by Max Monroe
I nodded even though I didn’t have the first fucking clue what he was talking about. Frankly, I wasn’t sure I wanted to. The man had demons in his eyes—big ones.
Pulling my coat from my shoulders, I draped it over the chair in his office and headed back out in search of the coffeepot.
It didn’t take long to find, right across the room in the center of the counter. Cops apparently liked their coffee—which was good. That was one thing I wouldn’t have any trouble getting into character for.
I had the pot in my hand and a healthy pour started into the mug labeled “Red” when the glass door opened, and the jerk cop who’d given me a ticket yesterday walked in.
He looked bad—the worst I imagined a guy as attractive as him ever did. Red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes and clammy skin, he’d lived a year in only a day’s time.
But by some sort of voodoo magic, the man still managed to pull it off.
Call me clichéd, but I had a thing for alphas.
And Officer Fox was alpha to the max. You could see it in his strong jaw, the powerful way he carried himself, and the way his midnight blue eyes exuded sex and sin and control.
Hell, at first, I had the ridiculous urge to make him a cup of coffee and offer him some ibuprofen, but I quickly thought better of it. He might’ve been a hot as fuck alpha cop, even when he was so obviously hungover, but he was also the dick who welcomed me to Cold, Montana with a speeding ticket.
Without warning, piercing pain coated the skin of my hand and made me jump as the dumb, distracted version of me poured steaming hot coffee up and over the lip of the mug until it ran onto my skin like a glove.
“Shit!”
Officer Fox’s gaze came to me, a mean smile livening the dead lines of his eyes as he took in my disaster.
He didn’t hesitate to bask in my agony. “Must be a habit of yours.”
My eyebrows pinched both in pain and confusion as I shuffled to the sink, dropped the offending mug with a crash, and turned on the cold tap full bore. It soothed the sting on the surface, but it didn’t stop the pulsing pain inside.
Christ. Ow.
“What?” I asked like a fool, glancing up from the stark white singed skin of my hand and into his deep sapphire eyes.
He jerked his head at my mess, his features almost shockingly devoid of sympathy. Since they were vibrant and supple in all the ways that counted, I figured he had to work at making them appear that severe. “Always pouring shit all over yourself.”
Anger, hot and spicy, filled my mouth, its intensity momentarily stronger than the pain. “You asshole.”
Full lips pulled back to bare his teeth as he spat his next words. “Better an asshole than a stuck-up bitch—”
“Levi!” Chief Pulse yelled from the doorway of his office, his voice hard and unyielding. “In here! Now!” Head swinging across the room, he speared the only other officer on duty with hard eyes. “Help Ivy, Glen. Make sure she doesn’t need a doctor.”
The only other man in the room pushed up from his seat, clumsy legs tangling with each other as he tried to escape the web of furniture. He had on a Cold Police uniform, and it wasn’t too hard to deduce his name was Glen.
“I’m fine,” I said confidently. Actually injured or not, there was no fucking way I was going to the hospital. The last thing I needed on my first official day in town was that kind of attention.
Despite my assurance, Glen crossed the room the rest of the way in a hurry and took my hand in his to survey. He didn’t move it out from underneath the tap, and for that I was thankful, but he did a thorough inspection nonetheless.
“Looks like some minor burns, but nothing that won’t heal.”
I nodded with an easiness I didn’t feel. My heart was pounding from the encounter and all of the unexercised anger it had produced. Fucking hell, I wanted to let that arrogant asshole have it. Chief Pulse had intervened in our exchange too fucking soon as far as I was concerned.
“I’ll check our first aid kit. See if we have any salve in it,” Glen offered. I took a deep breath to calm down before answering on a whisper.
“Thanks.”
As soon as he stepped away, I peeked through my curtain of falling hair, eager to see what was going on in the office with Officer Levi Fox.
He was the one they’d been talking about this morning, and he obviously had a big fucking chip on his shoulder. I wondered if it would hurt worse than normal if I punched him in it.
His taut back the only thing of him I could see, I watched as his shoulders bunched, the chief’s mouth moving a mile a minute.
I was nearly desperate to hear what was being said, but no matter how hard I strained, the most I could make out was a muffled rumble.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Chief shouted.
His voice was loud, but honestly, his body language was doing most of the yelling. Wild arms swung out from his bulging neck, and all one hundred and ninety pounds of him were poised forward, ready to break my bones with a tad more attentiveness than a quick snap.
“Do you get some kind of pleasure from being a goddamn idiot?”
“Chief—”
“Shut up! I don’t wanna hear any-fucking-thing you could be thinking right now.”
The beat of my heart turned caustic. Bitter excuses and unfounded insults raced through my head, and it was on the tip of my tongue to tell him he was the one who was asking fucking questions—but I thought better of it at the last minute.
Always perceptive, he read my mind anyway.
“They’re rhetorical, asswipe. I mean, Jesus Christ, you look like a sack of warm dog shit from your little trip to the bottom of the bottle last night.”
My jaw flexed at the news that he’d heard about last night. A picture of the chain of human telephone formed clearly in my mind. Jeremy is friends with Mona’s husband, Nick. “Jeremy—”
“Is a good fucking friend, so you keep your shit-talking mouth shut. I think you said quite e-fucking-nough when you came in here spewing hate at a woman you don’t even know.”
The f-bombs were flowing like water from his lips. It was his ultimate tell. Old Red wasn’t just a tad pissed; he was outright furious.
“I know her,” I contested. Her lead foot had introduced us.
You could see the kind of woman she was in every stupid stitch of her designer clothing. You could see it in her mossy, catlike eyes. I could see it in the way she held herself like she owned everything around her.
Lush lips, bright green eyes, and a body that could make a man weep, Ivy Stone was beautiful; I’d give her that. But none of that shit mattered to me.
I didn’t want anything to do with her.
Yeah, but you don’t have a say in the matter.
Worn and brittle, Red’s voice lost some of the volume but none of the grit. “You don’t know her. You’re all twisted up in your head, so much so you can’t see past your thick fucking skull.”
Mention of my head made it pound with more than just my hangover. My arms felt heavy, and my legs felt weak. I knew blood flowed quickly and reliably through my veins, but for the way I ached, they may as well have been dry.
I hurt. All over. Couldn’t he see that?
This whole film liaison bullshit was the fancy, slow, and excruciating version of a knife carving me up from the inside out. It might have only been a day since the chief told me I had no choice in the matter, but I already had enough memories consuming me to be considered an actual haunted landmark.
“You need to find someone else to do this,” I whispered. Pain and poison seeped out of me and spilled into the space between us. “Can’t you see what this is doing to me? And the fucking film hasn’t even started yet,” I added by way of a mutter, more to myself than him.
“You’re doin’ it to yourself,” he said softly. I could feel the rough edges of his declaration as it scraped across my skin. All of his bark was gone, but his decision was resolute. I was doing this—even if it killed me.
“Now
, get yourself together. We’re gonna go out there and check on that girl, and I swear to God, you say one fucking thing I don’t like, and I’m gonna feed you your balls for breakfast.”
Hands in fists and teeth clenched so hard they’d be worn clean away in an hour, I gritted out my answer. The words tasted sour. “Yes. Sir.”
Chief Pulse moved to the door, but I stayed rooted to the spot as surely as if my feet had actually attached. As soon as he was out of sight, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and then, finally, with sheer force of will and some emotional cutting shears, followed him.
Visions of days past clutched at my chest tightly as I cleared the threshold of the office and saw her there, perched on the edge of Glen’s desk, wild red hair covering the entirety of her face while she looked down at her hand. The skin where she’d burned herself was red and angry, and her knee bounced—tiny, fluttery motions—as Glen rubbed the inflammation with cream.
Guilt over my callous disregard for her injury and the lingering Jack Daniel’s churned and mixed in my stomach. I struggled against the impulse to throw up the rotten combination and stepped closer to the huddle at Glen’s desk.
Ivy’s head came up as I got near. Her body tightened and her eyes dulled, all green glitter and sparkle gone.
Translation: I wasn’t welcome in her personal space.
As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t fully blame her.
“Are you okay?” I asked, somehow finding a way to hustle the words through the fire in my throat.
Harsh words and pithy comments hung precariously on the tip of her tongue—I could tell. But with just one glance to Red, she held them back.
Instead, she gave me an answer. And it was genuine, every bit of it, as well as cool and detached. “I’m fine. I doubt they’ll be planning my funeral anytime soon.”
As much as the words were innocent, harmless filler to her, they were like a goddamn bullet to the chest for me. Funeral. That word was associated with memories I didn’t want to lose myself in. It was all too fucking painful, and the chief noticed and moved to defuse the situation.
“Look, why don’t we call it for today? Ivy should at least get someone to look at her hand. And you should go home and get some rest, Levi.”
I nodded. I was on shift today, but nobody needed me to be out on the streets like this—least of all me.
“We’ll meet back here again tomorrow morning and try this again.”
Resolved and ready to get some space, I nodded my acquiescence and got the hell out of there.
My old truck started up on the first crank—the furthest thing from a given on days as cold as today—and I pulled out. Destination: unknown.
“Well, well, well, look what the toilet puked up.”
I smiled at Jeremy and settled into the chair in front of his desk at the bank. He was a loan officer here, had been for a decade, and he was one of the most well-liked guys in town.
And he was a much better friend to me than I was to him.
“I’m sorry for last night.”
“Yeah, well.” He waved a hand. “My life would be too sedate without you anyway.”
I shook my head and picked up the framed picture on his desk, turned it around, and rubbed my thumbs down the silver frame thoughtfully. His wife was laughing, her head thrown back as she looked up at him, their youngest baby on her hip, and he had their eldest daughter in the air, hands up and ready to catch her as she came down.
None of them gave even one fuck about the camera. Everything that was important to them was well within arm’s reach.
“Your life is perfect,” I said as I set the frame back in its place. And it was. He had it all figured out; what was important, what wasn’t. I envied him with a poisonous intensity.
He smiled then, but his eyes, they stayed keen as they surveyed me closely. “So…what’s up, Lee? What are you doing here?”
I smirked and steepled my fingers in front of my chest, pressing hard enough that a couple of them cracked. “I thought it was obvious. I’m apologizing.”
His dark brown brows shifted closer together, and his mouth pursed. “Survey says that’s bullshit. I’ve had to drag your drunk ass home more times than I can count, and I’ve never received such a royal showing. Something brought you here today other than clearing your conscience.”
I did a quick once-over of his compact, muscled body, trying to calculate if I could take him. I knew he worked out five days a week, but I was a cop, for shit’s sake. I was in superb physical condition.
Still, given the pint and a half of Jack still roiling around in my stomach, there would be better days to test it. I settled for verbal aggression instead.
“I could tell you what a fuckface you are for telling Nick about last night. Would that make you feel better? You know he tells Mona fucking everything. And once Mona knows, Old Red knows too.”
He shrugged, completely unaffected.
The bastard. Why couldn’t he ever take the bait like a normal fucking person?
Suddenly tired, I dropped the front and gave him the veneration he’d deserved from the beginning of this impromptu meeting. I was ninety-nine percent sure he’d spent time last night cleaning up my vomit. I was all kinds of an asshole for shit-stirring at all.
“Fine. I just… The chief gave me the day off—” He raised his eyebrows and sank back in his chair, hands at the back of his fresh-cut russet hair and elbows out. “Ordered it, really,” I clarified with a hard swallow. “And I didn’t want to go home.”
He shook his head and rolled his eyes, but he pushed to his feet all the same. “Come on.”
Forehead pinched, I followed his lead and got to my feet as he grabbed his jacket out of his closet and headed for the door. “We’re going to breakfast,” he told Karen, the twentysomething and very pretty receptionist at the front desk, when we passed her by. “I’ll be back in an hour.”
She smiled and nodded, briefly meeting my eyes with carnal interest. I considered it for half a second before tossing the idea out like garbage. She had too close of a connection to my friend and this town, and I only fucked strangers. I broke into a jog to catch up to Jeremy.
“Going to breakfast, huh?” I asked, slinging an arm around his shoulders.
He shook it off dramatically and shoved my shoulder. “Yep. And then you’re going to go home and shower the fucking filth off of yourself and get some rest so you can be at my house at five thirty.”
I barked a laugh. “And why’s that?”
“Payback. The girls will be thrilled to have Uncle Levi as a babysitter tonight. I can hear their squeals now.” My eyes narrowed playfully. “I’ll make sure they have tons of new nail polish to try and all the latest Justin Bieber playing through the house when you get there.”
I laughed, rubbed at my eyebrow with a very particular finger, and shook my head. “You’re a cruel man, Jer.”
But really, that sounded like exactly what I needed.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” my sister and assistant, Camilla, asked for the fortieth time as I sat in the dark living room of Grace Murphy’s little house with my phone to my ear. It was late—nearing midnight. I needed to go to bed, but my thoughts wouldn’t slow and my mind wouldn’t ease. After the tense encounter of this morning, the injury, and an endless stream of producers going over various details of the movie, I needed a little mindless chatter with my sister to take the day away.
I’d questioned early on whether involving family in my professional life was a good idea, but Camilla had turned out to be one of the best personal assistants in the business. Other celebrities were constantly trying to steal her away from me with fancy cars and promises of obscene money, and in the end, having a blood tie to keep her loyal to me wasn’t such a bad thing.
“I’m fine. The doctor came and went three hours ago—” A point of contention, by the way, with many, many people. Mariah, Camilla, Jason, two of the producers—they’d wanted me to be seen immediately, but there was no way in hel
l I was going to let it interrupt my schedule for the day. I’d wrapped my hand loosely with gauze over the salve Glen had put on and agreed to a visit after I finished my meetings. “The burns are only first degree, and I did the right thing by putting it under cold water. He wasn’t thrilled that it’d been running from the tap, but he didn’t see any signs of long-term damage. Plus, the cop who helped me put salve on it, right after getting it cooled made the active burning stop.”
“Ooh,” she cooed, my injury temporarily forgotten. “Hot cop tending to your wound. Sounds sexy.”
I laughed and pulled the blankets covering me in my huddle on the couch up higher. Even with the heat turned up to seventy-five, I was fucking freezing. It probably didn’t help that I’d naively packed silk camisoles and matching short-shorts for my pajamas.
“Not quite. Glen was very nice, but he’s middle-aged and has a daughter in college.”
I kept my mouth pointedly sealed about the cop who was hot—offensively so. He’d ruined any chances he had to star in my daydreams by being a colossal prick, and I didn’t need Camilla hounding me about him.
“Bummer,” she muttered glumly, and I laughed.
“I’m here to work. Not fall in love.”
“That’s the best time to fall in love!” she insisted. “When you’re lost in your work and don’t see it coming. Other celebrities do it all the time. Look at Channing and Jenna!”
I smiled and mindlessly picked at the quilt covering my knees. “I appreciate your enthusiasm, but I don’t think this is like that.”
“You never know—” Camilla started, but the flash of headlights through the front blinds caught my attention and distracted me.
“Who the hell is that?” I whispered without thinking.
Camilla picked up on the uncertainty in my voice immediately. “Where? What’s going on? I thought you were at your house.”
I jumped from the couch and ran to the front window, peeking through the blinds as discreetly as I could. The beams of the headlights blinded me, so I couldn’t see much.