by Mallory Kane
What made the difference? Her eyes sparkled, but that could just be from getting a good night’s sleep. Her lips looked softer, redder. Her expression looked—that was it, Dana thought in a mixture of disgust and embarrassment and amusement. She looked serene, satisfied. Kind of a “cat that ate the canary” expression.
She pressed her lips together, splashed water on her burning cheeks and looked again, trying for her lawyer demeanor. She shrugged. Not too bad, if she could just wipe the sparkle out of her eyes.
Now she had to face him, the man she’d spent four years getting over, the man who had destroyed all her careful control in one night of love. The man who would go back to his crazy, dangerous job and leave her to battle with her heart for another four years, or fourteen, or forty.
Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! She felt like banging a legal pad against her forehead. Well, there wasn’t going to be a repeat of last night.
Ever. Never ever. She’d revealed way too much of herself. Physically, emotionally, mentally. She’d just have to put some major damage control into effect, starting now.
She took a long breath and opened the bathroom door and almost ran into Cody, who’d obviously been just about to knock. He had a mug of coffee and he proffered it, grinning devilishly.
“Morning,” he said, and leaned down to kiss her.
Dana neatly sidestepped him as she took the mug from his fingers. “Aren’t you leaving today?” she asked shortly, walking away from him toward the living room.
“I’m fine. Thanks for asking,” he said wryly, following her.
She ignored him.
“Ah, chère,” he said, coming up behind her. “I need to get back to New Orleans. My buddies are out there looking for Fontenot and I’m sitting up here doing nothing.”
His words cut into Dana’s heart. Doing nothing. Is that what he thought of what they’d spent practically the entire night doing—nothing? She tried to reerect the barriers around her heart. It wasn’t as difficult as she’d been afraid it would be. Not with him talking like that.
It would be even easier if he’d put on some clothes.
“Do you have to walk around in those boxer shorts?” she groused. “They’re not decent.”
“They cover up more than a bathing suit.”
“That’s not the point,” she retorted. “The point is the boxers are underwear and are not acceptable attire. The bathing suit has gained an acceptability.”
“Ouch,” Cody said conversationally. “I think I just got attacked by the counselor.”
He walked over to her, pinning her in between the bed and the wall, blocking her exit. He put his hand around the back of her neck and caressed her nape, an act that never failed to make her crazy with the need to kiss him.
She closed her eyes and reached for control. “Cody, stop fooling around. If you’re going back to town, you’d better get started.”
“No can do,” he said, shaking his head slowly, as his lips inched slowly closer to hers.
She pulled her head back and met the resistance of his strong fingers on her neck.
“We have to wait for reinforcements. In fact, it will probably be a couple of hours.”
“Cody, stop it,” she said in a strained voice.
After a sharp look, Cody backed off. “What’s the matter, chère? Didn’t get a good night’s sleep?” His own voice was beginning to sound a bit strained.
“Uh, Cody, I think we should talk about last night.” Dana walked past him into the kitchen and sat at the table. She felt better sitting down. And it helped to have the battered wooden table as a shield.
Cody came in behind her and got his cup. He leaned back against the sink and watched her, his blue eyes narrowed with suspicion and wariness.
Dana took a deep breath, clutching her mug in both hands and looking at it instead of him. It didn’t work very well. Her peripheral vision was filled with the long expanse of her husband’s bare flesh—her ex-husband’s.
Cody had no modesty. He’d always paraded around with few if any clothes on, and Dana had always loved to watch him. He had a graceful efficiency of movement that reminded her of a big cat, like a cheetah, or a leopard.
With a shake of her head, she pulled her mind away from Cody’s body and focused on what she needed to say. “I know this has been an unusual situation for us, being forced together like this because of circumstances beyond our control. And I know that it’s only natural that two people who once were intimate might have some dregs of familiarity that would—”
“Dregs?” Cody stood up straight. “Dregs! What the hell are you talking about. Dana? Could you just spit it out please? You’re not making closing remarks here.”
He looked at her oddly and when Dana caught his gaze, she had to look away.
“Or are you?”
“Cody. I think last night was an unfortunate aberration, a natural response between two people who were once married and who are forced to spend time in a place that holds so many…”
“Memories,” he finished for her. “I see, counselor. An aberration. So what you’re saying is, take a couple of aspirin and if the aberration hits again you might want to consult a doctor? You know, somehow that wasn’t the way I saw it.”
He glared at her. “I was under the impression we both discovered a few things yesterday and last night. It seemed to me like a good starting point. I thought we might try—”
“No!” Dana banged her cup down on the table, desperate to stop him before he could say it.
She couldn’t stand to hear what he thought they might try. She didn’t want to be faced with the possibility that they could get back together. That was way too scary.
“I mean no, Cody. I don’t think it would be a good idea.”
“Just what is the problem here, Dana? Why are you acting like I’m the silver-tongued devil and you’re about to lose your soul?”
Dana couldn’t look at him. If she did, he’d see the shock and the fear in her eyes. She couldn’t have described the way she felt any closer than he’d just done in his offhand way.
About to lose her soul. It was a very good description of how she felt—how she had felt last night as the waves of pleasure, and if she were honest, of love, had washed over her as Cody made love to her.
It was the strangest conundrum. She only felt whole with Cody, but she also felt fragmented, like she was losing her mind and her soul when she let down the barriers and allowed him in.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she snapped in answer to his question. “You’re trying to reduce our situation to a song lyric or a throwaway line. We are divorced, Cody. Divorced. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
For an instant, a stark pain shone on Cody’s face, and the pain echoed hollowly in Dana’s heart.
“I know we’re divorced. You don’t have to remind me of that. I was there, remember?”
“Well, kind of there,” she said sarcastically, hating herself for pushing but unable to stop. She was hurting, aching, for what had been, and what could never be. And she always had to be the bad guy in these situations.
She had the feeling Cody would have stayed married forever if she hadn’t forced the divorce on him. She spoke to avoid having to deal with that thought. “You had very little if anything to say. No response. No argument. It obviously didn’t matter to you what I did.”
Cody glared down at her, his eyes sparking with blue flame. “No, it didn’t matter to me. Much. What the hell was I supposed to do? I get out of the hospital, come home to my loving wife to find out you’re sleeping on the couch and our bedroom is set up like a sickroom, to take care of the recovering invalid.”
He poured more coffee, his usually graceful movements jerky and clumsy. He spoke over his shoulder. “Do you have any idea what it was like? I know you were hurting, Dana. You’d lost our baby. It had to be eating you up inside.” His shoulders slumped for an instant, then he straightened and turned around.
“But you acted like some remote sister from
the Catholic hospital, solicitous but distracted, like a goddamn saint who does good works but can’t be bothered with actual human reactions. You wouldn’t even touch me, you hardly looked at me.”
He shook his head. “Then when I was able to go back to work, you were out of there so fast if my head wasn’t already spinning enough, you finished the job. Then wham, I got divorce papers in the mail and a lawyer telling me any further communications should go through him.
“Matter to me?” Cody laughed, shortly and derisively. “It was just the end of my entire life. Why the hell should it have mattered to me?”
Dana’s eyes were burning. Her chest felt as if an elephant was sitting on it. “I didn’t want to talk about this now.”
Ever.
She swallowed. “But maybe it’s time. If we get all the—”
Hurt…
“—if we get everything out in the open, then maybe we can both move on.”
“Move on…” Cody’s voice was tight and flat.
“Well, sure. I mean, there are obviously unresolved issues between us. Maybe it’s time for some closure.”
“Closure.”
“Would you quit repeating everything I say?”
Cody stared at her. “I’m just trying to understand,” he grated.
“I don’t see what’s so hard for you to understand. It was all your fault,” she said desperately, hating the look on his face, not wanting to face up to the pain that shone in his blue eyes. She gestured distractedly.
“You had to keep going out there. Every night I sat up wondering if you would make it home.”
“I made it home. Every night. I had a job to do. And I did it well. But hey, go ahead, blame me. You’ve always blamed me for everything.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Well, neither is holding me responsible for everything bad that’s ever happened to you.” He looked at her, his eyes smoky and dark. “I don’t blame you.”
She stared at him, shocked by his words. “Blame me? For what? What did I ever do to you?”
“What did you…are you kidding? You left me.”
CODY’S WORDS ECHOED in Dana’s ears. Harsh words, stated bluntly, flatly. As she stared at him, he dropped his gaze, looking down at his hands. Her gaze followed his and she saw the whitened knuckles, the strained tendons in his wrists and the hard, smooth muscles of his forearms. She winced involuntarily, afraid the cup he was holding would shatter in his grip.
You left me.
She remembered what he’d said the other day, in her apartment, too.
I came home to find out my wife was divorcing me and the baby we’d wanted so badly was never going to be born. So don’t talk to me about pain. Pain is something I know all about.
Dana’s chest was suddenly so tight it felt paralyzed. She gasped for breath. She had been so caught up in what he had done to her by getting shot and almost dying and scaring her half to death, that she had never stopped to consider what she had done to him.
He was right. They’d never really talked after he’d come home from the hospital. She hadn’t allowed it.
She’d closed herself off from him, from feeling, from pain.
She had been so caught up in assigning blame that she hadn’t considered how she had hurt him. All she’d been able to feel was her own hurt, her own emptiness, her own pain.
“Oh, Cody.” She pressed her hands against her chest, trying to ease the heavy weight that made it so hard to breathe, as her throat clogged. “I am so, so sorry.”
She looked up at him, surprised at how hazy and watery he looked. She blinked and a stray tear slid down her cheek. “I was scared. I hadn’t been feeling well for a couple of days. I knew something was wrong with the baby.” She spread her fingers over her flat belly as she talked. “You were…gone, on some undercover operation. I hadn’t heard from you, hadn’t seen you, for days. I w-waited there in that apartment, and it was just like all the times…all the times Mama and I sat up waiting for Daddy to come home.” She clenched her fists on the table and looked down at them, seeing instead the anxious, terrified look in her mother’s eyes.
“We’d wait and wait, sometimes for weeks, and maybe he’d call, or send an envelope with some money. But then the calls would stop, and Mama would ask me to come sleep in the bed with her. Only we wouldn’t sleep. We’d just lie there, waiting. She’d look at me with that awful terror in her eyes, and I’d pat her h-hand—”
She stopped. Her voice had cracked. She curled her fingers against the scarred wood of the table. “I’d pat her hand and tell her I was sure he’d be back soon.”
“Chère—”
She shook her head. “I was so sure he’d be back. Every single time. I was sure. Because he was my daddy, and he promised me.” She blinked, and two fat tears escaped and rolled down her cheeks.
“And every time, eventually, he came home. But then, my twelfth birthday came, and he’d promised me he’d be there…you know? But he wasn’t. The weeks turned into months, and we didn’t hear from him. My thirteenth birthday came and went, and sometime during that year my mother’s eyes turned from scared to sad.”
She shrugged and glanced up at Cody, biting her lip to keep it from quivering. She could hear the thickness of tears in her voice. “Then one day the police called. They’d found a car when they drained a lake. He’d lost control on a rickety country bridge. Drowned. His driver’s license was laminated.” She shuddered violently, then covered her mouth with her hands.
Chapter Twelve
Cody had watched Dana with a dawning horror, as she relived something he couldn’t even begin to understand. He longed to wrap his arms around her trembling shoulders, but he didn’t. The thread she was hanging on to was so fragile right now. She was so breakable.
Her pale face, her trembling hands that barely held the hysteria at bay, her stiff, thin shoulders, all those things were more precious to him than ever. He stood, helpless, as a new, terrible understanding dawned in him.
Waiting. That was what scared her so. The waiting. Sitting, being brave, wondering if this would be the time he didn’t come home, just like her father. Now he knew what kept her from letting go. Fear. Fear, and a sadness he could never imagine.
If it were the last thing he ever did, he would banish that fear from her eyes.
After a few moments, she put her hands, palm down, on the table again. “There’s a place inside me, Cody,” she said in a small voice. “A place that I have to keep closed off. Because the…the pain in there is so bad…” She gestured helplessly and smiled a sad little smile. “I don’t think I could stand it.”
With every fiber of his being, he wanted to reach out and pull her close, but he knew her well enough to know that she didn’t want to be held right now. Especially by him.
So, forcing a lightness he was far from feeling into his voice, he spoke quietly. “I’m right here, chère. I can help you. You can count on me.”
She looked up, and he saw in her face that his attempt at lightness hadn’t worked. She was poised, halfway between the past and the present, and nothing he could say right now would convince her that he was any more dependable than her father.
“Dana, please. I want to help.”
He watched as she drew strength from somewhere and straightened up. She closed her eyes tight, then opened them again, and her look was accusatory. “While you were in surgery, I lost my baby. Alone, in a public bathroom in the surgical intensive care waiting room. It was too much. I can’t go through it again, Cody. There’s no room in me for any more hurt.”
Cody’s heart was filled to bursting, and a suspicious stinging was starting behind his eyes. “Come here.” He reached out to her, and she almost yielded, but then she pulled back.
She held up a hand, palm out. “Don’t, Cody. Please don’t ever touch me again.”
Cody froze at her words. He saw the tears in her eyes, and he knew she loved him.
But she would rather live without love than take the cha
nce of being hurt, of losing him like she lost her father. He understood her fear. But, oh God, it hurt.
Cody wanted to kill the bastard who hadn’t cared enough about his family to stay with them, to give of himself to keep them safe.
She stood and put her cup in the sink, then turned back toward him. “Please don’t try to see me again, Cody. I’d appreciate it.”
She whirled and stalked off to the bedroom, her slender back stiff, her chin held high.
He loved her so much. There was no question about that. He’d loved Dana from the first minute he’d set eyes on her.
The very things he loved were the things that kept her from him now. Her strength. Her determination. Her courage. Now he knew even better just how strong and courageous she really was.
But did she have to be so stubborn?
He shouldn’t have said what he did to her, but it was the truth. Mostly. He really didn’t blame her. He hadn’t blamed her for leaving him. But sometimes, deep in the night when the air was too muggy to sleep and the loneliness crept in to suffocate him, he blamed her for not loving him enough to put up with him.
He blamed her for wanting her safe, orderly life more than she wanted him.
He was a cop. It was in his blood. There was nothing he could do about that. His grandfather had come to New Orleans from Ireland to start over, and had walked a beat for thirty years.
There was nothing as exciting as pitting yourself against a worthy adversary. Nothing as satisfying as putting a murderer away. Nothing.
Cody stopped his thoughts right there. He was lying to himself. Last night had made him start thinking about things, made him look back at his life and wonder if he’d made the right choices. And Dana’s words this morning only reinforced the doubt that was beginning to grow.
He’d missed a lot.
What if watching his own child being born was more exciting than anything he’d ever done?
What if holding his own child in his arms surpassed the satisfaction of capturing a murderer?
What if a quiet, safe life with the woman he loved was better than being a hotshot detective?