Bear Claw Conspiracy (12 page)

Already moving before he was consciously aware of having made the decision, he crossed to the door. He cracked it and heard her voice, opened it all the way and saw her reclining in the hot tub, mostly submerged in bubbles, with her wet hair slicked back from her face, her eyes closed, and her head tipped back against the curving wall of the faux stone surround.

With the fire in the background, candles around the edges and music carrying just over the water’s burble, the space was a warm, comforting fantasy that put him instantly on edge and told him this wasn’t a good idea, that it was as much an illusion as his peace and quiet had turned out to be.

He took a big step back and reached for the door. But then he hesitated, empathy tugging when he realized that Gigi might be surrounded by soft luxury, but she didn’t look comforted. She looked stark.

A woman’s voice emerged from a hidden speaker. “We’re keeping our fingers crossed for you, baby. Call us the minute you hear anything, okay?”

“I will,” she said softly. “’Bye, Mom. I love you.”

“We love you, too, sweetie.”

Those simple, profound words cut through him and left him aching for the things he’d lost. But at the same time, there was a dullness in Gigi’s voice, a sense that she was deeply disappointed.

The line went dead, but it was a long moment before she sighed and stirred, reaching across to cut the call.

“She doesn’t know what’s happening out here, does she?” he asked.

She stiffened, but didn’t do the jerk-gasp-squeak routine he would have expected from so many other women. Instead, she slowly opened her eyes. “How long have you been standing there?”

He suspected that she meant to glare, but the effect was ruined by an air of quiet unhappiness. It tugged at him, drew him closer, until he was standing at the edge of the hot-tub platform. He was all too aware that her robe was draped nearby, her skin pink beneath the swirling, bubbling water. “Just through the goodbyes. Did you tell her about the fire and the crash?”

For a second he didn’t think she was going to answer. Then she looked away and sank a little deeper, so the water covered her shoulders. “I was going to—that’s why I called her. I was going to tell her everything, ask her what she thought about…well, all of it. But then she started asking about the academy, all excited for me, and I just couldn’t. It’s taken this long for her to stop asking ‘are you okay?’ right off the bat every time I call. I just…”

She shrugged, the movement causing ripples in the restless water. “She doesn’t need to worry about me. I can take care of myself.” She paused, lips quirking. “And now you’re going to tell me that someone sure as hell needs to worry about my reckless butt, and how I don’t take care of myself nearly as well as I’d like to think.”

He might have, but he was caught up in the sudden realization that even though she was surrounded by friends and intimately connected to her family, at the same time she was, in her own way, very isolated.

Maybe because of that realization, or the strange emptiness inside him and the things Jim had been saying about the dangers of waiting too long, he found that it wasn’t all that hard for him to say what he’d been meaning to say. “You know how I said I would tell you later why I left L.A.?”

She nodded slowly, eyes sharpening on him.

“Well, it’s later.” He paused. “That is, if you still want to hear the story.”

Her lips parted in surprise. She hesitated, and for a second he thought she was going to be the smarter, saner one by turning him down. But then she reached over to dial up more bubbles, obscuring his glimpses of pink skin beneath the water, and patted the soft faux stone beside her.

“Come and put your feet in, at least,” she said softly. “The water helps.”

And so, he realized, did the feeling of moving toward something for a change, rather than walking away.

Chapter Eleven

Gigi made herself keep breathing as he levered himself easily up onto the platform and padded toward her, barefoot. His faded black pants had slipped below his hipbones and his white T-shirt clung, dampening in the humid air.

With any of the fun, insubstantial men she had spent time with over the years, she would have stripped those last few pieces of clothing off him and pulled him, laughing, into the hot tub with her. More, a small, panicked part of her brain said that would be safer than peeling back this layer. Not because she feared she wouldn’t like the man beneath, but because she was badly afraid she would, and she wasn’t sure she could afford it.

That scared part of her said to run. Instead, she stayed put as he rolled up his pants to reveal masculine, muscular calves and the hint of a small surgical scar below one knee.

His eyes followed hers and a corner of his mouth kicked up. “I tore my ACL trying to get around this tall, obnoxious guy during a pickup basketball game my freshman year of college. Ian busted me up back then, and he’s been doing it ever since.”

It was the kind of small detail she had never cared about with other men. Now she stored the information away as he sat beside her, let his feet drop into the water, and braced himself on his palms.

His entry sent new currents brushing along her body, touching her breasts and thighs. Not that she needed anything to heighten the churning burn of desire. It had taken root the moment she saw him in the bedroom doorway, eyes dark with an emotion she couldn’t name. Didn’t dare.

Okay, this so wasn’t going to work. “Close your eyes,” she ordered. “And no peeking.”

When she was pretty sure he had obeyed, she grabbed the robe and climbed out of the hot tub, wrapping the garment around her.

Then, feeling better armored with a layer of white terry cloth around her rather than bubbles, she sat beside him, slipped her feet into the water beside his, and said, “Okay. Start talking.”

He didn’t say anything at first, which made her think the moment had come and gone.

But then, without looking at her, he said, “The summer before my senior year in college, my father’s chopper went down during a National Guard training exercise. When my mother heard that he was being rushed to a trauma center about an hour away, she and my fifteen-year-old sister Lena jumped in the car and took off.” His voice was almost inflectionless, as though time or repetition had robbed the story of its emotion. “They ran a red light a couple of miles from home and got T-boned by a furniture truck. They both died instantly.”

Oh,
she thought.
Oh, no.
A soft sound escaped her. She had heard the stories the cops told at Shakey’s after shift—about families devastated by multiple blows at once, wretched coincidences where even the survivors were victims. But she couldn’t imagine—didn’t
want
to imagine—the pain.

He continued: “Ian and I were in France, spending a month before school started back up. It took the authorities two days to track us down, took me another day and a half to get home. They had been dead four days before I made it back.”

Gigi nearly closed her eyes to block out his pain. But then, knowing that was the coward’s way out, she instead reached out to him. He didn’t offer a hand, didn’t offer anything, just stayed braced back on his palms, staring into the bubbling water. She wrapped her fingers around his wrist and squeezed, feeling his pulse beneath her fingers. “I’m sorry.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Not for you.”

“Yeah.” He unbent a little, shifted and took her hand. He twined his fingers through hers so gently that tears prickled behind her eyes, though she didn’t let him see.

“Afterward, the whole political science thing seemed…pointless, like it was just people sitting around and arguing about stuff most of them would never need to worry about. I wanted to make an immediate difference in peoples’ lives, make things safer for them, better.”

“So you became a cop.”

He paused, mouth twisting in a humorless smile. “I lost my father because of a freak mechanical problem, my mother and sister because of distracted driving and bad timing, not any sort of crime. But yeah. I became a cop. Within a few years I was the guy they called on for the tricky stuff, the one who always went in the door first. I was promoted to SWAT, then to team leader. For nearly three years, Team Four cleared more tricky situations without casualties than any other team…and then the odds caught up with us.”

He let go of her hand and scrubbed at his face, then dropped his arm and just sat there, wrists dangling between his knees. “It was a hostage call, which always adds to the pucker factor because you’ve got civilians in there, and it was at a bank, which sucks for the obvious reasons. The robbers weren’t pros, which meant they were twitchy on the triggers, and…” He shook his head. “My team wasn’t in great shape—one guy’s wife had just walked out on him, another guy had just found out he had a second kid on the way. They said they were good to go, that they could put that stuff aside… Hell, I don’t know. I know prescience isn’t part of the job description, but afterward, looking back, I could see the signs.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again, because it was the truth. What else was there to say?

She had guessed it had been a crisis response gone wrong, but she ached doubly for him now.

“We were in position, waiting on the hostage negotiator and a few feds who were en route, when the shooting started. Later, we found out that a construction worker had gotten it in his head to play hero and went after one of the thieves. All I knew was that we couldn’t wait. We breached and went in on the intel we had at hand, which was good but not great. We thought there were four gunmen. Turns out there were five, and the fifth guy knew where to aim, how to go in over and under the body armor, and through the joints.”

Thus the scars high and low on his torso. Gigi’s stomach did a slow roll. “How many casualties?”

His eyes had gone dead and his voice was flat with pain. “They took out twelve hostages before we breached. Three more were wounded in the crossfire, their bullets, not ours. We got all five of them within, what? Two minutes? Three? But I lost four good officers, including the two guys who had other things on their minds.”

“Other things,” she echoed. “Like people they cared about.”

He didn’t seem to hear her. Or maybe he did and didn’t know what to say. He continued: “I took a couple of bullets, lost a chunk of my liver and gained an ulcer. And after I finished rehab, I…I don’t know. Tuned out, I guess, or maybe burned out. I passed the psych evaluation, but I just couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t go into a call knowing I was putting my teammates’ lives on the line, and that us going in there—wherever ‘there’ was—could upset the balance and start the shooting again. I lasted three months with SWAT, another three in plainclothes before I quit, moved out here, found some peace and quiet, and thought I had healed just fine.” He glanced at her, expression as fierce and unreadable as it had been the first time they met. “And then you showed up, and the pins and needles started.”

She took his arm in both of hers, leaned against him and pressed her cheek to his T-shirt-clad shoulder, over the bullet scar. “No matter what happens next, I’m glad we got to know each other.”

In such a short amount of time, he had become more important to her than she wanted to admit. He annoyed her, intrigued her, turned her on, made her look at things differently. He hadn’t quit because he wasn’t good enough; he had flamed out because he’d cared too much, put too much of himself into the job. She was happy that he was starting to reconnect with the people and things that had once been important to him.

And when she left… No. She didn’t want to think about that right now. Tonight was tonight.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” he said quietly. “What, exactly,
does
happen next?” He paused. “Just now, Jim was talking about sitting with Tanya and regretting the things he hadn’t done because the timing didn’t feel right. And I can’t help thinking that either of us could’ve wound up in the same position today.”

She shifted to face him as her heart thudded quickly. Although that small, cautious kernel of self-preservation inside her said to keep her distance, the larger part of her wanted to lean in.

Maybe it was the soft light and the bubbling backdrop, or maybe it was having spent some serious time thinking about death and dying, but the whole idea of avoiding the big foam finger of emotion didn’t seem nearly as critical as it had a few days earlier.

Still she didn’t want to let him know how huge those emotions were, how all-consuming. He was having enough trouble managing his own head, he shouldn’t have to deal with hers, as well.

So she let him see she was serious, didn’t let him see her yearn. “I’ve always said I’d rather have regrets about the things I did do, rather than the things I didn’t.”

“Why am I not surprised?” For a second, the supercop was back in his expression, as if he wanted to warn her to be careful, stay back, duck and cover.

His sudden fierceness didn’t irritate her as it would have before, because now she knew where he was coming from. More, seeing him in full-on cop mode set off a chain reaction of heat inside her, because for all that she wanted to be the best at what she did, it got her seriously hot when she met someone who was better.

Mixed in with the heat was tenderness, though, because beneath that capability was the weight of responsibility.

“Hey,” she said softly, cupping his face in her hands and feeling the bristle of afternoon growth. “We’re safe, remember? You can let yourself be off duty for a few hours.”

He lifted his hands and caught her wrists, handcuffing her in place. “That’s the problem. I can’t compartmentalize anymore—hell, I wasn’t ever very good at it. I just sucked up the stuff that bothered me. Now, though, I can’t separate this case from the thing that’s bothering me the most.”

“And what is that?” she asked, even though she already knew. It was in the intensity of his eyes and the hard, unyielding grip that said he wasn’t going to let her go this time, wasn’t going to push her away.

“You,” he rasped. The word both thrilled and intimidated her, making the moment feel far more important than it should, far more than she was comfortable with. She had thought she was out of her comfort zone before, but she hadn’t known the half of it.

She was outside the box, outside her usual paradigm, and she didn’t care.

The firelight and candles painted him bronze and the humidity had made his hair curl at the tips, contrasting with the hard angles and intensity of his face. His damp T-shirt clung to the bulges of his shoulders and biceps, the ripples of his abs, and his pants were worn enough to drape suggestively, drawing her eyes to the flat planes of his hips and the strong columns of his thighs.

But it was that small nick of a scar below his knee that caught her attention. It was nothing compared to his bullet scars, but it was part of the history he had drifted away from. It gave him a past, marked a time in his life when he still had his parents and sister, still had dreams of going into politics. Those things were gone, but the guy who’d given him the injury wasn’t. Anyone who had kept an Ian in his life all this time wasn’t nearly the loner he wanted to think.

And, loner or not, cop or ranger, she wanted him. Now. Tonight.

As if her body had been waiting for that permission, heat flooded her, pooling in her breasts and core, and making her very aware that she was naked beneath the robe, that only a thin tie separated them.

His voice rasped low as he said, “I watch you, worry about you, think about you when I should be concentrating on other things.” He paused, expression shifting. “Look, I know you’ve got other plans, and that you don’t want to start something with someone as screwed up as me…so here’s your chance. Say the word and I’ll hole up in the bedroom until morning.”

“And my other option?” Her heart tapped a quick rhythm in her chest.
Tonight is tonight,
she thought. She could do this. She could enjoy him yet protect a piece of herself.

“You’re the overachiever. You figure it out.”

Lips curving, she shifted her hands in his grip and moved in, conscious of the way her robe gaped at the chest as she rose up onto her knees to lean over him. Catching one of his hands, she brought it to the bend of her knee and up along her bare thigh, then pressed her hand atop his, holding him there.

His eyes fired and his fingers flexed restlessly beneath hers as he waited for her kiss. “Just do it,” he rasped.

“That’s a family motto,” she whispered bare inches from his lips.

Then she looped her free hand around his neck and flung herself backward, yanking him fully clothed into the bubbling froth, laughing. Feeling free.

M
ATT SURFACED WITH A
shout and found himself standing nearly chest-deep. He hauled her into his arms as warm, foamy water ran down them both. “You’re insane. You know that, right?”

She latched her legs around his waist, flung her arms wide and leaned back into the bubbles. “Sanity is over-rated, especially at a time like this.”

She had a point—they were in an oasis of calm in the middle of a crisis, and she was in his arms. If this was crazy, maybe he
was
overrating sanity. But there was no way to overrate her wet, gleaming skin.

The robe clung to her breasts but parted between and below, flaring away beneath the bubbles, so when his hands came up naturally to catch her legs where they wrapped around him, his fingers slid without interruption along sleek skin covering gloriously toned muscle.

Murmuring approval, she slicked her hair away from her face and rose back up against him, wrapping her arms around his neck to meet him in an openmouthed, rapacious kiss.

Heat hammered through him, around him. His shaft hardened to iron as it had been that morning when he woke thinking of her.

They kissed, straining together in a clash of lips and tongues that nearly sent him over the edge then and there.