Misadventures in Blue Page 6

  “So no cops…because they might die? Hate to tell you this, Cat, but everyone dies. In every profession.”

  She presses her lips together. “It’s not the same. And cops are reckless, risky, and rough. They get hard. Now that I’m older and know that, I don’t know if it’s what I want in my future.”

  “I didn’t hear any complaints about my getting hard earlier.”

  She looks like she wants to roll her eyes. “And you’re young, Jace. Inappropriately young.”

  “I don’t mind,” I tell her. “The difference in our ages doesn’t bother me at all.”

  She looks away. “It will.”

  “Why?”

  She still won’t look at me. “Because you’re young and sexy and you’ll have equally young and sexy girls raining from the sky. You deserve better than wasting your time on me.” She stands up to leave.

  I stand up too, not willing to let this go. “Cat—”

  She holds up a hand. “It’s enough, Jace. It’s enough to make it a bad idea. I’m thirteen years older, and you’re the kind of man I’ve sworn to stay away from anyway. Maybe you can fuck the same person over and over again without feelings getting involved, but I look at you and I know that’s not going to be possible for me.” She takes a deep breath and meets my eyes. “I look at you and I think you might be capable of breaking my heart.”

  And with that bombshell, she crosses to the door without so much as a goodbye and leaves me alone in the meeting room. The room that still smells like us.

  Chapter Seven

  Cat

  It’s quite frigid between us after that.

  Perhaps the frigidity is all on my side. Perhaps I’m the one making it cold, because more than once this week, I’ve caught him staring at me with a heated need that nearly made my skin catch fire.

  He still wants me. And fuck all if I don’t still want him.

  But life isn’t that easy, and after the close call of Kim and Hougland nearly walking in on us, I’m reminded of what matters most.

  Working. The. Damn. Case.

  So we work the case. Jace has officially switched to day shift now, so I actually do get him up to speed on everything. I assign him to some follow-ups and calls to witnesses to verify reports, and we manage to get through it without any unprofessional interaction. Or, you know, more police station intercourse.

  I can’t stop aching for him, though. Those intense gray eyes that get darker and stormier when they look at me. That frowning mouth that I now know can be kissed into softness. Those big, rough hands that handle my body the way I’ve always needed to be handled, even if I hadn’t known it. More than once when we’re working in the meeting room, I excuse myself to use the restroom and then rub myself to a quick, urgent orgasm in the stall just to take the edge off. It’s the only time I’ve ever been grateful for the gender disparity in the police force—more privacy in the bathroom to indulge this unseemly need for a much-younger-than-me man.

  It’s a long week, with both of us unhappy and strained and physically uncomfortable. And the week gets even longer when I realize I have my low-light range recertification waiting for me at the end of it. It’s the annual test I have to take to prove to my department I can operate a firearm in the dark. But I know I can operate a firearm in the dark and operate it well.

  It was how I killed Frazer’s murderer all those years ago.

  And therein lies the problem. It’s the one thing I do each year that brings it all back. The dark, shitty house in the worst part of town. The frantic babbles of the meth addict who’d just stabbed Frazer and left him to bleed out on the dirty floor. The kick of the gun in my hand as I fired and the killer fell. Trying to save the man I was supposed to marry…

  My hands shake as I pull my vest over my shirt. I opted out of my usual uniform of silk and tailored skirts today, knowing I’d be striding and darting around the darkened range rooms. I’m wearing the blue, like a real cop. Something I rarely do since I transferred to investigations after Frazer’s death, leaving the world of uniforms and midnight stabbings behind.

  So here I am—polyester uniform shirt, utility pants, load-bearing vest. I’m even wearing boots instead of my customary heels. I have to force myself to breathe as I tighten the laces, I’m so agitated by what’s about to come.

  It’s stupid to feel like this, I chastise myself. It’s been twelve years, and anyway, it’s never permissible to be afraid of the dark.

  But the minute the lights go down, my mouth goes dry. I can make myself move through the cinderblock rooms, shining my flashlight onto faceless paper targets. I can make myself shoot perfectly, hearing only the dull pop pops through my earmuffs, but it doesn’t matter. I still see that house, the terrified and blank face of the perp, spattered with Frazer’s blood. I still smell old food and vomit and the coppery scent of my fiancé’s life soaking into the old, stained carpet. I still remember Frazer’s vacant stare.

  I relive it every single time I’m forced to do this.

  When I finish, I’m as empty as the magazine in my gun.

  “Two hundred forty-six out of two fifty.” The firearms sergeant grins at me as I’m taking off my vest. “That’s a new personal best.”

  “Sure.”

  He laughs. “Don’t act too excited now.”

  I try to give him a smile in return, but it feels all wrong on my face. Everything feels wrong.

  Nothing will ever feel right again.

  Making excuses, I stride quickly out of the training center and get to my unmarked car. I go back to my station and finish up for the day, staying a couple of hours late because I forget to look at the clock and can’t seem to feel the time passing. Jace has gone home—the keys to his patrol car are hung back up, and I recognize every personal car left in the lot, meaning none of them are his.

  Not seeing Jace makes everything worse—makes everything so bad that I just want to curl up and cry and cry and cry.

  But I don’t cry. I never do.

  Somehow I make it out to my own car, with my portfolio and purse in the passenger seat and my phone in my hand. I’ve dialed Russo.

  What the hell am I even doing? I don’t know.

  “Russo,” Nicki answers in her familiar brusque way.

  “Nicki, where do your evening people go to unwind?”

  A pause. “Whyyyyyyy are you asking?”

  “I’m looking for someone.”

  “Is it Jace Sutton?” my old friend asks in a too-casual voice.

  Oh no. Like any cop, Nicki smells gossip, and I’m searching for a plausible reason—any plausible reason—why I’d need Jace after hours.

  “I have a couple questions about his contacts today. He was out of the station his whole shift, and I didn’t have a chance to catch him before he left.” Even with as shaken up as I am, as empty and wrong-feeling, my voice is still perfectly steady, perfectly cool. I know I sound convincing.

  “Okay,” Russo says, and I can tell she’s torn between her instincts and how well I sold that lie. “Well. The eves crew usually heads over to the Dirty Nickel after a shift or on their days off. He might be there, I guess.”

  Her guess is my hope. I don’t have his cell number, and I don’t feel comfortable digging through personnel records to get it when this isn’t police business. Ditto with his address.

  But showing up at his favorite dive is any better? Get a grip, Day.

  “Thanks, Nicki.”

  “Anytime. And hey…” She stops for a moment, as if deciding how to proceed. “I saw in payroll that you had low-light range today. And I know that—well, what I mean is, if you ever need to talk, I’m here.”

  My throat feels as if someone’s cinching a ribbon tight around it. “Thank you, Nicki. That’s very kind.”

  “I mean it, okay?”

  “Okay. Good night.”

  And Russo hangs up without saying goodbye, per usual. I drop the phone in my passenger seat and sigh.

  I should go home.

  I should
go home and do what I’ve done every year after low-light range: pop open a bottle of wine, drink the entire thing, and then fall asleep curled around Frazer’s college sweatshirt.

  I should not go to a place called the Dirty Nickel to find a man thirteen years younger and…

  And what? What is my plan? That Jace will take one look at me and know I need to be hugged? That I need a warm chest to finally, finally cry into?

  No. If anything, we’ll fuck, because that’s the only connection we have, and then we’ll both be miserable after because every time we have sex, we’re courting major professional trouble.

  I should not go to the Dirty Nickel.

  I should not.

  I start my car and tell myself to drive home.

  The Dirty Nickel is in a rougher part of town, in a cluster of old strip malls and used car lots, tucked away at the end of a low-slung building that also contains a thrift store and a vape shop. It’s a far cry from the martini bar I occasionally venture out to with my girlfriends from college.

  I nearly almost go home to change into something less fancy…and then remember I’m not in my usual silk and tailored wool. I’m in the dark-blue polyester of my uniform, with utility boots and a ponytail.

  All I’m missing are the sunglasses and I could be a cop for Halloween.

  With a sigh at the uniform—and at everything, absolutely everything—I get out of the car and walk inside. It doesn’t matter what I’m wearing. It doesn’t matter because I shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be doing this, but it’s the only thing I can think to do. It’s the only thing that feels right when everything else feels so wrong.

  The inside of the bar is only marginally better than the outside. Pool tables hunker down under dim lights, a couple of televisions play a baseball game between two teams no one cares about, and an unseen jukebox issues forth music the other detectives and I call “construction worker rock.”

  At seven, the place is just picking up, and I catch a table in the far corner with a few faces I vaguely recognize. Young cops. It’s awful, perhaps even a little elitist, but I don’t bother to learn a rookie’s name until they bother to stick around for five years. Or more.

  So I’m not entirely certain who they are or what shift they work or how long they’ve worked for Hocker Grove, but they’re definitely HGPD. Even if I didn’t recognize their faces, I’d be able to tell they were cops immediately. Legs sprawled but eyes alert, everyone in those free T-shirts you get for working golf tournaments or charity 5Ks or holiday parades. The men with short, inexpensive haircuts and the women in low ponytails or messy buns.

  Not every woman.

  In a table of about twelve, five are women, and three of those five are definitely cops, but the other two are just as definitely not. They’ve got impeccable makeup and glossy hair, and they’re young, so fucking young.

  Badge bunnies.

  I’ve never liked the term—it seems vaguely sexist to me to disparage young women for the type of men they like to take to bed—but right now, something about their shiny, giggling youthfulness sets my teeth on edge. Especially after I see that one of them is curled around the one cop I do recognize.

  Jace.

  He hasn’t seen me yet. He’s peering up at the baseball game with his fingers wrapped around a beer bottle, but the bunny sees me standing in the doorway. She watches me watching them with her salon-perfect ombre hair brushing against Jace’s shoulder and her hand on his thigh. He’s in street clothes, the same kind of free-event T-shirt the rest of the cops are wearing, and battered jeans and boots.

  And he still looks magnificent. All rounded, muscled shoulders, long, firm thighs, and a stubbled jaw that looks like pure sex. A warrior at rest, with the requisite maiden waiting to comfort him.

  I have to go.

  That’s the only thought that registers in my mind—the rest is an awful kind of static. A static that hisses what did you expect? You pushed him away. How long did you think it would take him to find someone else to screw?

  Oh God. I’ve made a giant mistake in coming here.

  I’m turning to leave when he sees me, and it’s like all the air is sucked from the room. His eyes meet mine, and I can’t read them, can’t even try, because there seems to be every feeling inside that silver gaze. Anger and hurt and lust and longing, and they’re all directed at me. Right at me.

  The bunny looks up to Jace as if she’s trying to read his stare like I am, except she takes the extra liberty of sliding her hand up his thigh to rest against the unyielding contours of his abs. I think she also managed to graze his cock on the way up, and Jesus Christ, who was I kidding with that whole if I break it off earlier, I won’t be heartbroken bit?

  Because I did break it off early, yet here I am, feeling like someone’s using the jaws of life to cut through my ribs and expose my beating heart. On top of what I went through today at range, it’s too much.

  It’s too fucking much.

  I break our gaze and wheel around, opening the door into the summer evening and making my escape.

  I have to go.

  I have to go home to my wine and to Frazer’s sweatshirt and the loneliness I chose for myself. At least that way I can be vulnerable in front of nothing more important than a sweatshirt. At least I’m not making a scene in a begrimed bar in front of a whole table of cops.

  And I can leave Jace to the bunny and the inevitable outcome of the night. She can kiss that pouty, serious mouth as bad music blares through the bar, and she can have those big hands drag her back to the bar bathroom for impromptu sex. She can feel the ruthless thickness of his cock wedging inside her. The hard flex of his abs and hips against her ass. His teeth biting her neck as he releases inside her.

  They can have each other, and I’ll have myself and an old sweatshirt that doesn’t even smell like the man it used to belong to, and it will be fine.

  The summer air is still hot, still waving above the pavement and trying to pull sweat out of my body. It feels like a punishment, and one I deserve.

  The door opens again, and the cop in me can’t help but turn at the knowledge someone’s behind me.

  “Cat.” Jace’s voice is husky. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Going home,” I say. I turn away from him because I can’t look at him. I can’t look at the man I pushed away, because I can’t lie to myself and pretend I don’t regret it. Pretend I feel some kind of wise, selfless pleasure in seeing some girl almost two decades younger than me crawl all over him.

  A hand grabs my arm, and I’m spun to face him.

  “The fuck you’re going home,” he says roughly.

  I’m brittle, I’m so damn brittle, and I can’t keep my tone even as I say, “I’m leaving and you’re free to go back inside to your friends.” My voice hitches over the word, and again that awful feeling of having my ribs cut open returns, even though I deserve it, even though I did it to myself.

  “I don’t want to go back inside to my friends,” he says, clearly missing my implication in the word. “I want to know why you’re here.”

  I twist myself out of Jace’s grip and start walking to my car. “I shouldn’t have come,” I say, more to myself than him.

  “But you did,” he says as he follows me. “Why, Cat? Why did you come here?”

  I have my car unlocked before I get to it so I can make a quick escape, but Jace isn’t going to make it that easy for me. Before I can open the door, his hands land on either side of me, caging me in. The hot metal has to be uncomfortable, but there’s no pain in his voice as he leans down to my ear.

  “Tell me.”

  The moment seems to intensify, crystallize, and become something sharper, more vivid.

  Cicadas are chirruping madly everywhere, and a breeze is blowing an empty soda can across the lot. It’s so humid that the air is a heavy blanket over my skin, and behind me I can feel the press of Jace’s body. His biceps crowding my shoulders. His chest against my back. His massive erection against my rear.


  And then there’s that scent. That leather and tea tree oil scent, and I hope it’s rubbing on my clothes. I hope I smell like him when I get home.

  That, more than anything, defeats me. How can I stay strong when Frazer’s sweatshirt smells like nothing and Jace is here and vibrant and alive and he smells like everything? How can I stay strong when I realize that maybe I want Jace more than I ever wanted Frazer…and how can I stay strong when I realize that today, of all days?

  I hang my head forward in surrender.

  “I came for you,” I admit in a tired voice. “I came here to find you.”

  Chapter Eight

  Jace

  Hot, raw joy floods through my veins at her confession.

  I open up the car door before she’s even finished speaking. “Get in,” I say shortly, and then I’m around the other side of the car in a heartbeat, climbing into her passenger seat after carefully setting her portfolio on the floor.

  I’m already buckled by the time she manages to sit down. She doesn’t start the car.

  “Jace…”

  “Ninety-three eleven Reeds Road,” I say. “Unit ten. My place.”

  She bites her lip. “What about your friends inside?”

  “My tab’s paid,” I reply. “And those assholes will be fine without me.”

  A little huff. “I’m not talking about assholes or your tab, Jace. I’m talking about the girl who was in your lap.”

  Oh. Ohhhh.

  I look at her more carefully now, at the burnish of red along her cheekbones and the press of her lips. She’s jealous. She’s jealous, and that sends a whole stir of male pleasure swirling in my chest.