by Elise Faber
I sniffed.
“You don’t agree?”
“Oh no,” I said. “Aaron is a good guy, and I’m thrilled they found their way back to each other.”
“Then what?”
“I learned a long time ago that you can never look at another person as your source for happiness,” I said, turning onto the on-ramp and navigating my way onto the freeway.
Quiet from his side of the car.
But then he nodded. “That’s the smartest thing I’ve heard in a long time.”
“Well, I’m so glad you think so.”
“Do you survive only on sarcasm and barbed retorts?”
“You forgot to include coffee and chocolate glazed donuts.”
He stared at me, and this time I couldn’t stop myself from glancing away from the road to meet his golden eyes. “Isn’t that a little cliché for a cop?”
Laughter bubbled out of me. “Probably.” A shrug. “But I like them anyway.”
That dimple flashed again. “I’ll remember that.”
“Why?” I asked suspiciously.
“Because I’ll need to pay you back for the ride.”
“Yeah, that’s not happening.”
He shifted in his seat, turning so the front of his body faced me. Not that I was looking. Nope. No way. I didn’t need to look to remember the man’s delicious chest, and I certainly didn’t need to look in order to see his sexy smile. “Why not?” he asked.
It took me a moment to deviate from my thoughts of smiles and yummy chests in order to process his question. “I didn’t give you a ride because I expected something in return.”
Silence.
For a long time.
“Why did you do it then?”
Good question.
Because part of me had wanted to spend more time with this man, part of me had craved to be in his presence, and because . . . well, a small part (and also the only part I could say out loud because the other two were just . . . okay, they were definitely pathetic considering who I was and who he was) of the reason I had helped him was because I was a decent person, he needed a ride, and he was Maggie’s friend.
Which I told him.
Which then resulted in more silence.
Silence that was so long and clawing so deeply at my insides that I found myself having to turn on the radio in order to relieve it.
I found a nice poppy station, full of sugar and cotton candy and catchy choruses, and listened as we drove toward his house. In mileage, it wasn’t far from Artie and Pierce’s, but in what I was learning about L.A., that didn’t necessarily mean that it wouldn’t take a long time.
Through stop-and-go traffic.
At eight o’clock at night.
“This is a little different from home,” he said, finally popping the seal on the conversation again and turning down the song.
I smacked his hand away. “It is a crime to turn down Lizzo.”
His brows rose. “Seriously?”
I didn’t even dignify that question with a reply. Instead, I just ignored him as the chorus went on, as the hair-tossing lyrics went on, as the anthem hit its peak, and then when it had slowed and blended into the next song, I turned off the radio, glanced at him expectantly.
“I was just saying that this traffic must be different from home.”
I nodded. “Not from the big cities I’ve lived in, but from Darlington, definitely. I think the big hoopla at the last city council meeting was that we were adding a tenth stoplight in town.”
He chuckled. “That’s a little different from L.A.”
“I can imagine.”
“Where else have you lived?”
“Pardon?” I asked, finally seeing the exit that would take us off this godforsaken freeway, and pushing, shoving, and cramming my car into the next lane—much to the anger of the cars behind me, their horns a cheerful melody—so we could exit.
“You don’t drive like you’re from a small town.”
I smiled. “Well, I’ve done stints in Denver, Salt Lake City, and a year in Chicago.”
“Why does the last sound like you’re chewing glass.”
“Because it’s a beautiful city, but it’s damned cold.” I shuddered. “I barely survived my first—and only—winter there.”
“Says the girl who grew up in snowy Utah.”
“Says the girl who is definitely not feeling the windchill.”
He laughed, and I found myself doing the same. Despite the chip on my shoulder, despite the alarm bells blaring in my mind, telling me to gather up armor and slap it on every part of me, to protect every vulnerable inch.
I laughed.
And for a moment, I forgot he was a big, fancy movie star and I was just a small-town woman, who dreamed of Disney and glazed donuts and a vat of coffee, black.
“Did you just grow up here then?”
He nodded. “In California, yes, but in the northern part, a suburb south of San Francisco.” A shrug. “Not a small town, exactly, but certainly not a big city like down here.”
“How’d you get into acting?” I found myself asking.
“How’d you get into being a police officer?” he countered.
“Tit for tat?”
A smile that hit me right in the gut. “Seems only fair.”
“My dad was a police officer, seemed fitting to follow in his footsteps.”
“What about your mom’s footsteps?”
That question stung. He couldn’t have known that, of course, but it still burned like acid dripping down my skin. I cleared my throat. “Nice try,” I said, forcing my tone to be light. “But you didn’t answer my question.”
“I got into acting because I needed to escape my childhood.”
I blinked, his reply pretty much the last thing I’d expected to hear, and certainly not with such a neutral tone. “That’s a bomb to drop in the middle of the getting-to-know-you conversation,” I murmured.
“You mean, you didn’t know?”
“Know what?” I asked, my brows pulling down.
“Know about my childhood.”
The light turned red, and I took the opportunity to study him closely. “Why would I know about your childhood?”
His gold eyes flared.
But he didn’t answer me, and then the light turned green, and I needed to pull forward.
“Because it seems like all of America knows about it.”
The soft sentence took me by surprise, and I thought carefully, trying to recall if I did know something. But . . . I liked a good action flick now and then, had certainly seen this man in a film or two, but I didn’t know anything about his personal life.
“I’m not one for gossip rags,” I said. “Darlington has its own gossip patrol, and I have enough to keep track of with Lilibeth’s mail thief, whoever toilet papered the elementary school playground, and the Milk Caper.”
I don’t know what he’d been planning on saying before I’d finished.
But it certainly wasn’t the same thing as what came out of his mouth next.
“The Milk Caper?” he asked.
“Don’t ask,” I told him. “It’s a long, drawn-out story, and one that’s barely interesting.”
“With a name like the Milk Caper, I doubt that.”
Regardless of his doubts, we were turning into his driveway, and I was saved from having to explain about little Tommy Brighton—all of six years old—and his mysterious milk guzzling abilities. The supermarket hadn’t been able to figure out where the milk was going—Tommy had been taught to clean up after himself, like a good kiddo—and so the gallons (yes, gallons) of milk had disappeared for weeks on end.
Until his dad, Mark, the owner of the grocery store, had set up a hidden camera and had caught his son in the act in between school and his afternoon nap.
Ah, to be a police officer in Darlington.
Though, I had to admit, I liked tracking down a Milk Caper much more than the drug busts from a few years back.
So long as I
wasn’t the one who had to clean up the toilet paper from the playground.
I pulled up to the gate, turned to him.
“It’s 7-7-1-9-2,” he said, and I lifted a brow. His lips turned up. “Consider this my play at getting a beautiful woman to have dinner with me and to maybe go on a walk afterward.”
“You’re unbelievable.”
“I’m taking that as a compliment.”
“You shouldn’t.”
He laughed and squeezed my hand where it rested on the steering wheel. “I can get out here,” he said, popping the door and unbuckling his seat belt.
I quickly put the car in park.
Then, for some reason, I got out.
Later, I wouldn’t be able to pinpoint why exactly, except to say that perhaps it was some kind of instinct bred from years of training, but either way, I did get out, shifting back so he could squeeze between the car and the code box.
He started to plug in numbers, and I saw 7-7-1-9—
But then I saw something else.
Movement out of the corner of my eye. Someone coming up fast, and—a flicker of silver, metal gleaming in the moonlight—I reached under my dress, yanked out my gun, and ordered, “Behind me.”
“What?” Talbot asked.
I yanked him back from the box, put his body between mine and the car, then leveled my gun in the direction of the threat.
There was an ear-piercing scream as a man appeared out of the bushes, a knife raised above his head—
I fired.
Once.
The man got up, and the blade whizzed near enough by my head that I felt the rush of hair flying by my ear.
Then I felt the sting of that blade hitting my skin.
And I fired again. Then again. And . . . finally, the man collapsed.
I kicked the knife away, knelt next to him, my hands going to the wounds and putting as much pressure as I could muster before my gaze shot back to Talbot’s. He was uninjured, his face pale, his expression one of utter shock.
“Call 9-1-1,” I ordered, just as a flash of light nearly blinded me.
He reached for his cell, more flashes coming.
I looked in the other direction, and I saw a good dozen cameras pointed my way.
At me and Talbot.
One instant.
One reaction.
And I knew my life had just changed forever.
Chapter Five
Talbot
I was an actor.
I’d played a cop a few times.
But I was just an actor.
So, seeing what Tammy had just done left me shaken as I ran to the house for some towels to staunch the bleeding.
She’d moved . . . like liquid lightning.
Beautiful, capable, liquid lightning. One second, I’d been punching in my code, and the next . . . she’d been fighting off a knife-wielding man with her gun. A man whose life she was now trying to save.
I barreled up to my front door, my fingers shaking when I pressed the code into the keypad, my breaths coming in short, staccato bursts.
Then I was inside, lurching toward the half-bath just off the hall, grabbing all the towels I could find, and hauling ass back toward the front gate. Tammy was there, still on her knees, still with her hands over the man’s chest.
They were covered in blood, and I swallowed down a sudden burst of nausea before kneeling next to her.
“What do you need?”
“Put some here”—she nodded toward the man’s chest—“then fold one up and put it under his head.”
The flashes were still coming, all except from a slender brunette, her camera slung over her shoulder. She was the same paparazzo who’d told me that she’d already called 9-1-1, walking through the flashes to come stand next to Tammy.
“Here,” she said now, taking a towel and carefully placing it under the man’s head. Then grabbing another and using it to pick up the knife Tammy had knocked away from the attacker. “So it doesn’t walk away,” she murmured before stepping back again.
But I noticed that she didn’t pick up her camera, wasn’t shooting the gory scene like her compatriots.
Before I had a chance to consider that too closely, Tammy cursed, and I glanced down to see that the towels had soaked through. Quickly, I set another one on the man’s chest, used my hands next to hers to add more pressure.
Thankfully, I heard sirens in the distance, the blaring coming nearer.
An ambulance screeched into the drive less than a minute later, the medics appearing quickly, bags in hand.
“Male, mid-thirties, three gunshot wounds, two to the torso, one to the right arm,” Tammy said. “He’s lost a lot of blood, and his pulse is there, but thready.”
They took over, attempting to staunch the bleeding, administering drugs, then quickly loading him on a stretcher. But even as I watched that, the police rolled up, sirens loud enough to make me wince, flashing lights even brighter than the paparazzi’s.
Tammy had retrieved her badge, holding it up so they could examine it, and then quickly turning over her gun as she explained what happened.
They nodded, glanced from the gun to Tammy to me to the paparazzi, and then one of the officers stepped forward. “Let’s take this into the house.”
Her hands were covered with blood.
I glanced down, saw that my hands were equally coated as well, and felt bile burn the back of my throat.
Tammy was talking to the officer, who had urged us into the house, and he was taking notes on a pad as she stood there in her dress and heels with scraped knees.
And blood-covered hands.
I barely bit back my gag reflex.
Tammy’s head spun, her eyes locking with mine for one brief, intense moment, and then she was saying something to the policeman, before he nodded, and she crossed over to me.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Fine,” she clipped, snagging my arm and bringing me over to the large kitchen sink. The water turned on . . . and then she was scrubbing my hands in the sink, the stream turning pink then red then back to pink, until eventually it ran clear again. Soap into her palms, rubbing over mine, rubbing firmly until both of our hands were clean.
“There,” she whispered, snagging a towel and running it over my fingers and wrists. “Why don’t you sit down?”
My eyes were on my hands, on hers. “I’m okay,” I said.
Fingers on my jaw, drawing my gaze up to hers, those hazel depths searching mine, seeming to scour my very soul. Then she nodded and started to turn away.
And that’s when I saw the blood on her arm.
The gash on her arm.
My heart skipped, thudding in my chest, slamming against my ribs. She’d gotten hurt protecting me.
The bile disappeared. The shock flitted away.
Rage took its place.
“Your arm,” I said, snagging her wrist, drawing her to a stop.
“It’s fine,” she said, glancing back at me over her shoulder. “The medics gave me some gauze earlier to stop the bleeding. I’ll get it looked at when I’m done giving my statement.” A beat. “You’ll need to give yours next. Unless you need to call in a lawyer?”
Gauze? Gauze?
She slipped her wrist free, raised her brows. “Do you need to call someone?”
I shook my head. “I don’t need a lawyer for this.”
At least, I didn’t think so. It wasn’t like either of us had done anything wrong, and certainly the mob of paparazzi could corroborate what had happened. I might need Maggie and her magical PR skills, but I wasn’t going to ruin the night of her engagement party with a scandal.
Although . . . I pulled my cell from my pocket, fired off a text asking her to call me.
Because if I’d learned anything about my friend in the years we’d worked together, it was that she hated to be blindsided—and she would hate even more to wake up tomorrow and be taken by surprise with the events of this evening plastered all over every gossip mag and site
, not to mention the main-stream news outlets.
The text would cover my bases.
And hopefully, she would see it after the party but before morning.
Tammy was talking to the officer by the time I finished texting, so I slipped down the hall and into the half-bath I’d stripped of all things towel just a little while before. There was a first aid kit beneath the sink, and I grabbed it, bringing it back into the kitchen and opening it up. More gauze. A wrap.
At least I could get it covered until Tammy had it checked out.
The last of which had me remembering a contact I’d programmed in my cell just the previous week. On Artie and Pierce’s recommendation, I’d signed up for a doctor’s service—it was easier than going into medical offices or the hospital (for non-emergency stuff)—and there was a direct number for urgent visits.
I stepped into the hall and called.
The calm, kind voice on the other end said they would be here in twenty minutes.
Feeling better about having done something, I told them to call my number when they arrived, so I could let them in, then went back into the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee. By the sound of the conversation Tammy was having with the officer, it seemed like they might be at it for a while, and then there was her arm to consider, how long it would take to treat it. We would probably be up for hours.
Plus, it gave me something to do that wasn’t standing around, staring into space, hating myself for freezing, and furious that she had gotten hurt protecting me.
The coffee steam hissed its way out of the pot, and I grabbed three mugs, filling them and bringing two of them to the officer and Tammy. The first took the mug gratefully. The second with no little amount of suspicion.
“Did you need cream or sugar?”
She shook her head, took a small sip, and I could have sworn that her eyes gentled. Then she was nodding at the cop and saying, “Talbot, this is Officer McTavish. He’s going to take your statement, if you’re ready.”
“Of course,” I said.
“Bill,” he said, extending his hand. “Feel free to just call me Bill.”
I nodded.
He gestured to the barstools. “Did you want to sit down?”
“No,” I told him, “I’m okay. What did you need to know?”