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“Is—is he gone?” The man’s voice cracked.
“Please come out where I can see you.”
After a long pause, a disheveled man in the ubiquitous white shirt and tie edged around the partition. Sweat dripped down his face and his gaze darted around the room. He flinched at the sight of his colleague.
“God!” he whispered. “I heard the shot….”
“Did you see the shooter?” Granstrom asked.
He shook his head. A sob wracked his body. “I hid. God help me, I hid. I should have tried to do something.”
“Unless you were armed, there wasn’t anything you could do,” Granstrom said quietly. “Hiding was smart. Now, sir, I’m going to ask you to exit the building. Officers in the hall will take you down.”
After one last shocked look at the corpse, he stumbled out docilely.
Granstrom rejoined Hugh, her face set. “Sixth floor, here we come.”
He grunted. “I can hardly wait.”
Thou shalt do it better, but he hadn’t. None of them had, or history wouldn’t have replayed itself.
NELL SWAYED, almost falling out of the booth onto the tavern floor. Her new partner saved her, his grip drawing her back to his side.
He was a good guy, she thought woozily. A really good guy. Today they’d gone through hell together. Or was it yesterday? She couldn’t remember. Just like she couldn’t remember why she’d hated him yesterday. Or was it the day before?
Didn’t matter. She laid her cheek against his arm. She’d been wrong. Hugh McLean was the best man ever. She nodded solemnly and tipped slowly forward toward the tabletop.
“Whoa,” he said, setting her upright again.
Best man ever. She could tell he felt the same. Why else would he keep putting his arm around her? Maybe they’d stay partners forever. A vague image of them chasing a bad guy, both of them toddling along with walkers, struck her as hilariously funny. She told him, and pretty soon he was laughing, too. Both of them howled until they were crying and lying in the corner of the booth, with her half atop him.
Their drinking mates, Officers Redding and Gardner, gazed at them in bleary approval.
“Don’t know wha’ was so funny,” one of them remarked. “But it musht have been real good.”
The other nodded solemnly.
Nell and Hugh laughed harder.
“I think I want to go home,” she tried to say, but it came out all slurred.
Up close, his blue eyes were brilliant. Maybe a little bloodshot, she thought critically, but then they’d both been awake for…almost a whole twenty-four hours. She thought. She was trying very hard not to remember why.
Some part of her knew she was going to be very sorry tomorrow that she’d had so many beers. But right now she didn’t care. So what if she got sick, Nell thought defiantly. It was better than…Well, than something. She didn’t let herself think what.
“Me, too,” he agreed. “But whosh gonna drive ush home?”
Her forehead furrowed in thought. “We could go get in the car,” she suggested.
“Okay.” He didn’t move, and she continued to lie comfortably on him. “You feel good.”
She thought about that, too, and nodded. “I feel good. You’re right. But howz…how do you know?”
“You feel good here—” he squeezed her butt “—and here—” his other hand cupped her breast. “Thash how.”
“Oh.” She listened to his heartbeat. “You feel good, too. Right here.” She laid a hand on his chest. She used to not like him, but he’d always had a good chest, broad and well-muscled and, she knew now, hot to the touch.
“Lesh go to the car.” He heaved them both upright. “Good night, good morning, good day,” he told Redding and Gardner. Enunciating clearly, he added, “We’re going home.”
“Don’t drive drunk,” Redding said, which set them to laughing so hard Gardner was banging his forehead on the table.
They wove their way among tables of cops, some coming on shift and drinking coffee, staring incredulously at the others. The parking lot was dark, but paler light tinted the skyline. Dawn. Last dawn, she’d been heading into the station to find out who her new partner would be. By 8:30 a.m., he and she had been in the squad car, lights on, heading to…
A barrage of images flickered behind her eyelids. Pools and splatters of blood. Body bags. Faces contorted in agony. A faceless…
No! She stopped dead and said carefully, “Maybe I need another beer.”
“We’re going to the car,” Hugh reminded her.
“Oh.” They were, weren’t they? That’s why they were standing in the middle of the parking lot. “Where’s the car?” she asked.
He frowned and turned in a slow circle. “Don’t know.”
“I have a car,” Nell said. She did remember that much. They’d returned to the station and left separately, in their own vehicles, they and a dozen others agreeing to meet at the Green Lantern after their debriefing to drown their hideous day.
“Where?” Hugh asked.
She thought. “Don’t know. Let’s jush…just look.”
They found his in the alley, next to the Dumpster. He produced keys from his pocket and unlocked the Explorer, boosting her into the passenger side. His hands lingered on her bottom, a pleasant sensation.
Inside, he pushed the automatic lock. “Can’t drive,” he said, after gazing in apparent perplexity at the ignition and dashboard.
“No,” she agreed.
“Got a blanket in back.” He looked delighted at the recollection. “We could sleep.”
She was getting sleepy. Very sleepy. Only, every time her eyelids closed, she saw…She widened her eyes. “Maybe,” Nell said doubtfully.
“Or cuddle.”
Cuddling sounded nice. “You feel good,” she told him.
He hoisted her between the seats. Her hips got stuck, and while he was pushing his thumbs exerted delicious pressure between her legs. She almost pretended to stay stuck.
He fell on her when he followed. Crushed on the seat, his weight on her, Nell contentedly wrapped her arms around him. After a while, his mouth moved on her cheek. “Feel good,” he murmured.
“Mm-hm,” she agreed.
Somehow his lips found hers. Normally she didn’t like the taste of beer on a man, but now she tasted of beer, too, so it was all right. This was a good kiss, slow, sweet, exploratory. She was able to close her eyes and think about the sensations his lips and tongue created in her instead of seeing those images she prayed she could forget.
The tinted windows of his Explorer created a dark, private world, a bubble enclosing just the two of them.
The kiss heated, and she tugged his shirt free from his pants and reveled in the sleek contours of his back. Muscles danced under her hands. She liked provoking a reaction. When she moved her hands around to his chest it was even better.
He had unbuttoned her shirt, she discovered with approval. He was making pleased sounds at the sight of her bra, a tiny scrap of lace that helped her feel feminine even in the unbecoming uniform styled and cut for men. She worked at unbuttoning his shirt while he suckled her breasts.
Nell was beginning to feel somewhat less fuzzy. A new urgency replaced the lazy abdication of responsibility. But when her hips pressed up against his, there was a clanking sound and she cried, “Ouch!” when something sharp-edged dug into her thigh.
“Damn,” he muttered, and pulled back. He looked down at her, his face taut in the faint streetlight coming through the windshield. “We have to take off our belts.”
Both wore the thick regulation leather belt that held an array of equipment: holster and handgun, pepper spray, flashlight, handcuff case, baton, radio and extra magazines.
He unbuckled, then said hopefully, “We could just take off our pants.”
In answer, she reached for his zipper. He groaned as her fingers grazed him as she slowly worked it down.
A cautious voice in her head tried to say, Wait! Nell refused to listen. Hugh was a good guy. They felt so close right now. She wanted to be closer yet. Her body was intensely alive, and she needed that to form a shield against the grisly images of death she couldn’t will away.
This was the right thing to do.
His mouth sought hers again even as he eased her trousers off. Through half-closed eyelids she saw the two of them tangled, her legs long and pale, Hugh with his pants half-down, his dark hair tousled, his every breath a rasp.
It seemed the most natural thing in the world when he parted her legs and entered her. She banged a knee against the door; he made another rough sound and readjusted their positions so that she half sat and he knelt between her legs. She looked down at where they met and realized that he was deep inside her, part of her. The past twenty-four hours were erased in the glorious flood of sensations as Hugh moved slowly, leaving her bereft, then filling her. She gripped his shoulders and rode him as he thrust harder, more desperately. Tension built and spiraled until Nell pleaded with him in a high, needy voice.
“Let go, sweetheart.” He gripped her hips and drove into her. “Let go.”
She went still in wonder as pure pleasure poured from her belly through every vein in her body. “Oh-h,” she breathed.
“Yes!” With guttural triumph in his voice, he thrust hard and fast one last time, jerked and groaned, then collapsed on top of her.
Nell wiped inexplicable tears on his bare shoulder. “Thank you,” she whispered, and didn’t know if he heard her.
HUGH AWAKENED to an aching body and head. His mouth was dirt dry and it took him a moment to work it closed. He opened his eyes, squinted against the brilliance, and, stabbed by pain, squeezed them shut again.
Damn, his neck hurt. It was bent at a weird angle, his head wedged into a corner. Where the hell had he fallen asleep? Or had he been unconscious?
An explosion. Maybe there’d been an explosion and a ceiling had fallen on him. That would explain the weight holding him down and the headache he felt waiting to erupt the second he moved the tiniest bit. He wasn’t on the bomb squad, not being suicidal by nature, but if some crazy had set one…
In a sickening wave, he remembered what the crazy had done. He lurched, his head fractured into a million atoms of pain, and somebody else gasped and shoved an elbow into his gut.
He swore and opened his eyes. A wild woman was staring up at him. Her eyes were big and brown and bloodshot, her face was puffy, her lips as dry as his mouth, and her dishwater blond hair was a snarled mess.
“Oh, my God!” she said in stricken tones.
His head clunked back against the car door and he shut his eyes.
Nell Granstrom. Naked. Lying on top of him. They hadn’t…Had they? God help him, images wormed their way through the shattering pain behind his eyes. He saw her uniformed ass sticking up between the seats, his hands on it. Him falling on her. Slow hungry kisses. Him on his knees like a horny teenager at a drive-in movie, squeezing her buttocks, slamming into her. And the single best orgasm of his entire life. He did remember that.
She was apparently frozen in the same frantic effort to remember. Or maybe horror held her paralyzed. He didn’t know. Just that all of a sudden she was scrambling to get off him, and to hell with which body parts she damaged on her way.
“I’ve got to get dressed,” she said in a high frenzied voice. “Where’s my bra? Oh, God. Where’s my bra?”
A faint memory of tossing it tickled at him. “Try behind the seat.” His voice sounded thick. Tongues needed to be lubricated to do their job.
She rose above him, and something stirred in him as he took in her long slender body and high, pale breasts. Unfortunately, she saw him looking, and she recoiled as if he were a monster.
“What are you…Oh!” Hands shaking, she put on the bra, tugged on a shirt, realized it was his and threw it in his face.
By the time he wrestled free, she was buttoning up her own, hiding the nest of dark blond curls at the juncture of her thighs.
“Get dressed!” she hissed. “You look…you look like hell!”
He reached out and fingered a mat in her hair. “Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black?”
She swatted away his hand. He caught one more forbidden glimpse as she arched to pull on her trousers and panties in one go. “Oh,” she groaned. “I’m going to be sick.”
That galvanized him. “Not in here, you’re not.”
She got open the door of the Explorer and half fell out into the alley. As he slowly, painfully pulled on his own clothes, he heard her retching. His stomach lurched in sympathy, and he gritted his teeth against a wave of nausea.
Wiping her mouth, she reappeared in the open door. The captain wouldn’t have recognized his cool, disciplined officer in this unkempt woman with a half-buttoned, wrinkled shirt, tangled hair and red-rimmed eyes. “I’m going to find my car.” She swallowed. “If—if I left anything…”
“Get in,” he said. He climbed between the seats to get behind the wheel.
She was still standing there staring.
“Get in,” he repeated, wincing at the sight of himself in the rearview mirror. “You don’t want anybody to see you. I’ll pull up right next to your car.”
Pride made her neck long, but after a reluctant moment, she did climb in and close the door.
Hugh found the keys wedged in the crack between the center console and the seat. His head was going to fall off. He knew it was. But he’d rescue her from possible humiliation first, like the gentleman he preferred to think he was.
Turning to look over his shoulder was undiluted agony, but he managed to back up, get turned around and cruise slowly into the tavern parking lot proper. “What do you drive?”
“It’s right there.” She indicated a cherry-red Subaru wagon.
He got up close, his Explorer blocking any sight of her from the tavern or the sidewalk. Not that there was any traffic at…
“Oh, hell,” he growled.
“What?”
“It’s noon.”
She half rose to look over the seat at his dashboard clock. “Aren’t we supposed to be back on duty at three?”
“That’s my memory.”
