Love like Yours Series (Box Set #1-4)

by Nicole S. Goodin

  She fell asleep quickly after that, and I wasn’t surprised, we’d worked hard tonight.

  I swept her hair off her face and kissed her forehead.

  “I love you too, Quinn,” I whispered into the darkness.

  ***

  “I’ll get it,” I called to Quinn when my doorbell dinged.

  “I’ll keep an eye on dinner!” she yelled back.

  Sweet Jesus.

  I hoped to god this didn’t take long. Quinn was terrible in the kitchen. She could safely manage coffee and toast, but anything outside of that was just asking for trouble.

  I pulled open the door and my stomach flipped.

  “Detective Rodgers? Can I help you?” I asked nervously. I was genuinely surprised to see him here; I thought for sure he’d given up on me by now.

  “Hunt.” He nodded at me once. “My partner and I...” He pointed to the car in my driveway and I saw the other officer that visited me at the hospital was sitting inside. “We were in your area and thought we’d pay you a little visit, see if you were up to talking.”

  I frowned in confusion. “But I’ve already told you everything I know...” My words trailed off at the look of bitter disappointment on his face.

  “I wanna help you, kid.”

  I stepped out onto the porch. “With what?” I asked, pulling the door so it was nearly shut behind me. The last fucking thing I needed was Quinn coming out to see who was here.

  He stared at me for a long moment, assessing how full of shit I was.

  “You know who beat up on you,” he stated.

  My heart rate spiked, and I shook my head.

  “It’s like I told you, wrong place—”

  “Wrong time,” he interrupted me with a wave of his hand. “Yeah, yeah.” He sighed. “Alright then.” He nodded slowly. “You wanna play it like that... answer me this... you ever heard of the name Max Barceló?”

  My whole body tensed at the sound of that bastard’s name.

  Play it cool, Hunt.

  “Nope,” I ground out. “Who’s he?”

  His hard eyes assessed me again, and I had no doubt he could see through my bullshit. “He’s an ex-cop.”

  I needed to cut this conversation off right now. It was getting way too close to home for my liking.

  “Huh. Now that’s all very interesting, but I’ve got to get back inside...see my girlfriend’s in charge of the lamb chops and we’re lucky she hasn’t burned the place down yet,” I rambled as I pushed the door back and stepped inside. “I appreciate you coming by to see me, but I’ve told you what I know, so... so... just leave it.”

  He held out a card for me and I reluctantly reached out and took it.

  “For when you’re ready,” he replied before shaking his head and walking back down to his car.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  I rested my head against the door before pushing it shut.

  41. Quinn

  “What the hell was he talking about?” I blurted out the minute the door was closed.

  “Jesus.” Harrison held his hand over his heart. “How long have you been there?”

  “Long enough,” I stated.

  I was doing my best to stay calm. Yelling at him now would just get his back up, and after what I’d just heard, I needed some answers.

  He shrugged, trying to seem relaxed. “He thinks I’m lying.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “And are you?”

  “It’s nothing, Quinn.” His eyes hardened. “Just let it go.”

  “It’s nothing?” I asked him quietly. “Nothing? You got beaten half to death, Harrison. You could have died. If you know who did this to you, you need to tell him.”

  He huffed out a breath. “Yeah, well I didn’t die. I’m here, aren’t I?”

  I shook my head slowly. “You’re here, but you’re not here.”

  “What the hell is that meant to mean?” His voice rose, only a fraction, but enough for me to know he was going on the defensive.

  I reached out for him and held him by the biceps. “You’re here. I can see you, touch you, smell you... but your mind... it’s not here with me half the time,” I told him quietly.

  His eyes softened. “I’m right here, Skippy,” he insisted.

  “Then tell me,” I pleaded.

  He frowned. “Tell you what?”

  “Tell me what really happened, Harrison.”

  He hung his head down. “I have told you.” His voice was strained and raw.

  Lies.

  “I’ve learned a lot about you these past months, you know that?”

  He looked up at me in question.

  “I know that when you don’t want to tell me something, you look away, you usually hang your head down like you just did now.”

  “Quinn—”

  I ignored him.

  “And your voice goes all tense and pained. Like it’s hurting you to lie.” I shoved him lightly away from me. “So, I know... I know that you’re not being honest with me.”

  His eyes were begging me to stop, but I couldn’t.

  “I need honesty, Harrison.” My voice was shaking.

  “Please... just let it go. It doesn’t matter,” he pleaded. “You said you would trust me.”

  I huffed out a breath in disbelief. “It does mat—”

  “I love you, Quinn.”

  I gasped. It was the first time he’d actually said the words to me. He’d implied it a few times, but I’d never heard him say those exact words.

  My heart soared.

  He loves me.

  “Then tell me, please,” I begged.

  His eyes hardened.

  He’s not going to.

  “I’m in love with you. That’s the most honest thing there is for me to tell,” he growled. He reached for my hand. “I love you and I need you in my life, Quinn. You’re the light.”

  Rage flooded my senses and I exploded at him.

  “Then be the man I need!” I screamed. “You can’t stand there, saying you love me... that you need me, asking me to trust you, while you’re pushing me away at the same time.” I dragged in a breath.

  My hands were shaking. I’d never been so wound up in my entire life.

  “Quinn...” He reached for me again, shock written all over his face as I slapped his hand back.

  “Don’t you fucking touch me. I feel like I don’t even know who you are. You lie, you sneak around... you know what I think?”

  I didn’t give him time to come up with an answer.

  “I think you’re a coward. I think you’re too afraid of doing this with me and you’re hiding behind this... this... whatever the fuck this is.” I ran my hands through my hair. “You’re hiding.”

  He huffed out a breath. “You think I’m a coward?” His voice was rising. “Me? I’m a coward?” he yelled.

  I nodded.

  “You know nothing,” he spat, his voice full of venom.

  I blanched. I opened my mouth to scream at him, but nothing came out.

  He’s right.

  “You’re right,” I whispered.

  He stood, fists clenched at his sides, his whole body trembling with fury.

  “I do know nothing. Because you refuse to open up to me... because you tell me nothing. Because you don’t trust me.” I turned and reached for my coat from the stand by the door.

  “Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” he growled, a slight hint of desperation coming through his voice.

  “I can’t do this, Harrison,” I murmured, slipping my arms into the sleeves.

  “You’re leaving me?”

  I almost turned to look at him, hearing the pain in his words.

  “I have to.” I stood with my back to him. “You won’t let me in.”

  I picked my bag up from the table and walked towards the door.

  “Quinn.”

  I shook my head.

  “Quinn!” he yelled after me.

  I didn’t turn.

  “Skippy!” His voice was bro
ken.

  My step faltered, and I felt the tears build in my eyes. I couldn’t look back. If I looked back, I wouldn’t leave. And leaving was the only option there was now.

  “If I tell you, you’ll leave.” His voice was so quiet I nearly didn’t hear him.

  I froze but didn’t turn around, that would still be a mistake.

  “I’m leaving anyway, Harrison,” I choked out. “How much worse could it get?”

  I took his silence to mean that he didn’t have an answer for me. I reached for the door handle with a trembling hand.

  Walking away from this man was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do in my entire life. I’d walked away before, but this time was different. This time it was real.

  I turned the door handle.

  “Wait.”

  I hung my head and waited.

  “I’ll tell you.”

  My head flicked up and I froze. I stood still, debating with myself internally.

  “You’ll tell me everything?” I asked timidly.

  “Everything,” he confirmed. “I’ll tell you it all, and then you’ll leave me anyway.”

  I released the handle.

  “Sometimes the smallest step in the right direction ends up being the biggest step of your life. Tip toe if you must, but take the step.”

  - Author unknown

  42. Harrison

  “You’ll wanna sit down for this.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me and I waited for the backchat. Quinn didn’t like to take instructions from anyone; the woman was infuriating. Surprisingly though, she kept her mouth shut, and sat her ass down.

  I picked the seat opposite her. I really would have preferred to slide in next to her and hold her while I smashed the last bit of trust she had in me, but Quinn had a wild streak, and I was worried for the safety of my balls.

  “Just tell me already,” she demanded with her arms crossed and a pissed off expression on her face.

  “What do you want to know?”

  She huffed out a breath. “Are you kidding me? What do I want to know? For fuck’s sake, Harrison... I want to know what happened to you back then; I want to know where you disappear to in the middle of the night, why you’re always sneaking around... I want to know why you’re always hurt. I just want no more lies.”

  Her breathing was ragged and her words came out in a rush. She was hurting – I was hurting her.

  “They’re all telling me it’s another woman. You know that, right?” she added quietly.

  I ground my teeth together and felt my nostrils flare. “It’s not another woman, Skippy. There’s not another woman in the fucking world.”

  She sighed. “I know that.”

  “You know?” I demanded.

  She nodded and met my gaze. “I can see it when you look at me.”

  My shoulders sagged in relief.

  Maybe this will be okay.

  “So, if that’s not it, then I know it’s bad... it’s fucking bad isn’t it?”

  I scrubbed my hands over my face and breathed deeply.

  I have to tell her... it’s time she knew.

  “Every day in that court room, I see assholes... bigger assholes than you can possibly comprehend, Quinn. They’re genuinely terrible people. They do horrible things, over and over and over again, and some of them get away with it.”

  I’d always believed there were three types of people in this world. Good people, who in general, made good choices, the kind that never intentionally hurt other people. Then there were good people who made bad decisions, people that made mistakes, but tried their hardest to make up for them. And then there was the last type, the type of people I dealt with constantly. Bad people. The kind who hurt others for their own pleasure, the ones who cared about nothing and no one other than themselves.

  I classed myself in the second category of the three, Quinn was in the first, and the pieces of shit I was going to tell her about, they were undoubtedly in the latter.

  She nodded, waiting for me to continue.

  “I have to stand there, and watch their victims break all over again when these pricks walk free.”

  “But you and Reeve have a fantastic success rate,” she argued.

  “We do,” I agreed. “But some get away. Then there’s other trials, other cases, ones I’m not involved with... I see a lot that I can’t fix.”

  She nodded. “Yeah... I guess that would be hard. But I still don’t know what this has to do with anything?”

  “But there is something I can do,” I replied quietly.

  Her eyes begged me for the answer.

  “I hunt them,” I told her, staring at my hands.

  “Who?”

  I paused. “The ones that get away.”

  I glanced up at her. She didn’t understand.

  I took a deep breath. “When I first started, I’d watch a trial, and then I’d find the asshole that got away with his crimes. I would just watch him, track him down in a bar maybe. I’d say or do something that pissed him off and he’d hit me. That was all it took to get most of them locked up, assaulting a lawyer isn’t the easiest thing to get out of.”

  She smiled a little. “That’s stupid, but honorable.”

  I shook my head.

  Maybe it was... if it had ended there.

  “I felt good about what I was doing. I was making a difference. I started sitting in on more and more rulings. The problem was, after a certain amount of these assault incidents, I was pulled aside by a judge and told to keep my nose out of that world. He knew what I was doing, hell, he even appreciated it. But he knew that if this pattern kept emerging, there would be no more convictions.”

  Quinn was listening intently to me.

  “So, I got more creative. I hired an ex cop to help me track these scumbags down, and I went to work. Some of them were found with large amounts of drugs that they swore they knew nothing about, some were caught with files on their computers that breached their court conditions... the list goes on. I broke into houses, bought drugs, and threatened people. I did a lot of bad things.”

  I studied Quinn’s face. She didn’t look horrified... yet.

  I could feel the sweat beading on my brow.

  “Some of them, though, they were untouchable. The only option I had... was to take care of them myself.”

  Recognition dawned on Quinn’s face and she pulled back, as far away from me as she could get.

  “You killed them?” she whispered.

  “No,” I replied quietly.

  She relaxed and sagged down in the seat, her relief evident.

  “Not intentionally,” I whispered.

  Her mouth gaped, but no sound came out.

  Desperation filled me.

  She has to understand.

  “You have to believe me, Quinn. I never set out to kill anyone. I just wanted to hurt them... fuck, that’s bad enough...” I rubbed my temples. “I hurt a lot of men. I justified what I was doing because they were scum, rapists, pedophiles... the worst of the worst.”

  She was visibly shaking. I wanted to comfort her, reach out and take her hand, but I knew it wasn’t what she wanted from me. So instead, I just kept talking.

  “One night, I was tracking the worst guy I’d encountered yet. Max, my contact, had given me the name of the dive he spent his time in. I waited and waited for him, and eventually he came out into the alleyway to take a piss. That’s when it happened. I cleared my throat, he turned, and I shoved him hard in the chest...”

  My voice cracked as I thought about it. It was the worst night of my life.

  “He tripped over some crates and fell. He hit his head on the way down and crumpled. I thought he was faking it.”

  Quinn whimpered.

  “But he was dead,” I choked out. “I never intended to kill him.”

  I lifted my head back up to Quinn, but she wouldn’t look at me. Tears were streaming down her face.

  “I found out later that he was high as a kite, he’d been on a four-day ben
der and been fighting non-stop. They wrote his death off as an accident. Apparently, he would have died from any type of impact, if he didn’t overdose first... they decided he’d just tripped and hit his head.”

  “You think that makes it okay?” she spat the words at me.

  “No!” I yelled. “I know that doesn’t make it okay. It doesn’t stop me from thinking about it every single day of my life, even though I know I’ve done the world a favor. He’ll never kidnap and trade another young girl for sex, he’ll never get children high and sell them as slaves, he’ll never murder and rape again. I have to believe that I did the right thing going there that night, and I have to try and let the rest go.”

  “He did those things?” Quinn asked quietly, her anger evaporating slightly.

  “He was the devil,” I growled. “But nothing he did wrong makes what I did right. And I have to live with that.”

  She sat silently, twisting a ring around her finger, contemplating what I’d told her. She hadn’t run out the door, and I was surprised. I didn’t think she could handle hearing what I’d just told her.

  “What happened to you when you... when you...”

  “When I got bashed half to death?”

  She nodded, flinching at my choice of words.

  “After he died... I stopped doing it for a while. I needed a break. I needed to stop, and I did for a long time... but then there was this one day...”

  I closed my eyes as I recalled the memory.

  “I was waiting for my hearing and I slipped into the back of the courtroom to hear the verdict of the case ahead of mine. The victim was a young girl, maybe fifteen years old, and the defendant was her uncle. He’d been accused of raping her, regularly, for three years. He was found not guilty. This poor girl broke down sobbing and shaking as the verdict was read out. She was either one hell of an actress, or the court had made the wrong decision.”

  “Oh god,” Quinn whispered.

  My skin still prickled at the thought of her innocent face.

  “I’d been around a lot of lowlifes, and I usually knew how to pick them. So I watched him... there was a hunger in his eyes as he looked at that young girl, and I knew he was guilty.”

  “So you hunted him,” she stated.

  I nodded solemnly. “I beat him within an inch of his life that night. I told him if he ever touched that girl again, I’d be back to finish the job.”