This, his hotel room, his job at the prison, the entire town, it all seemed like some kind of hallucination. Like he'd wake up and find himself back in Los Angeles, back in the job that had so drastically changed his life.
What was that bit of white sticking out from behind the clock? He squinted, tried to make it out, and finally remembered.
The other night, when he’d first met Alexa, he’d placed the white napkin with her sketch of him on the bedside table, where he could easily see it.
He liked looking at it, not because he wanted to admire himself, or anything, but because it had been drawn by her hand. It contained some of the brightness that drew him to her.
This morning, that drawing was what gave him the strength to prop himself up on his elbows, then to draw himself up to a sitting position, the sheets pooling at his waist. Shaking his head, feeling the brush of the russet colored hair on the skin of his forehead, he reached for the drawing.
This woman, the one who had put a bit of her soul into this little sketch—she wasn’t perfect either. His every instinct said that she had secrets, and yet… and yet none of this darkness clung to her, like it did to him.
Maybe that was part of his attraction to her—his shadows to her light. No matter what the reason, he knew he wasn’t going to be strong enough to do what he should, namely, pull away from her so that he didn’t bring her down.
No… he needed that brightness. Craved it.
Thinking of Alexa, of maybe stopping by to see her, was what finally drew him from bed. Untangling the sheets from where they had twined around him during a restless night, he finally, finally sat up, planted his feet on the scratchy carpet. Stood, wobbling only a little before striding naked across the room to the bathroom.
He didn’t bother to look in the mirror—he knew what he’d see. A face that was thinner than it should have been, and eyes with dark smudges beneath them. But the cold water that he turned on full got his blood moving, and he knew that when he got out of the shower he at least wouldn’t be so pale.
“Aah.” When he couldn’t stand it anymore, Nate added a twist of the hot water faucet to the cold. His skin screamed at him for the abrupt temperature change, but uncomfortable as it was, it cleared the lingering fog from his head.
Allowed him to remember what had caused him to go to bed with his emotions even, but slide into depression overnight.
He’d had the nightmare again. The one that would never leave him, because it was real. Not something that he’d manufactured in his brain, but a memory, a mental snapshot of blood and bitter cold.
Nate. Watch out!
The smell of blood in his nostrils as Nate turned, was able to avoid being shot himself, as Jud had been. The rattle of his partner’s breath as Nate took precious moments to subdue their attacker, a kid barely out of high school who’d gotten desperate at the first wail of sirens.
An armed robbery gone wrong. So wrong, that by the time Nate had the perp secured, lying face down on the concrete, Jud’s eyes had been glazed over, his soul already on its way home.
His partner had been steps ahead of him in that alleyway because Nate had been nursing a sore ankle, his own fault for leaving free weights on the floor to trip over in the middle of the night. Something seemingly so inconsequential.
But because Nate hadn’t put away those fucking weights after his workout, Jud had gotten into the alley first. Jud had cornered the panicked kid, and Jud had been shot, straight through the stomach, a wound that there was no coming back from.
It should have been me.
Nate had friends, and his parents were alive, but there was no one who depended on him ultimately—no one whose life would fall apart if he’d been the one to die.
Jud? Jud had a wife and two children, a six year old boy and a four year old girl. An entire family whose lives were torn to shreds.
Yes, it should have been him. But instead he was here, caught in not hell, but purgatory. Forced to put one foot in front of the other, day after never-ending day. No sun to burn away the clouds—and he didn’t want the light.
He didn’t deserve it.
But since meeting Alexa… he craved it.
* * *
He found Alexa sitting on a wobbly looking stool in front of the flower shop. A large pad of bound paper was open in her lap, and a hand holding a pencil was sketching furiously on the snowy white paper.
She was so absorbed in what she was doing that she didn’t look up as he approached, though the change in the angle of her body told him that she knew he was there. Stuffing his hands in the pockets of his uniform pants, he waited, patiently, until finally her hand slowed and she looked up at him with those wide, expressive eyes.
“Hi.” Her skin was pale, and there were violet shadows underneath them. The urge to make everything better in her world didn’t make any sense at all—he barely knew her. But the feeling lifted him up out of the clinging dregs of nightmare and depression, and he hadn’t nearly enough of those moments lately not to reach for it with both hands and hold on tight.
“May I look?” He gestured at her notepad. She studied him silently, then tilted the paper so that he could see it.
She’d been sketching a book. It was a simple image, dark covers surrounding a stack of paper, bound with some kind of cord—a journal, perhaps.
But something about the way she’d drawn it—maybe the fact that she’d taken the time to shade the entire background, adding darkness—it made ghostly fingers play over the base of his spine.
“What’s that?” Even when he shifted his attention from the art back to her face, he found that he could still see it in his mind’s eye, burned into his mind.
“I don’t know, exactly.” Alexa let out a short, startled laugh, standing then stretching. The movement caused her breasts to be outlined by her T-shirt, and though his libido had been rather firmly on hold through his depression, the sight of that soft flesh had fire roaring back to life, licking along his skin.
“I don’t know much of anything anymore,” she continued, shifting a step closer to him. When her eyes locked on his own, something snapped tight between them, a connection he hadn’t asked for and couldn’t help.
There was more than a little fear in those amazing eyes, too—though whether it was of him or of something else, he had no way of knowing. All he understood in that moment was that something about this woman made him want to move heaven and earth to make her happy. To keep her safe.
“You don’t have to be afraid of me.” His voice was low and his words sounded raw. “Or of anything else. I swear.”
“I believe you.” He took in the way her lower lip trembled, the almost innocent lines of her painfully beautiful face.
Then, as though he had absolutely no say in the matter whatsoever, his hands were gently cupping Alexa’s cheeks. He heard her soft intake of breath, his own quiet moan as he brushed his thumbs over the smooth planes of her jaw.
He was going to kiss her. He just might die if he didn’t. And though he had no idea of how he would stop himself, he wanted to give her time to say no.
She didn’t, standing up, rising to her toes and brushing incredibly soft lips over his in the lightest of butterfly touches. One of them moaned—him? Her? Then their mouths were fused together, a kiss that might have looked chaste to a passerby but that made the entire inside of his body turn to molten fire.
This—this wasn’t just a kiss. This was everything he’d never known he wanted.
* * *
Before Nate’s arrival, Alexa had been stuck thinking about the passage from the book. She’d spent a long, sleepless night, questions racing through her mind—who had written it? Why was the book in Estelle’s shop?
She wanted to believe that it wasn’t real, and to forget that she’d ever found it. Nate’s kiss—it did just that.
She hadn’t been kissed at all in a long time, and never, ever like this.
When finally he pulled back, she couldn’t stop from pressing her
fingers to her lips with wonder. She’d never been the type to blush and stammer over a man—she’d grown up with far too strong of a role model.
But this simple touch from a man who was the next thing to a stranger—at a time in which neither of them, she was certain, were looking for anything like this?
It was very nearly her undoing.
“That... that was interesting.” Running her tongue over her lips, she tasted him, watched his grey eyes darken, like an incoming storm.
He nodded, his muscles tensing, and for a brief, wild moment, she thought he might kiss her again.
Then he was gone and Alexa felt better, brighter, than she had since before her accident.
Chapter Seven
What had possessed him?
Nate had never been the kind of man who avoided intimacy, though some of his ex’s might have argued that point. But the fact remained that he’d come to Florence for peace, and in his experience, that fairer sex were rarely peaceful.
But Alexa... Alexa was different. She was the furthest thing possible from a badge bunny, a woman who was just attracted to the uniform—and sometimes handcuffs—of a cop.
She ran deep. Though he was certain that those deep waters were not still, he was already in over his head and didn’t want to be saved.
He ran the back of his hand over his mouth, trying to recall the way it had felt to have her soft lips pressed there.
The clanging of a locker door in the men’s staff room tore the image away, reminding him to get his game face on. Daydreaming while on shift at a maximum security prison was suicide.
“Fury.” The outgoing officer who held Nate’s position, but on the night shift, nodded at him as Nate entered the cell block. Dylan Stark was a man about Nate’s age, and he too carried shadows in his eyes.
Nate never asked, and Stark never offered. Still, the man was the closest thing to a friend that Nate had here in Florence.
“Anything I should know?” It was routine, to compare notes with the outgoing officer before the shift changed over. Knowing which inmates were sick, or feuding with one another, even those who had recently lost or gained privileges could mean the difference between life and death.
A few days ago, avoiding that fate had been mechanical, something that Nate knew he ought to do, but hadn’t cared much about either way. In fact, the cop shrink back in LA would probably have argued that he was tempting fate because he felt like he didn’t deserve to be alive.
Now, with Alexa’s taste still on his lips, Nate felt the promise he’d made to her tugging at the corners of his mind, sparking to life things that had lain dormant for months.
The measured look that Stark leveled at him told Nate that the other man had noticed the change in him, but their relationship wasn’t one that allowed for personal comments. So he waited, silent, for Stark to fill him in.
“Pretty quiet night.” Stark nodded down the line of cells. Once Nate was on shift, the doors would unlock, and the inmates would be escorted to breakfast.
Nate nodded, was about to head off to meet up with the other guards who would help him escort the cell block to the dining hall, when Stark spoke again.
“Keep an eye on Higgins, though.” Stark’s face was, like Nate’s, set in impassive lines—but something in his eyes made Nate stop to listen.
“What’s going on?” That hint of curiosity that had led him into the police force tried to sprout, but Nate tore it out by the roots. He was here to keep order, and nothing else.
“Nothing concrete.” Now Stark turned and looked Nate square in the face, and Nate knew what he would say before he did. “Just a sixth sense, I guess. He’s dangerous. I just don’t know why.”
Nate nodded in thanks before Stark strode off, and though no one would have known it to look at him, he kept his fellow guard’s words in mind as he and the other guards started to open the cells, organizing the inmates for the march to breakfast.
In a place like this, where every single inmate had done something pretty fucking bad to land them there in the first place... for Stark to comment on this one particular man?
Nate would pay attention.
There was too much to do, to pay attention to, to single the man out before the men were all seated with their trays, eating bowls of grey sludge that masqueraded as oatmeal. But as Nate patrolled the tables, he found Higgins sitting at the far end of a mostly empty one, hunched over his bowl, eating steadily.
He’d had a vague recollection of the man’s face when Stark had mentioned his name. But now he studied the man with a vague sense of foreboding.
The Native American was young, in his mid-twenties, if Nate remembered correctly. There was nothing overly sinister from his appearance, nothing to set him apart from the other men—his dark hair, though long, was tied back neatly in a knot with a scrap of cloth, probably torn from a sheet, and though his moustache was unfashionable, it was neatly groomed. Nate had never liked the dark webbing of tattoos that inked the skin of his temples or cheeks—thin lines with slender but menacing spikes—but again, more inmates had ink than not.
But there was something about this young man that was vaguely... off. That notion was only reinforced when Higgins looked up to find Nate watching him, and Nate saw the strange flicker in his night dark eyes.
Like a lightning flash in a pitch dark sky, it hurt his eyes before vanishing entirely. Then the sullen man returned to his meal, shoveling it in with a ferocity that said he didn’t find the taste nearly as revolting as Nate found the appearance.
The man ate steadily, moving from his oatmeal to apple without appearing to have any interest in or even knowledge of the other men surrounding him. Nate was so intent on figuring out what, exactly, made the seemingly inoffensive inmate seem so strange that it took a second before the whispered comment penetrated his consciousness.
“Now!”
Nate turned just in time to see the prisoner who’d been seated back to back with Higgins—Rorman, Nate thought his name was—turn, so quickly that if Nate hadn’t been looking he would have missed it.
“Motherfucking rapist!” The other man’s bald head gleamed as he dropped a small milk carton onto Higgins’ head, before letting out a triumphant shout, shooting a look around that dared anyone to come close.
Nate was already moving when the contents of the carton—a biological cocktail that it was best not to ruminate on the contents of—started to cascade down Higgins’ head.
His eyes met Nate’s as he rose, and the blank insanity in their depths chilled his blood.
With a howl, Higgins launched himself at Rorman, and Nate caught a glimpse of something metallic in the man’s hand. The scene before him slowed, and he heard his own breath roaring in his ears as he grabbed for his baton and plunged himself into the fray.
“Break it up! Now!” He knew the words would fall on deaf ears... by now every inmate in the entire hall had closed in, circling the small group, anticipating the fight. The noise was deafening, but Nate was focused entirely on the two men at the center.
He’d been certain that he’d seen the flash of something in Higgins’ hand, and was sure that the man had had a shiv. But now, in close, it was Rorman whose fist was closed around a weapon, a crude sliver of plastic that had been filed to lethal sharpness.
Higgins had the rage of the insane on his side, but Rorman was nearly twice the younger’s man size—and Nate was pretty sure that if Higgins had a weapon, Rorman had help in disarming him.
Maybe he shouldn’t have cared whether the men here lived or died. But even without a badge on his shirt, the feeling was the same—he was here to protect.
He’d been in dangerous situations before, but it never got easier—the sickly surge of adrenaline, the knowledge that every decision you made had to be the right one.
The one with the weapon was his primary concern. Lunging like he was back in high school football, he wrapped his arms around Rorman’s waist and tackled him to the ground. The man howled, and heat spre
ad in a thin line over Nate’s shoulder.
He’d been stabbed. Twisting, he tried to get his hand on the weapon, and was rewarded with a fist in the eye, another in the jaw. Higgins was behind him, spittle flying as he tried to get at his attacker; Nate kicked out with both feet to get him the hell out of the way.
His muscles strained as he wrestled Rorman down and over, then shoved his face into the floor. As he cuffed him another officer rushed in to help restrain him, and Nate heard the alarms—one of his fellow officers had pressed the panic alarm and other guards were on their way.
Two officers took charge of Rorman.
“You’re going to solitary,” one said as Rorman was dragged toward the door. The prisoner just grinned.
“Rapists don’t deserve to share space with the rest of us.” The rest of the prisoners in the hall let out a cheer even as they were herded into lines to be escorted back to their cells.
Strange bit of prison culture, that, Nate thought as he grimaced and pulled himself to his feet. He tried not to pay too much attention to who had done what to land them behind bars, but Rorman had been convicted of killing three men. Yet he and the other inmates considered him, and most others, a better man than one who had harmed a woman or a child.
Case in point—no one had come to the aid of Eugene Higgins, a fact, Nate saw, that had not been lost on the prisoner. As Higgins was escorted toward the door himself, a safe distance behind Rorman, he looked back over his shoulder at Nate.
“We pals now. Right, man?” “Shut it,” barked the officer in charge of him, but Higgins looked to Nate.
Having decent relationships with the inmates was important for maintaining order. But at the same time, they had to be reminded of who was in control.
Nate opened his mouth to reply in the negative, but Higgins was gone. Only then, when a medic came at him, did Nate realize that a hot, sticky trail of blood was dripping down his arm—and that the place where he’d felt that heat during the fight was throbbing with white hot pain.
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