Protector’s Temptation

by Marilyn Pappano

  She gave his fingers a particularly tight squeeze before releasing them and peeking through the curtain on her side. “I’m not hiding while you face them down, Decker. They want me.”

  “So do I,” he retorted. “Alive and well.”

  She blinked at the fierceness of his response. He would have given it a moment’s thought himself, if every cop sense he had wasn’t on alert, warning him that danger was near. “This is my town, Mas. My turf. I get paid the big bucks to protect the people in it.”

  “I’ve been trained by the best to do that, too.”

  It was true. She was far from the average victim: strong, smart, capable of defending herself. She’d never needed his protection when they were on the job together. Most people who’d messed with her had lived to regret it.

  At the moment, he didn’t care if Myers, Kinney and Taylor died regretting it.

  He stared back where he knew the tree line was, still unable to make out any shapes in the shadows. Maricci and Gadney were back there now, dressed all in black for the job, wearing body armor and carrying high-powered rifles; and the Brat Pack were probably there, too, but AJ couldn’t see a damn thing.

  The first clue that something had changed came from next door: a high-pitched yapping from Pepper. A few seconds later, everything went dark: the security light, the thin strip of kitchen light coming under the door. Silence settled abruptly over the house as the refrigerator and the central air stopped.

  Masiela swore, and he echoed it. “Come on,” he whispered, grabbing her arm, pushing her toward the door. They’d seen enough. Now the action was starting.

  “I won’t hide—”

  “If they’re coming in, they’re coming in the back. Let’s get the hell away from the door.”

  They were halfway down the hall when breaking glass sounded in the laundry room. They quickened their steps, then AJ pushed her into the parlor and toward the pile of wallboard while he took up position at the door, pistol in his left hand.

  An instant later, making only a whisper of sound, Masiela darted past him and into the living room across the hall. He swore silently. It had been too much to hope that she would hide as he asked.

  Like him, she hovered just inside the opposite door, weapon in hand. She had the better vantage point; having to use his pistol in his off hand, he would have been too exposed if he’d taken that side. She didn’t stay there, though. As floorboards creaked at the rear of the house, she gestured in the dim light coming through the windows, then disappeared. He wasn’t sure if she intended to go through the dining room and circle around behind the intruders, or to ensure that none of them tried the same maneuver in reverse. He just knew that she was out of his sight. Out of range of any help he might give her.

  A form appeared at the far end of the hall—broad-shouldered, well over six feet tall. Taylor. Behind him was another man, shorter, leaner. AJ listened hard, but couldn’t hear a third set of footsteps. Had they left a guard outside, or was the other guy on a direct route to come face-to-face with Mas?

  Shifting his weight until he was out of sight, AJ bit back hard on a groan as he fixed the flashlight into the awkward grip of his right hand. He stepped into place, switched on the beam and directed it and his pistol at the two men.

  They froze just past the bathroom, Max Taylor in the lead, Stan Myers mostly concealed behind him. Taylor threw up one hand to shield his eyes, then grinned. “Hey, buddy. Long time no see.”

  “You should have made it longer,” AJ said quietly. “I don’t remember inviting you into my house. That means it’s okay if I shoot first and ask questions later.”

  “We don’t have a problem with you, Decker.” Myers’s voice was cool, displaying no hint of fear, though he remained in the cover Taylor provided. “Just give us Leal, and we’ll go away.”

  The way he said her name, the inflection, stirred a long-forgotten memory: Mas in the homicide division a week, maybe two; Kinney leering, making the other guys around laugh. I hear she lives up to her name. Lay-all. Sleeps with anyone, everyone. You gonna be the first to do her in homicide, Decker? ’Cause if not, I wouldn’t mind taking the job.

  AJ had blown him off—hadn’t even dignified him with an answer. He should have stopped Kinney then, should have stood up for Mas then.

  “You really think I’m stupid enough to believe you’ll just take her and go?” AJ asked mildly.

  “I’m not sure just how stupid you are, Deck. After all, you’re hiding her.”

  “Yeah, you know about hiding, don’t you? Why don’t you come out from behind Taylor where I can get a good look at you?”

  “That all you want?” Myers asked with a sneer.

  “A good look, a good shot.” AJ shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. With the load I’ve got in this pistol, I can take out both you and your shield with one shot.”

  Taylor stepped to the side, his back to the wall to keep Myers in the open. “‘You go first, Taylor,’” he muttered, mimicking his bud. “‘I’ll be right behind you.’ Yeah, hiding like a damn coward behind me.”

  AJ’s right fingers were starting to cramp, making the light waver. “Mas and I were just talking about that, how him and Kinney always manage to bring up the rear. It’s a wonder they haven’t gotten you killed before this, Taylor.”

  Distantly, AJ heard a swish. The door between the kitchen and dining room swinging open? He would give damn near anything to know exactly where Masiela was, what she was planning. She was an expert shot and could do some serious damage with the flashlight—or with her bare hands and feet, if necessary. Still, good cops could get unlucky or taken by surprise.

  “Enough talk, Deck. We didn’t come all this way to screw around with you. Taylor here might have second thoughts about killing you, but me, I don’t much care. I always thought you were a sanctimonious prick anyway. Hell, I should’ve let that scumbag kill you when I had the chance.”

  A knot settled in AJ’s gut. How much of his misplaced loyalty to these guys had been based on Myers’s saving his life all those years ago? And the bastard wished he hadn’t done it. Intended to finish what he’d stopped back then.

  AJ’s arm was throbbing. Any minute now, the flashlight was going to slip from his fingers, no matter how hard he tried to hold it. In the dark, Myers and Taylor would scatter, taking cover in the living room or retreating to the kitchen. They could trap Masiela between them.

  He sighted the pistol, grateful for all those hours spent practicing at the firing range with both his dominant and his off hands, and squeezed the trigger at the same instant he dropped the light. The blast rattled the walls and was followed almost instantly by a grunt, a body slumping to the floor, a curse.

  “Damn sonovabitch shot me!” Myers gritted out. “Kill the bastard and find Leal!”

  Though she’d prepared herself for gunfire, the first shot sent a jolt through Masiela. She pressed her spine tight against the unfinished wall in the dining room, pistol gripped in both hands, and inched toward the kitchen door. It had opened once, barely a few inches, the space filled by a shadow that must have been Dave Kinney, before it melted back into the kitchen and the door swung shut. Likely, he’d gone toward the hall to help out his buddies. She knew how they thought: no woman could possibly be as good as they were. Their priority now was taking out the real danger—Decker—then killing her would be practically an afterthought.

  She never had liked the way they thought.

  As more shots sounded in the hallway, she eased up to the door, listening, hearing shuffling sounds from the other side. She couldn’t identify who or where, though. Taking a deep breath, she wrapped her stiff fingers around the knob, turned it carefully, then pulled the door open one agonizing inch at a time. Nothing appeared out of place in the kitchen. The gunshots were coming from somewhere to her right, just outside the kitchen door and, it seemed, farther down the hall in the library. If Myers was still in the hall, down—dying?—that meant Taylor was likely in the library. As long as their attention
was focused on the hall and AJ, she had the advantage—she hoped—of surprise.

  She squeezed through the doorway. A shape too solidly black to be shadow was hunkered near the hall door, back to her. Dave Kinney, in the flesh. Anger swept through her, leaving ice in its wake. A fellow cop, whose job was to serve and protect and be better than the average citizen. A liar, a deceiver, a murderer. For years she’d detested him. At that moment she hated him—for what he’d done, for what he was. It would be so easy to kill him—justifiable, even. He was shooting at a police officer, and not just any officer, but Decker, his old friend, his fellow cop. She could use whatever force was necessary to stop him.

  Her arm was rock steady as she took aim center mass. She’d practiced for this—close range, distance, head shots, body shots. Kill shots. Practiced until she was perfect, until she could practically do it blindfolded, until the process was second nature, but in all her years as a cop, she’d never had to take that shot.

  She’d never imagined that the first time she shot a man, it would be in the back. Never imagined it would be a cop.

  “Come on, Decker,” Kinney called after a momentary silence. “You can’t outlast us. We came prepared.”

  Masiela strained to hear something from the direction of the parlor—movement, panting, swearing. For an instant her heart pounded, then AJ’s voice, quiet and calm, sounded.

  “Backup will be here any minute.”

  “A bunch of small-town cops, never been shot at in their lives,” Kinney scoffed. “We’ll kill them, too.”

  AJ was right, Masiela realized. So was Kinney. By now someone would have called for help—Maricci or Gadney, one of the neighbors. More cops, more guns, more danger. They could take out half the neighborhood, AJ had warned earlier.

  Or half the police department.

  Her finger was tightening on the trigger, slow steady pressure, when a sound, boots crunching on glass, came from the direction of the laundry room. Kinney heard it, too, abruptly pivoting in that direction, firing off a rapid burst of shots. There was a stumble, a crash, a groan, a panicked whisper: “Ty!”

  Masiela stepped away from the wall, readjusted her aim and pulled the trigger. The blast propelled Kinney sideways, carrying him into the wall, where he slumped to the floor. Unlike Myers and Gadney, he didn’t swear or groan. He lay silent, unmoving. Dead, she hoped.

  “Two of your buds are down, Taylor,” she said loudly. “You want to come out, or do you wanna be next?”

  Into the long silence that followed came the wail of distant sirens. A “shots fired” call at a police officer’s home would bring out every cop in town and every deputy in the county. “You’ve got about a minute to decide,” she warned Taylor.

  “You want to die, big guy, I’d be happy to accommodate you.” Maricci’s voice came from the left, moving stealthily toward the library. Mas saw what must have made up Taylor’s mind for him an instant later: the red dot of a laser sight centered on his chest.

  “Okay, okay, I’m coming out.” Taylor’s weapon hit the floor, then his shadow loomed in the doorway.

  Maricci shoved him to the floor and cuffed him, then spoke into the mic on his shoulder, calling for paramedics.

  Sirens blared then silenced, and doors slammed outside. Blue lights lit up the night, flashing through the front windows, as she went down the hall. She supplemented it with her flashlight, pausing a safe distance from Myers. He was bleeding, unconscious, but still breathing. Maricci came toward them with a pair of Flex-cuf restraints, and she stepped over the man and the blood pool and shined the light ahead of her. “AJ? AJ, where are you?”

  She directed the beam into the parlor and saw his feet first. Flip-flops—not the footwear of choice for a gun battle. That would go in the teasing-for-the-rest-of-their-lives category, along with that godawful Hawaiian shirt.

  He was sitting on the floor just inside the doorway, his back to the wall. Wallboard dust from a couple of too-close shots had turned his black cast white, along with an unused magazine resting in his lap.

  “Hey, Mas,” he said, his voice quiet, subdued. “Help me up, will you? I can’t seem to get my feet under me.”

  “Too much excitement on top of a broken wrist, huh? You never did get the adrenaline rush like the rest of us.” She set the flashlight aside, holstered her pistol, then bent to hook her arm under his. As she leaned close, the house lights came on again, and she found herself just inches from a red blot on his shirt, wet and growing bigger. She touched it, convinced it couldn’t be what it appeared, and her fingers came away sticky.

  Dear God, he’d been shot.

  The emergency room was always busy on Saturday nights, but AJ had never seen it like this. Multiple gunshot victims, plus one badly beaten Donovan, recovered from the trunk of the bastards’ rental car, just about every relative Ty Gadney had, along with most of the Deckers within driving distance, and so many cops that it looked like a convention. Considering he’d been shot, the trauma surgeon had told him he was the least of their worries that night. No threat to his life, no surgery.

  Considering he’d been shot, AJ reflected, he felt pretty damn good. It didn’t matter much if the Texas courts took on the case against Myers and Taylor. They’d tried to kill three cops and a lawyer in Georgia. Georgia wasn’t letting them go for a hell of a long time.

  And he wasn’t letting Mas go. Even if that meant going back to Texas with her.

  He eased up in the bed, testing the pain in his shoulder and arm. They’d packed the wound, put him in a sling and made noise about keeping him overnight. There was broken glass, splintered wood, Sheetrock and blood all over his house. He had no problem with spending the night elsewhere.

  He was swinging his feet over the side of the bed to the floor, when Maricci came into the cubicle, caught him under the ankles and swept both legs back onto the mattress. For good measure, he also locked the side rails up.

  “What do you need?”

  “Where’s Mas?”

  “She’s talking to Ray Donovan a couple doors down. He’s not feeling real macho right now—letting his guard down, giving her up.”

  AJ shook his head. “They beat the crap out of him. Anyone would have talked eventually.”

  “You wouldn’t,” Maricci replied. “I’m not sure she would have. She’s tough.”

  “More than you know.”

  “I’ll tell her you want to talk to her,” Maricci said on his way out.

  Talk? Mostly what he wanted to do was hold her. Look at her. Make sure she was all right. Touch her and just be with her. They hadn’t had more than a couple minutes together since she’d realized he’d been shot.

  The curtain that enclosed his cubicle fluttered, then Masiela slipped inside. Her hair was down, any makeup she might have put on in the past forty-eight hours was long gone, and her clothes were dusty and dotted with blood.

  She looked more amazingly beautiful than he’d ever seen her.

  She tugged the curtains shut behind her, then came to his right side. Her fingers were cool against his skin as she bent to rest her arms on the railing. “You want an update, I guess. Kinney, of course, is dead. I shot him. Myers isn’t dead. You should have shot him again. Gadney was hit in the leg; he just got out of surgery and is fine. Donovan…I don’t know what they did to him, but they kept him coherent enough to fly them here. They planned to kill him as soon as they got back. He’s pretty closed off. Doesn’t want to talk to anyone. His parents are flying in on their private jet tonight. As soon as Dr. Cate says he can go, they’re whisking him off someplace.” She paused. “Have I left anyone out?”

  “You.” He tried to take her hand, but the best he could manage was brushing the back of his fingers against hers. “Are you okay?”

  Her eyes grew darker, and she gazed at the curtains that blocked her view, down in the last cubicle, of Dave Kinney’s body. After a moment, she met AJ’s gaze again. “I didn’t want to kill him, but the choice was his.”

  Her answer
was simple, thoughtful, reasonable. He liked it. It was no more than he’d thought the first time he’d killed a subject. No less than he’d expected from her.

  “So what are your plans?”

  She blinked, then tucked a strand of hair back. “I haven’t really had time to think.”

  “I have. Put that railing down and climb up here with me.” He carefully moved to the edge of the bed, making room for her to stretch out next to him. The instant she came close enough for him to feel her heat, to smell her scent, tension he’d hardly noticed disappeared.

  She rested her head on his good shoulder, and he held her the best he could with his casted arm. “So you’ve been thinking…” she prompted.

  “I have.”

  “Solved the world’s problems?”

  “I don’t give a damn about the world’s problems. Just yours and mine.” His gaze locked with hers. “I figured out one thing for sure. I want you in my life, Mas. All these years, that’s what’s been missing—why I haven’t fallen in love, gotten married, had kids, been satisfied. I needed you to do those things, but I was too stubborn to see it.”

  “I’m still a lawyer,” she pointed out.

  “Yeah, well, we could use a few more honest lawyers.”

  “And cops.”

  “Absolutely.”

  She gazed at him, her fingers lightly touching his throat, his jaw, his cheek. “So…you think you might need to marry me? Have kids with me? Be satisfied with me?”

  “I don’t think it. I know.”

  “My job’s in Dallas.”

  “I lived there once. I can do it again.” He grinned. “I know for a fact that Dallas PD will be looking for a few experienced detectives.”

  “I’ve lived there a long time. Maybe it’s time for me to try someplace else.”

  AJ’s muscles tightened. He would go back to Texas and be happy, though deep inside there was a part of him that preferred the slower pace of Copper Lake. The events of the night aside, it was a safer place. Home to good friends who would risk their lives for a woman they didn’t even know. Close to his family. A good town to raise kids and a great house for them—once the new repairs were added to the old.