Bear Claw Lawman

by Jessica Andersen

  He’d been silent too long, because she grimaced and shook her head. “Never mind. I thought… Well, I guess I thought wrong.” She turned to leave, and he told himself to let her go.

  He followed and caught her arm instead. “No. You weren’t wrong. You were very right—I owe you an explanation. But I need you to wait here for a minute.” When her eyes narrowed, he added softly, “Please, Jenn.”

  After a brief hesitation that felt far longer than it probably was, she nodded. “Okay.”

  It didn’t take him long to brief Tucker on the interrogation and get the ball rolling on Slider’s deal. Then he grabbed his bomber, caught her arm once more and urged her down the hallway. “Come on.”

  She let him lead her away from the interrogation rooms to the stairwell leading up. “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Chapter Seven

  He took her to the roof of the P.D. headquarters, where they found the air crisp and chill, the sky leaden with an incoming early-winter storm. The building wasn’t the tallest in the city, but there was enough of a vantage that Bear Claw City spread out around them, looking like a half-size diorama, and far more peaceful from up above than it was down on the street level.

  Jenn hadn’t ever brought Nick up here, didn’t know how he’d figured out it was one of her favorite escapes when she needed a five-minute break from the basement. Or maybe he didn’t know. Maybe he’d found it on his own, and liked it for the freedom and wide-open spaces.

  Darn him.

  It was hard for her to stay mad up here, though. Not when the city—her city—was spread out around her, reminding her that she had a ton to be grateful for. She had a great job in a city she loved. And she was still alive, thanks to Nick.

  She drew a deep breath, filling her lungs with air that shouldn’t have smelled of the distant mountains, but somehow did. She loved the way the edges of the city sprawl petered out to the patchwork blocks of snow-shrouded ranchland in some places, and bumped up against the stark green and rocky open stretches of the state forest in others. The nearest mountains were threaded with brilliant white veins of snow, laced with ski lifts and studded with lodges. All of it felt very vibrant to her, very alive, even from a distance.

  Still, though, she was all too conscious of Nick standing a few paces away, watching her with guarded eyes and a lingering edge of the toughness that he’d shown in the interrogation room. The wind tugged his hair out of its stubby ponytail, making him look untamed.

  Her too-sharp awareness of him brought a shiver that was quickly amplified by a gust that cut right through her sweater and thermal layer. She crossed her arms and hugged herself for warmth, glancing over at him and doing her damnedest not to let her thoughts show on her face. “Okay, we’re out here. Talk fast. It’s too cold.”

  “Here.” Nick shrugged out of his bomber and draped it around her shoulders, snapping it closed at her throat to form a warm, heavy cape. The fleece-lined leather surrounded her instantly with body heat and a heady, masculine scent that tugged against bittersweet memories.

  “You’ll freeze,” she said, though the protest sounded halfhearted, even to her.

  “I’ll be fine.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and blew out a breath that made white ghosts in the air. Somehow he didn’t look any smaller without the heavy coat. If anything, the dark green sweater made him look bigger and broader through the chest.

  He’s just being a good guy, she told herself. Don’t read too much into it. Especially not when this good-guy mode carried more than a bit of the bad-boy edge in the hard lines of his jaw and the steady steel in his eyes. “So?” she said finally. “Tell me about the guy I saw in Interrogation Three.”

  “That’s me,” he said, meeting her eyes. “But this is me, too. I’m the guy who lived with you for two of the best weeks of my life, the guy who broke it off with you and didn’t explain why, the guy who kissed you earlier and then ducked talking about it…and I’m also a guy who can worm his way into the tightest organization by talking the right smack and doing whatever it takes to make himself be what the bosses need.” He paused. “I’ve been a mule, an enforcer, even a killer. I’m all of those guys, Jenn, and that’s the problem.”

  She shivered involuntarily, but wouldn’t—couldn’t—let that drive her away. “What problem, exactly?” she asked, though she could start to guess, had already gotten part of the way there just by watching him and realizing she couldn’t trust what she was seeing.

  “It’s not something you can understand until you’ve been there.”

  You have no idea where I’ve been, she wanted to snap. She didn’t, though, because that wasn’t his fault. When they’d been together, it had been about the fun, the excitement, the sex. They hadn’t really gone out, hadn’t really talked about their pasts—it had all been in the moment, most of it in the bedroom. That had been their agreement, after all, and there hadn’t been any reason to take it deeper.

  Now, maybe, there was.

  So she kept her voice and her eyes level, didn’t let him see the nerves that flared when she said, “Try me.” And, yes, those were nerves. Because if they were sharing, at some point it was going to have to go both ways, and he wasn’t the only one with monsters in his closet.

  He hesitated, then said, “I have an ex-wife and two sons who I only see a few times a year.”

  “You…oh.” She actually took a step back, away from him. Not because he looked particularly fierce just then—although he did—but because where she might’ve been braced to learn about some of the awful things he’d needed to do undercover, she suddenly found that she wasn’t braced for this.

  She didn’t have any right to feel a spark of anger, maybe even jealousy, at learning he had an ex. They were grown-ups, were bound to have pasts. But coming from a tight, loving family like she did, there was an instinctive flinch at the thought of him staying away from his kids. She wasn’t an idiot; she knew it happened, was more the norm than the exception in some places. It just seemed late for her to be hearing this now. Especially given that she had told him almost from the beginning that she was a widow, and that things hadn’t been good between her and Terry.

  She hadn’t told him how bad, though, or what form the fallout had taken.

  “Stacia and I got along great at the beginning,” he said, so softly that Jenn might’ve thought he was thinking out loud, except that he was looking right at her. “I was just out of the academy when we met, bumping up from rookie when we got married, working at a local P.D. in southern Florida.”

  “Was that where you grew up?”

  “She did, not me. I moved there after college, because I was looking for something that wasn’t anything like New York. Pensacola wasn’t the city and it wasn’t freezing four months out of the year. As far as I was concerned, it was heaven.” He shrugged. “And it was, for a while. But two kids later, with me working for the DEA, things started falling apart.”

  “Once you started working undercover,” Jenn said, beginning to get past the sting enough to see the pattern.

  She’d heard it before. Heck, she’d seen it more times than she cared to remember, mostly among SWAT members, like Terry had been. Those of his buddies who’d been married rarely stayed that way, thanks to the crazy hours, the mental and physical realities of the work, and the distance it created.

  For a long time, it had seemed that she and Terry were the only ones who knew how to make it work, knew how to keep the flame going through the ups and downs of SWAT work. Then everything had hit the fan, and she’d learned how wrong she had been. How badly he had played her, fooled her.

  “Yeah,” Nick said, and for a second she thought he was agreeing that she had been an idiot to believe her husband’s lies. A split second later, though, she realized he was talking about undercover work and how it had wrecked his own marriage. “I turned into That Guy,” he continued. “You know, the one who gets weird and distant when the work gets ugly. I thought I was doing t
he right thing by not telling Stacia what I was going through, what I was up against, because I didn’t want her worrying all the time.” He grimaced. “Anyway, you know cops, which means you can probably fill in the rest. The better I got at my job, the more they put me undercover, which meant time away from home. And when I was home, I was That Guy. A stranger, Stacia said. I tried like hell to be the man she remembered, the one she fell in love with, but it wasn’t enough.”

  “And the kids?” She couldn’t imagine it was somehow better for them to only see him a few times a year.

  “Nicholas and Turner.” His expression twisted. “I’d show you pictures, but I don’t carry anything that can link me to them, or the rest of my family. Just in case.”

  “I…” She trailed off, realizing suddenly that maybe he was right. Maybe she didn’t really get what his life was like. She had only really seen him as another cop—he was something of a rock star among the detectives, yes, and she had liked that about him. She’d known he was more than that, just as SWAT cops were more than the norm. But maybe she hadn’t thought about what it really meant to do what Nick did, day in and day out.

  What would it be like, not being able to carry her parents’ pictures with her, or even have their numbers in her cell? She tightened his bomber around her, suddenly far colder than even the wind.

  Was that how he lived back in Florida? As a solo operator, only managing to be a part of his family during carefully timed gaps in his schedule?

  “Stacia remarried a year after the divorce was finalized,” he said, the words seeming to come easier now for him, even though they were getting harder and harder for her to hear. “Paul is a great guy, and a way better father than I was. He adopted the boys, took them as his own, and I…well, I’m more of an uncle to them, like I am with my brother’s and sister’s kids. The cool uncle who shows up a few times a year with good presents.” His words were far more matter-of-fact than the bleakness at the back of his eyes.

  Or maybe she just wanted to see that, wanted to think he had regrets.

  “Why didn’t you quit?” She hadn’t meant to say it, and shook her head. “Never mind. Not my business.”

  “It’s okay.” He shrugged and looked out toward the ski slopes, which were growing fuzzy with a band of incoming snow. “At the time, I thought I was indispensable, that if I didn’t take the assignments nobody would. Or even if they did, they couldn’t possibly get the jobs done as fast and with as little collateral damage as I was managing.” He glanced back at her. “This was when the drug traffic was at its absolute worst in Miami. We were fighting a rearguard action, with new organizations cropping up as fast as we could take them down. Faster, even. So, no. I couldn’t make myself quit, not even to save my marriage.” He grimaced. “Partly because I knew damn well she was right, that she and the boys were better off without me. At least then they didn’t have to wonder whether I was coming home.”

  Pain tugged somewhere deep inside her. “What about now?”

  “Miami still has its dark side, but it’s not as bad as it was.”

  “So why not quit now and try the family thing again?”

  His grin was rueful and very self-aware. “Because deep down inside, I still think I’m indispensable, and I still can’t see myself giving it up. Besides, I’m good at being the cool uncle.”

  In other words, he didn’t want a family more than he wanted the job. She shouldn’t blame him for that—heck, she had moved three states on forty-eight hours’ notice, just for a chance to get back in a crime lab for half the money she had been making.

  Still, though, it hurt to say, “So that’s it? That’s all you want for yourself?”

  “It’s about what’s fair, and what I can offer to someone else…which isn’t much.” He turned away from the mountains and crossed to her, so his big body was blocking out the wind and he was very close to her, looking down into her eyes as he said, “Since Stacia and I broke up, I’ve only dated very casually, had the occasional no-strings affair, a week, two at the most. Nothing that ran the risk of hurting anybody. Until you.”

  Her blood heated, though with anger rather than desire. Or maybe both. It was hard to tell sometimes with him. “Is that why you dumped me? Because you thought I was starting to pick out china or something? That’s a hell of a leap.”

  Maybe she’d been thinking in terms of extending their relationship, taking it up a notch, but she hadn’t said anything to him. More, that was hardly the same thing as expecting forever and a family, complete with a puppy and a picket fence.

  The thought of it tugged at her far more than she would’ve expected, though. Far more than she was comfortable with.

  He tipped his hand in a “sort of” gesture. “It wasn’t you, it was me.”

  “Ha. Original.”

  “I mean it, though.” He took her hand. He didn’t lift it to his heart as he might have before, letting her feel how hard it was beating, how much she turned him on. Instead, he looked down at their joined hands. “What we had was great, Jenn. Better than great. It was amazing, wonderful, crazy…and it was the crazy part that had me worried. When I found out the agency wanted me to stay here in Bear Claw until the Death Stare case wraps up, it was like Christmas came early. I wanted to tell you right away, even picked up my phone to call you…but then I saw how I’d programmed your number into my cell just as ‘J.P.’ Nothing else. And even that would be something I’d erase the second the case was over. Which reminded me why I didn’t get to be in a real relationship.”

  Ignoring how her throat tightened at knowing that he had been excited, too, she said, “We said it was nothing serious, just two adults having fun.”

  “Two adults who were living together, damn near inseparable?” He met her eyes. “Tell me you weren’t counting the days, the hours, dreading when the weekend came and I got on that plane.”

  She didn’t deny it. Couldn’t. “And I suppose you were looking forward to it, figuring it was the easy way to end things, clean and simple, no hurt feelings?”

  “No, damn it. That’s the point.” He squeezed her fingers. “I was crazy about you, Jenn. I wanted to stay and be with you, more than almost anything.”

  Almost. That, apparently, was the key word with him, especially when he was weighing the value of having a life against doing his job. In a way it was admirable. Mostly, though, it was irritating. Heartbreaking.

  “You were crazy about me,” she said, “past tense. Meaning you’re not anymore. But earlier you said you still want me. Pick one, Nick. Either you want to be with me or you don’t.”

  He brushed his knuckles across her cheek, though she wasn’t crying, wouldn’t let herself show that weakness. Not now, with him. Still, though, it brought a pang when he said, “I shouldn’t want you if I know I can’t have you.”

  You could have, though. You did. She shook her head, torn between anger and a hollow, echoing sadness. “You can just shut off your emotions like that?”

  “No, but I can do my best to override them if I know it’s the better course of action.”

  And that was the thing, she realized as her anger drained, leaving the hollowness behind. He was really trying to do the right thing, at least as he saw it. She might not agree with his methods, or even his conclusions, but she could admit he hadn’t been trying to be a jerk.

  In his own way, he had already known what had solidified for her today: the things that made him one of the DEA’s best undercover agents—his ability to play many roles, be many men and, more, the need that drove him to do the job—made him a bad bet for a relationship. It wasn’t learning of his divorce that made her think that, either; it had been seeing him in the interrogation room, and then after, when she’d watched him shed the role of Bad Cop and put his detective face back on.

  It had been eerie. Unsettling. And it had warned her of what she already understood, deep down inside—that she didn’t know him, not really.

  Aware of the warm pressure of his fingers, the steadiness o
f him waiting out there in the cold for her reaction, she sighed. “You could have told me the truth, Nick.”

  Something sparked in his eyes, but he nodded. “You’re probably right. Hell, you are right. I just didn’t figure that out until way too late.” He paused. “If it helps any, this is the first time I’ve been in this situation.”

  “Breaking up with someone you’re still going to see every day?”

  “Ending it with someone I still want to be with.”

  Her breath whistled out. “Don’t,” she said softly. “Don’t say things like that, and don’t kiss me again. Not unless you’re willing to do something about it.”

  It wasn’t quite an ultimatum, but it was close. What else could she do, though? Now that she knew what was really going on with him, she wouldn’t be able to hang on to the low-grade anger that had been keeping her sane when she saw him. And even knowing that she wasn’t seeing all of him, she was still desperately attracted to the guy standing in front of her. If he kissed her, kept kissing her…well, she would be in serious danger of making a big mistake.

  A deliciously fun mistake. Probably one of the best mistakes of her life. But a mistake nonetheless.

  He didn’t say anything for a moment, and her heart momentarily bumped at the thought that he was going to tell her that he’d changed his mind, that they should go back to the way things had been between them, no strings, just a blazing affair, with the deeper things left unsaid.

  Even knowing that wouldn’t be enough for her, and that she would just be setting herself up for heartbreak by getting involved with him, her pulse quickened. Because when she came down to it, the sex had been fantastic. Good enough to overrule her common sense, and then some.

  But then he nodded. “You’re right. I won’t…well, I won’t. That’s a promise.” He paused. “And I know it’s probably too little, too late, but I want you to know that I’m sorry. Not for getting involved with you—I wouldn’t trade those twelve days for anything. But I wish like hell I had ended it differently. I wish I had told you all this back then, and asked you to understand.”