Читать книгу You Only Love Once - Tori Carrington - Страница 8

“YOU’RE LATE, Officer McCoy. Again.”

David waved away O’Leary, the desk sergeant, and his penchant for protocol as he rushed by on his way to the briefing room. He’d run into bumper-to-bumper traffic near Dupont Circle, so had parked his car in the station commander’s spot in front of the street level building to save time. His uniform shirt was wrinkled because when he’d looked for it on the passenger’s seat—where he thought he’d put it when he leapt into the car half-dressed—he found instead that he’d been sitting on it. And he hadn’t had a chance to clean and check his firearm, as he did every morning.

Despite all that, he caught himself whistling.

Okay, so it was tuneless, and he was also pretty sure he looked like Gomer Pyle on drugs, but he couldn’t help himself.

Slowing his step, he made sure the back of his shirt was tucked in, folded his police issue winter jacket over his arm, and started to turn the corner. Lieutenant Kowalsky would have his ass for being late again. Still, suffering through old Kow’s impending wrath didn’t bother him half as much as it normally would. His good humor might have something to do with last night, and the incredible mind-blowing sex he’d had with Kelli Hatfield.

Kelli Hatfield.

If it was true what they said about the whole Hatfield and McCoy feud…well, then, he and Kelli had made it their duty to put a huge dent into righting old wrongs.

“Nobody’s in there.”

O’Leary’s words reached him the instant David opened the door to find the briefing room empty. He relaxed his shoulders from their stiff at-attention angle then glanced at his watch. Certainly, he hadn’t missed roll call.

“Okay, O’L, what gives?” David stalked back to the front desk.

“Didn’t have your radio on during the drive in, did you, kid? Everyone’s downtown. Some guy’s holding his little girl hostage until he can talk to his estranged wife. The whole city and county forces are down there now, not to mention every branch of the news media.”

David felt the familiar, all-powerful burst of adrenaline kicking in. A hostage situation. Now that was a meaty way to start a day. He sprinted for the door, shrugging into his coat as he went.

“McCoy!”

David winced at Kowalsky’s shout. He’d recognize that low, eardrum-popping sound anywhere. The guys around the station joked that you could hear his voice in the next county if you listened hard enough.

“Yes, Lieutenant?” he said, turning to face him, though he maintained his momentum.

“Going somewhere?” Kow asked, eyeing his shirt and raising a brow.

David either had to go through the door or stop. Given the warning written all over his superior’s face, he opted for stop. “Yes, sir, I thought I’d head downtown to see if I could be of assistance.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“Sir?” Methodically, he patted his badge, his firearm, his cuffs. All there.

“Your new partner, McCoy. I’m talking about your new partner.”

David winced for the second time. That’s all he needed. A new guy to play getting-to-know-you with during the ride downtown. He quickly rebounded. “Sorry, sir. I’d assumed that since I was late, he would already be on the scene.”

Contrary to his name, Kowalsky was a six foot five African-American with the manner of a drill sergeant and a monstrous grin he used only to his advantage. That he grinned now made David mutter a mild oath.

“What was that, McCoy?”

“Nothing, sir. My new partner… Where can I find him?”

Kow’s grin widened. “Right here, McCoy.”

He turned to find the hall empty. The grin left his face. “Hatfield!”

The bottom of David’s stomach dropped out. Hatfield. His mind quickly calculated the odds that he would meet two Hatfields in less than twenty-four hours. They were very small. So small as to be minuscule. So tiny as to be impossible…

Naw. He had Hatfield on the brain, that’s all.

He made the mistake of looking at Kow’s suspicious grin, noting the telling absence of his new partner—as if he or she didn’t want to be seen—and felt the sudden, irresistible urge to run. Especially when the sweetly sexy, innocently insatiable, utterly feminine Kelli Hatfield popped out from around the corner, her face mirroring the shock he felt.

Forget his stomach. The floor had just dropped out from beneath his feet.

It couldn’t…wouldn’t…there was no way in hell that this…that she…was his new partner. Hell, last night he judged her competence to be somewhere between squirting perfume on little blue-haired ladies with platinum credit cards and helping panicky brides try on their wedding dresses. The reality that she was actually a cop was enough to send any man reeling.

Kelli appeared to regain her bearings before he did. “Officer McCoy,” she said, clearing her throat. Apparently remembering their company, she moved her coat from her right to her left arm, then thrust her hand—her soft, slender, delicate hand—toward him.

David took it, tempted to use it to pull her into the nearest room so they could have a little talk. Now. Kow be damned.

Speaking of Kow, he glanced to find him staring at them guardedly. “You two know each other?”

David nearly choked on the words, “yep, in the most sinful sense.”

“Yes, sir,” Kelli answered instead. “We met last night at The Pour House. First night back in town, as luck would have it.”

“Good.” Kow nodded. “Now isn’t there some place you guys need to be?”

He had to be dreaming. That was it. This was all some sort of sick, twisted nightmare brought on by what happened to his ex-partner and his anxiety of who his new partner would be. At any moment he would—

“McCoy!” Kow barked. “Get with the program, man.”

David winced. If this was a dream, what the hell was Kowalsky doing here?

Kelli gave him a pointed look. “We’re on our way, sir,” she said.

Completely dumbfounded, David watched her walk by him. Catching a whiff of her subtle scent didn’t help matters any. His gaze zipped around the station lobby, but he didn’t find any chuckling officers hiding behind any doors or around the corner. O’Leary wasn’t even watching them. And Kow’s expression darkened further with each second that passed.

This is for real. It wasn’t some really bad practical joke being played on him by fellow, prankster officers. Kelli Hatfield truly was his new partner.

Yeah, and he was the king of Siam.

Picking up his jaw off the gritty tile, David hurried after Kelli’s trim little bottom. The door closed after them and he stopped again. After a few steps, she turned toward him, shrugging into her coat. “Are you coming, McCoy?”

“There’s no way…I mean, I don’t believe… Come on, Kelli, you can’t be a police officer,” he blurted.

She planted her fists on her hips, her expression altogether thunderous. “Which one’s ours?”

“Huh?”

“The car, Officer. Which is our vehicle?”

David pointed left to the cruiser in the lot and watched her head for it. She reached the driver’s side. The impact of what her actions meant provided the impetus he needed to finally move. He was next to her in no time flat. “I’ll drive.”

Rolling her eyes toward the sky, she took her hand off the handle, then rounded the car and got in the passenger’s side.

David stood still for a long moment, concentrating on little more than his breathing. This couldn’t be happening. Any second now he expected to wake up from this dream—nightmare—and find his mind was playing some sort of sick joke on him after last night’s recklessness. He bent over and looked through the window. Kelli was fastening her seat belt. He snapped upright again. Nope. She was still there.

Damn.

KELLI SAT flagpole straight, staring at the dash like a dazed crash victim waiting for the airbag to deflate. Her friend Bronte’s words of warning from the night before echoed in her mind. “Just don’t say I didn’t tell you so….”

Somehow she didn’t think this was what Bronte had in mind. Though her friend would probably argue it was exactly what she deserved—right after she laughed herself into hysteria.

Kelli closed her eyes tightly. Only to her. This could happen only to her. Her first night back home in D.C., the one and only night out of her entire life that she had thrown caution to the wind, and she wound up spending it with her new partner, screwing up both her personal and her professional life.

She scrubbed her damp palms against the scratchy material of her police issue slacks and whispered a long line of curses that would have done her police chief father proud. Well, it would have done him proud if, indeed, she’d ended up being the son he’d wanted instead of his only daughter. But she hadn’t, and it was a fact he never let her forget. Not when she’d played little league baseball. Not when she’d enrolled in the academy at twenty. Not when she’d graduated and was denied a spot with the D.C. Metropolitan Police. It hadn’t helped any when she learned that her father made sure her status was knocked down to third tier standby, essentially barring her from a job on the force. Apparently he had thought she would lose interest in her pursuit while in the academy. He’d always been so overprotective. As he’d told her, no little girl of his was going to get her butt shot off so long as he had any power within the department. And as Regional Assistant Chief for the East, he had more than enough to waylay her…at least in D.C. In New York, however, his power was nil.

The driver’s door finally opened and Kelli nearly launched from her seat. David slid behind the wheel. She pointedly avoided his gaze and suspected he did the same beside her.

He’s just as much a victim in this as I am, she reminded herself. But for some reason his undisguised disbelief when they were introduced irritated her. Shock, she expected. Disbelief? Suddenly agitated, she shifted. She told herself to give him the benefit of the doubt. That there was a good chance he wasn’t like eighty percent of the other males she’d worked with who thought her completely incapable of her job as a police officer. Okay, maybe not a good chance. But there was a chance. And after last night, she, um, owed him at least that much consideration.

He moved. She forced herself to look at him. His mouth was moving, but no words made it past his impossibly wicked lips. She swallowed, reminding herself that she wasn’t supposed to notice what a great mouth he had…or remember all the naughty places that mouth had been mere hours earlier.

His attempts at speech continued, nudging up her impatience level. Finally, she said, “Look, I didn’t expect this anymore than you did, David…um, McCoy.” Stick to last names. Maybe that would afford her the distance she so desperately needed right now.

His crack at imitating a wide-mouth bass out of water stopped and he seemed to relax. “Actually, Hatfield,” he said, stressing her last name. “That’s not entirely true. Last night you knew you were going to be reporting to work at this station and that you would be assigned a new partner. That’s a helluva lot more than I was privy to.”

She sighed and stared at the ceiling of the car. Okay, she’d give him that. Still… “Come on, David, we met at a cop bar. Surely you had to know there was some connection.”

“All right. Sure. Maybe. But as someone’s daughter. Or sister. Or…”

She raised a brow, daring him to say “cop groupie.”

He cursed under his breath. “I didn’t expect you to be a blasted police officer.”

She stared out the windshield as a couple of uniforms walked by, openly curious about the couple in the squad car a few feet away. “Don’t you think we should get going?”

“Huh?” He followed her line of vision. His long-suffering sigh told her he’d somewhat snapped out of his momentary trance.

“Look, David, when I came in this morning, this was the last thing I expected.” She hated that she noticed his eyes were an even more vibrant blue in the light of day. “I say we do this. Go on about our business for now and pretend last night never happened.”

He blinked as if the effort took every ounce of his concentration. “Are you crazy?” he said, startling her with his intensity. “I have the best friggin’ sex of my life and you tell me to forget about it? Act like it never happened?”

Heat spread quickly through Kelli’s veins, making her remember just how incredible last night had been for her, too. But last night was last night. And, oh boy, did the guy who sang “What a Difference a Day Makes” ever know what he was talking about.

David started the cruiser and began to back out. “Ain’t a chance in hell I’m going to forget about last night, Kelli.” He looked at her. “And I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you forget either.”

THEY ARRIVED on the scene to find the street glutted with blue-and-whites. David spotted the scene commander and within moments he and Kelli were next to him. A brisk December breeze brought her scent to him. Damn, but she smelled good. Like ripe peaches picked fresh from the tree.

He grimaced. Yeah, she was a peach all right. A peach with a gun.

“Glad you could join us, McCoy,” Sutherland said dryly.

An officer David recognized as being at the bar the night before chuckled as he elbowed his partner.

“Look, loverboy has himself a new partner.”

“Can it, Jennings,” David told him. His gaze rested on Kelli’s face to find bright spots of red high on her cheeks. But whether her flush was a result of the cold, or the obvious gossiping going on, he couldn’t tell. Her shoulder-length toffee-colored hair was caught back in a neat French braid, her skin nearly flawless where the gray morning light caught it.

She looked at him. He immediately looked back at the commander. “Why don’t you bring me…us up to speed on what’s going on?”

Sutherland did, covering much the same ground O’Leary had at the station. Except his details were more specific. The perp was on the third floor. Door was open, but there wasn’t a clean shot. He pointed to where the perpetrator’s estranged wife stood shivering next to a nearby patrol car, then to a fire escape on the side of the building. Across the way on the roof of a neighboring building a couple of sharpshooters were setting up shop.

“The perp demands to talk to his wife before he’ll give up the three-year-old girl.”

“The perp is the child’s father?”

“He ceased being a father the minute he took his own child hostage, McCoy.”

David stepped backward until the fire escape was in sight, ignoring the red-and-white flashes of light against the brick building.

“What is it?” Kelli asked, coming to stand next to him.

He looked at her again. Damn, but just looking at her did all sorts of funny things to his stomach. “Just that the guy couldn’t have picked a worse time to do this, that’s all. You’ve got the tired third shifters exhausted and pumped up on caffeine, their trigger fingers itchy as hell. Then there are the first shift guys barely awake and pissed as hell that their coffee-and-donut run was interrupted.” He grimaced. “Really bad timing.”

Her gaze swept him from forehead to mouth. Was she remembering last night as vividly as he was? Was she thinking about how great it had felt to be joined together, far, far away from this mess? She looked quickly away and this time he was sure the color of her cheeks wasn’t due to the cold. “Any ideas on how to end it?” she asked.

He mulled over her words. “Yeah. I think what I just said makes a lot of sense.”

“What, let SWAT take him out?”

“No. The donuts part. If the father’s just coming off third shift he probably hasn’t had breakfast yet. A guy can get awful hungry after putting in a full one.”

“Are you saying we should feed the perp?” she asked, a suspicious shadow darkening her green eyes.

“The father, Hatfield. The guy is the kid’s father.” He grinned. “And yeah, I think we should try feeding him.” He shrugged. “Couldn’t hurt.”

He scanned the street. At the corner was a small donut shop. He thrust five dollars at her. “Here. Get a half dozen and a couple of coffees.”

Kelli frowned. “But—”

“Do it, Hatfield.”

Her eyes flashed, but she started toward the shop—though not without looking back a couple of times first.

The instant she was out of sight, David grabbed a bullet-proof vest from the back of a riot wagon, then strode toward the fire escape. He pulled down the ladder even as he shrugged into the vest. He pulled his weight up on the first rung, then methodically climbed until he reached the third floor landing. Ducking off to the side, he peeked in through the window. The father was sitting on a couch out of view of the front door and of the sharpshooters across the street, grasping his little girl in one hand, a twelve-gauge shotgun in his other. The little girl looked unharmed. More than that, the toddler didn’t seem to have the slightest idea that things were out of control as she giggled and toyed with the buttons down the front of her father’s work shirt.

David ducked back out of sight and took a deep breath. He figured out the scenario in his mind. The father had just knocked off work at a nearby factory, had stopped by to see his daughter, his soon-to-be ex refused to allow him to, and he’d taken matters into his own hands.

Any way you cut it, what had begun as a harmless domestic squabble had spiraled out of control until you had the situation he now faced.

“I’ve got a clean shot,” a sharpshooter’s voice crackled over the radio fastened to David’s gun belt.

“Be at the ready,” scene commander Sutherland’s voice responded.

Shaking his head, David reached over and tested the old wood-frame window. Unlocked. Hoping the bit of luck would stay with him, he pushed the window up before the guy inside, and the commander outside, had time to react.

“Whoa, there, cowboy,” David said, swinging his feet over the sill and sitting with his hands up. “My name’s McCoy and I’m here to make sure no one gets hurt.” He grinned. “Especially me.”

OFFICERS, uniformed and otherwise swarmed the small, neat apartment, talking into radios, issuing orders and generally making a mess out of things. In the middle of the chaos, Kelli finished reading the perp his Miranda rights, then cuffed him. Distractedly, her gaze trailed over to where David stood near the door holding the little girl. She clung to him like a young chimp. He leaned in and whispered something into her ear, then chucked her under her dimpled chin. She twirled her blond, sleep-tousled hair around her chubby index finger, then giggled shyly. Somehow, David had not only skillfully managed to keep the girl from seeing her father being arrested, he had made her laugh. Kelli couldn’t help noticing how…right he looked holding the little cherub.

Testing the cuffs, she forced the unwanted thought aside and concentrated instead on her total lack of amusement only moments before. David’s sending her off on some two-bit, phony errand so that he could play maverick hero set her blood to simmering.

“This way,” she said, grasping the perp’s elbow, then angling him toward the door.

He hesitated. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I just wanted my face to be one of the first she saw this morning, that’s all,” he told her. “It’s her birthday, you know. All I wanted was five minutes to give her a hug and her present. I would never have hurt my little girl.”

Kelli took in his aggrieved expression. “I hope not. But that’s for a judge to decide, isn’t it?”

David handed the child off to another female officer who would likely take the toddler to her mother and Kelli passed the handcuffed perp off to the first officer on the scene.

“That was a stupid stunt you pulled, David,” Kelli muttered as they walked out of the apartment together.

“Just so long as it’s over and no one got hurt.” He acknowledged a hearty slap on the back from one of their colleagues with a nod. He flashed a loaded grin at her. “I didn’t know you were so concerned about my backside.”

“I’m your partner,” she said, her breath catching at the teasing expression on his face. “I’m supposed to be concerned about your backside. But that’s not what I was talking about. I didn’t much care for your little diversionary tactic, David. Do you even know the definition of the word partn—”

“McCoy! Get your ass over here now, boy,” Sutherland’s voice boomed up the stairwell.

“Speaking of backsides…” David groaned. “I’d better go see what he wants.”

Kelli opened her mouth, then snapped it closed again. She got the impression that whatever she had to say wouldn’t make one iota of difference anyway.

She stopped and let him pass in front of her. “Go ahead. I just might enjoy watching the scene commander take a piece out of you.”

David’s grimace was altogether too cute. “Be careful what you wish for, Hatfield. At this rate, I won’t have any behind left to risk.” He waggled his brows.

Sutherland was at the bottom of the steps and was apparently ready to do just as David forecasted. Even so, Kelli couldn’t help eyeing the backside in question. The clinging, unattractive material and bulky weapons belt was unable to hide the fact that David McCoy’s behind was the stuff of which fantasies were made. She started to push wisps of hair from her forehead only to find her hand shaking. She greeted an officer, then outside on the street away from the crowd she took a deep, calming breath.

Why did she get the feeling that everything in her life had just been turned upside down? And why was it that she suspected that a certain precinct Casanova named David McCoy was solely to blame?