as sharp as they’d once been.

“And I get to you,” she said, “whether you’re willing to admit it or not.”

“Why?” He asked the question that had been nagging at him for a year.

“Why do I get to you?” she asked, her lips tilting up in a smug smile. “Or why aren’t you willing to tell the truth?”

“Why do you want to get to me?” he wondered. “I’m always the victim of your poison pen.”

“A little paranoid, Sergeant?” she teased, her dark eyes gleaming with amusement. And triumph.

He shook his head. “No. I used to think it wasn’t personal. That I was your target just because I represented the department.”

“Now you’re a martyr,” she quipped.

Remembering all those people who had tried to make him one, he suppressed a shudder. “God, no.”

“Oh, I forgot. You’re a hero,” she said. “That’s what Mrs. Halliday called you.”

The act that others called heroic had been sheer instinct—an instinct every cop had. He didn’t doubt that any one of his fellow officers would have done the same thing he had. “I’m no hero.”

“You don’t have to tell me that.”

He clenched his jaw so hard that his back teeth ground together. The woman was damn infuriating. “So it is personal.”

“You’re paranoid,” she said, but her gaze slid away from his.

“I heard what you said to the chief,” he admitted. “That you think I got my job by arresting innocent people. Why would you ask that?”

Sure, a lot of people claimed innocence, but no one he’d arrested had ever gotten away with their crimes. There’d always been too much evidence.

She shrugged. “How else would you have racked up the arrest record you have?”

“Because a lot of people commit crimes, Ms. Powell.” He stated what he considered obvious. “And I’m good at catching them.”

“Not anymore,” she taunted. “You sit behind a desk now. Your badge is all for show.”

Damn, she had struck that nerve he’d sworn she couldn’t. But she had actually spoken a grain of truth for once. Sometimes he did feel as if his badge were only a prop.

Her eyes sparkled as if she’d picked up on her direct hit to his pride. “Isn’t that what you wanted?” she asked. “To move up in the department, to get ahead?”

Getting desked was the last thing he’d wanted, but she was the last person to whom he would make that confession. “I know what you think of me, however unfounded,” Kent said. “Do you know what I think of you?”

“I can guess,” she replied, gesturing toward the dartboard.

He shook his head. “That wasn’t my idea. Someone else blew up the photo that runs with your byline, and pinned it there.” For him. He couldn’t claim that he hadn’t appreciated the gesture, though.

“I don’t care what you think of me, Sergeant,” she insisted.

“I’m going to tell you anyway,” he assured her.

“On the record or off?”

“Everything seems to go on the record with you.” Which he would come to regret, he knew.

“The public has a right to know….”

“Do they know about you?” he wondered. “That you’re ambitious to the point of ruthless? That you’ll use anything and anyone to further your career?”

She shook her head. “The person you just described sounds more like you. You don’t know me at all, Sergeant.”

“Then I guess we’re even.”

He finally admitted to himself the rest of his reason for allowing her into the program. He hadn’t wanted to change her opinion of just the department—he’d wanted to change her opinion of him, too. After a year of trying to deal with her, he should have known better. She was a lost cause.

ERIN TIPTOED INTO her dark apartment as if she were a kid sneaking in past curfew. And just like when she was a kid, she got caught. A lamp snapped on and flooded the living room with light.

Was this actually her apartment? Someone had tidied up. Books had been put back on the built-in cherry-wood shelves. Nothing but polish covered the hardwood floor. Even the cushions were on the couch. If not for having just unlocked the door, she would have suspected she’d stumbled into the wrong place.

“You’re late,” Kathryn Powell pointed out from where she sat primly, with her ankles crossed, on the sofa. Had her mother been sleeping like that or just sitting in the dark, waiting for her?

Erin blinked against the glare of the halogen bulb of the floor lamp. “I’m sorry.”

She should have called, but she hadn’t planned to go anywhere after class. Once she’d arrived at the Lighthouse, she hadn’t dared to call, what with the rowdy background noise. Her mother would have gotten the wrong idea. She tended to think the worst of her children.

Kathryn sniffed as if doubting Erin’s sincerity, and patted her short brown hair, not a single strand of which was displaced. “Your father is upset that I’m not home yet. He doesn’t want me making that long drive alone at this hour.”

Her parents lived about seventy miles southeast of Lakewood, in the austere Tudor home where Erin and her older brother, Mitchell, had grown up, in East Grand Rapids. Her brother had moved to Lakewood for college, and then, after dropping out, had stayed on because he’d liked being close to the water.

“You can stay over,” Erin offered, although her shoulders tensed at the thought of more quality time with Mom. Despite her mother’s best efforts, she would never be able to tidy up Erin’s life.

Kathryn shook her head. “I didn’t bring any of my things with me. I didn’t think your class was supposed to go so late.”

“It wasn’t.” It hadn’t. “Or I wouldn’t have signed up. You can stay, Mom. You can borrow something of mine.”

“No, I need to get home to your father.”

Mitchell had resented their mother’s devotion to Erin’s dad, his stepfather. That devotion used to inspire Erin to want that kind of love for herself someday, but she’d given up on her dream of love for her dream of justice. She had to clear Mitchell’s name and get his conviction overturned.

Erin passed through the neat living room to the hall, traveling a few steps to lean against the doorjamb of a bedroom. A night-light with a clown’s face illuminated a jumble of blocks and cars littering the racetrack rug. She ignored the clutter and focused on the bed and the small body curled into a ball under the covers.

“How was he?” she asked her mother, who had followed her—despite her desire to get home to her husband.

Kathryn sighed. “Hyperactive. And much too dependent on you.”

Guilt surpassed the defensiveness her mother usually inspired in her, and Erin admitted, “Maybe I shouldn’t have signed up for the course.”

Kathryn stepped closer and sniffed her hair. “You smell like you’ve been in a bar instead of a classroom.”

Erin shook her head. “Restaurant. It was easier to do interviews there than at the police department.” Or it would have been if she’d actually managed to speak to anyone without Sergeant Terlecki’s interference.

“You’re wasting your time,” her mother claimed. “If what you’re really looking for is some evidence to clear your brother, you’re not going to find anything.”

“Mom, I have to help him.” She would never be able to turn her back on her half brother the way her parents had. “Not just for Mitchell but for Jason, too. He can’t keep losing people he loves.”

That was why her nephew had become so attached to Erin—he was afraid she would leave him, as his father had four years ago and then his mother just last year. Mitchell’s girlfriend had found someone else, someone who didn’t want to raise another man’s child. So except for Erin’s parents, who tended to be more disapproving than affectionate, Erin was all the little boy had now.

“If you want to help your brother,” Kathryn advised, “then get him to admit the truth.”

“He’s not the one lying.” Kent Terlecki was. He had to be, or else her brother was one of those many people of whom Kent had spoken who committed crimes. And her older brother, her hero growing up, could not be a criminal.

A CURSE BROKE THE SILENCE in the living room, then books and CDs toppled to the hardwood floor as someone banged into a table in the dark. Kent snapped on a lamp, the light revealing the intruder: a tall, wiry guy with dark hair and a beard, dressed in dark clothes.

“What the hell—” Billy griped as he rubbed his knee. “Why are you sitting up in the dark?”

“Couldn’t sleep.”

“Your back bothering you?”

Kent shook his head. “Nope,” he said, ignoring the twinge along his spine. He had grown used to it over the past few years. “That’s not the pain keeping me awake.”

“The reporter?” Billy asked, snorting with disgust.

He nodded.

“I heard you brought her to the Lighthouse.” Billy dropped onto the old plaid couch across from the leather chair where Kent sat.

“You talked to your mom?” He grinned as he thought of Marla Halliday and how she’d led Erin to the dartboard. “Did you know she was joining the class?”

Billy shook his head. “I wish Paddy would’ve given me the heads-up he gave you about Powell.”

“You’re lucky you have a mom who wants to be involved in what you’re doing,” Kent told him. He’d been estranged from his folks since he’d chosen to go to the police academy instead of continuing the Terlecki tradition of working the family farm in northern Michigan.

“Mom can’t be involved in my life now,” Billy said, sinking deeper into the couch. Exhaustion blackened the skin beneath his eyes, making him look older than his twenty-six years. “You know how vice is….”

Deep cover. Streets. Bars. Abandoned houses and back alleys. Late nights and dangerous people. Kent had loved his years in vice. That was where he had made the majority of his arrests. Erin was delusional to think he’d had to frame innocent people; he hadn’t met many innocent people during that time. Or now. Somehow he suspected she was every bit as dangerous as the criminals he’d dealt with during his stint in vice.

She sure had it in for him for some reason, finding fault with everything he said or did.

“How come you came home?” Kent asked.

Not that Billy spent every night in the drug house the department had set up in the seedy area of Lakewood. The cover wasn’t so deep that the officers weren’t entitled to some downtime. Some officers even worked a regular twelve-hour shift. Billy wasn’t one of them.

The other man yawned and flopped his head against the back of the sofa. “I wanted to get some sleep without having to keep one eye open to watch my back.”

“I remember feeling like that,” Kent sympathized.

“You should still feel like that,” his roommate warned him, “with that reporter out to get you. Why the hell did you okay Erin Powell getting into the CPA?”

He sighed. “I wanted to prove to her that the department has nothing to hide.”

“She’s not as interested in the department as she is you, Bullet,” Billy warned him. Some of the weariness left his dark eyes as he leaned forward and studied Kent. “You’re not interested in her, are you?”

Kent choked on a laugh. “Talk about having to sleep with one eye open…”

Not that he expected they would do much sleeping if they ever stopped fighting. Erin Powell was one passionate woman. Too bad her passion was hating him.

“We’re talking Fatal Attraction, huh?” Billy chuckled.

“Oh, yeah,” Kent agreed. For me. How the heck could he be attracted to a woman who obviously couldn’t stand him? Especially since he really didn’t like her much, either. But she was so damn beautiful….

“So why the hell did you bring her to the ’house?” Billy asked again, too good an officer to give up.

But after serving as public information officer for three years, Kent was good at sidestepping questions he didn’t want to answer. “She saw the picture you pinned to the dartboard,” he said instead.

Billy chuckled again. “That should be a warning to her to lay off. You showed her?”

“Your mom did.”

The younger man sighed. “Yeah, now that my mom knows where the ’house is, there’ll be no escaping her.”

“Your mom is great,” Kent countered, staunchly defending Marla Halliday. “And tough.” She’d had Billy when she was seventeen, and had raised him all by herself.

“She’s not your mom,” Billy reminded him.

That hadn’t stopped Kent from wishing he’d had someone like her in his life—someone who actually gave a damn about him. “You’re lucky.”

His friend sighed. “Yeah, I am. Too bad you didn’t have better luck.”

As well as not being a hero, he wasn’t a martyr, either. He refused to blame anyone else or make any excuses for what had happened to him. “We make our own luck.”

“By letting Powell into the program, you made yourself some bad luck, my friend,” Billy warned. “You’re going to have no escape from her now.”

It didn’t much matter where Erin went. He already had no escape from her. She was in his head…and under his skin.

“Why’d you bring her there?” Billy persisted.

Kent shrugged, keeping the grimace from his face as muscles tightened in his back. “I don’t know.”

“You want to get her to change her mind about you,” the younger officer guessed correctly.

“About the department,” Kent insisted, unwilling to admit everything.

After all the things she’d written about him, Erin Powell should be the last woman to whom Kent was attracted. But his instincts told him there was something more to her, something she didn’t want him to know. And he’d never been able to resist a mystery. Of course, his instincts had gotten too rusty to trust, so he could be wrong. He might have just imagined the hint of vulnerability in her brown eyes.

His roommate remarked, “Seems like her biggest problem is with you.”

“Seems like,” he agreed.

Billy leaned back on the sofa again and closed his eyes, almost idly asking, “So are you going to finally find out why she has a problem with you?”

“How?” She was too stubborn to tell him.

“You may have been desked, but you’re still one of the best cops Lakewood’s ever had. You know how,” his roommate insisted.

“Beat a confession out of her?” Kent asked with a laugh. “That’s the kind of cop she seems to think I was.”

“She doesn’t know a damn thing about you.”

“No.” And she seemed to think he didn’t know a thing about her. Maybe it was time—past time, actually—that he did. He wanted to know everything there was to know about Erin Powell.