“Shit, you’re beautiful,” he breathes, ducking his head to kiss my breasts and belly. “So fucking beautiful. I love you so much.”
I love you so much.
Love.
A tidal wave of ice-cold water crashes over me, and I’m choking on my own panic. Drowning. Dying.
No. No. He couldn’t have said those words. He couldn’t have just…said them. Like they were no big deal. Like they were beyond self-evident.
Jace lifts his head. “Cat? You okay? You went tense all of a sudden.”
“You said you loved me.” My voice sounds strangled even to myself.
His handsome face looks so adorably confused, and my heart twists. “Of course I love you,” he says, puzzled. “What did you think all that was last night?”
I pull my lower lip between my teeth, distressed.
His expression goes from puzzled to something else. Something wary. Watchful. “I said I was claiming you,” he says slowly. “Making you mine. What did you think that meant?”
Excellent question. Even more excellent because didn’t I realize last night that I wanted only him, that I was falling for him—and doesn’t that mean I feel the same way? Doesn’t that mean I’m in love with him?
Oh my fucking God, I’m in love with him.
I can’t breathe. I can’t think. The tidal wave is everywhere, and I’m all cold, flailing panic. I push him away and sit up, needing space, needing…a moment to just fucking think.
“Cat,” Jace says, letting me move away but not letting me wriggle out of answering. “Tell me what you think this is between us. What we have.”
“It’s supposed to be just a sex thing,” I say, pressing the heels of my hands into my eyes. “Just sex, just fun. That’s it.”
He takes my wrists and gently tugs my hands down so I have to meet his gaze. “This isn’t just anything, baby. Not between us. This is real.”
I search those gray eyes, so strong and young and sure. “That’s what I’m afraid of,” I whisper.
His jaw is tight. “Why?”
That he even has to ask reminds me of how new and naïve he is, and the unfairness of it all, the stupid, pointless waste of it all cracks me wide open. “Because this can’t go anywhere, Jace! It never can! You’re just starting, you have your entire life ahead of you, and you are going to find your wife and marry her and have lots of babies, and all of that is still going to be after several years of fucking anything that moves. I’m not going to be the reason you miss out on all that.”
If I thought his face was tight before, it’s nothing compared to now. I can see the muscles working along the sharp line of his jaw and around the sculpted corners of his mouth, like he’s working very hard not to shout. “You don’t want me to miss out,” he repeats.
“Right,” I say, even though as I say it, something twists inside me, hard. I know what I just said is true and I know it’s necessary, but God, it feels uncommonly depressing to think about. Jace’s life after me. Him falling in love and marrying and—
“Fucking other people,” he says flatly.
And that.
“So you’d be okay with me sleeping with women who aren’t you,” he clarifies in a bitter, awful voice. “You’d sleep just fine saying goodbye and knowing I’ve found a new place for my cock.”
I can’t help it—I wince. Because I hate it. I hate it. I hate the thought of any other woman getting to see the dark line of hair arrowing down from his navel or the way his long eyelashes rest on his cheeks right after he comes. I loathe the thought of anyone else knowing the flex and clench of his ass as he fucks…or the hard lengths of his thighs straining as he gets ridden…or the rough, male authority of those hands that grab and hold and squeeze as he makes love.
Most of all, I hate the thought of someone else using his bicep as a pillow. Knowing the warm fan of his breath in their hair. Getting to wake up to sleepy gray eyes already blazing with possession.
And I can’t meet those gray eyes now as I think about all this.
Hating it doesn’t change anything, I remind myself. He’s still too young. He’s still a cop. This is all still so wrong.
Jace catches my chin with his fingers and forces me to look at him. “Is it really such a huge thing? Our ages? Because it’s not to me, and if anyone says anything to you about it, I’ll tell them as much.” His gaze darkens. “Or more.”
The noise that comes out of my mouth is a sour, scoffing noise that I’d ordinarily be appalled at making. “What are you going to do, Jace? Beat the shit out of every person who calls me a cougar?”
He starts to object at the word, but I go on. “Are you going to shake up every person who stares at us, wondering if I’m your older sister or an aunt—or worse, your mother? Walk around with a sandwich board telling people to fuck off?”
His eyes are narrowed now, and I feel the heat of that cop gaze scrutinizing me, and I hate it. I hate that he’s examining me while I’m shredded with fear and messy with feelings I didn’t ask for. Catherine Day isn’t supposed to be shredded or messy—I’m always contained and cool. Icy, just like the rest of the department says I am. And not being icy when I most need to be is infuriating.
I toss my head away from Jace’s fingers like an agitated filly. “And what are you going to say to yourself, Jace? In a year? In five? In twenty? When you’ve thrown away your life chasing something ridiculous instead of living it the way you should?”
I’m pinned to the bed before I can blink, two hundred pounds of pissed-off cop looming over me and pressing my body into the mattress. “You are not ridiculous,” Jace growls. “And you’re not allowed to say that shit about yourself. Not while I’m around. Got it?”
Despite everything, the insane chemistry between us is setting my skin aflame. I can feel my nipples pebble between us, his cock go rigid and hot in the notch between my legs, both our hearts hammering hard against our chests as if they’re trying to trade places. I want him to kiss me. I want him to eat my mouth like he’s starving and then fuck me screaming into the bed.
Jace looks like he very much wants the same, his arms trembling where he holds himself above me and his eyes dropping to my mouth like he can’t decide whether he wants to kiss me or shove his cock down my throat.
I moan, and his control breaks—for a single instant. He drops his mouth onto mine for a crashing, ragged kiss, but before I can even begin to kiss him back, he’s gone. He’s off the bed, staring at me, naked, his denied erection dark and bobbing between his legs. He ignores it and bites out, “We’re not going to do that.”
“Do what?”
“Fuck the fight away,” he says shortly. “That’s not going to help anything.”
“Because it can’t be helped, Jace.”
He ducks his head, muscles popping in his jaw, but he doesn’t argue my point.
Which leaves me feeling a little stung, although I’m not even sure why, given that I started this fight. And I’m not even sure what I feel anymore, actually, just that it’s a million things at once. Like maybe a secret part of my mind was hoping he’d keep trying to convince me that we could overcome this.
“I can’t help my age, Cat,” he finally says.
“I know,” I say. “But it’s not just that.”
“Oh,” he says, his posture stiffening even more. “That’s right. The badge.”
I blink, and in that blink, I see my dead fiancé’s sightless stare and an ocean of blood.
I sigh. “Yes.”
“You’re a cop too,” he says. Accuses.
“Exactly.” I get to my feet now as well, which maybe is a mistake because it only serves to highlight how much taller he is, but I don’t care. “I already carry all the fear and the trauma for myself. I can’t carry it for another person. I can’t wait up every night wondering if this will be the night you don’t come home. I can’t be the one waiting on that phone call, Jace. I just…can’t.”
“Are you saying you don’t worry now?” he asks, taking a
step forward. “Are you saying because it’s only been a few weeks, because we haven’t put labels on anything, you wouldn’t give a shit if I lived or died?”
My mouth drops open. Of course not, I want to sputter, but he keeps going.
“Because maybe you feel that way, but if you don’t think I’m already in so deep that I wouldn’t be in fucking agony if you were hurt, then think again.”
I’m staring up at him—defensive and confused—and whatever he sees in my face is not the right answer because he reaches down for his clothes and starts yanking them on in jerky, vicious motions that make me suddenly desperate to take back everything I’ve just said.
“Jesus, Cat,” he mutters, pulling his T-shirt over his head. “You can’t freeze out everything, you know. And I’ll be damned if I’ll let you do it to me.”
“Where are you going?” I ask as he shoves his feet in his boots. “You can stay. We can…talk.”
He shoots me a dark look. “If I stay, we’re not going to talk.”
“I’m okay with that,” I whisper.
He gives a cheerless laugh. “Of course you are. I’m good enough to fuck, but that’s it, right?”
Irritation stabs through me, fast and sharp. “I never said that.”
“You don’t have to.” He gets to the doorway, swiping his keys and wallet off the dresser and turning to face me. The morning sunlight pouring in from the living room outlines his hewn, perfect form in hazy gold. “Here’s what I can’t figure out,” he says with a glare that raises the hairs along my arms. “How can you say you’re afraid of having your heart broken if you can’t even admit you have a heart at all?”
It’s a fair question, and it lands with a punch. I stagger backward a step and sit heavily on my bed, unable to meet his eyes.
And he leaves without another word. He leaves me naked and alone and searching for an answer to a question I should have asked myself the moment we met.
It’s the weekend, and since Jace is on my mini–task force of two, he has the weekend off as well. But he doesn’t call that night or the next day. He doesn’t text or stop by.
I don’t reach out either.
Instead, I catch up on work email and a few other cases I’ve had to shelve while I’ve focused on the burglaries. I go grocery shopping. I do a yoga class. I call my parents, who’ve retired in France, and we catch up on the last couple of weeks. They beg me to come out and stay a month. They drop hints about how much fun their little farmhouse and pond would be for children.
I usually dodge the hints easily enough, but this time, my voice catches when I say I haven’t been really dating anyone.
“Catherine?” Mom asks. “Is there someone?”
I don’t know how to answer that. “Sort of,” I hedge. “It’s complicated.”
“What isn’t?” Mom laughs. “I’ve been married to your father for forty-one years, and it’s still complicated. Is it another police officer?”
“It is.”
“You don’t sound happy about it.”
I sigh. “We fought yesterday.”
Mom takes a minute to reply to that, and when she does, she says, “You know, sometimes your father and I worry about how we raised you. The…impressions…we might have left, without meaning to, and I just worry that it’s made things harder for you now that you’re grown.”
“You’re going to have to be less vague,” I tell her, “because I don’t understand.” And I mean it. My parents were the ideal parents. One a judge, one a doctor. They doted on me, their only child, and while there were certain expectations of etiquette and demeanor required of me, I never doubted their love. Or their respect, once I reached adulthood.
“I’m afraid we’ve raised you to be, well, picky,” she says carefully.
“Oh, Mom.”
“We really did adore Frazer,” she forges on quickly, “but maybe your father and I didn’t tell you enough that we didn’t mind that he was, you know, poor.” She whispers this last word as if it’s not a word for polite company, and I lean my head against the doorway I’m standing in.
“Mom.”
“We’re so proud of what you do and that you do it for not very much money. It’s so honorable, and we would extend the same perception to any police officer you wanted to date.”
I’m suddenly and fiercely grateful I never told them about Kenneth, because I know with a deep, regretful certainty that dating Kenneth wouldn’t have required this conversation. They would have been overjoyed with Kenneth’s background and career in law, especially my retired judge of a father, and we never would have had this talk about them not minding someone I loved.
It’s both exasperating and sweet, I suppose, that Mom feels these things must be said to me now. Exasperating because, generally, when someone goes out of their way to tell you they don’t mind something, it’s indicative that they do mind, on some level. And sweet because I can tell she means well, in her own privileged way.
“That’s thoughtful of you,” I say because I’m truly not sure how to respond.
“I know,” Mom says with benign obliviousness. And then she adds, “And we just really, really want to have some grandchildren before we die!”
I manufacture an excuse to get off the phone very quickly after that, but her words find their mark. Not because her guilt finds any real home in me but because her words echo the fleeting, forbidden fantasies that have been chasing through my own mind. Feeling my belly swell with Jace’s baby. Watching his big, strong hands cradle our child. Seeing him play on the floor and roughhouse and carry our child on his shoulders.
Fantasies that would rob him of his youth and the rest of his life.
Fantasies that can never come true.
Monday morning finds me at my desk two hours earlier than normal.
Without Jace laid out behind me in a wall of warm male, I find it hard to sleep, and then I also find myself intensely irritated because I shouldn’t miss him so damn much after such a short time. After repeatedly telling myself nothing can ever come of our ill-advised liaison. After doing my goddamn best to guard my heart.
But I do miss him. I do.
After tossing and turning and barely skimming under the surface of consciousness into bleak dreams, I finally gave up and decided to start the day. So here I am, poring back over the license plate data from the last burglary. Last week, I had Jace run the plates through our system to see if anything came back flagged as linked to a criminal record, and we got a few hits. All dead ends.
Now I’m back to the beginning, narrowing the list down to the plates caught in the hour before the alarm was triggered and then seeing if I can find any patterns. It stands to reason that any burglar worth their salt would have done reconnaissance before—at least driven by once or twice—so I go back to the larger data pool to see if I can find any matches.
Ah, the glory of detective work. Spreadsheet-driven analysis and data tabulation. No wonder there’s so many TV shows about us.
After getting a fresh mug of hot water for tea—tea that I get endless taunting for drinking in a station full of coffee addicts—I pull up emails from the different office managers listing the plates of employee cars so I can eliminate them from any potential patterns I find. I highlight all of those and then cross-reference them with information from the burglary sites.
I find something.
I roll out my shoulders and take a sip of tea as I consider the screen, and then I pull up our informational system and run a plate through. Since it’s a cop system, it takes a long minute to load, and I click back to the spreadsheet while it searches, tapping my fingers against my lips.
The same plate number pops up at four of the five burglaries within an hour of the alarms being triggered. And at scene number five? The car passed through the closest intersection at 7:48 that morning and didn’t pass back through until 10:23 at night. Three minutes after the alarm had been triggered.
Drywall, I think. The stupid drywall.
I cli
ck back to the database to see the car is registered to a woman in her late forties named Debbie Pisani.
I scribble a quick note to Jace about where I’m going, grab the keys to a squad car, and head out the door, calling a patrol captain as I go.
Chapter Twelve
Jace
I nearly jerk my dick raw that weekend, being away from Cat. Three weeks of her in my bed and I’ve turned into something insatiable and ravenous. I’ve always had a healthy appetite before, but now with Cat, my need to fuck has exploded into a ceaseless, throbbing ache. An ache only she can ease, and she’s not here to do it.
I could call. I know I could. I could show up at her doorstep right now, and she’d let me inside and we’d fuck until this awful thing between us tucked its tail and hid. We could lose ourselves and our hurt in each other’s bodies, and maybe things would go back to how they were.
But I don’t want that.
I don’t want things to be how they were. I want more, and I’m not going to cheat us out of something better simply because a day and a half without Cat is agony.
No.
I love her. I need her forever. And I know I’m going to need every tool in the box to woo her away from these superstitions about age and occupation.
The most important tool: time.
Time for both of us to cool down. To miss each other. Time for the argument to recede enough that we can see all the unspoken fears underneath the words we said to each other.
So I settled for my hand as my body demanded its woman, and I made plans. Of what to say, what proofs to give, of when I’d concede her points and when I’d kiss the arguments right off her perfect mouth. We just have to get through work today, and then I’ll take her home and tell her about my love over and over again until she realizes that love is strong enough to swallow up everything else. What are some years between us when I love her so much? What is a job? Nothing at all.
But she’s not at her desk when I get there, even though I’m easily fifteen minutes early. I set down the cup of tea and donut I got for her—despite all the silk blouses and high school dressage trophies, Cat likes donuts just as much as any other cop, although she prefers the gourmet honey-and-sea-salt-type flavors to the glazed ones we usually have at the station—and then read over the note she left by her desk.
Misadventures in Blue Page 11