It was all too much to process. Questions flew around her brain like poison-tipped arrows—so many she couldn’t settle on which to mull on first.
“Well.” She swallowed hard and tried to align her features into a bland expression. “You’re right. I didn’t know that.”
Recrossing her legs, she sent a small isn’t that interesting smile around the table to her cowriters, who were unsurprisingly watching the exchange like spectators at a tennis match.
“While the AOS certainly has an aura of mystery around it”—and the men and women who were part of it looked tough enough and mean enough to appear as if they ate criminals for breakfast—“why is being a former member so fascinating?”
“There’s more to Constable Daniels’s story than that. Much more.”
Smugness coated his words. Heaviness like a swallowed bowling ball settled in Tilly’s gut. Like it or not, she was about to hear something she really didn’t want to.
By now, every other writer practically salivated at the thought of burrowing into the hidden depths of a stranger’s life. Someone’s most precious secrets could be tweaked and embellished then flung onto the small screen as fodder for an uncaring audience. And she was just as guilty of it as any other writer. Didn’t feel so nice when she knew the person having their life and actions dissected.
A person she was falling for.
The thought froze her tongue, and Jonas took it as a cue to continue.
“Who remembers a few years back when a man holding his girlfriend hostage in Wellington was shot dead by a member of the AOS?” Jonas asked.
There were a few mumbles around the table, but most of her cowriters shrugged or shook their heads.
Ken lifted his hand as if asking for permission to speak. “I remember. The guy slit the woman’s throat and made a run for it. Cops took him down as he came out the back door firing a hunting rifle.”
“A cop took him down,” Jonas said. “Noah Daniels, the newest member of the squad, fired the fatal shot.”
“That’d be a justified shooting, wouldn’t it?” Marjorie asked.
Jonas nodded. “Yes. But any shooting incident is treated like a homicide and the officer involved is thoroughly investigated. Eighteen months Daniels was under scrutiny before he was cleared, and the poor guy cracked under the pressure. Such a shame.” His gaze slid to Tilly’s, but there was absolutely no sympathy in his tone. “He left the AOS and returned to normal duties, but he couldn’t stomach it for long and transferred to Stewart Island. A killer with a conscience, it appears.”
It felt like a slab of marble were pressing down on her chest, flattening her lungs. “He’s not a killer.” The words came out in a whisper.
Jonas’s eyes once again displayed a predatory gleam. “Have you developed feelings for him?” He tutted, trying—and failing—to affect an expression of concern on his face. “Matilda, those men are stone-cold, highly trained machines. They have to be in order to do what they do. I imagine being emotionally distant is a core requisite to a long-term successful career. Just the sort of man a woman like you should avoid tangling with.”
She stiffened in her chair, hands bunching into fists upon her lap. While he might be correct in his assessment, she wasn’t a doormat he could wipe their past relationship issues on. “This discussion is now work inappropriate, Jonas. Can we get back to business?”
Dammit, he knew her well enough to spot that he’d hit his target and that his arrows would leave one hell of a bruise. “Certainly. Let’s put a pin in Trevor Marshall and move along to Nicole’s story arc. What have you got for us, Ken?”
While Ken began to speak, Tilly’s cell vibrated against her hip. She slid it out of her jacket and glanced down at the text message displayed onscreen.
Noah: How’s Auckland? Temperature’s supposed to drop to single figures tonight. My bed will be lonely and COLD.
As would hers—assuming she got any sleep that night. With a quick look to ascertain no one was still paying her any attention, she composed a response.
Tilly: Still in meeting. Suggest hot-water bottle and shark-shaped decorative pillow from B&B to keep you company.
She paused, rereading her message to ensure no hint of what was swirling around in her brain would tip him off. She didn’t want to discuss his lying by omission from seven hundred and fifty miles away. After a moment’s consideration she added a winking emoji face and hit send.
She stuffed her phone back into her pocket and concentrated on what Ken was saying. For all of five seconds. Dammit.
Emotionally distant. Stone-cold, highly trained machines.
My bed will be lonely and cold.
Noah couldn’t even come out and say that he missed her. Then again, you had to have feelings for someone to miss them, even if you were a little pissed at them at the same time. The way she missed Noah—craved him, wanting to be his hot-water bottle tonight and every night—only pointed toward an undeniable fact that made her stomach tip into free fall.
She was done falling in love. She’d already fallen.
Chapter 17
Noah’s plans to collect Tilly from Oban’s airport went by the wayside. He was called to a dispute between two neighbors who’d reportedly been reduced to screaming abuse at each other along with one flinging said neighbor’s dog’s smelly indiscretions back over the fence.
By the time he’d gotten the two hotheads to see reason, Tilly’s flight had long since landed. While neighbor one picked up all the dog turds he’d flung and neighbor two fixed his yard gate so the animal couldn’t escape and then do his business on his front lawn, Noah composed a message.
Noah: Doggy drama central here. Come to quiz night later at the pub?
A reply came a minute later.
Tilly: Will meet you there.
Noah frowned at his phone screen, a sliver of unease stabbing pinpricks down his spine. He’d been planning to sneak in a quick private reunion with her before heading to Due South. As much as he was loath to admit it, he’d missed her like crazy. She’d only been gone for three nights, and he was like a kid on Christmas Eve, dying to rip into a pile of gifts but not wanting to appear uncool and desperate.
Which he totally was.
And he planned to show her just how much he’d missed her once he got her alone.
After the dreaded paperwork was complete, Noah returned home to change out of his uniform and shower off the stench of doggy-doo seeping into his pores. Twenty minutes later, after his nose told him he no longer smelled like the wrong end of a mutt’s digestive system, Noah jumped in his ute and reversed out of his driveway. A quick glance up the road revealed all the lights were out at Southern Seas. The fact that it bothered him sat like a rock in his gut.
“Lots of things bother me,” he muttered as he drove toward the pub. “People who chew with their mouths open. Reality TV. The ever-growing population of plastic bloody shopping bags.”
How quickly time slipped away when you were just beginning to have fun with a woman. In two weeks the lights would be permanently off at the B&B. Until a new owner snapped the property up and moved in. Noah wasn’t feeling very neighborly about the prospect.
He found a parking space and strode past the fogged-up windows of the pub, which was crammed with warm bodies thanks to the quiz night’s growing popularity with tourists. Noah paused outside the glass door leading into the pub and the sizeable line forming at the old-fashioned wooden bar. Behind it, Kip, Carly, and their part-time bartender, Zach, busted their collective asses serving a last round of drinks before quizmaster Rhonda took over the mic. He eased inside, catching an eyebrow-lift greeting from Ford who was currently hogging the bar’s mic with his guitar and soulful voice.
He moved deeper into the pub, scanning the crowd for Tilly. Stuffy air barely circulated and what did was fragrant with the smell of wet wool, wet earth, fried pub food, and wet beer. Spying her seated at a table, talking with Ford’s wife, Holly, he dodged drink-bearing patrons and responded to hai
ls from other locals with a raised hand and a talk to you later smile.
“Hey.” He slipped into a seat that Bree had just vacated and ignored her grumble of irritation as she headed for the bar.
Tilly’s gaze slid past Holly to him. Her mouth rearranged itself into a thin smile, her lush lips pulled tight across her teeth. “Hey, yourself.”
Holly twisted around in her seat. “Where’s your Manly Man tiara and runner-up sash tonight?” Holly also smiled, but unlike Tilly, her eyes crinkled in the corners and she seemed genuinely pleased to see him.
“You’re a funny lady, Mrs. Komeke.” He rested his forearms on the table and leaned forward. “You okay, Til? Rough flight in, so I heard.”
“You heard right,” Tilly said with another fake-as-hell smile. “It was pretty bumpy, but only one passenger started reciting the Hail Mary as we approached the runway.”
If there’s one thing that bothers a guy more than a female uttering the word fine, it’s the torpedoing gut sensation he’d done/said/thought something wrong but with no idea what that something was. While Holly retold some of her most vomit-inducing aeroplane and ferry horror stories, Noah studied Tilly, hoping to spot a clue.
Her usually wild mass of hair was neatly tamed in some sort of complicated braid, and her makeup was applied to perfection. She wore a deep red leather coat he’d never seen before, a short skirt, and knee-high boots with a heel that looked both sexy and lethal. His bafflement only grew as he racked his brain for what’d changed since he’d pushed her laughing out of his bed early on Tuesday morning.
In the pub’s corner by the makeshift stage, Rhonda tapped the mic. “One minute, folks. Please move back to your quiz team’s table and we’ll get started.”
“Tilly, do you want to join me at Ford’s table?” he asked once Holly paused to take a breath in the middle of her How Many Times Piper Has Gotten Seasick story.
Holly switched topics on a dime and answered for her. “No way, José. Tilly’s already agreed to be an honorary member of the Madame B’ovaries. No backsies.”
Tilly rolled her shoulder. “Sorry.” But her eyes said not sorry. “I’m taken.”
Yeah, she was. And she would be—by him. But there was nothing he could do about it in a public place without arresting himself for disturbance of the peace and/or indecent exposure. Someone tapped his shoulder and he looked up to Bree’s move your butt stare. Hell—had he somehow pissed off the entire female population? Then her gaze softened—unlike Tilly’s—and she winked.
“I believe it’s time for you to get out of my seat, Officer Sexy-Britches.”
Noah stood, keeping eye contact with Tilly. “Talk to you later?”
“Count on it.” This time her smile was genuine, but there was a razor edge in it that cut him to the core.
Something was really bloody wrong.
Tilly was still an expert at making small talk, and Noah was wound up tighter than a jack-in-the-box spring as he drove them home after the quiz night ended. She’d begun a super-chirpy monologue on the way, the likes of which he hadn’t heard since she first arrived in Oban. He knew her well enough now to see it for what it was.
Nerves.
Auckland weather, Auckland traffic, the airline’s newest safety video, the person seated in front of her on the plane with a diabolical case of gas. A little of everything and nothing about what she really wanted to talk about. Because she did want to talk, otherwise she’d never have agreed to him driving her home.
Noah pulled into his carport and killed the engine. After a few moments the interior lights switched off, leaving them sitting in semidarkness. The dashboard lights cast a green shadow over their faces. Tilly finally ran out of steam and fell silent. He unclipped his seat belt and shifted his weight to face her, his jeans rustling. Tilly flinched and her hands clamped into fists on her lap, as if the sound of denim on vinyl was like a gunshot.
What the hell was going on? And why was she suddenly not the good kind of nervous around him, but the bad kind?
She unclipped her seat belt, crossing one sexily booted leg over the other. Then she crossed her arms so tightly against her chest that her leather jacket creaked.
“Will you tell me what’s wrong? Or do we have to play twenty questions?” He kept his voice pitched low and calm because he didn’t want to startle her into making a run for it. In those heels she’d break her damn ankle.
“I don’t play games.”
Her tone implied that he did.
Nope, he still had no clue. Only that whatever she was mentally accusing him of wasn’t a misdemeanor but a jailable offence.
“And since I don’t play games,” she continued, “I won’t ask if you forgot to tell me you used to be in the AOS, but I’ll tell you how my ex smugly informed me of it, proving that I didn’t know you as well as I thought.”
Whatever he’d been expecting—a misunderstood text, calling her by her full name that she hated, forgetting her birthday even though it wasn’t until June—it hadn’t been this. His fingernails dug crescents into the vinyl-covered seat, ice slicking through his veins and freezing any plausible excuse he might’ve invented on his tongue. He swallowed thickly, which sounded absurdly loud in the confined space of the cab.
“It just never came up in conversation.” Even to his own ears that sounded lame.
“Please. Yes, we’ve screwed more than overshared our life stories, but you can do better than that.”
He winced at her description, since he’d begun to think by the time she left on Tuesday morning that they were doing more than screwing. Like more than just good times and smoking-hot sex. Like creating something real and solid—hell, maybe even an actual relationship.
“Only a few people in Oban know what I did before. I don’t talk about it because it’s not relevant to my life here.”
“It’s relevant to me.” Then her voice softened. “I heard about what you went through, and I want to be here for you to talk to.”
Of course she’d heard. And he could guess what kind of spin her ex had put on it. Blood thrummed in his ears. All he could hear above the thudding was the memory of his OC barking orders, the sound of a gunshot, and his life swerving off in a different direction in an instant. He stiffened on his seat, muscles turning to a cold, hard shell to protect his weakness beneath.
“So you can use me to write an authentic, messed-up cop character?”
He regretted his outburst the moment he snapped his mouth shut again. If he’d been aiming to wound her with his words, he’d done more than that. While her chin arched in defiance, brokenness shuttered her gaze. He’d done more than wound her; he’d hurt her deeply.
Noah turned to stare through the windshield, unable to fend off the smothering weight of his emotions. How the hell could he feel guilty, fearful of rejection, and pissed at the world but most of all himself, all at the same time? Gripping the steering wheel in both hands, he braced himself for the justifiable Wrath of Tilly.
But there was no wrath forthcoming.
The passenger door cracked open. He caught a glimpse of her pale drawn face as she slid out of the vehicle and quietly closed it.
He swore under his breath. “Tilly—”
But she’d already gone.
Some call it navel gazing. Others, like his mates, a good old-fashioned man brood.
Whatever label Noah used to describe sitting alone in his ute, staring out the windshield at his darkened house, it sucked. And it sucked more that she was kinda right. He should’ve opened up to her about that part of his past.
He groaned and thunked his forehead on the top of the steering wheel. When all was said and done, he trusted Tilly. So accusing her of plagiarising his life was beyond a douche move; it was an all-time low blow. One he couldn’t let go unchecked.
With a mental kick in the butt, Noah walked up to Southern Seas. This time the lights were on, and the sight of them gave him a momentary twinge of comfort. At least she was still here on the island. He pushed
away the not for much longer thought that followed it and knocked on her door.
Silence echoed from inside the house, and all the drapes were pulled tight. He knocked again, straining to hear the soft pad of her footsteps on the other side. Nothing. He leaned against the door, resting the back of his head against it.
“I can wait out here all night if I need to, though my nuts will probably freeze off.”
Not even a twitch of her living room drapes. Yeah. He probably deserved her lack of sympathy for the state of his junk on this brisk night. With a grimace, he slid down to sit on her doorstep, draping his arms over his bent knees and closing his eyes.
A cold, salt-infused breeze stung his cheeks, ate through the thin wool of his sweater, and chilled his skin. Moments later the breeze swept a volley of icy raindrops across the porch steps. Likely the wind would bring that rain under the small porch roof soon. His lips curved into a wry smile—he’d waited in worse conditions than this and for longer periods of time. Though he suspected, even with Tilly’s kind heart, getting a foot in her door wouldn’t be a walk in the park.
He kept his eyes shut, relying on his old training to still his mind and yet remain alert to anything changing in his immediate environment. An unknown amount of time passed before he detected the whisper of footsteps inside, the rustle of clothing against wood, and the change of pressure against the front door. If he wasn’t mistaken, Tilly was mimicking his position on the other side.
Bending The Rules: Stewart Island Book 10 Page 21