“Why not?” she asked. “You’re so protective of the people around you, you’d make a great father.”
He shook his head, rested his hands on his hips and looked down at the floor. “No. I wouldn’t. And I won’t, ever. I’m always careful. Last night I wasn’t. Yeah, last night…that just reinforced my decision to be done with it and get a vasectomy to guarantee nothing like this happens again.”
Whoa. Now that was drastic. He was really serious.
“If there’s a chance you could get pregnant from last night—”
Um, yeah. This was soooo not a conversation she wanted to be having with him right now. Talk about ruining the romantic mood she’d been in all morning long. “I’m on the pill, Shane.”
“You are?”
She nodded, hating the spark of relief she saw in his eyes. Okay, it was dumb, considering they’d only been together a couple of days and he’d made no promises to her regarding anything long-term, but why did he have to regard the idea of a baby with her as so goddamn depressing? “Yes. Better to be safe than sorry in my view. It’s highly unlikely you’ll end up a daddy from what happened last night.”
He blew out a long, relieved breath. One that grated on her nerves. She reached for her brush from the sink and brushed out her hair before she could react. Ignore it. You’re thinking twelve steps ahead of where he’s at. Just let it go and enjoy being with him right now.
She forced a smile. Dropped the brush, then tightened her towel around her breasts and moved in to kiss him on his cheek. “If you want to worry about something, worry about how the heck you’re going to top last night. You raised my expectations.”
Her grin did little to ease his mood. If anything, it seemed to etch those lines deeper into his face.
He followed her out into the bedroom and watched as she peeled off her towel and slid into fresh clothes from her bag, which she’d set near the dresser last night when she’d come in to wait for him. “Hailey, we need to talk about the rest of it.”
Oh, man, he was seriously trying to ruin her good mood. She pulled the T-shirt over her head. “The rest of what?”
“What happened. What I did to you.”
Now this was what she’d expected him to start with. She tugged on jeans, buttoned them. “You didn’t hurt me, Shane. I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. Your neck’s all red.”
“That’s from the hot water in the shower,” she lied.
“We both know that’s not true.”
She glanced his way. Okay, yeah. He was definitely still feeling guilty. “I startled you. You surprised me. I’m not made of glass, though, so stop treating me like I am. Now I know not to startle you awake again.” She glanced around the floor for her shoes.
“There won’t be a next time,” he mumbled.
“What?”
“Shit.” His jaw clenched. But he didn’t once look away from her face. “I tried to keep my distance from you. I really did. Because I didn’t want what happened last night to happen in the first place. But now that it has…now you know why I won’t let it happen again.”
“Hold on a minute. What are you saying?”
“I’m saying, while we figure out who set you up, I’ll be staying somewhere else.”
Her eyes narrowed as his words sank in. “Wait. Let me get this straight. I know this doesn’t have to do with you wanting me, because I was there last night. I know you do. So you’re telling me now you’re not going to sleep with me again, all because I startled you awake?” She rolled her eyes. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Hailey—”
“I already told you there’s no chance I could have gotten pregnant. If you’re worried about that I’ll make sure we—”
“Jesus, Roarke, I killed a man!”
Her mouth snapped shut, and silence fell like a dark shroud between them. In the stillness, he rubbed a hand down his face. “Fuck, I didn’t want to tell you this.”
Yeah. She could see that in the tension etched into his face. “You’re a cop. And…things happen in the line of duty. So…I’m not sure what that has to do with you and me.”
He looked up at the ceiling, seemed to gather his thoughts. And suddenly she wasn’t sure she wanted to know what he was about to tell her. “You asked me if I ever thought about marriage. I did. Once. About a year ago. Tony and I got called out on a homicide. In the projects. A twenty-two-year-old hooker had been sliced and diced. We knew it was her pimp who did it. He’d cut her in places to make sure if she lived she’d never work again.”
Hailey’s stomach rolled. “That’s sick.”
“I got the job of knocking on doors, looking for witnesses. This one apartment, two doors down…a girl answered. She was young. Early twenties. Skin and bones. And scared out of her mind. But what I noticed most were the bruises all over her face. Someone had beaten her good. She wouldn’t talk to me, but I had a hunch she knew more than she was letting on. So I went back a few days later and tracked her down.
“She was wary at first. But after a while I got her to open up. Her name was Julie. She and the victim were friends. They worked for the same SOB.”
“She was a hooker, too.”
“She didn’t tell me much, and I knew the same POS who’d killed the other girl had beaten Julie black and blue to keep her from talking. But I went back anyway. Several times. Until she agreed to have coffee with me in a caféseveral miles away.”
Hailey sensed immediately something bad was coming, and her stomach tightened. “What happened?”
He looked toward the windows, somewhat lost in memories. “She’d been in Chicago less than six months, followed her boyfriend there from North Dakota, and then he’d ditched her. She hadn’t known anyone, didn’t have any money. There was no one she could call back home for help. She’d met Dee Dee—the girl who was killed—at the bus station. Dee Dee’d given her a place to stay, had told her how she could make some cash, had introduced her to Malcolm.”
The pimp. The way Shane said the man’s name sent ice to Hailey’s veins.
“Julie was…pretty. Like the girl next door. And so damn sweet, even after all the crappy luck she’d been served. She’d gotten in with the wrong people. And she was stuck.”
“You helped her,” Hailey said, as understanding dawned. Of course he would have. He was a protector. Remembering the way Shane had reacted to her bruised face in Lake Geneva, she knew without a doubt he’d helped this girl.
He nodded, swallowed. “She didn’t want me to. Took a couple of months before she’d let me. Going back and seeing her, talking her out of staying. But eventually…yeah, I helped her get away from Malcolm. I got her hooked up with a new apartment on the other side of the city, in a good neighborhood. Got her a job with my ex-partner, Jack, doing secretarial stuff at his PI firm. Made sure Malcolm didn’t know where she’d gone. Since no one would talk about his involvement in Dee Dee’s murder, we didn’t have crap on him, but I knew he did it.”
Hailey’s stomach tightened. “Then what?”
“I kept my distance from her for a while. If Malcolm thought I’d been the one to get her out of there, I didn’t want him following me to find her. After about three months, I figured things were safe, you know? So I went to see her at Jack’s office. And the change in her…it was like night and day. She was a different woman. Her hair was short, her eyes sparkled. She’d gained at least ten pounds that made all the difference. And she smiled. All the time. It was like…the way I think she might have been before she’d come to Chicago.”
A tiny piece of Hailey’s heart pinched. “You loved her.”
His eyes finally met hers, only they weren’t soft like his words, they were very hard, and very dark. “No. But I could have. I think…I wanted to. I took her to dinner. And the whole time she was grinning at me and talking nonstop about Jack and her job and how happy she was, all I could think about was what it would be like to be with her. Not just for sex, but long-term. With som
eone who had that much energy and love of life.”
This was the woman he’d considered marrying. Hailey almost didn’t want to hear the rest. Knew she had to.
“I walked her back to her apartment,” Shane went on, not waiting for a reaction. “I wanted to go inside with her, but I didn’t want her to feel like she owed me or that I was only interested in sex. When she invited me in, I said no, even though I was already thinking about when I was going to see her again. I kissed her good night instead, then left.”
She didn’t know how, but Hailey instinctively knew that was the last time he’d seen her. “Then what?”
Shane’s eyes hardened. “He’d been waiting for her in the apartment. All those months he’d been watching me, waiting for me to lead him right to her. As I was walking back to my car he…” Shane’s eyes slammed shut, and he swallowed, hard. “The things he did to Dee Dee were nothing compared to what he did to Julie.”
Hailey pressed a hand against her mouth. “Oh, Shane. That’s horrible. But it wasn’t your fault. He—”
Shane’s eyes popped open, and her words died when she saw the danger flare in their depths. “If it hadn’t been for me, she’d still be alive. I couldn’t bring her back, but I sure as hell could do something about him.”
Now it all made sense. “You went to arrest him,” Hailey said quietly.
“No,” Shane corrected in a tone that held nothing but ice. “We didn’t have enough evidence to bring him in for questioning, let alone arrest the piece of shit. I went to kill him. I waited and I planned, and I made sure enough time had passed so it wouldn’t look like a retaliation hit. But I had absolutely no intention of bringing him in or letting him see even a thread of justice.”
A lump formed in Hailey’s throat. And she thought about the scar on his side. “You found him.”
“Yeah,” Shane said coldly. “I did. We fought. I took a knife to the side, which is how I got the scar, but in the end, he’s the one who left that warehouse in a body bag.”
He didn’t elaborate, but she could almost envision the scene. The run-down slum, the empty warehouse. The sounds of fists cracking bone and bullets echoing in the vast space.
“There was an Internal Affairs investigation. They knew about Dee Dee. They knew about Julie and that I’d gotten her a job with Jack. They knew I was up to my eyeballs in shit. The only reason I didn’t go down is because Tony lied for me.”
Hailey’s heart went out to him. The man had a clear dividing line between right and wrong, and in his mind he’d stepped over that line. Way over. She thought about what Lisa had told her in the kitchen last night, about how much Shane had changed in the last few months, how he never smiled and had pulled back from those he cared about. The memory of what he’d done and that law he was forced to uphold because of his job were obviously eating away at him.
She took two steps toward him, cautious not to touch him yet, because his eyes were still blazing and he looked ready to pound something, but she was determined to get him to listen to her. “What Malcolm did to Julie and Dee Dee was wrong, Shane.”
“I killed a man, Hailey. In cold blood. Premeditated and all that shit.”
She wasn’t so sure of that. She knew him way better than he thought she did. For whatever reason, he was trying to get her to think badly of him right now. Only it wasn’t working. She remembered how he’d been adamant Lisa and Rafe go to the police when things had turned during their search for the Furies and he’d been shot. How he’d pressured her to come clean with him in Lake Geneva about Bryan’s murder. No matter what he thought he’d gone there to do, his moral compass would have kicked in at the last minute.
The scar on his side confirmed that. If he’d gone there just to kill Malcolm, he could have done it without the struggle, without the injury that had left him in the hospital for over a week, without the scar that told her he’d more than likely killed Malcolm in self-defense.
“When did Chen arrive?” she asked.
“Right after it happened.”
“And what was IA’s final finding?”
His jaw clenched. And he hesitated, then finally said, “Exonerated.”
There it was. By definition that meant the incident had never happened, or his actions were found lawful and didn’t violate any written policies. His partner would never have been in the area unless Shane had called and told him where he was. And if Chen had known, then Shane hadn’t wanted to go through with his plan in the first place. “Self-defense is not murder, Shane,” she said quietly.
“Doesn’t matter,” he snapped. “I went with the intention of killing him, and I did.”
She took a step closer. “You stopped him from killing any other young girls. No one in their right mind would blame you for that. I certainly don’t. And if you expect me to be shocked, you’re talking to the wrong person. I worked the streets, remember? I know bad things happen to good people and that justice isn’t always served. If you’d have taken him in, there’s no telling how long it would have been before he was out again.”
“You don’t get it, Hailey. What I did to him doesn’t matter right now.” He took a giant step back before she could touch him. “I killed someone for a hooker I barely knew. I didn’t love her. Didn’t even really know her. What I feel for you is a thousand times stronger and a million times hotter, and that makes me dangerous. To you, to anyone who crosses you, to the SOB who’s setting you up for your cousin’s murder. When I said what happened last night between us won’t happen again, it’s not because I don’t want to be with you. It’s because I don’t trust myself around you. And I can’t—won’t—let anything happen to you because of me.”
A thousand thoughts and feelings rushed through her. He hadn’t said he loved her, not in so many words, but it was there, hanging in the silence between them. Her heart soared, and a joy the likes of which she’d never really known swept over her.
But just as quickly it dropped like a stone into her stomach.
Because the tone of his voice and the look in his eyes finally registered.
What he felt for her wasn’t enough to convince him she was good for him. Not enough to get him to see that she’d made him laugh and smile the last few days when no one else had in almost a year. Not enough to break through the barrier of guilt he’d built around himself. Somehow, she had to get him to see he wasn’t responsible for what Malcolm had done.
“You can’t blame yourself because you weren’t there when it happened, Shane. You did everything you could to help her, to get her a better life.” She moved toward him. “You can’t stop living because of it, either.”
He stepped out of her reach before she could touch him, and the searing look in his eyes warned her not to try. “You can’t just say that and expect me to feel it. You weren’t there. You didn’t see what he did to her. You don’t have to live with the knowledge if you hadn’t gotten involved, she’d be alive now.”
“Who’s to say Malcolm wouldn’t have killed her anyway?” she countered. She wanted to pull him close, tell him it would be okay, but she knew it wouldn’t be. Not until he was able to let this go. “Shane—”
“Look,” he said quickly, “I’m not trying to hurt you. I’m just telling you the way it is. I’m not relationship material. I thought last night…maybe there was a way…” He lifted one hand. Dropped it. “But I know now there isn’t. This ends here.”
He sounded so final. Like he’d made up his mind and she had no say in it whatsoever. But instead of being hurt, she was suddenly angry. Frustrated beyond belief because he couldn’t see what he was about to throw away. “So that’s it. All because you say so. End of story. Thanks for the fuck, and see ya.”
“Don’t say it like that.”
She glanced around the room that only a few hours ago had been cozy and warm and the only place she’d wanted to be. Now just seeing the rumpled bed and remembering what they’d done there left a hollow ache in her chest. “Why not? That’s all it was, wasn’t it?” r />
“No, it wasn’t. It was—”
She finally spotted her shoes under the chair on the far side of the room. To distract herself she dropped into the same chair they’d made love in last night and stooped to tie the laces. “You’re going back to Chicago as soon as we find that sixth sculpture, aren’t you?”
His mouth snapped shut. Then quietly he said, “Yes.”
She nodded. Didn’t bother to look at him. Hated that the ache was spreading. Hated even more that she wouldn’t tell him to leave now and save her some angst. Because if she did, there’d be no way for him to change his mind. And how desperate did that make her? God, was she ever going to learn with men? “Then I guess we’d better get busy finding that bronze so you can get home sooner rather than later.”
“Hailey—”
A knock at the door cut off his words.
He glanced at the door, then back at her. “I don’t want it to end like this.”
The regret in his voice was too much, and she stood quickly, pinned her eyes on his and pulled up the one trait that had saved her every other time life had thrown her a curveball. “I think you do. I think this makes it easy on you.”
A fist pounded against the door, followed by Rafe’s muffled voice. “Maxwell?”
Irritation creased Shane’s features as he jerked his head to the side. “What?”
“Open the damn door, cop. I’m not gonna keep yelling in my own house!”
“Fuck,” Shane muttered, stalking to the door. He disappeared around the corner. “What?”
“Good morning to you, too, sunshine,” Rafe grumbled. “Glad to see you slept so well. Your sister sent me up here to tell you breakfast is ready. And to find out if Hailey said anything to you last night. No one seems to know where she is.”