Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Mac
T he whole situation around the new chief was a thorn in my side, and something just seemed off about it. Maybe it made sense bringing in someone from the outside, given the amount of bullshit our department had been through in the past couple of years. The weird circumstance the former chief had left under—with allegations of favoritism—then the interim chief having to deal with the tornado and following months of recovery. Then the whole bullshit of the arson case.
That one still haunted me because I’d almost lost a good man. Finding Thoren nearly dead in that house, lying next to his twin, had almost broken me.
But the new chief was a different kind of wrinkle.
It was bad enough bringing in fresh blood to our station and not knowing if she had an agenda, but my personal connection, and my reaction to seeing her again… all of it was so damn confusing and complicated. The way she looked directly through me with zero reaction stung. I’d had to work damn hard to keep my face neutral. To appear unaffected—like my body didn’t automatically respond to hers.
It sucked that she was so cold about our time together when I’d thought of her so often over the years. Asking for discretion like it had meant nothing. Like I meant nothing.
My footsteps echoed in the cavernous stairwell as I trudged up the flight to the chief’s office, the sound pinging around the concrete walls and glass windows like my thoughts bouncing around in my head.
Why was it that in the last two years, I’d managed to avoid coming down to headquarters, yet this was my second visit in a week?
My gut rolled with anticipation, or maybe it was nerves.
Fuck that. I didn’t get nervous about seeing the chief. I hadn’t in over a decade, and I wouldn’t now.
I paused at the doorway to the administrative offices, taking a moment to steel myself. It was just a meeting with the chief. How bad could it be?
“Hey, Cathy,” I greeted the clerk sitting behind the desk, a mass of reports spread in front of her. Photos of her musician husband playing the guitar and her towheaded little boy sat off to a corner.
“Hey, Captain Collins. How’s it goin’?” She glanced at me in greeting and then frowned at her computer screen and mumbled, “That’s not right.”
“Anything I can help you with?” I offered, willing to do anything to stall this face-to-face with Li—Chief Hawkins.
“Eh. I just can’t get this inventory to balance. My numbers must be off somewhere.” Cathy clicked her mouse and then turned to me with a smile. “Are you here to see the chief, or is there something I can help you with?”
I’d always liked Cathy. She’d been our administrative assistant for a decade and called herself the chaos coordinator. She handled our timesheets, our invoices, any certification records, and basically made sure we were taken care of.
“I’ve gotta meet with the chief on this arson case.”
Cathy’s eyebrows shot up her forehead. “You get some news?”
I grunted in response, because I had news, but it wasn’t good.
“You can head in. She’s free for an hour or so.”
I paused at the open doorway, an odd, fluttery sensation filling my belly, making me regret skipping lunch when I’d had the chance to stop. Low blood sugar was a real thing. That’s all it was. Definitely not nerves.
She stood facing the file cabinets along the back wall, her back to me, that glorious ass cupped in another of her skirts. I swallowed, hard.
Quit looking at her ass. She’s your boss, dummy.
Rapping a knuckle on the doorframe to get her attention, I tried not to stare as she turned.
“Hello, Captain Collins,” she greeted as she turned, surprise flittering across her features for a half second before returning to the ice princess.
But that voice. It did things to me.
“Hey, Chief, you got a minute? I’ve got news about the arson case.”
She approached her desk, motioning for me to sit. I glanced behind her, waiting, as she lowered to her chair. Much like Cathy, she, too, had photos lining her desk. A teenage girl smiled from a frame.
“That your daughter?” I asked as I lowered to the chair across from her. What a stupid question. Why else would the chief have a photo of a girl in her office? I blamed it on how strangely drawn I was to the image of that girl. Her hair was different in the photo, but seeing it still reminded me of that stupid social media post of Kylie’s.
“Your news?” she stated, voice sharp, cutting to the point. So she didn’t want to discuss her daughter. Noted. But at some point, I was going to have my questions answered.
“After months of them hedging, I finally got the truth out of the deputy that was on guard the night Loren Watkins went missing.”
She didn’t need to know that I’d cornered the officer, or how effective a forearm to the throat was.
“This is our arsonist? Suspected arsonist?” she corrected.
I nodded and opened the file I’d brought with me, found the report I was looking for, and flipped it around, placing it on her desk.
“Loren Watkins. This is what we know about him, in summary. He set multiple fires, some of which had catastrophic results, then made it personal and laid a trap. Thoren almost died. We had the bastard caught when he got injured in the same fire Thoren got hurt in. Talked to a buddy of mine at the PD, and they are doing their own investigation, but it boils down to this… The guy they had guarding Watkins got distracted and left his post.”
Her eyes shot to mine. Icy daggers glinted in the coldness of them. “Got distracted how?”
I couldn’t tell if this cold attitude was directed toward me, or if this was just who she was now. If the passage of time had hardened her from the warm, caring woman I’d known into this ice queen. I glanced at the photo behind her and, for a heartbeat, wondered again about the girl in the photo.
Shifting my gaze back to the chief, I met her direct gaze. “ Apparently, there was an attractive female nurse that drew his attention.”
“Unacceptable. Was it deliberate?” she fired back.
“Hard to say. I doubt it, though. Watkins is an opportunist. It’s likely that the officer on detail just happened to have his back turned and Watkins snuck right out.”
She shook her head in disgust. “And what happened to the officer?”
“I’m not sure. Couple days off, maybe?”
“We have photos of the crime scene. Do we have any of the suspect?”
“No.”
She thumbed through the report, giving me a chance to study her. Her dark brown hair was pulled back with a clip, but even with the severe style, the curls I remembered were still visible, refusing to lay flat, begging to be released.
What a fucking stupid thought.
Curls couldn’t beg. It was hair, for God’s sake. And I was a fucking moron, remembering another time and place and imposing it on the woman before me, who was not at all the warm, effervescent person I remembered. That woman smiled easily and had eyes that twinkled, like she held a secret that was too good, and she wanted to share it with the world. She’d been playful and spontaneous.
This woman was cold and calculated.
“And what happened with Firefighter Watkins?” she continued, looking down at the reports, the folded pages caught with a manicured nail.
I recalled those nails scratching down my back. In fact, our last day together had left me with several marks. She’d teased me, telling me she wanted to leave me with something to remember her by. I’d laughed and given her a reason to remember me as well when she dug her claws in .
The snap of a paper brought me back to the present.
How come I’d gone for years not really feeling any kind of sexual attraction to anyone at all, and suddenly, I was as horny as a teenager?
Realizing she’d asked a question,I cleared my throat and shifted in my seat, trying to ease the discomfort at my fly. “He’s since recovered. The building, though, was a loss.”
She placed the folder on her desk and sat back in her chair, gazing at me with that cool expression on her face. “Can I ask you something and trust you to tell me the truth?” she asked after a long silence.
“Of course, Chief.”
“Why is it that administration didn’t deliver this news? Or the police chief when I met with him earlier this week? Why am I just now learning that there is an active investigation that one of my people was injured on?”
Something about the way she was claiming Thoren as hers resonated with me. Maybe the ice queen was making an appearance because someone she saw as “hers” had been wronged.
“Truthfully, it’s probably because they don’t know or don’t care. But Mike Harrison, he’s the fire marshal, will be your point of contact. I guarantee he will keep you posted on the details.”
“So, what made you decide to come deliver this news to me in person today? Why not let the marshal handle it?”
Was she pushing my buttons on purpose? What the hell was she asking me? “Because I know he was headed out of town for a few days, and I thought you might want to know sooner rather than later.”
Another one of those cool moments passed where she just sat and watched me. I’d survived boot camp and eight years of military service working with some of the most hardened motherfuckers on the planet. I’d done a year with PD before landing in the fire department. Her cool assessment ranked right up there with some of the best interrogators.
Or maybe it was just the effect she had on me.
I would not fall under the pressure of her gaze. Those beautiful dark blue eyes that were glacial, and yet, I remembered how they heated. How her lids lowered as she’d climaxed around me.
Motherfucker, why couldn’t I keep my mind out of the gutter?
Like the pussy I was, I broke first. Yielding to her superior stare down, I glanced to the side and focused again on the photo. It drew me in, made me want to snatch it up and study it.
I needed to get the fuck out of here.
Wiping my palms on my pants, I leaned forward a bit and extended a peace offering. Not that we’d been fighting. I just wanted to offer her something. Anything.
“I figure you and I are on the same team, and I’m just trying to help. Bring you up to speed on things. When Mike gets back, I’ll send him your way. In the meantime, I’ll keep an ear to the ground and see if I can find out what the PD knows that they aren’t telling us.”
Her shoulders released ever so slightly. I hoped she’d been battling herself as much as I had.
“Thank you, Captain.” The words were a relieved dismissal.
With no reason to linger, I left her office and made my way home, wondering why I’d even bothered to try to meet with her. She’d made it very clear she held no remaining interest, not that I could go there with her anyway, or would even want to, especially since there were rules prohibiting any kind of relationship between us. But still, there might have been a tiny part of me, buried somewhere down deep, that wondered what if .
Buster, my yellow lab, watched from his lounge spot in the yard as I pulled up to the house. He met me at the door with a chewed-up stick poking out both sides of his mouth.
“Hey, buddy.” I gave him a good scratching behind the ears before tossing the stick toward the pond. A couple of tosses later, he was bouncing into the edge of the lake, his favorite thing.
We had an easy routine, a simple one. I liked it that way.
We played fetch, Buster would swim. We’d go inside and find some food, then settle in for some TV, or I’d finish a book, Buster at my feet. On my off days, we worked on projects, or we went to the lake and worked on my boat. A quiet life. It was a good life.
So why couldn’t I get a certain ice queen and her little princess off my mind?
A week went by and, finally, things at the fire department were settling in.
Mike had come home and pushed the issue of the officer’s negligence. We’d had a blessedly silent week of minor medical calls. I stayed away from headquarters.
So why couldn’t I quit replaying all the times I’d seen Olivia Hawkins. The way her skirts cupped her ass. The way she wasn’t afraid to hold a man’s gaze.
More than once, I’d fantasized about that skirt, with her bent over the table in the conference room, and it bunched up around her waist .
A knock at the front door ripped me back to the present. I wasn’t in the conference room with a certain sexy brunette who I had exactly zero business fantasizing about. I was nursing a lukewarm beer in the silence of my den on a Tuesday afternoon instead of taking advantage of my time off.
With a curse, I stood, dropped the beer on the counter on my way to the door, and grabbed my shop keys from the rung. I needed to get out of this funk and do something with the rest of my day.
The young girl staring back at me from the doorway stopped me dead in my tracks. With a backpack slung over one shoulder, she wore a vintage Eagles concert T-shirt, ripped jeans, and beat-up Converse sneakers.
Recognition was a lightning bolt, firing all my senses and zapping my brain.
There was no denying she was mine. She was the perfect combination of both her mother and me. She had her mother’s luscious hair and facial structure, but those were my eyes that stared back at me, my nose on her face. She was tallish for a girl. Lanky. Just like I’d been. My heart stopped beating, breath caught in my throat.
This was not a joke.
This girl was mine. If you held a picture of me next to her at the same age, we’d be twins.
“Are you Mac Collins?”
I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t move.
Dumbstruck.
That was the word I was looking for.
Every-fucking-thing I’d ever known just flew out the window. Every lie I’d ever told myself about not wanting kids or a family slapped me in the face with the truth. An overwhelming sense of loss threatened to consume me. I had a child, a daughter. A living, breathing part of me that existed outside of my body.
As I took her in, that grief morphed into fiery-hot rage. All of my unanswered questions rose to the front of my mind.
How’d she find me?
Had her mother told her where I lived?
What did she know about me?
What did she want from me?
She began to fidget beneath my stare, wringing her hands and shuffling from side to side. I couldn’t drag my eyes off her.
“You look just like your picture, only, like… old.” She paused, her eyes going wide, hands stilling. “Old er , I mean.”
She dropped her hands, huffing and looking down the expanse of the covered front porch. Her gorgeous cheeks bloomed an adorable pink as she studied the swing at one end.
I chuckled despite myself. “You had it right the first time.”
I stepped onto the porch, letting the screen door slam behind me. Buster rounded the corner of the house and bounded up the stairs. Her eyes lit up as she dropped down in greeting, an offer Buster accepted with glee, his yellow tail wagging in delight at a new person to shower him with affection.
“Oh my gosh, he’s so cute. What’s his name?”
Obviously, Buster was a welcome distraction.
Without hesitation, she dropped right to her butt, burying her face in his neck when he stepped right into her, his version of a full-body hug .
“This is Buster. He doesn’t understand the concept of personal space.”
Her giggle as Buster showered her with doggy kisses tightened my chest as both instant affection and denial warred for dominance.
“He likes you.” I stated the obvious, at a loss for what to say, finally dragging my eyes off her. Staring at her was freaking me out.
In the yard, a shiny new mountain bike lay on its side, answering my question about how she’d gotten here.
I studied the bike, trying to figure out where the fuck to start. Did I go full-on with my questions? She obviously knew who I was, so what the hell was she doing here? And why now?
Another giggle, combined with happy whimpers, drew my attention back to the rollicking crew on my porch. With a last scratch behind his ears, she made to stand. I reached over and grabbed Buster by the collar, pulling him away, and grasped her elbow to help her stand. She flinched at the contact, and I immediately dropped my hand and stepped back.
“What’s your name?” I started with the obvious.
“Rosa Nell Hawkins.” Her last-name confirmation was a solid punch to the gut. She continued, “You know who I am?”
I nodded. “You’re Chief Hawkins’s daughter, right?” And mine.
“Yeah.”
She was still too nervous, too jittery to be confident, but I had to admire her for the sheer amount of brass balls it took to find and confront me. I needed to be gentle.
“It’s nice to meet you, Rosa Nell. I’m Mac.”
“Yeah, I know who you are. ”
“You, uh, you want to sit for a minute? That swing’s real nice on a day like today,” I offered, rearranging my face into what I hoped was an inviting expression. And damn if I didn’t sound like some backwoods weirdo offering a kid a piece of candy.
Her head bobbed once, her arms wrapping around her slender waist as she checked me out without directly meeting my eyes. “Everyone calls me Rosie.”
I took another step back and leaned against the porch rail, bracing my hands on the banister behind me and crossing my legs. Making myself the least intimidating as possible, needing her to feel safe and comfortable.
“It’s a long way out here. Your mom know you’re here?”
She eased onto the porch swing, shaking her head. Buster crowded her legs, begging for her to continue. Her hand landed on one of his ears, absently giving him head pats and ear rubs.
“No, I told her I was just going for a ride.”
“She lets you just run wherever you wanna go?” The thought didn’t sit well with me.
“No. I lied and told her I was meeting friends.”
At least she was honest about lying. In some fucked-up way, I respected that. It was how I’d lived my youth.
“So, what made you lie to your mom and then ride all the way out here to the middle of nowhere, alone? Which isn’t safe, by the way. How old are you, anyway?” The words came out stern, almost gruff.
“I’m fourteen. I wanted to meet you.”
I had to hand it to her. She was forthright. And also the exact right age to be mine.
“You did?”
She swallowed, glancing out to the pond beyond the house while she fiddled with a turquoise ring on her finger. Then she looked right at me.
“I saw an article online. You guys raised a bunch of money for a firefighter who had cancer.”
That was totally not where I expected this conversation to start.
I waited and let her continue. “The guy who had cancer was the cousin of one of the girls at my old school. She was bragging about it in class and was really thankful. And then after he died, they reposted that article online, and I made the connection with the town. So, when we moved here, I figured maybe you’d want to know that, about the family, and I found you.”
Okay. Part of that might’ve been the truth. Probably.
But I sensed there was more to this story that she didn’t want to say out loud.
She was back to fidgeting, not meeting my gaze. “So I did some digging and figured out where you lived, then rode out.”
Did some digging? How? Where? Definitely more to this story.
“Well, that’s awfully nice of you to come out here to tell me. I appreciate that. I remember that fundraiser. He was a nice guy. We miss him.”
She nodded.
I waited patiently. I could wait all day if it gave me a chance to study her.
“So, yeah. Anyway. I was just out exploring and realized I was close, so I thought I’d drop by.” She stood and hitched a thumb over her shoulder. “I guess you have things to do, so I’ll just be on my way.”
She bent to scratch Buster’s ears again. “He’s a great dog. Before Mom was chief, she was gone every third day. Who helps you with him when you’re on duty?” She stood again, glancing into the house. “You have a roommate or something that helps you? A girlfriend?”
She was fishing.
I chuckled because she was so unexpected and mischievous. I didn’t know her end game, but I appreciated the effort she was making.
I snapped my fingers to get Buster’s attention and give her some space. He bounded over to me as if just noticing that I was available for attention. “Buster is a roamer. When I’m not here, he hangs out at the neighbor’s house. We sort of have joint custody, though I do get stuck with the vet bills.”
“So… no girlfriend?” The amount of hope in the words was surprising. I needed to steer us away from this conversation, but for some weird reason, I shook my head no.
“You headed back to town now that I’ve answered all your burning questions? It’s a haul. You don’t want it to get too late and cause your mom to worry.” Plus, I needed to man up and figure out just how to address this elephant. Because Rosie being here meant she thought she knew me. And I thought I knew her, and yet, here we were, bouncing around this subject and not confirming anything or really talking about the real issue at all. I really needed answers from Olivia.
“Yeah, I guess I better go.”
She slipped her other arm into the strap of her backpack and tugged the straps to secure it. I wanted to offer to give her a lift, but it wasn’t a smart move to offer a fourteen-year-old girl I’d just met a lift. Any number of accusations could come from it.
I turned, bracing both hands on the porch rail as she bounced down the steps. She was so young and full of spirit. She paused at the bottom to look around my property, her eyes wide and curious. Taking in my workshop, the deer feeder in the food plot beyond the workshop, the small pond in the distance. “You’ve got a really great place here. Any fish in that pond?”
I grunted in acknowledgment.
“You think I could come back sometime, and you teach me to fish? Some of the boys in my old school talked about it all the time. They’d go with their dads to the marshes and always had the best stories. I’ve always wanted to learn, but my stepdad wasn’t into it.”
How the hell was I supposed to answer this? The hope was back, and it killed me to even think of telling her no. If she knew who she was to me, and she was as brave as I first thought, why didn’t she just ask me outright if I was her father? I felt like that’s what she wanted to ask, but what if she didn’t really know? I certainly couldn’t be the one to tell her.
Plus, a stepdad? What was the deal with that?
Not to mention, I didn’t want to piss off my daughter’s mother.
I needed to tell her no and stay far, far away from this girl.
She turned expectant eyes on me, and I crumbled.
“If your mom says it’s okay.”
She beamed at me. “Thanks, Mac.”
She gathered her bike, swinging a long leg over the seat and setting off down the drive that would lead her to the road and safely back to town. Except, people were assholes. And she was gorgeous.
The next thing I knew, I was opening my truck door and whistling for Buster to get in. She didn’t need to be alone in my truck. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t follow her at a safe distance and make sure she got home okay.
She spotted me about a mile in when she stopped at a stop sign.
“Not trying to scare you, just following to make sure you get to town safely.”
She grinned as she pushed off, yelling over her shoulder, “Thanks, Mac.”
As she pulled into a nice townhouse complex in downtown, my heartbeat finally returned to normal.
I hoped her mom told her no when she asked about fishing.
I hoped she’d douse this curiosity she had about me.
I dreaded the whole conversation—the multiple hard conversations I needed to have—with my chief. But at the same time, I knew they had to happen.
Buster, who’d spent the entire ride with his head out the window and his attention on Rosie, barked a goodbye at the girl as we slowed to pass.
“Bye, Buster!”
Even my dog was already in love with her, but he loved everyone, so that wasn’t saying much. No, it was my own reaction to her that left me feeling like I’d been hit by a bus. Gone was the dread and anxiety over the knowledge of her existence. In its place was a bone-deep acceptance and immense grief that I’d missed so much of her life.
The front door of the townhouse opened, and my chief stalked to the edge of the front porch, a stern glare leveled on Rosie as the girl passed by her.
“Shit.” The curse rumbled forth, drawn from the deepest part of me. Seeing the two of them side by side was a fist to the gut.
I eased my truck to the stop sign beyond their complex and checked the rearview to find Olivia scanning the street. Part of me relaxed seeing Olivia as a concerned mother rather than as the cold woman I’d dealt with. The other part of me wanted to turn around, go back and demand to know why her daughter had had the freedom to venture so far out on her own.
Demand answers to so many fucking questions.
And yet I didn’t want to betray this young girl who might be mine. I didn’t owe either of them anything aside from common decency. But a strange sense of loyalty toward Rosie wormed its way through my chest. She’d made it a point to seek me out, so obviously she wanted to know me. I didn’t want to be a total asshole and reject her or stick my nose into Olivia’s personal business. She’d had the opportunity multiple times to clear the air between us. Why hadn’t she? And why had she waited so many years?
I glanced to the back seat as I made my turn and found Buster looking out the back window. His huge expressive eyes met mine, and he whined.
“Yeah, I know,” I said on a sigh. “I’m fucked.”
He clapped a paw on my arm in solidarity, and I ruffled his fur. “Thanks, buddy.”