by Lisa Harris
She caught his gaze. “But there is something you’re not telling me.”
“Madison, there’s nothing—”
“Just tell me. Please.”
His jaw tensed, but he knew she wasn’t going to take no for an answer. Even in her groggy state, she was too stubborn for that.
“I found a black rose on the floor next to you. It was definitely the same person who’s been leaving the flowers.”
“Who killed Luke.” She closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath. “I have to remember.”
“You will.” He squeezed her hand. “But you don’t need to worry about anything right now. We’ll find out who did this.”
“Whoever shot me killed my husband, Jonas.”
“I know, but don’t try to force it. Right now you just need to rest more than anything else. Though this might change your moving date,” he said, struggling to change the subject.
She tugged on the end of the sheet. “I’ve been thinking I might stay, actually.”
“Really? What changed your mind?”
“I don’t know. Things I talked about with my dad. Things you and I talked about. The realization that I don’t have to leave or start over to move forward and that it doesn’t matter where I am, but who I’m with. And maybe most importantly the reminder that I don’t want to leave friends and family.”
And me.
No. Jonas shoved back the thought. She wasn’t staying for him.
“My sister found me this fixer-upper a couple weeks ago,” she continued. “I went to see it, and while I didn’t really say anything to her, well . . . I’m still thinking about it. It’s still on the market. Or maybe it’s more me not wanting to put up with Danielle’s constant nagging about my well-being and needing to be close to her and her family.” Madison laughed, then groaned at the pain. “Anyway, it was built in 1950, has the original hardwood floors, plus these large picture windows and mahogany woodwork.”
“So with all your spare time, you’re going to fix it up?”
“Are you any good with a hammer?”
“Are you implying you need my help?”
She laughed. “My sister’s husband is a contractor and could do most of the work. I’d end up with a discount and a great house.”
“Are you trying to convince me or yourself?”
She pressed her lips together. “Jonas, I can remember the hardwood floors in that house, my sister telling me our father has Alzheimer’s, but not who stood in my kitchen and shot me.”
All that matters is that I didn’t lose you.
He swallowed hard and forced an easy smile. “You’ll remember.”
He needed to go but didn’t want to leave her. Not yet. “There is another thing I hope you haven’t forgotten. We made a deal. I would try your cream cheese hot dogs if you try a bowl of chowder.”
“We did, didn’t we?” She smiled. “I’d like that, though it might be a few days before I can handle an outing.”
“Take as long as you want. I’m just grateful you’re alive.”
“Me too. You’re my hero. I owe you.”
“If you’re staying, then you just might get the chance to pay me back. Looks as though we’ll be working together a lot.”
She yawned. “I’d like that as long as we never repeat last week.”
“I agree.” He smiled at her, but he couldn’t forget how close she’d come to dying. Couldn’t help asking the what-ifs. What if he hadn’t been there at that moment? What if he’d decided not to go see her? There was another question, though, that he couldn’t let go of. What would happen if he told her right now what he was feeling? Because when he’d found her lying on the floor of her kitchen, he felt a piece of himself dying when he thought he was going to lose her. And now, looking at her, all he could think about was kissing her.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
Jonas avoided her gaze, thankful she couldn’t read his mind. “A couple things. One, I need to go so you can get some sleep.”
“I do need to sleep.” Her eyes started to flutter shut. “It’s getting hard to stay awake. What’s the other thing?”
Besides the fact that I’m falling for you and don’t know how to stop myself?
He shoved aside the thought and squeezed her hand. “We’re going to find who shot both you and your husband. I promise.”
She nodded. “I’m sorry . . . I’m so tired.”
She closed her eyes, and Jonas watched her sleep for a moment, before slipping out of the room. He would find a way to keep his promise to her, and maybe, just maybe, find a way to give her his heart as well.
One
Madison James burned through the final sixty seconds of her workout on the stationary bike, then released a slow breath of air. Rain had kept her inside this morning, but the forecast was calling for sunshine tomorrow. It felt good to have things back to normal again.
She headed to the bathroom, then stopped at the dresser and picked up her US Marshal badge. Today was her first day back on the job. It had been twelve weeks since she’d been shot.
And she still had no idea who’d pulled the trigger.
The doorbell rang, and she hesitated for a moment before grabbing her Glock off the bedside table and heading to the front door. She looked through the peephole, then smiled.
“Jonas?” She unlocked the bolt and the handle before opening the door. “You’re early.”
“I thought you might appreciate breakfast on your first day back. And since I didn’t know what you might be in the mood for, I brought you a bit of everything.” He headed to the kitchen, set a bag and two coffees on the counter, then turned back to her.
“Okay.” She let out a low laugh. “My interest is piqued. What did you bring?”
“Let’s see . . . raspberry vanilla croissants, an apple Danish, and pain au chocolate.” Her stomach rumbled as he pulled the baked goods out of the bag one at a time. “Or if you’d prefer something savory, I’ve got a couple smoked salmon croissants, two with bacon and one with spinach.”
“I don’t recognize the name of the bakery on the bag.” She grabbed a couple plates from the cupboard and set them on the counter. “Where did you find this place?”
“Apparently they just opened a couple weeks ago. Michaels recommended them to me.”
She glanced at the options, then picked the raspberry croissant. “Not that I’m complaining, but it looks like you were expecting to feed an army.”
Jonas laughed. “No, but I did assume that anything that didn’t get eaten here, we could always take to the office.”
She took a large bite of her croissant, savoring the flavor. “Nice way to win brownie points with the boss.”
He winked. “Oh, and there is one more thing.” He pulled a little box from the bottom of the bag and held it up. “Chocolate Mocha Cheesecake.”
“It’s six thirty in the morning.”
“This is for later. I know it’s not Friday, but I thought we might need to celebrate your first day back over dinner. Unless you’re busy tonight.”
“No, I’d like that.”
Somehow over the past three months, they’d made Friday nights a standing “date” between the two of them. Though she’d never officially call it a date. It started with Jonas coming by with takeout as an excuse to check on her after she got out of the hospital. She’d tell him the boring details of what she did that day in physical therapy, then she’d probe for details on whatever case he was on. Eventually, they ended up working on one of the DIY projects in the house she’d bought after the shooting. With his help, they managed to paint her bedroom, redo the floors in the living room and kitchen, and update the tiles in the guest bathroom.
Once, instead of their normal takeout fare, he made her shrimp linguine that was so good, she told him he might have gone into the wrong business. Boy, the man could cook. Their time together was something she’d come to look forward to, like Sunday dinners with her father and her sister’s family. Except with Jon
as, she could talk about things she couldn’t discuss with them.
Her sister teased her that there was more between her and her partner than just friendship, but Madison ignored the not-so-subtle hints. They’d only officially worked together two times. The first was a few years ago when she trained under him at a shoot house in Nashville, and the second was just before her incident. The two of them had tracked an escaped felon across the country. But the bottom line was that they were friends, nothing more, and that’s how things were going to stay.
“This is delicious.” She took a second bite of the croissant. “You can feel free to stop by with breakfast any morning of the week. I promise I won’t complain.”
He laughed at the comment and picked up one of the bacon croissants. He took a bite. “Did you run this morning?”
She glanced out the window, not surprised it was still raining. “I chose to bike indoors over getting soaked.”
“I don’t blame you.” He wiped his mouth, then caught her gaze. “How was your last day in physical therapy?”
“Worried about my overdoing it?”
“Maybe?” He took another few bites of his croissant, finishing it off in seconds.
“I passed, Jonas. I even did a ten-minute mile.”
“Not bad, though you have worked hard these past couple months.” Jonas grabbed a second croissant. “How are you sleeping?”
She avoided his gaze, focusing instead on her breakfast. “Why the twenty questions?”
“Just making conversation.”
Right.
“I know I slept, because I dreamed a lot.” She kept her voice even, not wanting him to worry about the nightmares that woke her up most nights. Or the memories that refused to surface.
“The memories will come back eventually,” he said, reading her mind. “Just give yourself some time.”
Except she’d given herself time, and three months hadn’t been enough.
She waved her hand like it didn’t matter. “Stop worrying about me. I’ll get through this. It’s part of the risk we take every day.”
Ironic, though, how she could chase a convicted felon halfway across the country and end up with barely a scratch, and then turn around and get shot in her own house. The place where she was supposed to be safe. It was part of the reason she’d put her old house on the market and snatched up the property she’d been eying in a different neighborhood. All new locks and double bolts on the doors had helped ease her anxiety. Running scared wasn’t something she was used to. She was the one who went after the criminals. Not the other way around.
But what she did know about the incident terrified her. Whoever shot her had also murdered her husband.
“I just wish whoever shot me wasn’t still out there.”
“We’ll find them,” he said.
“How? We have nothing.” She grabbed a napkin off the bar, wiped the sticky sugar residue off her fingers, then eyed the spinach croissant. “No forensic evidence. No DNA or fingerprints. Even our one eyewitness—yours truly—doesn’t have anything, and we know I was just a couple feet from the shooter.”
Or at least that’s what she’d been told from the ballistics report.
“You’re putting yourself under too much pressure.”
“No.” She shook her head while Jonas grabbed another croissant and took a huge bite. “I need to remember, Jonas. Luke has been dead for five years, and I’m no closer to finding his killer than we were the day he was murdered.”
She’d told him some of the details of the day her husband died. Luke had just finished a twelve-hour shift in the ER. He’d called her on his way to the parking garage like he did almost every day. He said he would pick up some takeout and meet her at home once she got off. She expected him to be there when she pulled into the driveway. Instead, two officers from her precinct were waiting to give her the news that Luke had been shot twice in the chest in the hospital parking garage.
For her, life had never been the same.
Madison ran her hand automatically across the four-inch scar on her stomach, trying to focus on the spinach croissant she’d been nibbling instead of the fear grumbling inside her.
She hadn’t told Jonas how many hours she spent combing through every scrap of evidence the authorities had collected on both Luke’s death and her incident. But all she found were dead ends. The only evidence they had was a black rose left at the scene, confirming in her mind that whoever had shot her was the same person who’d killed Luke.
But she had no idea what they wanted. Or when they might strike again.
“I got your text last night,” she said, shoving away the memories that haunted her. “You said Felicia’s back in town?”
“Changing the subject?”
She shot him a smile, needing to ease the tension that had surfaced between them. “I’d always rather talk about your drama than mine.”
“There’s no drama,” he said, reaching for his coffee.
“If you say so.”
“Her grandmother texts me every once and a while. She just said that Felicia’s been having some problems with her prosthetic leg and came to Seattle to see a specialist.”
“Are you going to see her?”
“I’d like to. If nothing else, for some closure, but according to Hazel, she still doesn’t want to see me.”
She caught the lingering hurt in his expression and wished she could take it away. But some things, she’d learned, weren’t fixable.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Me too.” He took a sip of his coffee. “How’s the croissant?”
“Delicious, but you know as well as I do that I need to get back to work.” She held up what was left of the spinach croissant. “If you keep spoiling me like this, I might not pass my next fitness test.”
“I doubt that, and on the upside, your new house is looking amazing. I see you hung up that new copper light?”
She turned to admire the new wall fixture she’d installed the night before. “I hope you don’t mind that I didn’t wait for you. I woke up in the middle of the night and had this inspiration to hang it in the kitchen instead of the dining room.”
“No. I like it,” he said. “It adds a lot of light to the room.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Jonas’s phone went off and he pulled it out of his pocket. She could see his expression sour.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“It’s a text from Michaels. A federal warrant finally went through for a suspect involved in that string of bank robberies.”
“Great. What are we looking at?”
Jonas hesitated. “Me, not we.”
She caught his gaze. “Jonas—”
“I’m serious. Give yourself time to ease back in. Michaels wants you at the office this week.”
She thought about arguing with him, then bit her tongue. She was going to have to find a subtler way to convince him she was ready to be out in the field. “Remind me about the case.”
“There’s been a string of bank robberies across the state. I think I’ve mentioned it to you. They’ve managed to steal over two million dollars and the Feds still don’t know who’s behind it.”
“And the warrant?”
“We were able to trace a fingerprint back to a Ben Galvan from a getaway car that was abandoned.”
“Who is he?”
“He’s nobody.” Jonas moved to the sink to wash his hands. “The strange thing is that, except for a couple minor speeding infractions in college, the guy has a clean record. He’s an accountant with a large firm in town.”
“And now he’s robbing banks?”
“That about sums it up. At least that’s what we think.”
“I want in on the raid,” she said, no longer beating around the bush. “If Michaels isn’t convinced, you can vouch for me.”
Jonas reached for a dish towel, avoiding her gaze.
“Wait a minute.” She moved around the bar and stopped in front of hi
m. “Is that the real motivation behind the croissants? You’re the one hesitating?”
“No, it’s just that—”
“It’s been three months, Jonas. I’m more than ready. My doctor has signed off, my psychologist has signed off . . .”
“I know.” He dropped the towel back onto the counter.
“You don’t think I’m ready.” It wasn’t a question, as far as she was concerned. It was a statement. She knew him well enough by now to read him.
“You’re the only one who really knows,” Jonas started, “but I can tell how hard this has been on you emotionally. On top of that, you have the added stress of your father’s recent diagnosis. Alzheimer’s is a devastating disease.”
Madison frowned. “So you’re saying that my father has a legitimate reason to forget who I am, but you’re questioning my ability to do my job because I can’t remember who shot me.”
“I’m not questioning your ability. You’re the best marshal I’ve ever worked with.”
“But . . . ,” she prodded.
“I’ll admit, the fact that you still can’t remember does worry me. Michaels and I think it might be best if you take it slow. Spend some time getting readjusted before you get back into the field.”
“I’ll call Michaels, and—”
“He left it up to me.”
Her jaw tensed. “You can’t leave me stuck behind a desk.”
She didn’t want any tension between them. Their job required complete trust in each other. But if they couldn’t—if he couldn’t completely trust her—where did that leave them?
She picked her coffee up off the counter and took a long sip. She’d been told that she likely had dissociative amnesia that stemmed from trauma. In other words, she couldn’t remember who shot her because of the psychological trauma to her brain. It was typical for a victim to lose some personal memories, but she’d forgotten something of even more importance. Knowledge. She needed to remember who’d pulled the trigger to figure out Luke’s murder.
“I want you back,” he said. “Trust me. It hasn’t been the same working without you.”
“But?”
“Are you sure you’re ready for this?”
She popped the last bite of her croissant into her mouth, then swallowed. “I am.”