Jonathan handed Shea both his own weapon, the one he’d taken off Moretti, and the key Moretti’s girlfriend had given him without being asked.
Shea eyed him suspiciously, though what exactly Shea suspected Jonathan had no idea. “How is she?” he asked.
“The EMTs say she’ll be fine.”
“How about you?”
“I’ll be fine as soon as that son of a bitch is behind bars.”
Shea grinned. “Thanks to you, he gets a trip to the hospital first.”
“Poor thing,” Jonathan would have said, but the sound of a single gunshot coming from the building silenced him.
And then he was running, like several of the other cops hauling ass toward the building. “Holy shit,” he hard someone say, but no one was moving.
He pushed his way through the crowd to the base of the stairs. Moretti was sprawled halfway down, face down and bleeding. Fragments of the top of his head dripped down from the ceiling above. “What the hell happened here?”
One of the older officers said, a sheepish expression on his face, “He said he didn’t want a stretcher, he could walk out. He talked us into cuffing him in the front because of his wound. We started down the stairs when he lunged forward and grabbed Dante’s gun, put it under his chin and fired. It happened so fast.”
Jonathan looked at the officer in question, Dante. A rookie who probably didn’t know crap about guarding his weapon. No wonder Moretti had picked him. The poor kid looked like he was about to pass out.
Jonathan headed back out the way he’d come. For a change, this wasn’t his mess to clean up. He met Shea right outside the building. “What went on in there?”
“Seems our friend will be taking a little detour to the morgue.”
Out at the curb he found Mari standing by the driver’s side of her car. “Hey, sailor,” she called to him. “Need a lift?”
For the first time that night, a smile formed on his lips. “Could be. Where you headed?”
“Over to Monte. A good friend of mine has a lady being looked at over there.”
He got in the passenger side and fastened his seat belt while Mari did the same. Without turning on the engine, she turned to look at him. “Seriously, Stone, are you okay?”
No, he wasn’t okay. He wasn’t ashamed to admit that. He rested his elbow against the doorframe and rested his forehead in a palm that trembled. Between nearly losing Dana and seeing Moretti’s brains splattered, he’d definitely seen better days. The best he could offer was, “I’ll be all right.”
She patted his thigh. “I’m sure you will.” She gunned the engine. “Now let’s get over there and see if they’ve got some cute doctors in that place.” Mari grinned. “A girl’s got to look out for herself.”
Twenty-one
Morning had already broken by the time Jonathan got Dana back to her house. The doctor had informed him that she’d been lucky that no major damage had been done to her throat or larynx and she should start sounding like herself in a few days as long as she rested her voice for the next twenty-four hours. They’d given her a foam brace to wear around her neck while the muscles healed. It hid the line of purple marks around her neck, a colorful reminder of what Moretti had done to her.
Neither of them was in shape for much of anything but sleep. Jonathan settled them under the covers in her bed, waited for Dana to drift off, then let sleep claim him. The next time he woke, darkness had already fallen again. Dana still lay cradled against his chest, her breathing even, though a bit raspy. That should ease up in a couple of days, too.
All in all, he was simply glad to have her here, alive, whole, lying beside him. He kissed her temple and she stirred, groaning in pain. “Ssh, baby,” he crooned, hoping she’d settle back down to sleep. That was not to be. She opened her eyes and winced when she tried to lift her head.
“God, this hurts,” she said against his chest.
“You’re not supposed to talk.” He scrubbed his hands up and down her back. The doctor had given her a prescription for painkillers that they’d filled on the way home. “Do you want me to get you one of your pills?”
She shook her head as much as she was able. “Ice cream.”
He chuckled. They’d picked up some of that, too, plain vanilla, chocolate and strawberry, which made chewing unnecessary. “I’ll be right back.”
He got out of the bed and went down to the kitchen, loaded a tray with two large bowls piled high with ice cream, a glass of water, her pills, a couple of spoons, and some napkins. When he got back to the room, she was coming out of the bathroom. His eyes traveled over her nude body. How long had it been since they were together? At most it was a couple of days, but it seemed like years to him. He wanted her, and his body had no compunctions about showing her how much. But for the time being, that would have to wait.
He waited until she got back into bed, sitting up against the pillows before setting the tray over her. He went around to the other side of the bed and climbed in next to her. She dug into the ice cream, wolfing down several spoonfuls and purring in delight. She lay back against the pillows. “You’re not eating.”
“And you’re not supposed to be talking.”
She gritted her teeth and rolled her eyes at him. She leaned over and got a pad and pen out of the nightstand. She wrote something on it and turned the pad around to show him. Her note read, You’re not eating.
He laughed. “I’m not hungry.”
She scribbled something else on the pad. Not hungry for food ? She offered him a wicked smile.
He definitely did not need her to go there. “Not hungry for anything.”
She looked down his body and wrote four letters on her pad. LIAR!
No kidding, but what did she want from him? He needed to rephrase that in his mind. He knew what she wanted. He wanted it too, especially after the last time they’d come together. He’d shown her a side of himself he would rather have kept hidden. But she’d been through so much physically and every other way that he didn’t want to risk hurting her.
As if reading his mind, she wrote on her pad and showed it to him. Doctor didn’t say anything about not having sex. She scribbled something else. Though a blowjob is out of the question.
He rested his forehead in his hand. What was he going to do with this woman? His only answer was to love her the best way he knew how. He took the tray from her and lowered it to the floor. He lay back and opened his arms to her. “Come here, sweetheart.”
She nestled against him, her head on his shoulder, one of her legs between his thighs, restless. Her fingers strummed across his chest. She murmured two words in that hoarse whisper of hers. “Please, Jon.”
Any trace of humor was gone from her voice, replaced with a kind of desperation he understood. She thought what she wanted was release, the physical kind, but it wasn’t, not entirely. It hadn’t occurred to him until that moment that she hadn’t said one word about what happened last night. Whatever she felt, she’d bottled up inside, and it would come out one way or the other. Either that or it would lie inside and fester, eating her up. He knew about that, too.
He tilted his head and kissed her cheek, her eyelid and finally her mouth, a soft sipping kiss that he repeated again and again. His hand roved upward to cover her breast, pressing her backward to give him better access. With his hands and his mouth, he brought her to the brink, before sheathing himself in a condom and pulling her on top to straddle him, knowing she couldn’t bear his weight. Yet it felt so damn good to be inside her, it took every ounce of his control to take it slow and easy, as she needed it. With his hands on her back, he urged her down to him, so that their upper bodies lay flush. He hugged her to him, as their slick bodies moved together, drawing each of them closer to the edge.
She toppled over first, her body contracting around his, her fingertips biting into the flesh at his shoulders. He let his own release take him then, tautening his body as a wash of pure pleasure flooded through him.
He hugged her to him
; aware at first only that she was trembling. Then he felt the dampness on his chest and the growing intensity of the sobs that wracked her body. “It’s all right, baby. It’s all right,” he whispered against her ear. He stroked her back, her hair, whispering whatever nonsense he could think of that might soothe her. He held her until there were no more tears, only dry sobs and then she finally quieted.
“Better?” he asked, before remembering she wasn’t supposed to talk.
“If I had a tissue.”
He laughed and reached for the box on the nightstand. Now that sounded like the woman he knew. She pulled out several, mopped his shoulder then blew her nose. “Sorry,” she mumbled.
“About crying all over me or about blowing your nose?”
She smacked him on the shoulder and reached for her pad. Both.
He squeezed her thigh. “You shouldn’t be sorry about either. That’s what I’m here for.”
She pantomimed blowing her nose then looked at him questioningly.
“Well,” he conceded. “Not that so much.”
She pressed her lips together and wrote. Don’t make me laugh. Hurts.
“What do you want me to do with you?”
She pantomimed turning on the faucet and a shower raining down.
Not a bad idea, considering the last time his body had seen water was the morning of the previous day. He got out of bed and set the shower, checked to see if there were enough towels for the two of them and went back to her. In that short span of time, she’d fallen back asleep. He couldn’t say he minded. She needed her rest. He went back to the bathroom and turned the cold water up full blast.
Dana woke in the middle of the night feeling chilled. Although she was covered by a sheet and thin blanket, her bed lacked the warmth of the man she’d become accustomed to sleeping beside. She turned on her side and found him by the dim light of the bedside lamp, standing by the window where she thought he’d be. But this time, he was nude, not having bothered to don a pair of pants in order to have a place to carry his gun.
She smiled as her eyes wandered over him, her savior, in more ways than one. As a woman who prided herself on her self-reliance, she wasn’t afraid to admit that she’d needed him and he’d come through for her, not only in keeping her safe from Moretti, but also a few short hours ago. She’d needed the release he’d given her, both physically and emotionally.
Ever since she woke up in the ambulance, she’d been numb, as if her emotions had shut down, like all she could remember were the events, not their impact. Last night, they’d come flooding back, mostly her fear that she would die in some unfinished building at the hands of some rogue cop and the desolation she’d felt thinking Moretti had gotten Jonathan, too.
He’d held her so sweetly, whispering bits of nonsense in her ear, soothing her. When was the last time someone held her and comforted her? Not since her mother, before the illness claimed her and took away everything that she was.
Oh, God, she was falling in love with this man. She had been long before the previous night. That scared her more than all the Morettis in the world, not in spite of what he was, but because of it: A man who was his own man, someone she couldn’t dominate and didn’t want to. She had no experience dealing with a man like him, and what experience she did have didn’t count. The whole time they were together consisted of her doing what he said in order for her to be safe.
But now that the danger was past, how were they supposed to get along? How did she, how did anyone let someone in that close, and not find themselves subsumed by the other person? She was sure people did it, but she never had. She’d spent the majority of her life sublimating her own desires to those of others. She was done with that now. She wouldn’t go back. Not for anybody.
But for now, she noted the tension in his posture and wanted to relieve it. She wanted to understand this ritual of his, whatever it was. He seemed oblivious to her, but she had no intention of pretending to be asleep. She leaned up on one elbow and said, “It’s a good thing we don’t live where there’s a monsoon season. You’d never get any sleep.”
He said nothing to that, relieving her of the notion that she could humor him out of his mood. She supposed only the direct approach would do. “What’s the matter, Jon? Tell me.”
He did look at her then. “It’s nothing you need to worry about.”
She groaned in frustration. At least he hadn’t told her to go back to sleep this time. “I’ll decide what I want to worry about, thank you, and it’s clear something is bothering you.”
He neither confirmed nor denied that. Undaunted, she asked, “Is it the rain?”
“It’s nothing.”
If she’d had something handy to throw at him, she would have hit him with it. Her throat hurt and his refusal to share with her hurt in a different way, as well. “I see. It’s okay for you to be there for me, but not the other way around.”
“I never said that.”
“No, but you implied it.”
He sighed and came over to the bed to sit facing her. She sat up; an unspoken sign that she was willing to listen to him. Still, for a long time he didn’t say anything. He simply rubbed his left hand over his right arm, back and forth over his tattoo in a distracted way. She’d seen him do that before. She scootched closer to him, took his hand away and kissed the tattoo. “Tell me about this,” she said.
Her gaze met his, and there was something about the way he looked back at her that told her she’d hit her mark. She wasn’t about to let it go. “What’s a big, tough police detective doing with the tattoo of a butterfly on his arm?”
She saw it in his eyes, his capitulation. He didn’t want to tell her but he would. “I’d been on the job about four years, still on patrol, when we got a tip that someone we were looking for was hiding out in an abandoned apartment building. I was working nights then. The crazy shift. So we go to this building. It’s pouring so hard outside and this place is in such disrepair that it’s more or less raining on us inside.
“We’re searching around with flashlights for this guy, when one of the officers comes across a body lying in a bathtub in one of the apartments. At first he thought it was a doll wearing a multicolored dress, except it was too big to be a doll, since the body was perfectly intact. But it was a four-year-old child, left there no more than twenty-four hours before, presumably by whoever had killed her.”
Dana swallowed. She’d figured whatever story he might tell her wasn’t going to be pretty, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear about the death of a child. “Who was she?”
“To this day I don’t know. There was never any missing person’s report filed on her. No reports of any child unaccounted for by social services. We canvassed the neighborhood, put up flyers; there were reports on the news. I don’t know how it can be that a four-year-old child is abandoned somewhere and absolutely no one is looking for her, but it was true. The officer who found her was Hispanic and gave her the name Mariposa.”
Dana knew that word from the Spanish she’d learned working in the neighborhood. Butterfly. “Hence the tattoo?”
“Well, a bunch of us, the ones still working the case, got drunk one night, the night we realized we’d have to give up on the case. We decided someone should remember her, even if no one else seemed to care.” He rubbed his arm while offering her a self-mocking smile. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
But she’d bet that little tattoo had become for him a physical representation of every mistake he’d ever made, every misstep, every unsolved case. “Why don’t you have it removed?”
“I can’t. We were foolish enough to make the promise that we’d wear them until we solved the case.”
“Is that a possibility?”
“Who knows? Every now and then one of us will pick up the file or get a tip from someone that doesn’t pan out.” He exhaled. “Probably not.”
He fastened a gaze on her that was as intense as it was searching. He probably wondered what she thought of him in lig
ht of the story he’d told her. She had no words to express what she felt. She recognized that he’d shared with her a part of himself that he probably didn’t share with many other people. That touched her more than she could say. And she understood now what the other night had been about, all his feelings of guilt, frustration and impotence coming out in the way he’d touched her. No wonder he’d withdrawn from her after that, since he hadn’t wanted to show it to her in the first place.
She took his face in her palms to place tender kisses on his cheeks, his eyelids, the tip of his nose and finally his mouth. Slowly, she leaned back against the pillows, pulling him down with her. It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that she loved him, but she wasn’t ready to voice that sentiment yet. Instead she showed him with her body what she couldn’t manage to say with words.
The next morning, after she’d showered and made him a breakfast of eggs, juice and coffee, she sat on the edge of the bed next to Jonathan and shook his shoulder. “Wake up, sleepyhead.”
Mumbling something, he opened his eyes and looked at her with eyes at less than half-mast. “Hmm?”
“I said, wake up. Your breakfast is getting cold.”
“Here’s the only breakfast I want.” He grabbed her by the waist and pulled her across him so that she lay beside him with her legs over his. He buried his nose against her neck, then stopped abruptly. He lifted his head and looked down at her. “You’re not wearing your throat thingie.”
“So you’re awake now?” she teased. “No, I’m not. I was starting to feel like Queen Elizabeth.” When he looked at her quizzically she explained. “You know with the ruff.” She gestured with her hands to emphasize her point.
He brushed a strand of hair from her face. “Your voice sounds better.”
“I broke down and took one of the pills.” She’d given in when she discovered nearly every muscle in her body ached from overexertion of one kind or another.
Body Of Truth Page 27