Too Charming (21 page)

‘I thought that’s what couples did,’ he interjected softly. ‘Argue. That’s why they invented making up.’

Megan’s heart was breaking. She couldn’t bear to sit opposite him any longer. To hear him try and charm his way into continuing a relationship he knew, just as well as she did, had no future.

‘I need to get back to work.’ Standing up, she slid out from her seat and pushed it back under the table. ‘You stay and finish up. I’ll get a cab back to the station.’

He lunged to his feet, his chair making a loud scraping noise as he shoved it back in order to get out. ‘I’ll take you,’ he ground out, flinging some notes on
to the table.

Once more they drove back in silence. When he parked up she quickly got out of the car. ‘So, this is goodbye?’ he asked flatly, his face totally impassive.

‘Yes.’ The word came out in a whisper. ‘And if you’re honest with yourself, when the dent to your ego has healed, you’ll thank me for it.’

Fighting against her instincts, she gently pushed the door shut. She wasn’t going to get upset. That meant no slamming doors or bursting into tears. She was Detective Sergeant Megan Taylor. If she could cope with rapists and murderers, she could cope with a little blip in her love life. Turning sharply, she strode back into the station.

Being a police detective was part of who she was, she told herself as she settled back at her desk. Something she was proud to have achieved. It was worth a few sacrifices in life, even when it came to matters of the heart. The first man she’d loved, Luke, had found it really unnerving being with a cop. It probably helped explain why he’d taken up with other women. That and the fact that he’d been immature and totally self-centred. Now, with Scott, the job had interfered again, but in a different way. It had stopped her from being able to understand him. Prevented her from being able to fully accept what he did for a living.

Even if they’d been able to work through that, though, a man who measured his relationships in terms of weeks was never going to be hers for long.
So, all in all, better to end it now before she’d been torn apart any further by their arguments. Or by his excuses for ending it. It should be easier this way, she told herself as she rubbed at her chest. A pitiful attempt to ease the crushing pain in her heart.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Megan made it through two meetings, a witness interrogation and tea with her daughter without breaking down. But by the time she put Sally to bed she felt as if she was walking on a tightrope. One false move and she’d come crashing down.

It was her father who finally pushed her over the edge. He’d taken one look at her as she walked back downstairs and, calmly putting an arm around her shoulders, had hugged her. That was all it took for the wrenching sobs to finally erupt. He sat with her on the sofa as she cried them all out. Cried for the love that might have been. It didn’t help that she’d known all along it wasn’t going to last. The man had bulldozed his way under her skin and then slid, quietly, into her heart.

‘Want to talk about it?’

She raised her head and looked out through puffy, bleary eyes. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to detonate on you like that.’

‘That’s what I’m here for.’ He pulled her against him and she felt his reassuring strength. ‘So, are you going to tell me what all that was about?’

‘I think you can guess.’ She looked at him with a wry smile on her lips. ‘There are only two times in my adult life I’ve sobbed my eyes out. Both times there was a man involved.’

‘
Ahh.’ His body tensed slightly, as if he was all geared up to go out and punch the living daylights out of the man who’d caused her to be so upset. Her father, her hero. ‘What did he do?’

‘He didn’t do anything. This time it was me,’ she quickly reassured him. He might be seventy, but she knew it wouldn’t take much for him to get into his car and turn up on Scott’s doorstep, demanding retribution for upsetting his daughter. ‘I finished things, so there’s no need for you to challenge him to a duel.’

He drew a finger under her chin and looked tenderly down at her with his sharp blue eyes. ‘If it was your decision, why are you so upset?’

Exactly. ‘Because I don’t want it to be this way,’ she admitted on an unladylike sniff. ‘Because I fell in love with him, despite the fact that I knew better than that.’

‘I know I’m a mere man, but I don’t understand why you ended a relationship with someone you love.’

‘Oh, Dad.’ She reached over to the coffee table and dragged out a box of tissues. ‘Sometimes love isn’t enough, is it? Scott isn’t the sort of man who has an eye on the long-term. He’s a charmer, flitting from one woman to the next in the bat of an eye. I knew that, but I slept with him anyway.’

‘Are you saying there was someone else involved?’

‘No.’
It wasn’t surprising her Dad didn’t understand this. When she spoke it out loud, even she was having trouble grasping her reasoning. But she was talking about feelings here. Not hard facts. ‘There isn’t anyone else. Not at the moment at least, though it wouldn’t have been long before someone else caught his eye. That’s the way with men like him.’ She shut her eyes against the sudden flashback to that moment she’d opened the door on Luke and another woman. ‘God, I should know.’

Her father ran his hand up and down her back, soothing her as he had done when she’d been a child. ‘Honey, just because Luke let you down, it doesn’t mean Scott is destined to,’ he said after a while.

‘Logically, I know that’s true. But …’ She bit at her lip in an effort to stem the tears that were threatening to erupt again. ‘God, Luke hurt me, Dad. I don’t ever want to live through pain like that again,’ she finished on a whisper.

‘I know, Meg, I know.’ He paused for a moment. ‘And sadly there are no guarantees in life. But I got the impression that Scott cared a lot for you. Why else would he have come round here and suffered a couple of meals with your stuffy old parents? Or made such a fuss of Sally, for that matter?’

‘You’re not stuffy.’ She gave him a weak smile before letting out a deep sigh. ‘I don’t know, Dad, perhaps you’re right, perhaps he cares, but is that enough?’ She blew her nose and leant back against him.

‘Well, they say, with age, comes wisdom.’ He patted her hand. ‘There doesn’t seem to be any reason why you two can’t get back together, if that’s what you want. Just let the dust settle for a couple of days and then give him a call.’

It sounded easy. Far too easy to take things back to where they were. But if she did, nothing would have changed. ‘No, Dad. It’s more than simply who Scott is. It’s what he does, as well. We argued all the time about it. Hardly surprising, really, when you think about it. I mean, I spend my days gathering evidence to convict someone. He spends his days finding ways of rubbishing that evidence. I know it wasn’t personal, but still, I couldn’t get past it.’

There was quiet for a while, just the sound of the steady tick from the grandfather clock in the corner of the room. ‘Did you ever ask him why he went into law?’ her father finally asked. ‘
Defence, in particular?’

Megan thought back through their conversations. It was the question she’d kept meaning to ask, but hadn’t. ‘No. I didn’t.’

He patted her knee and went to stand up. ‘Perhaps you should.’

She glanced up sharply at him. She was a cop, and the daughter of a cop. She could tell when someone was holding something back. ‘What is it? What do you know that I don’t?’

‘I’m not sure. It’s not my business, so I’ve not said anything, but I think I remember a case with a Donald Armstrong.’ He looked over at her. ‘He wasn’t from round here, but you should be able to find it on the database. If I’m right, and he was Scott’s father, it might help you to understand.’

Megan avoided the gym the following morning, choosing to run from home instead. She wasn’t feeling strong enough to face Scott just yet. It was enough that he was constantly on her mind, as were the words her father had spoken last night. So it wasn’t a huge surprise to find herself ignoring her usual coffee stop, and heading straight for her computer terminal instead. Straight for the central criminal database.

There were a lot of
Armstrongs, but when she narrowed it down to Donald only a few came up. She immediately discounted three as they were too recent. Which left two. One was a case of fraud. She skimmed through the notes quickly, but there wasn’t anything in there that seemed to point to what her father had hinted at.

The second was a case of murder. As she read through the file, two things screamed out at her. The first was that this Donald Armstrong had been sentenced to life for the murder of his brother. The second was that his sentence had been revoked seven years ago on appeal.

Weakly, Megan sat back in her chair, staring at the computer. She could feel the thump, thump of her heart against her ribs. Good God, was this Donald Armstrong his father, or were the names just a coincidence? She pulled up a picture of Donald Armstrong’s face and her heart nearly cartwheeled out of her chest. There was no way this was a coincidence. The man in the picture looked almost the spitting image of Scott. It had been taken at the time of his conviction, when he wasn’t much older than Scott was now.

Suddenly, with aching clarity, pieces of the Scott Armstrong jigsaw puzzle started to fall into place. He’d told her his father had left when he was seven. By left, she’d naturally assumed he’d separated from his mother and gone to start a new life. She hadn’t bargained on him having been sent to prison. But the dates matched up. There was no doubt about it. What she was reading here weren’t just the dry facts of an old case. It was something Scott had lived through. No wonder his mother had turned to drink: the loss of her husband added to the shame of having him locked away for murder.

Part of her didn’t want to read on. It was too harrowing. If felt like an invasion of Scott’s privacy, and no doubt it was. After all, if he’d wanted her to know about this, he would have told her. He’d had the opportunity, but he’d settled for half-truths. The detective in her, however, wanted to know more about the case. Why his father had been sentenced. Why the sentence had been overturned. The file told her only so much, but it did at least shed light on why Scott had turned to law. It was obvious, from the dates of the appeal, that the case had come to court not long after he’d qualified. If she’d have to guess, she’d say Scott had gone into law with the express purpose of helping to overturn his father’s conviction.

So what, if anything, did all this mean to
her
, she pondered as she finally made her trip to the coffee machine. Did knowing it make any difference to their compatibility? The short answer was no. It was true that at last she could understand why Scott did what he did. Why he was always so adamant that his job was to stop the innocent from going to prison. To stop what had happened to his father. If that had been the only problem between them, then maybe the knowledge of what he’d lived through might really have made a difference. It wasn’t. Scott was still Scott. Utterly gorgeous, charming. A total heartbreaker. There was more depth, more substance to him than she’d ever guessed, but he was still a man who didn’t put down roots. Who definitely didn’t settle with one woman. So he was still a man she was better off without, no matter how much that might hurt right now.

Scott was in his chambers, ploughing through the brief on the Rogers case. He’d been working on the damn thing all day. All long, dreary, day. Foolishly, in hindsight, he’d started the morning with a degree of optimism. Yes, he’d had a restless night, filled with vivid dreams and too little sleep, but he’d really believed that work would be his salvation. That it would stop him from thinking about Megan.

He’d been wrong.

Every time he attempted to cram his brain full of details of the case, cram it so full there wasn’t room for anything else, his mind would rebel, flinging up images of Megan for him to alternately lust and cry over. Not that he was actually crying. God forbid he was going to do that again. It was bad enough crying over his mother. To cry over a lover? No way. He wasn’t going to do that. Occasionally his eyes felt tired. That was all.

Thankfully the ringing of his phone put a halt to his pitiful thoughts, and not a moment too soon.

‘Scott, it’s Nancy. I was just wondering how you were getting on with the Kevin Rogers brief?’

‘Still working on it.’ He omitted telling her that he’d be getting on a lot faster if he wasn’t spending so much of his time brooding like a lovesick fool.

‘Good. I’ve found the name of the pimp that Kevin says runs the girls. He’s called Reg Blake. Apparently he’s also the local drug dealer, which I guess—’

Scott was aware of Nancy’s voice still echoing through the speaker, but he’d almost stopped listening at the mention of
Reg
and had definitely stopped when she’d followed that up with
drug dealer.
As she wittered on, his mind was whirring into overdrive. What were the chances of there being two drug dealers in the area with the same name? Infinitely small. Christ. He rubbed a hand over his face, not surprised to find it wasn’t the least bit steady. The man his mother was shacking up with wasn’t just a dealer. He was a ruddy pimp. Suddenly his face felt clammy and a bitter taste of bile was surging up towards the back of his throat. He tried to swallow it down, but he couldn’t fight off the feeling of acute nausea. Any minute now, he was going to puke up all over his bloody case notes.

‘Nancy, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you later.’

He slammed down the phone and made an anguished dash down the corridor and into the gents. Moments later he was emptying the contents of his stomach into the ceramic white toilet. Long after he’d finished retching, he continued to lean over the bowl, placing one hand against the cubicle wall to support his weak and trembling body. His mother, living with a pimp. God. Wiping a hand across his mouth he made an effort to stand up straight. It had been hard enough to take in when he’d heard this man of hers was a drug addict. Now it felt a million times worse. What if she was on the game? If Reg was making her sell her body? The thought had him quickly bracing his hands on his knees as he once more wretched into the toilet bowl.

He’d started the day telling himself that things couldn’t get any worse. He’d been wrong. And God help him, the day wasn’t over yet.