“Nothing,” Colin murmured.
“Sounded like a pretty loud ‘nothing’ to me,” Sanchez contradicted. “Give.” When Colin made no response, Sanchez got up from his desk and circled around behind his new partner. “We catch a cold case?” he asked, reading the information on the screen.
Rather than close the window, Colin decided to leave it open. Sanchez was the type to keep digging once his interest was aroused.
“No, it’s a closed case,” Colin said. “My last case as a uniformed officer. A convenience-store robbery that went wrong.” He recalled it now as vividly as if it had happened yesterday.
Sanchez read a few lines and began to nod. “Yeah, I remember that one. That’s the one with the Marine who’d just come home after a couple of tours of duty. He tried to stop this guy from robbing a young couple and caught a bullet for his trouble.”
Colin turned his seat to look at his partner, curious. “Why would you remember this case?”
“Because of that reporter on the local news station, the woman who was covering it. She fainted on the air and that created a hell of a stir. Didn’t you see it?” Sanchez asked, surprised.
Colin shook his head. “No.”
Back in those days, he never even turned on the TV monitor in his apartment. He’d been too busy enjoying the company of the fairer sex to spend his time watching images on the screen.
“Why’d did she faint?” Colin asked. The tingling feeling he was experiencing told him that he might just be onto why Ellie had reacted the way she had last night.
Sanchez blew out a breath. “Well, it seems that no one told her that the guy who saved that couple at the convenience store from being shot—and got killed for his trouble—was her husband,” he recalled.
Colin could only stare at his partner. “What?”
Sanchez nodded. “Yeah. He’d only been home a couple of days and was just picking up a carton of milk on his way home when he saw what was going down and put himself in harm’s way to keep that young couple from getting hurt. The robber panicked and started shooting. That was your case?” Sanchez asked in disbelief. He shook his head in amazement. “Small world, I guess.”
“Too small,” was all that Colin would say.
It explained a lot.
What it didn’t explain was why Ellie hadn’t said anything to him. She had to have known of his involvement in the case. He was the officer on record and if she’d covered the story, she had to know that he was the policeman who’d taken down the killer—and the one who’d tried to save her husband.
Tried and failed, Colin reminded himself grimly. He could still see the Marine’s blood oozing through his fingers as he vainly applied pressure to the wound to try to stop the bleeding.
Damn it, Colin thought in frustration, that was what had been nagging at him all this time, what kept trying to surface only to fade away again. This was that elusive memory that refused to take shape, the one he kept trying to catch hold of but just couldn’t.
Why hadn’t Ellie said anything to him? he asked himself again in exasperation. When she’d first shown up at the station to do that interview with him, she must have known then who he was. She’d said that she’d done her homework—that meant getting his background. She was far too much of a professional not to have known the connection between them.
And yet she hadn’t said anything.
Why?
Colin felt confused, conflicted.
His mind peeled apart the situation in a dozen different ways with none of them yielding a satisfactory conclusion. About the only thing he knew at this point was that he needed to collect himself before he talked to Ellie about it.
Right now he felt like someone who had just walked over a land mine. He was still intact, but just barely—and very likely to say the wrong thing.
Wanting to distract himself—and calm down—Colin used his lunch hour to go to the pet store to purchase the puppy crate he’d told his niece about. While he was at it, he stocked up on several different kinds of dog treats and another bag of dry dog food, this one manufactured by a chef who prided herself on being able to prepare food equally appetizing for man and beast.
He dropped all that off, along with a couple of chew toys that he thought might come in handy, in his apartment.
Colin remained there only long enough to release Pancakes from the bathroom and place the puppy into her new home away from home, the puppy crate. He felt that the puppy needed to get accustomed to it before Heather came home.
Once he finally got back to the station, Colin called Olga, leaving a detailed message on her answering machine about both the puppy and the new crate, explaining everything.
He fervently hoped the woman liked dogs.
The remainder of the time that he spent at the station, Colin focused on work, giving it his undivided attention. Apparently, the witless art thief he’d caught the other day—the one that had brought Ellie into his life—wanted to make a deal with the assistant DA. The latter had said that his presence was needed to verify and back up several facts of the case.
While Colin always invested himself in his job 100 percent, he couldn’t block out the thoughts about Ellie that were at the back of his mind, slowly eating away at him.
For that reason, Colin couldn’t wait for his day to finally be over. He just prayed that nothing would come up at the last minute, the way it was wont to do at times, necessitating his presence beyond the end of his shift.
* * *
The second his shift was officially over, Colin cleared out, his hasty exodus causing his partner to comment rather wistfully, “Hot date tonight?”
“I wouldn’t describe it as that,” Colin answered, not wanting to go into specifics.
Sanchez locked his drawer and shrugged into his plaid jacket.
“Hell, I’d settle for a lukewarm date at this point. All the wife and I do is stare at the TV—separately,” he emphasized. “She’s got hers on in the living room, I watch my shows in the family room.”
He and Sanchez walked out of the squad room together. “Maybe you should give watching together a try,” Colin suggested.
Sanchez merely shook his head at the idea. He pressed for the elevator. “She doesn’t like any of the programs I watch.”
“Try watching the ones she likes,” Colin told the older man.
Sanchez made a face as they got on the elevator car. “I’m not that desperate,” he told his partner as the doors closed.
Some horses just couldn’t be led to water. “Think about why you proposed to her in the first place.”
In response, Sanchez rolled his eyes dramatically. “That hasn’t happened in a long time.”
He was definitely getting too much information here, Colin thought. He had only one last suggestion for his romance-challenged partner.
“Maybe if you watch TV with her, it might. You’ll never know until you try,” he told the man.
Reaching the ground floor, the elevator opened and they both got off.
“Yeah, well, maybe. We’ll see,” Sanchez muttered. “See you in the morning.”
“Right, see you.”
They parted company at the front door.
Colin hurried over to his sedan.
He had suppressed the urge to call Ellie more than a dozen times today, feeling that a face-to-face meeting with her would be far more effective than just talking to her on the phone.
He considered his options. He did not want to confront her at work and turning up at her home might make the woman feel he was stalking her. So the only thing left for him to do was sit in his car in the studio’s parking lot and wait for her to leave the building where she worked. She had to come out sometime.
As it turned out, he didn’t have long to wait.
Chapter Eleven
Ellie’s heart almost stopped when she spotted Colin walking toward her. Acutely aware of the way they had parted last night, she would have preferred pretending that she didn’t see him, but he had seen her looking right at him, so there was no way she could avoid saying something to him.
However, she didn’t want to get into any sort of a serious discussion, either. Doing so would just bring up memories that hurt far too much.
Momentarily at a loss as to how to handle the situation, Ellie said the first thing that came to her mind.
“Something wrong with the puppy?”
“The puppy’s fine. My apartment’s a little worse for the wear, but I picked up a puppy crate at a pet store, so that should keep her from chewing up everything in sight while I’m not home.”
“Good,” Ellie said, not really listening. All she wanted to do was get away. Reaching her car, she began to open the driver-side door. “If there’s nothing else, I’ve got to be—”
Colin didn’t put his hand up to keep the door from closing, didn’t block her access to it with his body. It was what he said that caused her to freeze in place. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
The same heart that had felt as if it stopped beating at the sight of him now seemed to sink all the way down into her stomach. Obviously, she wasn’t going to be able to make that quick getaway.
“You didn’t come to see me about the puppy, did you?” she asked quietly.
She couldn’t read his expression. “No, I didn’t.” His eyes pinned her in place as surely as if someone had nailed her shoes to the ground. And then the detective surprised her with a question. “We’ve interacted how many times?”
She braced herself for a confrontation. Jerry had warned her about this and he was right, she couldn’t help thinking. She should have told Colin about the way they were connected before this.
Ellie shrugged. She wanted to look away, but she didn’t and wanted to defend her position if she could.
“I don’t know,” she told him. “Honestly, I wasn’t counting.”
“Five,” he answered in the same emotionless voice he’d just used. “Five times if you count when you interviewed me on camera and my phone call after that piece aired. We interacted five times and not once could you tell me that you knew that I was the one who found your husband at the convenience store that night. Why?” Colin demanded.
Ellie shrugged again, feeling helpless. Feeling cornered. She hated it, even if ultimately Benteen had a point. She should have told him. She hadn’t. End of story.
“There was no right way to work it into the conversation.”
“The hell with the ‘right way,’” he told her, raising his voice as he dismissed what he viewed as flawed reasoning. “How about the right thing?” he asked. “As in telling me you knew I was the cop on record that night. How could you keep something like that from me?” he demanded, struggling to control his temper. “Were you planning on springing it on me after you were convinced that I was hooked on you? Did you want to make me somehow pay for not being able to save him?” Colin asked. “Because I tried, Ellie. I tried my damnedest to save him and it haunted me for a long time that I couldn’t.”
She stared at him, speechless.
“I rode all the way to the hospital in the ambulance with him, trying to bully him into hanging on even when I knew there was no hope,” he told her.
Colin blew out a breath, his impotent anger beginning to subside. “I didn’t know you found out about his death while you were on the air, doing the story about the foiled robbery. I had no idea until Sanchez informed me today,” he said. “Maybe I should have been the one to notify you about his death, but my sergeant told me someone was sent to talk to the Marine’s family, and frankly, I was glad because I didn’t want to have to face them. I didn’t want to tell them that I couldn’t save him.”
“There was no ‘family,’” Ellie informed him in a still, subdued voice. “There was only me.”
His eyes continued to hold hers. “And you knew I was the patrolman?” he asked her.
Ellie nodded her head slowly. “Yes, I knew,” she admitted.
“Then why didn’t you say something?” he asked. “I don’t mean when you had that microphone shoved in my face, but afterward, why didn’t you tell me you knew who I was?”
He wanted to know, okay, she’d tell him, Ellie decided—and hoped that she wouldn’t wind up breaking down while she did it. “Because I didn’t want to bring it up. Because I’m still trying to put it behind me.” There were tears in her eyes as she looked at him. Tears she was desperately struggling to hold back. “Because it was all my fault.”
That was a curveball he hadn’t expected. For a second, she’d knocked the air out of him. And then he found his tongue.
“How was it your fault?”
She gave up trying not to cry. The tears slid down her cheeks. “If I hadn’t told him to pick up that damn quart of milk on his way home, he wouldn’t have stopped at the convenience store. And if he hadn’t stopped, he’d still be alive.”
“Was he passing the convenience store on his way home?”
“Yes,” she answered, averting her face so he couldn’t watch her crying.
Colin took her face in his hands and deliberately but gently turned it toward him. “Then he would have seen the robbery taking place and, being the kind of man he was, he would have tried to stop it anyway.”
Seeing Ellie crying this way undid him completely. Colin took her into his arms and held her. “It wasn’t the milk, it was the man, and ultimately you had nothing to do with that.”
Ellie resisted his offer of comfort for all of thirty seconds. And then she just broke down and really cried. Cried the way she hadn’t allowed herself to cry in two years.
She cried for a long time.
Colin said nothing. Instead, he held her, letting her cry it out, his silence telling her that he was there for her if she needed him. That all he wanted her to do was feel better.
Finally, spent, Ellie drew her head back. “Oh God,” she said, trying to wipe away the tears from her cheeks with her hands. “I must look like such a mess.”
Colin smiled as he offered her his handkerchief. “A beautiful mess,” he amended.
She took his handkerchief. “Right. You must have a very low threshold of beautiful,” Ellie told him as she passed his handkerchief along first one cheek, then the other, drying them in earnest before she handed the handkerchief back to him.
“Actually, I don’t.” Colin absently tucked the cloth into his pocket. His attention was completely focused on her. “Do you feel like going somewhere for a drink?” he asked.
“A cop encouraging drinking and driving?” she asked wryly, doing her best to smile. It was a halfhearted effort at best.
“Doesn’t have to be alcohol,” he pointed out, then offered her some choices. “Coffee? Tea? Maybe a smoothie?”
Ellie eyed him rather skeptically and asked in disbelief, “You drink smoothies?”
He laughed softly, understanding her surprise. He wouldn’t have touched a smoothie six months ago, but things had changed since then.
“Actually, I’ve tried a lot of things since I became Heather’s guardian,” he told her. “She loves them and I have to admit, some of them aren’t half bad. How about it?”
She took another deep breath, trying to steady herself. “Speaking of Heather, shouldn’t you be getting home to her?”
“It’s okay,” he assured her. “Olga’s watching her. And now that she’s got Pancakes, I don’t think Heather even notices I’m not there.”
“Oh, she notices,” Ellie assured him, more attuned to his niece than he thought. “Trust me, with her parents gone, you’re the center of her universe.”
This time as she opened her car door in order to slide in
behind the steering wheel, Colin did hold the door in place. She looked up at him, waiting for an explanation. She’d assumed that they were done; obviously not.
“You shouldn’t be alone right now,” he told her seriously. “Tell you what—why don’t you follow me home?”
A refusal was on the tip of her tongue, but she knew he was right. She really didn’t want to be alone tonight. After what had just happened here, if she was alone, it would give her time to think and magnify everything. She supposed she could always call her mother. Her mother would be over before she had time to terminate her call. She knew that her mother worried about her. Her mother especially worried about her not getting on with her life and she didn’t want to have that conversation tonight.
Colin was still watching her, waiting for an answer to his suggestion that she follow him home. Waiting for her to agree.
“I bet you say that to all the women,” she said flippantly.
“Actually,” he told her, his eyes still on hers, “I don’t.” The next moment, he deliberately lightened the mood by asking her another question. “Don’t you want to see what that energized ball of fur is doing to my floorboards?” When she seemed confused, he elaborated on the situation. “I didn’t know that dogs teethed.”
“Well, she’s a puppy, which means she’s a baby dog, and all babies teethe, so I guess it’s to be expected.”
He supposed she was right. But just like he’d never been a guardian before, he’d also never had a pet before. This was all just one giant learning process for him.
“A little warning might have been nice,” Colin told her.
“Think of it as a learn-as-you-go kind of situation,” she suggested.
“Do I have a choice?” he asked, knowing that he didn’t. Heather was so crazy about the dog there was no way the animal could be given its walking papers. Pancakes was there to stay.
Ellie laughed then. It was a small laugh, but in his estimation, it was gratifying to hear.
“No.”
“Then I’ll learn as I go,” he said thoughtfully. “So, are we all set? You’re following me home?” he asked, just to be clear that she hadn’t changed her mind. “I know that Heather’ll be thrilled.”
Twice a Hero, Always Her Man Page 11