Turn Me Loose

by Anne Calhoun

  Lamar’s gaze swept over Ian. Ian knew he’d been made as a cop. “Where y’all from?”

  “Lancaster. About six hours from Chicago.” Not his jurisdiction, in other words.

  Lamar pursed his lips and nodded slowly.

  “We’re just here for a tour,” Ian said. “No surprises.”

  “And the ingredients,” Riva said. “Definitely those.”

  They got a tour, Ian making sure to stay in Lamar’s line of sight and take absolutely no interest in anyone or anything not related to dirt, plants, and the process of turning seeds into food then getting them to kitchens and restaurants around the city. The people working at the site eyed him with the wariness common to people who grew up with cops in their faces but without the sharper edge that indicated fear or guilt. Toward the end of the tour, Riva sat down with their chef and talked ingredients and recipes with an absorption that fascinated Ian.

  “You remind me of a kid focused on a video game,” he said as they were leaving. Lamar was going to deliver the ingredients the morning of the luncheon, and Riva had that distracted expression that meant she was processing the conversation with the chef.

  “If I add pears to the green salad…”

  “That place had an interesting vibe,” Ian mused as he fastened his seat belt. “Can you find your way home or do you need directions?”

  She surfaced long enough to look around. “I can find my way home.”

  “This kind of business would make a great cover for moving drugs,” he mused.

  Her head whipped around so fast he thought he heard something crack. “It was just an observation,” he said.

  “Good,” she said, her color high. “Because that wasn’t why we were there.”

  Riva, however, set off his radar. “Something you want to tell me? About Isaiah, maybe? Or the ESCC?”

  “No!”

  “Pull over. Right now.”

  She swerved into a gas station parking lot. “What?”

  “What, what? You tell me what. Now, Riva.”

  “I hate it when you use my name like that,” she muttered. “Fine. I got up early and talked to my dad before he left for work this morning.”

  “And?”

  “I told him the farm wasn’t doing well and I wanted to get in on his business. His real business. Not the vending-machine cover business.”

  Ian glared at her. “I know that was the original plan, but plans change.”

  She shook her head. “I can do this faster than you can. He already trusts me, and he’d believe I couldn’t make it on my own—”

  He cut her off. “That was before I met your dad. If there’s a safer way to do this, then we’ll do it. Aligning me as a connection inside City Hall is safer.”

  “For me. Not for you. If they find out about me, Dad has some leverage. If they find out about you, you’re dead.”

  “I’m trained and paid to take that risk. You’re not.”

  “With me, there’s less of a risk in the first place.”

  A man walking by with a gigantic soda and a bag of chips stared at them. “Lower your voice,” Ian said.

  “I can’t go back now,” Riva said. “I’m less of a risk to him than you are.”

  “But I’m a bigger prize, and we both know how your dad feels about winning.”

  Her shoulders slumped ever so slightly. “Yeah. You’re probably right. But that’s not going to stop me. The point is to do this as quickly as possible. I’m really worried about my mother. This app says there’s a Vietnamese food truck that gets great reviews a few blocks from here. You up for pho?”

  They needed to talk about her mother, but for the moment he nodded, keeping quiet until they’d ordered from the food truck and found an empty table in the small park near the food truck. The paper bag contained chopsticks and a spoon useless for gathering up the noodles. Ian fumbled with the chopsticks until he’d gotten the hang of lifting a dripping portion of noodles and beef to his mouth. “Tell me more about your mother. She doesn’t show up on anything but social media and charity profiles.”

  “She’s been a homemaker since before I was born. Her dad didn’t raise her to have a career, and my dad didn’t want her to have one.”

  “Does she know about your dad’s side business?”

  “No.”

  He gave her a look. Denial was fine when nothing was on the line, but right now, they needed to be realistic. “You sure about that?”

  Another mutinous glare. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that she shows all the signs of someone who’s dealing with serious cognitive dissonance.” He slurped up the noodles, then wiped his chin. “She wouldn’t be the first wife to turn to painkillers, or to polish her husband’s tarnished reputation with good works like raising money for a drug treatment wing at a hospital.”

  “She doesn’t know!” She set down her chopsticks and folded her hands, sugar sweet except for the fury turning her lips white around the edges. “Someday someone’s going to get into all your personal business and drag it out into the sunlight and point out the flaws and mistakes.”

  “You can do it, any time you want.”

  She stared at him.

  “All you have to do is tell Captain Swarthmore about last night. I probably won’t lose my job, but I’d lose any shot at promotion. For kicks, the media would be all over my life and everyone in it.”

  She looked away, then fiddled with her paper cup of iced tea. “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “You could.”

  “I wouldn’t.” Her color was high. “Last night was between you and me. No one else needs to know about it.”

  He chose his words carefully. “You still looked a little startled this morning.”

  She poked moodily at her chicken, then plucked a mushroom from the broth and ate it. “It’s different when you touch me now. I want to know … what it could be like if you really let go.”

  “I did let go.”

  “Not really.” She flicked him a glance, like she was worried about his ego. “It was good. I’m not criticizing. It was fine.”

  “Every man dreams of hearing that,” he said, squinting into the sunlight. “‘Fine’ means you added a few things to the grocery list and made a mental note to get your tires rotated.”

  “Hardly,” she retorted. “Stop trying to distract me.”

  Of course she wanted all of him. Riva wouldn’t accept anything less. “I understand.”

  She spoke haltingly. “You were careful. With me. I appreciate that. I’m not complaining. I just … you’re always holding back with me. Do you think I can’t handle you?”

  He was having trouble breathing. So many questions, none of them ones he should ask. His heart was going to come right out of his chest. “Maybe you’re not the only one remembering the way we used to be.”

  She flashed him a look, blue eyes, tousled chestnut hair, trying to find her way through this. “This is where you tell me that you fantasized about tutoring an inexperienced girl in the ways of lovemaking.”

  “I didn’t.” He took a deep breath, forced himself not to check out the skyline she found so entrancing, looked her right in the eyes. “I fantasized about this.”

  Her brow furrowed as she pointed at the remains of their lunch. “What? This?”

  “About meeting you again. When you were older. About you liking me, instead of looking at me like I was your worst nightmare. About somehow finding a way to ask you out. I didn’t fantasize about having sex with a girl who was completely under my control. It was wrong on so many levels that I knew I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I let my mind go there. You were eighteen, but I was older and a cop, and it was my responsibility to keep things in line. We could have so easily crossed that line, Riva.”

  “You fantasized about this.” She looked at the table, strewn with the remains of their takeout lunch. “About, like, a lunch date?”

  “Any kind of date. The biggest moment was you not turning white and
bolting when you saw me again. After that, I was all smooth lines and cool banter. Getting a yes was easy.”

  She was staring at him, really looking at him. “Not sex.”

  “No.”

  “Wow. Now I feel like a total creeper.”

  It was his turn to half laugh. “I was aware of the attraction between us.”

  “Do you always talk like you’re writing a report?”

  He locked his gaze with hers. “You turned me right the fuck on. I’ve never been so attracted to a woman. It started the moment we made eye contact at Kaffiend. Intense, devastating, all consuming. I thought I’d never get out from under it. Is that better?”

  Her breathing was rapid, shallow. “How did you not think about it?”

  “I just didn’t.”

  “That’s some amazing mind control.”

  “I’ve always been focused.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “And there you go again, back behind the walls.” He expected an explosion, but she just stared at the sky, lost in thought. “I guess your fantasy met reality that night at Oasis.”

  That actually made him laugh. “Yeah.”

  “Kitchen fires and getting thrown out of a restaurant are a great way to reconnect. Unless, in your mind, you were saving me from something.”

  He would have given up his entire salary not to react to that comment, but the gods weren’t smiling on him. He flushed, beet red by the stinging heat in his cheeks and ears.

  Her laughter was half crowing, half sheer delight, loud enough to turn heads at tables around them. “Okay, now you have to tell me. Car accident? Burning building? Stalker? All of the above?”

  “Sometimes we just met at a bar.”

  She laughed harder. Getting defensive wasn’t helping him here, so he finished his noodles and waited for her to settle down. When she did, she flicked him a glance. “I want my startle reflex gone.”

  “It takes time,” he said quietly. Riva needed to learn to turn into his touch, to seek it, to arch and purr under it.

  “How do you know that?”

  “There’s a reason why we put recruits through a training academy.” He was sidestepping the answer. He’d learned that long before he joined the LPD. Staring at an IV line into his port, knowing it dripped poison into his veins in order to kill the cells gone rogue in his body, was the biggest mind fuck he’d ever come to terms with.

  Wrapping his brain around the complex, fragile relationship he was forming with Riva would be the second biggest.

  “Any ideas?” Her tone was light, like they weren’t talking about how to come to terms with a power imbalance, like they weren’t talking about how to have sex without her getting shocked out of the moment every thirty seconds.

  Possibilities ran through his mind. He could get a hotel room, plan a nice dinner beforehand. He’d start with her hands, gentle touches, nonthreatening, undemanding. Sharing a shower wasn’t a bad idea, either, something physical but not sexual. He could focus on this, double down, spend hours seducing her until all she thought when his skin touched hers was yes, there, more.

  But then he remembered why they’d met again, their purpose in coming to Chicago. They didn’t have time to take a weekend off and hole up at an expensive hotel. “Nothing that doesn’t totally ignore why we’re together again, and here.”

  She sighed. “Our timing is crap.”

  “But this time—”

  He stopped. This time wasn’t all that much different from last time, and they both knew it. It wasn’t timing. It was them.

  “Yeah, there’s no way to finish that sentence,” she said. Moving briskly, she collected their paper bowls and took them over to the trash can beside the food truck. “I’m still a CI you arrested, and you’re still moving up in the police department. Ready to go?”

  “You’re going out with Kelly tonight, right? Drinking and dancing.”

  “We’re going to Lit.” She gave him a defensive look. “It was Kelly’s idea, but I’m totally up for blowing off some steam. You can stay home, if you don’t want to come.”

  Memories returned in flashes, some HD sharp, others fuzzy edged and slurred voices. The wall of noise made by hundreds of people packing into a tiny space and the music thumping over, around, through them. A chemical mixture of smells, perfume, cologne, hair gel, hair spray, detergents, sweat. Alcohol searing into his gut, then through his bloodstream to the very edges of his skin until the boundaries between him and the rest of the world blurred into a smear. A haze of desperation, provocation, and artificial shrillness rising like the tide until everything went black.

  It never stayed black.

  He realized he was staring blankly at the gas station sign, and Riva was staring intently at him. He cleared his throat. “Does it fit with your usual routine when you come home?”

  She looked away. “This is the first time I’ve been home since … since then. Kelly was my best friend in high school and we’ve stayed in touch on social media. She was a bit of a wild child. Mom didn’t like the idea of me sneaking into clubs, so meeting up with her is a plus with Dad. He’ll see it as me siding with him over her. Kelly doesn’t get out very much now that she has Wyatt. I want her to relax and have a good time.”

  “You haven’t been home in seven years.”

  “No.”

  She hadn’t bothered to tell him that. He felt a muscle in his jaw pop when he gritted his teeth. “You didn’t think showing up out of the blue would look suspicious to your dad?”

  “No one can predict what will look suspicious to him. Unpredictability is a big part of how he keeps us off balance. Plus, if I come home for Mom but then start doing business with him, he’ll feel like he’s controlling me again. I told you I’d thought about this.”

  “He’s not going to be happy if you start asking questions about your mother.”

  “I’ll deal with that when it happens.” She still wouldn’t meet his eyes, but tension radiated from the set of her jaw. “I have to do something. I’ve left her here, with him, for too long.”

  Ian rolled his shoulders to knock the tension from them. Riva’s mother’s plight hadn’t been a part of his calculations on how this would go down, but helping her mother obviously mattered to Riva as much as protecting Isaiah. “Fine. We’re going out. We,” he stressed. “This isn’t negotiable,” he added when she opened her mouth again.

  “Fine.”

  * * *

  In between nailing down the order for her mother’s lunch, Riva had picked up ingredients for dinner. He watched her drive back to the house, biting her lip as she navigated through traffic.

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “Dinner.”

  “What are you going to make?”

  “I’m going to give the menu a trial run,” she said. “That will reassure Mom, and let me fine-tune before the big day.”

  He thought of the bags of fruits, vegetables, and herbs sitting on the truck’s back seat, all needing to be washed, scraped or scrubbed, then chopped. “I’ll help,” he offered.

  She blinked at him. The seat belt bisected her torso, creating a sweet little bulge on either side. It was kind of endearing. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  They carried the bags into the house, Riva calling, “I’m home,” as the screen door closed behind them. No mini mop greeted them.

  “Maybe she’s taking her for a walk?”

  “Unpack everything,” she said. “I’ll be down in a second.”

  Riva’s feet hurried up the stairs, growing fainter as she made the turn for the third floor. Her voice was too muffled for Ian to hear the tone of the conversation, much less the words, so he hastily emptied the carrier bags and folded them.

  Riva’s steps paused on the second floor; when she reappeared in the kitchen she was barefoot.

  “Mom says she’s got a migraine,” she explained, her forehead wrinkled with concern.

  “Are the headaches new?”

  “Yes. She was anxious,
not headache prone.”

  “If she’s taking something stronger, it could be withdrawal symptoms,” Ian said. “She’ll be down for dinner.” He kept his voice down. “Anyone else in the house?”

  “No. We’ll see Dad pull into the driveway from here.”

  “I want to search his office.”

  “He’ll have the laptop with him.”

  “Probably, but I’m doing it anyway. Whistle or something if anyone comes to the door.”

  She looked like she was about to protest, but instead closed her mouth. Ian pulled on a pair of gloves to do a quick search of Rory’s home office. As he opened drawers and searched behind knickknacks and books on the shelves, pictures on the walls, he heard Riva running water in the kitchen, drawers opening and closing, the whump of a gas stove lighting.

  Nothing. Nothing obvious in the warehouse, and nothing here. He needed to get a look at the upstairs suite, but that wasn’t happening today, with Stephanie and the dog asleep up there. Sugar would start yelping if he even set foot on the stairs.

  “You sure you’re up for being my sous chef?”

  “That’s the person who does the prep for the chef, right?”

  “You know the difference between chopped, diced, and minced?”

  “Uh,” he said. “They’re not all the same?”

  She sighed. “Lucky for you I like teaching. Put on an apron.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Cooking dinner with Ian Hawthorn. Never in all of Riva’s fantasies about Ian had cooking a meal with Officer Hawthorn come up. Maybe she needed to expand her horizons.

  Working with sharp knives meant keeping her mind on her work, and in this kitchen, it was a pleasure. Whoever designed the kitchen remodel had had a chef in mind. The cooktop was built into a workspace across from the fridge, with the ovens built into the wall adjoining. “Let’s start with the tarts. Wash and slice the new potatoes and shred the Emmentaler.”

  She handed him a knife and turned back to the puff pastry dough, letting her mind wander as she assembled the tarts. Like any other experience with Ian, this one was causing some serious cognitive dissonance, not least because she’d never expected to bring a man home.

  Forget the fact that the man you’ve brought home isn’t actually a boyfriend, much less a serious one. Ignore that. Instead, think about how normal this is. You’re worrying about your mother’s Valium-induced stupor, your father’s ability to find any weakness or flaw and exploit it for his own amusement. You’re worrying about having sex without your parents hearing.