Turn Me Loose

by Anne Calhoun

  It was going to be a very long trip to Chicago.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Seven years earlier …

  A shadow fell over the economics textbook she was pretending to read. Riva looked up to see Officer Hawthorn looming over the table at the back of the pancake house. With one quick glance he took in her face, hair, clothes, the textbook and laptop open on the table beside her.

  “You paid up?”

  She nodded. Her heart was pounding, her eyes unable to decide where to focus: on his face, or anywhere but his face. How could she have mistaken him for a grad student? The lamp hanging over the booth threw a soft light on his face, but it only brought out the lines around his mouth, the firm set of his lips, the implacable look in his eyes. He wore jeans, the soft caramel leather jacket over a long-sleeved T-shirt and no-nonsense boots.

  Her stomach rolled a slow loop she might be able to chalk up to nerves. There were two problems with that. One, she’d bought drugs from a dealer before without her nerves getting involved. Two, the glimmering sensation coursed through her chest to settle low in her pelvis. Nerves didn’t make her body go soft, her lips part.

  Desire did.

  “Let’s go.”

  She hurriedly closed the laptop and the book, then shoved them both into the messenger bag she carried and followed him through the pancake house. It wasn’t busy at this time of night. The perfect out-of-the-way place to meet your cop handler before buying some drugs.

  A nondescript car sat around the corner of the building. Hawthorn clicked open the locks.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “To the meeting point.”

  He skirted the edge of campus, taking Riva down streets she’d not seen before, using a back route through the science buildings to avoid the worst intersection on campus before turning onto the winding road that led through the park that marked the campus’s eastern edge. They pulled into a small parking lot where joggers and runners left their cars before setting out on one of the trails. The lot was empty except for one other car, idling near the dumpster. Hawthorn parked next to it. “Out.”

  He met her on the passenger side of the car. Riva hugged her arms around her body and shivered in the cold October night while the other driver’s door opened and a blond woman got out. “Officer Sorenson, Riva Henneman,” Hawthorn said.

  “Hi,” Sorenson said. “How are you doing?”

  “Great,” Riva said, mock cheerfully. “Fine. Couldn’t be better.”

  “Glad to hear it.” Sorenson opened the back door. “Get in the car.”

  Riva got in, then slid across the seat to let Sorenson follow her. Once inside, Sorenson opened a nondescript tote. “You’re going to do these deals wearing a wire.” She pulled out a black square with a cord neatly wrapped around it. “Battery pack. Goes on your waistband. Mic. Clips somewhere under your clothes. The advantage to being a woman is that your bra makes a good attachment point. Men have to have the thing taped to their skin. You would not believe how much they bitch about losing a little chest hair.”

  “Okay,” Riva said.

  Sorenson eyed her. “How many layers are you wearing?”

  “I get cold easily,” Riva said, defensive.

  “Lift up your top.”

  Riva looked around. All she could see of Hawthorn was his back, where he leaned against the side of the car. From the sounds and posture of his body, he was on his cell phone. Awkwardly, she hoisted her shirt above her bra. In less than a minute Sorenson had the battery pack clipped to her jeans and the mic tucked into the spot where her bra cups met. One strip of medical tape snugged the slack cord against Riva’s stomach.

  “All done,” Sorenson said, businesslike. “You can go back to Officer Hawthorn.”

  She felt like a dog during an obedience trial. Riva yanked her shirt down, got out of the car, trotted over to Hawthorn’s vehicle, then opened the passenger door. Once inside, he looked her over again, gaze lingering on her chest.

  “Want me to take my shirt off so you can get a better look?” she snapped.

  “I’m checking to make sure the wire’s not visible,” he replied. “Also, everything you say while we’re recording goes into the public record.”

  Oh, Jesus. “Are we recording?”

  He reached for the handset. “Are we recording, Jo?”

  “Not yet,” came the response. “Say when.”

  Hawthorn looked at her for a moment, then spoke into the handset. “Turn it on when she gets out of the car each time.”

  “You got it.”

  “How long until the first meet?”

  “Twenty minutes.”

  He hung up the handset. One elbow on the doorframe, the other on his thigh, he stared straight ahead. Fine. Two could play that game. She opened her messenger bag and pulled out her econ textbook. She couldn’t focus on the words. Her head was full of so many details, the way his legs sprawled open, the intriguing, complex meeting point of zipper, belt, and soft cotton shirt tucked into his waistband. The scent of his leather jacket and some sort of cologne, or aftershave, or maybe his shampoo. His skin. She was sure she could smell his skin, faintly musky. He’d done something to make himself sweat during the day, but it wasn’t an unpleasant smell. Instead, she found herself wanting to burrow into it, breathe deeply, rub her body against his.

  He startled her out of her dreamy train of thought when he reached out and turned the heat down. “You’re flushed,” he said. “I thought you were too warm.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m…”

  She was cold and hot, sick with fear and nerves and a growing sense of shame. How could she have been so stupid as to agree to sell drugs for her father? Her psych class had discussed sociopaths; with cold dread she’d recognized all the behavior traits: intelligent, charming, untruthful, egocentric, lacking in remorse. Her whole life he’d played her against her mother, holding out his approval like a toy in front of a toddler, then snatching it away the moment she made a mistake. How was she supposed to know Hawthorn was a cop? Her sheltered upbringing didn’t include picking out undercover police officers.

  What if this never went away? What if she never learned from her mistakes, never found her own power and courage and confidence?

  “You’re what?” he said impatiently.

  She was terrified, and as turned on as she’d ever been in her life. Her body and brain were in a state of cognitive dissonance she’d never experienced before, animal desire surging hot and fierce through her veins. Her fingers and toes were numb with cold, almost imperceptible shudders running through her shoulders, but her face was indeed flushed and heat pulsed between her thighs.

  Awareness flickered to life in his eyes. His gaze skimmed over her again, this time seeing the truth. His hand hovered over the knob, then turned the heat back on.

  Present day …

  Ian was jolted out of a near coma the next morning by his kitchen cabinet doors opening, then slamming closed. Convinced he should be the only person in his apartment, he lurched out of bed and hauled open the bedroom door. Riva Henneman jumped about three feet in the air and two feet backward, careening crazily off the edge of the sink before fetching up against the counter.

  “You scared me half to death!” Her hand was over her heart, her blue eyes wide in a face so pale her freckles stood out.

  He blinked, remembered the events of yesterday, and woke the rest of the way up. “Sorry. I was sound asleep.”

  “Are you still working the night shift these days? It’s after eight.”

  He hadn’t fallen asleep until almost four. “Do you need something?”

  “Coffee. Desperately. And a shower. Almost as desperately. Um … do you mind putting that away?”

  For a short, terrifying moment, he thought she was staring at his tented sleep shorts. Then he followed her gaze a few inches right to his hand, loosely clasped around his service weapon. He didn’t even remember grabbing it. “Habit,” he said shortly.

  “
You sleep with it?”

  “It’s close at hand.”

  “That’s not exactly safe gun practice.”

  “I don’t exactly have small kids in the apartment.” A thought occurred to him. “Can you handle a firearm?”

  “Sure,” she said offhandedly. “I’ll give you a demonstration if you don’t tell me where you keep the coffee.”

  “In a minute,” he said, setting the gun on his dresser for safety. “What kind of firearms?”

  She shrugged. “Hunting rifle, shotgun, and handgun.”

  He might need coffee to deal with this. “You learned to shoot because you live alone in a rural area?”

  “No, I learned to shoot because my dad thought guns were cool. Seriously, Hawth—Ian. Can we save the interrogation for after coffee? I have a splitting headache and if I don’t get caffeine in me soon I’m going to—”

  “Fridge door. Does Isaiah have access to those weapons?”

  “Weapon, singular, and of course not.” She hauled open the fridge door. Her face lit up when she found the bag of beans in the door. It gave him a moment to look her over. His first instinct had been the right one. She wore a pink T-shirt nightdress that fell to midcalf. It looked soft to the touch and was charmingly wrinkled from the heat of her body. The V-neck showed her clavicle while the soft cotton clung lovingly to her breasts, a thought that threatened to turn his morning erection into an all-day companion.

  “I only have a shotgun at the farm.” She unrolled the bag and found the scoop inside, then opened the top of the coffee maker and dumped in enough ground coffee to wake the dead. He thought about pointing that out, then thought the better of it. “Normally I keep it under my bed, but when I got home yesterday I unloaded it, locked it up in the gun safe in my closet, and hid the shells in the chicken feed.”

  “You keep a shotgun under your bed.”

  “I live alone on a farm at the end of a dirt road. You probably know this, but the sound of a pump action shotgun being racked is the most recognizable sound the world over.”

  Riva Henneman stood in his kitchen in her nightie, making coffee and talking about guns. Surreptitiously, Ian grabbed the doorframe. Solid under his hand. He wasn’t dreaming, but he also wasn’t totally awake, so he said the first thing that came into his head. “What do the guys you bring home think about that?”

  She ran water into the carafe, then poured it into the reservoir. “Usually they’re on the bed, not under it, so it doesn’t come up.”

  She brought them home for sex, not conversation. You only looked under a woman’s bed if you were at the joint-cleaning stage, or if you’d landed on the floor during seriously athletic sex. She also must need that coffee. She was answering his questions with a hefty dose of attitude but not outright loathing.

  “But I’ve mostly dated guys in the farm-to-table world, so they know all about shotguns. They’d be surprised if I didn’t have a gun in the house.”

  Maybe he was the only man who found a woman’s competence with weapons sexy. Maybe he needed more than four hours of sleep.

  The silence stretched between them, gaining an electric crackle as she actually focused on him. No longer distracted by the frantic search for coffee, her gaze sharpened and took him in from head to toe, sliding over his skin like fingertips, starting with his face—eyes, the lines in his cheeks, his mouth—then gaining weight and heaviness, more like it was the palm of her hand that dragged slowly over his chest, down his abdomen to the waistband of the cotton sleep shorts he wore. Her gaze lingered and his cock responded appropriately for what he felt was a really difficult situation: Riva in his kitchen, Riva likely naked under her nightgown, Riva looking at him like a morning quickie would be a great way to kill time while the coffee brewed.

  He didn’t look away, or shift, or apologize. Instead he stood under her gaze and felt a rush of pleasure unlike anything he’d known, let desire sweep through his veins and capillaries to pulse at the edges of his skin.

  Her gaze swept down his legs to his bare feet, then back to his face. When their eyes met she blushed, hard, like she’d forgotten that at the end of that sexually charged survey of his body she’d have to deal with the man again.

  If she asked him now if he wanted that kiss, he’d say yes. One shitty night of sleep and Riva in a nightgown, and his self-control was shot.

  Riva ducked her head, letting her hair hide her expression while she pushed the start button on the coffee maker. “I won’t be long in the shower. We should get going. It’s a solid six-hour drive to Chicago and I want to be there in time for dinner.”

  * * *

  When Ian came out of his bedroom, he carried a duffel bag and a backpack. His hair, still wet from his shower, gleamed like the coffee she’d just finished. He wore a pair of flat-front chinos, a thin sweater with the sleeves pushed to his elbows, and brown leather boots. The effect was office drone who rode a motorcycle. A familiar little thrill skittered along her nerves and settled in her chest, making her heart jump.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  She was sitting on his sofa, trying her best not to fidget herself into a frenzy. Being inside like this made her antsy. She needed fresh air, miles of walking, dirt under her hands, rain on her face. And now she was about to go back to the place that had made her the girl he’d arrested.

  “As I’ll ever be,” she said. He opened the door for her, then followed her down the hallway to the stairs they’d walked up the night before and out to the parking lot. It was a glorious spring day, sunshine pouring down from the skies like light flung at a painter’s canvas. She’d spent a fair bit of her time in Hawthorn’s car wondering where he lived, how it was decorated, if he had roommates. Never had a sleek condo crossed her mind.

  He unzipped the backpack and pulled out his laptop. “You drive the first shift.”

  She didn’t say anything while navigating traffic to the highway. To her surprise, neither did he. She’d half expected him to tell her how to drive, where to go, which route to take. Instead, he fiddled with some electronics she didn’t recognize.

  “You can ask,” he said without looking at her.

  “What?”

  “You want to know what this is, but you’re not asking.” His gaze flicked up to hers. “You can ask.”

  Getting used to a situation where she could treat Ian Hawthorn like an equal was going to require serious adjustment. “I couldn’t, before,” she said.

  “This is a different situation.” He plugged a USB cord into the laptop. “We’re colleagues, remember? We have to act like colleagues, like you’re the boss and I’m the apprentice, or intern, or whatever.”

  She laughed, merging into traffic on the eastbound interstate. “You are so not an intern.”

  “Just pretend for a while,” he said.

  Pretend they didn’t have history? Pretend the air wasn’t heated and crackling between them? Pretend he’d never cuffed her, never used her as a CI, never changed her life? She blinked. No time like the present. They had six hours to get this straightened out. “Okay. What’s all that?”

  “Portable secure wifi.” The answer came readily to his lips. “I can access national and state databases with secured wifi. Can we share the charger?”

  Before, Hawthorn hadn’t asked her questions unless it pertained to her readiness to buy yet more drugs from yet another unsuspecting dealer. “Sure. I’m all charged up.”

  He disconnected her phone, plugged in, and powered up the laptop. She looked at him, seeing him in the sunlight for the first time.

  “You keep staring. You can’t stare like that. You have to take me for granted.”

  “I’ve never seen you in sunlight before,” she said.

  That got his attention. His gaze snapped to hers; she could see him riffling through his memories of her. “Am I sparkling?”

  It took her a second, then she laughed. “No.”

  “Keep going,” he said. “Ask away.”

  “Pets?” she said, somewhat randomly
. It was easy to talk about pets.

  “I don’t have any now. My schedule’s too erratic to be fair to a cat, let alone a dog. We had collies growing up. My mom was around to let them in and out. Dad named them after quarterbacks. Marino, Elway, Montana, Bradshaw. You?”

  This was weird. Very weird. “We had a cat.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Mr. Fluffers,” she said reluctantly, and watched his mouth slide out of control.

  “Mr. Fluffers.”

  “You got a problem with that?”

  “Not at all. A Persian?”

  “White. My mom has a Yorkie now.”

  “A preference for fluffy things she can cuddle?”

  “I guess,” she said, thinking about her mom’s longing to love things. “Why?”

  “Because later tonight I’m going to be sitting down to dinner with your parents, under the guise of us being very friendly colleagues. From what you’re saying, you don’t go home much, let alone bring other people home. I need some of the basics of your story to not fuck this up from the beginning, because fucking it up could put us in a lot of danger.”

  And there was the Hawthorn she knew, focused on the operation, completely disregarding the personal elements. She hoped the old saying was true, that familiarity bred contempt, but in their case, all it seemed to be breeding was new, complex layers of attraction, desire. On her part, at least.

  “My dad may not be the most law-abiding citizen, but he’s not going to kill either of us.” But even as she said it, she wondered if she knew who her father really was. Seven years was a long time. People changed in that length of time. She had.

  “That’s not a risk I’m willing to take. You said yourself you haven’t been home much in seven years. You may not know what your father’s become. Tell me about your parents.”

  “They’re both from Chicago. Mom’s from the Gold Coast. Dad grew up in Fuller Park, on the South Side, and got himself a scholarship to Northwestern. He met Mom there.”

  “What’s her family like?”

  “Her dad was a banker, on corporate boards, that kind of thing. He was a perfectionist, which made Mom anxious. My earliest memories are of her always fretting, about meals, about how we looked, the house, traffic, the weather, anything she couldn’t control.”