by Julie Miller
“You look beautiful.”
Her gaze dropped to the clasp of their hands atop the sheet and a silence that lasted an aeon ensued. Their last conversation had been an argument. All business, she’d said. She couldn’t mix a job and a relationship. She’d never trust it to last.
He trusted what he felt would last forever.
If that was what she wanted.
Not knowing whether she’d take that risk left him tongue-tied too.
Suddenly, her body thrummed with energy and she lifted her gaze. “Daniel’s in the basement.”
She was choosing business.
Cole sighed, but didn’t surrender. He’d let her run the first part of this conversation, then he’d pick his time to argue his case.
“Good to see you, too. We found the keys in your pocket, put two and two together and found the body downstairs.”
“We?”
“KCPD, FBI, the DA’s office. We’ve been pretty busy while you’ve been sleeping on the job.” She huffed up at the implication. Cole made no apologies. “You put me through seven days of hell, Tori Westin. It’s about time you came back to me.”
“I guess I did need rescuing, after all.” Her fingers clenched around his. “You carried me out of the house. I thought you were the divine horseman.”
“That’s a compliment I’ll take. The little guy, by the way, is in a vault at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Since he seems to have changed hands illegally several times in the past few years, we’re holding on to him until all the details are sorted out.”
She pushed against her pillows and sat up straight in bed. “What else did I miss? Were there bullets?”
Her excitement pulsed through the room like a bolt of pure energy, and he knew for certain the woman he loved was back and ready for action. “Two slugs. We ran ballistics and got a match.” He grinned. He’d never specified what kind of action he wanted her to try. “I’ll give you a kiss if you can tell me whose gun they belong to.”
Her eyes sparkled at the challenge. “Let’s see. I can eliminate Lana, Aaron, Lukasiewicz, the two Bills—they wouldn’t have been searching for the statue, otherwise. Daniel wasn’t killed because of the statue. He was killed so he wouldn’t cause his father any more trouble.” She was talking with her hands now, back in perpetual motion. “So who would go that far to protect Jericho?” She paused. He waited. She knew. “Paulie. He figured out what Daniel had done, keeping the statue from Lukasiewicz and bringing the wrath of an entire nation down on the Meades. Did you arrest him?”
“Yeah. Chad and Jericho, too. Though Jericho’s in the hospital ward. Your hunch was right. Lana poisoned his cigars. Lukasiewicz is being extradited to his homeland. Everybody else is dead. Brilliant as usual, Agent Westin.” Cole cupped the side of her face and bent down, pausing just before he touched her lips. “But I would have kissed you anyway.”
Some time later, after the nurse had checked her, her mother had visited and Tori had met several of his brothers, Cole snuggled down in the hospital bed with Tori in his arms. That same peace he’d felt that night at Meade Manor swept through him again.
Tori’s voice was a husky whisper in the dimly lit room. “You don’t have to stay with me, you know. I’m going to be all right. I know your family’s worried about you getting enough sleep. And you have a job to do.” She reached over and patted his belt, touching the KCPD badge he could once more wear with pride.
He heard the hesitation in her voice, the longing, the hope. “I’m not going anywhere tonight,” he whispered against her ear in the low voice that seemed to soothe her fears. “Or any other night, as long as you’ll have me.”
She slid her fingers up over his ribs and splayed them across his chest above his heart. “You sound like you’re talking long term.”
“I am talking long term.”
Her fingers stroked him, petted him, touched his soul and made him crazy with desire.
“With me?”
He laid his hand over hers and held her close to the heart she had healed. “I’m not in love with anybody else.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Her cheeks flushed with color. She smiled. She believed him. “Cole?”
“Yeah?”
“I need you to kiss me now.”
He did.
Epilogue
“Do you know how hard it is to get all you people together in one place at one time?”
“Just bake a pie, Ma. We’ll all show up.” That was Josh, carrying his daughter, Anne Marie, as he bent down and kissed Martha Taylor’s cheek before hustling over to his position beside his wife, Rachel.
Cole laughed along with the rest of the Taylor clan. That’s all it took to defuse her temper. Show a little love. Heck, with this tight-knit bunch it was impossible not to show a lot of love.
“Mitch, you and Casey sit down front.” Mitchell III toddled along beside them, his tiny hand latched on to one of his father’s fingers.
Martha was directing traffic again, clearly in her element, as she ruffled her grandson Alex’s hair and instructed him to gather his three adopted brothers and sit on the pile of leaves on the ground in front of the grouping of chairs.
This was all she had wanted for her sixty-fourth birthday, a new family picture to replace the one the two Bills had stolen from her that day in the parking lot so many months ago.
Cole bristled inside and took a cleansing breath. It still worked him up to think his job had brought harm to his family. But his mother saw the mugging as an opportunity for a bigger, better photograph. His father had repaired his shop and gotten city approval to designate it as an historic landmark since it was one of the original buildings in the City Market District. Now he was looking at full-time retirement, tinkering around his workshop and taking his grandkids to ball games.
Even Ginny had taken the tragedy of being shot and turned it into something beautiful. She and Brett had had three months of recuperating time together at home. Now she was pregnant with their first child.
“We’d better get this picture taken fast, Martha.” That was Sid, urging her to come sit beside him on the two center seats.
Meghan pulled the black Kansas City Fire Department cap off her husband Gideon’s head, ruffled his hair and then sat in his lap at the end of the row.
His sister, Jessie, still beaming as beautifully as the bride she’d been just last month, reached for her husband Sam’s hand and cuddled up beside him in the back row.
Mac and his wife, Jules—the best damn second baseman Cole had ever had the honor of playing with—took their position to Martha’s right.
“They’re waiting for us, Cole.”
Any remaining tension in him eased as Tori snuck up beside him and wrapped her arm around his waist. He gladly dropped his arm around her shoulders and kissed her. The crisp air had whipped a rosy color into her porcelain cheeks, and the bright, copper-red color of the trees had nothing on her gorgeous hair.
“I suppose you just needed to do that?” she smiled.
“I will always need to kiss my wife.”
There were no babe’s, no sweetheart’s, no honey’s that he used with her. She’d rather talk shop than talk sweet. But when they took their place behind his father, Cole leaned over and whispered the words he knew would make her blush, make her crazy, make him one lucky man later that night.
“I love you, bossy britches.”
Her smile matched his as the camera flashed.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-6754-5
LAST MAN STANDING
Copyright © 2004 by Julie Miller
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All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
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*The Taylor Clan
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