Heroes in Uniform: Soldiers, SEALs, Spies, Rangers and Cops: Sexy Hot Contemporary Alpha Heroes From NY Times and USA Today Bestselling Authors

by Sharon Hamilton

  Sophie grinned, her entire posture relaxing, light spreading through her. “He’s amazing, isn’t he?”

  Love looked good on her. Gone were the post-transplant dark circles from under her eyes, that tired look that had lingered on too long after the surgery.

  Sometimes love gave you a glow, sometimes it gave you bruises. Wendy bit back a groan. She was beginning to sound like a country song.

  “If he makes you this happy, I’m all for it. Even if he’s a little scary. He looks like he could seriously hurt someone if he put his mind to it.”

  “He’s a big teddy bear. Joe too, by the way. He looks tough, but I’ve never seen him lose his temper.” Sophie smiled. “He’s so sexy even his scar is sexy. You two look scary good together, by the way. Did you know he used to be a wide receiver?”

  Wendy rolled her eyes. “Local businesses have his picture on their wall. It’s freaky. I’m surprised they don’t have a statue of him in the Main Square.”

  Sophie laughed. “Don’t give anybody ideas. People like him a lot around here. Bing says he did a lot for the town for the short time that he was in the limelight. Funneled in a ton of charity money, that kind of thing. He set up a fund that keeps the no-kill animal shelter going.”

  That painted the kind of picture Wendy hadn’t considered before. She’d pictured Joe’s big-shot football-player years as partying with cheerleaders, not doing good and giving back, worrying about strays.

  “He definitely has major hotness going on.” Sophie glanced toward the back door.

  “I’m not going there. Wrong guy, wrong time.”

  Sophie signed. “That’s what I said about Bing. Turns out I was wrong.”

  “Well, I won’t tell anyone if you won’t.”

  They bit back their smiles as the men came inside.

  After Sophie and Bing left, Joe cooked dinner. He insisted that it was his turn and made a mean spaghetti-and-meatball dish. The aroma of tomato sauce and parmesan filled the air, along with oregano and basil. He was whistling as he stood by the stove, shirtsleeves rolled up over sculpted forearms. He picked up Justin and let him stir.

  He grinned at her when he caught her staring. “You look surprised.”

  “I didn’t picture you cooking.” More like watching a game on TV while the woman in his life got dinner ready.

  “You take me for a total jock. I feel like I should be offended.”

  “No offense.”

  “None taken, then. You don’t like jocks.”

  “Keith was one. Played some football in college. He likes to golf now.”

  “I see.”

  She had no idea what he saw, but she said nothing.

  He seemed preoccupied while they ate an early dinner, but kept answering Justin’s questions about dinosaurs. He knew all the names. He was a veritable paleontologist, the both of them completely engaged.

  She wasn’t a fan of existing reptiles. She cared even less for their ancestors. Maybe it was a boy thing.

  Then Justin finished his food and ran off to play.

  “I have to go out tonight. Police business,” Joe told her. “Are you going to be okay alone?”

  “Keith is in custody. We’re going home in the morning.”

  He looked like he might protest, but instead, he picked up his empty plate and walked it over to the sink.

  As much as she hadn’t liked the idea of Joe moving in, now that the danger was over, she could appreciate it. It was nice of him to take time out of his schedule. And it was definitely nice of him to watch Justin while she’d worked. And she was glad that he’d been with her when she’d found the bloody wig inside that package. That had freaked her out pretty badly.

  “Thanks for watching over us.”

  “Not a problem.” He cleaned his plate, put it into the dishwasher, then turned to leave. “I’m not sure when I’ll be back.”

  If he wasn’t back by morning, they’d be gone. She wondered when she would see him again. She’d miss him. She squashed that thought. “Stay safe.”

  “You too. And lock up behind me.”

  She did.

  Her cell phone rang—unidentified number—as she was heading up the stairs with Justin to give him a bath.

  “Hey,” a strange voice said when she picked up. “Keith used his one phone call already to call his lawyer, so he paid me to use mine to call you. He said don’t worry about anythin’. He’ll be home soon. He’ll be takin’ care of you and the kid. He says that’s a promise.”

  The man on the other end put the phone down, the cold click ringing in her ear. She shoved her cell into her back pocket, picked up Justin, and held on to her baby as she carried him up the stairs.

  She knew what taking care of her meant. But Justin…. Oh God, would Keith file for official shared custody to teach her a lesson? Yes, he would. He was mad at her, and he would do anything to hurt her, teach her a lesson.

  Keith wouldn’t get full custody, she told herself. He wouldn’t get any kind of custody for years, hopefully. He was going to go to prison.

  She was going to be free of him for a long time. And during that time, she would figure out how to be free of him forever. She would save every penny she made and hire the best lawyer. Or move far away with Justin, someplace where Keith would never find her.

  She’d fought back before. It hadn’t worked, so she’d given in. She knew now that had been a mistake. Keith wasn’t going to turn reasonable. She was going to have to find new ways to fight him.

  Because there was no way she’d let Keith get his hands on Justin.

  Deathblow: Chapter Eight

  Wendy was safe. Joe still hated to leave her, but he had a job, and he was going to do it. He strode into the station, looking for the captain, but Bing had Jack Sullivan, one of the detectives, in his office.

  “That’s a new style for you,” Leila commented from behind the reception desk as she looked Joe over.

  In her mid-forties, she was trim, with short dark hair, a no-nonsense style and attitude. Her only weakness was shoes. A person was well advised not to ask her how many pairs she had. Touchy subject. She wore a modest pair today, although the heels looked like they could be used as a weapon in a pinch.

  She squinted as she scrutinized Joe’s best gangbanger wear: expensive sneakers, loose pants, black shirt.

  Joe shrugged. “It’s good to switch things up now and again.”

  He’d gone undercover as an up-and-coming Jersey wise guy, wearing an Italian suit when he’d first approached Ramos, then he’d changed little by little to fit in. In Ramos’s neighborhood it was better not to stick out too much on the street. Especially since Joe was supposedly hiding out in Philly. Lil’ Gomez had had a lot of fun advising him on how to blend, then mocking him when he’d been slow on the uptake.

  The more he looked like one of the guys, the more they treated him as such. His skills with basketball didn’t hurt either. He’d played football, but he was fast, and he had good hand-eye coordination. Give him a ball, any ball, and he’d do well with it. Ramos had a steel hoop on his garage behind the house, and his crew spent plenty of time bouncing the ball on the driveway. They were just kids, really. Ramos was the oldest at twenty-three.

  Leila shook her head as her gaze settled on Joe’s footwear. “I don’t know if I can trust a man who has fancier shoes than I do.”

  Joe grinned. “You’re jealous, and you know it. Working late?” Then his gaze wandered to the bulletin board behind Leila, where something sparkly hung from a long piece of red yarn and threw a rainbow over the paperwork as the sun coming through the window caught it. “What’s that?”

  “A crystal,” she said in a tone that would have gone better with dog turd.

  Joe raised an eyebrow.

  “It’s something to do with breaking up bad energy.” She rolled her eyes. “Robin. She’s having plumbing issues. She’ll be in later.”

  As Joe nodded, he noticed the lucky bamboo on the counter.

  Leila followed his g
aze. “Don’t ask.”

  Leila was a no-nonsense woman who was likely a Marine drill sergeant in a previous life. The front desk, the break room, the files, the entire station, in fact, were organized within an inch of their lives. Which made life easier for everyone. They had more time to spend on fighting crime if they didn’t spend half their lives looking for something.

  Robin Combs, the new part-time dispatcher, was a hippie in her mid-sixties, a self-professed psychic.

  “She wants to paint the front door red,” Leila said. “It brings good luck in feng shui.”

  “She’s not Chinese.”

  Leila’s nostrils flared. “She’s one with the universe.”

  Joe looked at her and made a mental note to suggest to the captain that there was always someone at the station around shift change. It’d be bad press for the PD if the two dispatchers strangled each other.

  Come to think of it, it wasn’t like Leila to get upset over every last little thing. This was about more than lucky bamboo. About to walk off, Joe pulled back. “What did Robin really say?”

  She huffed, but then she drew her spine straight. “She said I’ll fall in love again. That I’m going to get married.” The last words were uttered in a tone so cold it could have frozen the leaves off the lucky bamboo. “As if I didn’t love my Billy.”

  Joe clamped his mouth shut. In fact, he grabbed an oatmeal cookie from the counter and shoved it in there. “Mhm. Uhm.” He made some sympathetic noises, then took the coward’s way out and slinked off for coffee.

  He caught Harper coming from the interrogation room.

  “Hey, the captain said you’d be coming in. I just brought in the suspect in the Brogevich case. The schizophrenic patient, Lewis Brown. He’s not saying much.”

  Joe thought of Phil, stepped forward. “I’d like to give it a go.”

  Harper moved aside. “No problem. He’s all we got for now. Judge’s dragging his feet on the warrant for patient records. Touchy subject, since the victim was a psychiatrist. He could have prominent people among his clients, the mayor, anybody. The captain put a call in. We’ll get a warrant, but it might take a while.”

  “I can help with going through the patient records when you get them.”

  “That’d be great.”

  They exchanged a look of we’ll-get-this-done, then Joe stepped into the interview room, while Harper went to the observation room to watch.

  The man sitting by the small table in handcuffs was in his mid-twenties, average height, skinny, wearing faded jeans and a wrinkled yellow shirt. His wild black hair stuck up in every direction. He fidgeted on the chair, clasping and unclasping his hands on the table, clearly agitated.

  He started with, “They want to frame me.”

  “Hi, Lewis. I’m Officer Kessler. I’m here to help you.” Joe took the seat across from the man. “Who wants to frame you?”

  “The government.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I don’t trust you. First they used my doctor to make me crazy. Now they’re using you.” Lewis dropped his hands into his lap and shrank back. “You’re here to kill me, aren’t you?” He shrunk back in his chair, sweat beading above his lips.

  Joe kept his posture relaxed. “I’m here to help. I promise. Where’s your doctor now?”

  “Dead. They killed him. They killed him because he failed with me.”

  “Were you mad at Doctor Brogevich?”

  The man wouldn’t meet Joe’s eyes. “He set me up. He was a bad man.”

  “Bad men have to be punished. That’s what I do. Did you punish the doctor, Lewis?”

  The suspect shook his head with over-the-top vehemence. “The government did. Not me.”

  Joe went a few rounds with him, getting nowhere, before his lawyer arrived. And then, with the lawyer came the alibi. Lewis had been with his attorney at the time of the murder. He was suing his parents for trying to force him to take his pills.

  “Would have been too easy,” Harper remarked once he released Lewis to his attorney.

  Joe nodded. “Maybe we’ll get a better lead from the patient records.”

  “I’ll call you when the warrant comes in,” Harper said. “We might have another clue. Lab reports are back on the murder weapon. All the blood on the phone is from the victim, but there are also traces of fresh paint.”

  “The railings outside were freshly painted the day before the murder,” Joe said.

  “Right. That paint might have preserved the killer’s fingerprints before it dried. I’m heading out there to see about that.” Harper hurried away.

  Then the captain spotted Joe through the window of his office and waved him in. Jack was still with him.

  “Jack will drive you into the city. He’s heading in to pick up Maddie from her grandfather.”

  “Thanks.” Joe followed Jack out. “How is Maddie doing?”

  Maddie belonged to Jack’s girlfriend, Ashley. The seven-year-old cutie-pie pretty much had Jack and the entire station wrapped around her little finger. Looked like an angel on the outside. On the inside…. Inventive. The week before, she’d jammed chocolate chip cookies into the fax machine to send a few home, since her mother had said when Maddie came to the station with Jack, she could have only one cookie per visit.

  “She spent the day with her grandfather,” Jack said. “I’m preparing myself for the sugar high. I can tell you this much, little girls are not sugar and spice.”

  They barely reached reception when the captain called after Jack, “If you change your mind. We’ll be here.”

  Jack nodded, glanced at Leila who was on the phone, staring balefully at the rainbow the crystal cast over her paperwork. He raised an eyebrow at Joe. Joe shook his head. He wasn’t going to go there.

  “Change your mind about what?” he asked as they strode out of the station.

  “I handed in my resignation.”

  Joe stopped in his tracks. “What are you talking about?”

  Jack smiled, which would have been unheard of a year ago. He’d been a morose bastard and then some, obsessed with tracking down the serial killer who’d murdered his sister. He did get his man—and saved Ashley and Maddie in the process. And he’d found love.

  Love was a pest, no doubt about it. Joe had tried it once. It’d ripped his guts out. No sane man would go back.

  Yet not only did Jack’s smile not fade, but his lips stretched even wider. “Ashley’s expecting.”

  Joe almost asked, Are you sure? Quitting a job because a woman said she was pregnant didn’t seem like the best idea. Okay, Ashley wasn’t Erika. All women didn’t make up pregnancies to trap men. But some did. Erika had done it to Joe. And these days, a woman could buy a positive pregnancy test for fifty bucks online to drive her boyfriend crazy.

  None of which had anything to do with Jack, so Joe reached out to shake his hand. “Congratulations. Man, that’s big.”

  “Yeah. I can’t wait.”

  Joe thought of the single day and night he’d spent guarding Wendy and Justin. Would living with a family be like that? That hadn’t been too bad. It’d been kind of nice, actually.

  “You don’t have to quit because she’s having a baby,” he told Jack as they got into his car.

  They were out of the parking lot by the time Jack said, “I became a cop for one reason only, to catch the man who took my sister. All my adult life, all I’ve done was look for a murderer. I want to try something else.”

  Okay, that made sense. “What do you think you’ll do next?”

  “Maybe get into private security. I’m going to take a few months off, be there for Ashley when the baby is born. After that….” He shrugged. “I’ll figure something out.”

  “How did the captain take it?”

  “He’s not happy that I’m leaving, but I think he’s happy for me.”

  That made sense too. “When are you leaving?”

  “I’m going to close out my current cases, but I won’t take any new ones. Once my desk is clear,
I’m good to go.”

  “You need help with anything?”

  Jack shook his head. “You?” He checked over Joe’s unusual clothes and narrowed his eyes. “I guess you’re in some kind of undercover gig. Bing wouldn’t say.” He waved off his last words. “Never mind. It’s on a need-to-know basis, and I don’t need to know. Be careful. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “I promise not to go out of my way to get myself shot.”

  They talked about Jack’s current caseload on the drive into Philly. Then Jack dropped Joe off two blocks from his car and drove away.

  The black Camaro—with red racing stripes—was where Joe had left it. He hadn’t even gotten a ticket or his hubcaps stolen. Sweet.

  He drove down dirty streets, past an abandoned factory with the windows all broken out, then down Brant Street to Gomez’s aunt’s house.

  The neighborhood was poor, with a mix of ethnicities. The kids in the hood grew up together, joined the gang together, replacing members who were killed. Black, white, Hispanic, Chinese—color didn’t much matter. Their common link was the bone-deep poverty they’d been born to and their burning desire to conquer it somehow in their own way.

  The four-bedroom row house belonged to Gomez’s aunt who was pretty much restricted to her upstairs room, in a wheelchair. The downstairs belonged to Gomez and his crew as gang headquarters. He liked to keep the “family” together.

  Trigger, a pitbull recently retired from fighting, guarded the property. Paco, Will, and DeShawn lounged on the derelict front porch. Trigger recognized Joe first, running to him when he was still two houses away. The dog was missing most of his left ear, his muzzle crisscrossed with scars. He had a limp, but he didn’t let that slow him down any.

  He greeted Joe, his whole body wiggling, as sweet as a lapdog. When Joe squatted to give him a treat, he swallowed it in one gulp, then licked Joe’s face with enthusiasm. Trigger loved people. However, he’d been trained to hate other dogs, and he did that with a burning passion. Letting him run free outside was beyond stupid.

  “Hey. Better take this bad boy inside before he eats a Chihuahua,” Joe called to the men as he straightened. “Ramos needs no police around here.”