Karma Patrol (25 page)

They rode the elevator in exhausted silence, and Luke didn’t break it until they’d reached his door.

“Uh, there’s something I should probably tell you.”

She glanced from the closed door of his apartment to Luke and back again. “Pets?” she guessed, and he gave her a baffled look.

“What?”

“You’ve got pets in there you didn’t tell me about? A pair of canaries? Six giant black labs? A barrel of monkeys?”

He snorted. “You’re punch drunk.”

“I can’t remember the last time I was this tired,” she admitted. “And I’m betting you are too, so tell me whatever you need to tell me so that you and I can both go inside and pass out.”

“No pets,” he began, looking embarrassed. “But I don’t have a whole lot of anything else either. Except dirty laundry.”

“Ah.” A small smile graced her lips. “So the guy who made fun of my interior design choices has a messy house, huh? I’ll survive. Unless you’ve got bugs in there, in which case I’ll be taking my police detail and going to a hotel.”

“No bugs,” he promised, unlocking the door and opening it for her. “It’s not that dirty. It’s just… you know. Not clean.”

‘Not clean’ was actually a pretty accurate statement, Jade decided as she looked around the apartment. It was at least as small as hers and was completely bland, with no visible efforts at decoration whatsoever. He had a few shirts draped over the back of the couch and several socks strewn across the floor of the living room, but other than that there wasn’t much mess. The dirty laundry was one of the few indications that anyone actually lived there.

“It’s not bad at all,” she told him as he shut and locked the door behind them. “But Luke, are you sure you want me staying here?”

He raised his eyebrows at her. “Not impressed with my interior design choices?” he replied, and there was an undertone to his words that made her wonder if she’d managed to offend him.

“It has nothing to do with that. It’s just—your place is as small as mine, and there’s no way for you to have any privacy with me here. You got
shot
tonight, for all that you’re acting like it’s no big deal. If you need some time to yourself to process that or something…”

He actually relaxed enough to chuckle at that as he shrugged out of the sling on his arm, setting it down on the coffee table. “Jade, I spend a lot of time alone. I won’t lie, I do like to have my space, but in the face of near death, I’d actually prefer to have a little company.” Luke glanced sideways at her as he added, “And I won’t sleep well unless I know you’re safe, and I won’t believe you’re safe unless you’re where I can keep an eye on you.”

“Oh.” She could feel the dreamy smile forming on her lips, but she was powerless to stop it. “All right, then.”

“I’m not going to be great company tonight, though,” Luke added, stripping off his ruined suit jacket and dress shirt and tossing them onto the floor with an impressive lack of concern for having just added to the mess he’d apparently been embarrassed by sixty seconds ago. “I have every intention of falling over and passing out.”

She glanced around the apartment for a long moment, deciding whether she was willing to sacrifice the dream of having a bed to collapse into in order to do the noble thing and let Luke, who was injured, sleep there instead. “I can take the couch,” she offered, and he looked at her like she’d grown a second head.

“You can if you want,” he replied slowly. “But I was operating under the assumption that we would just share the bed.”

She bit her lip, hesitant, and he frowned at her expression.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said hastily. “I just—I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”

Luke looked baffled at her concern. “Why not?”

“Well, we haven’t—I mean, we just met, and I don’t think I’m ready for… for anything.”

Slowly, his bewildered expression transformed into comprehension. “You don’t think I would take advantage of you, do you?”

“No,” she said, but her tone wasn’t particularly convincing. The truth was that she’d spent her entire life dreaming about finding her soulmate, but she was realizing she hadn’t spent nearly enough time thinking about what would happen after she found him. She’d fantasized that they would fall madly in love at first sight, but Luke’s attitude toward her was more ‘amused tolerance’ than ‘passionate longing.’ Being in his unfamiliar apartment and on unexpectedly awkward ground had put her on edge, and she was starting to realize how unprepared she was for this situation.

“Jade.” He came over to rest his hands on her waist, catching and holding her gaze with his. “Hey. Look at me. I promise you that you’re safe with me. You’re always going to be safe with me. It wouldn’t matter if we were soulmates or old friends or strangers on the street; I would never
try to do anything to you that you didn’t want me to.” He paused, gathering his thoughts and trying to decide how to express them without giving too much away. “I’ve been treated badly before, so I know what it feels like to be pushed around. I think that’s one of the problems I have with the whole idea of destiny, you know? The thought that someone else is pushing me into doing things. I’m never going to push you into anything. Okay?”

The truth of what he was saying was so powerful that she could feel it in his words, and she nodded.

“Yeah. Okay.” She considered what he’d said for a moment. “The same thing goes for me. I mean, no matter what, I would never intentionally take advantage of you or push you around.”

“Good.”

“Except for pushing you into buying a nicer suit,” she added, wanting to be clear about her intentions. “And replacing my scarf. And—”

He chuckled, his fingers brushing against her lips to silence her. “Doesn’t bother me,” he told her. “I like a woman who knows what she wants.”

Jade couldn’t restrain her laughter. “Then I’m the perfect woman for you,” she informed him.

“Good.” He gave her another searching look. “I’d prefer it if you slept with me tonight. No sex, just sleep. I don’t know if it’s the soulmate thing or what, but I get this ache in my chest when I think about being away from you. Even the couch seems too far.”

“It is,” she replied, the raw honesty of his words sending a thrill through her. “It’s the soulmate bond, I mean. I feel the same way.”

“Yeah?” he asked, a pleased smile tugging at his lips, and she returned it with one of her own.

“Yeah.”

“Good,” he said again, decisive. “I want you to sleep with me. I want to hold you while I fall asleep. If you aren’t comfortable with that, for any reason, I have no problem with sleeping on the couch.”

“No, I—” She bit her lip again, this time out of embarrassed pleasure rather than worry. “I’d like that too.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” she agreed, smiling up at him, and he pressed a chaste kiss to her forehead before pulling away.

“All right. Then the next order of business is finding you something to sleep in, because that outfit can’t be comfortable.” He gestured to her dress, which had acquired several snags in the fabric and a small bloodstain on the hem from their earlier escapades.

“It’s probably ruined,” she sighed, examining one of the more extensive snags. “I loved this dress. I got it on clearance a few months ago, and I’ve only worn it a couple of times.”

“When we catch the shooter, I’ll have the city bill him for a replacement,” he told her, walking over to the dresser and rummaging around before coming up with a t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants. “Here. The pants are going to be huge on you, but at least they’re warm. Do you want to use the shower?”

She glanced down at herself again, weighing the bliss of a hot shower against the additional time requirement of having to do something with her hair after washing it. It was vanishingly unlikely that he owned a blow dryer, she realized, and the travel-sized curling iron that she carried in her purse for touch-ups would take at least an hour to do all of her hair from scratch.

“If you have a washcloth I can use, I’ll just wipe off the worst of the dirt now and shower tomorrow when I’m not so tired,” she decided with a sigh, and he grinned.

“That sounds like an excellent plan, Ms. Bailey,” he told her. “I may do the same thing. Give me a second.”

He went over to the hall closet, rummaging around on the top shelf to find the spare towels he’d tucked away up there when he’d first moved in. As he’d suspected, there was a set of washcloths he’d never used, and he took them down and tossed one to her.

“There’s an unopened toothbrush under the sink. Ladies first,” he invited her, gesturing to the bathroom. She gave him a tired smile and disappeared through the door, closing it behind her.

He used her brief absence as an opportunity to gather up all the dirty clothes he’d discarded around the apartment over the past few days and throw them into the laundry hamper. His torn, bloodstained clothes ended up in the trash after a quick inspection confirmed that neither the shirt nor the jacket was going to be salvageable. After a moment’s consideration, he also stripped the bed, throwing the sheets and pillowcases into the laundry hamper on top of the dirty clothes. He washed the sheets regularly, but he wasn’t sure if he did it quite as regularly as Jade did; she struck him as the type to be fastidious about her housekeeping. He had a spare set of bed linens in the dresser, and he initially thought that if he worked fast he could have them changed before Jade was finished in the bathroom. He’d overestimated his ability to make the bed one-handed, though, and it ended up taking him nearly twice as long as it would have if he’d been uninjured.

“Oh, lovely. Fresh sheets,” Jade sighed happily from behind him as he smoothed the new top sheet onto the bed.

He congratulated himself on his foresight as he turned around to face her. His self-congratulation lasted until he caught sight of Jade wearing his oldest NYPD t-shirt and a pair of baggy sweatpants, at which point it was replaced by a combination of arousal and awe that anyone could look that attractive wearing ratty pajamas.

“What?”

He couldn’t help the slow grin that spread across his face. “You’re beautiful.”

Jade flushed an attractive shade of pink at the compliment. “You’ve just joined the ranks of the very small group of people who’ve ever seen me without makeup,” she replied, and he snorted.

“You don’t need it,” he told her, matter of fact. “You’re beautiful without it.”

“You know just what to say to a girl,” she replied with a smile. “The bathroom is all yours. Here, let me put on the pillowcases.”

He yielded the job to her without argument, since he hadn’t been looking forward to trying to wrestle the pillows into the cases with only one good arm.

“Back in a minute,” he told her, heading into the bathroom.

ith the door safely shut behind him, Luke lowered the toilet lid and half-sat, half-collapsed onto it, taking deep, steadying breaths as he finally let himself acknowledge the stress he’d endured over the past several hours. He’d been shot at in the military, and he’d had guns drawn on him during his time with the NYPD, but this was the first time he’d actually been shot. In the ER, he’d been preoccupied with worry about how Jade was coping and trying to figure out whether she had been the intended target of the shooting, so he hadn’t done much thinking about himself. Now that they were both safe in his apartment, his knees had turned to jelly and his pulse pounded in his ears.