Chloe
“Two beds.”
I whip my head in Colin’s direction, brows pulling together in absolute disbelief. “What?” I turn back to the friendly but bewildered looking hotel clerk. “One bed.”
I just staked my marital claim on him, for fuck’s sake. We are not sleeping in separate beds.
The hotel clerk looks at Colin for permission, pinching his credit card between her fingers.
“Fine,” he grumbles. “One bed.” I smile and give the young girl a happy nod.
I told Colin he should walk me in here in handcuffs and really raise some eyebrows, but he was against the idea.
Maybe next time.
He slings my bag over his shoulder, his much smaller bag gripped in his hand as he turns from the desk and heads out the lobby door, holding it open for me to pass.
“418,” he reminds me, lifting his chin in the direction of the exposed hallway.
I walk ahead of him, trailing my finger along the wall of doors until we eventually hit the one that will be ours for the night.
He presses the plastic card to the sensor until the light turns green and the lock clicks open.
I’ve been to Sunset Peak plenty of times, though I’ve never found the need to stay in a hotel before.
The room is clean, the white sheets and comforter plush looking and crisply folded.
It’s not my bed, but it’ll do for the night—especially because I’ll finally get to sleep next to the man who’s been frustratingly choosing the couch over me for three nights.
There’s a TV directly across from the bed, and a table in the corner by the window with two chairs pushed under it on either side. Colin sets our bags down and opens his laptop on the table. I cross to him to push it closed.
“No working.”
His eyes narrow, fingers steepling on the tabletop. “A man was just found murdered with Maeve’s name carved into his stomach.”
“And? What are you going to do about it from fifty miles away?”
He squeezes his jaw, but he acquiesces, making no attempt to reopen the computer on the desk.
“Besides,” I continue, moving to fall back onto the bed and fold my arms behind my head. “You’ve got the woman you’ve been stalking for a year all to yourself. Isn’t that more interesting than some dead guy?”
He huffs out a tense laugh, perhaps at my blunt reminder that he isn’t as upstanding as he portrays himself to be.
His gaze moves to where my dress is riding up my thighs, and I instantly feel the warmth pooling between them under his suffocating stare.
“Why two beds?” I ask him. His eyes snap back to mine, the dazzle in them sparking into a blaze as his pupils expand.
He turns away from me, busying himself with irrelevant tasks at the table like making sure his laptop is positioned properly and unloading his bathroom items onto the surface, even though that’s not at all where they belong.
“I thought it would have been best,” he clips.
“For who?”
“It’s more professional,” he says, not exactly answering my question.
“I think we’re well past that, detective,” I whisper from the bed, and he freezes ever so momentarily before forcing himself to keep moving. He starts gathering his bathroom supplies from the table, carrying them toward the small, tiled space off the room.
His avoidance of me is frustrating. Infuriating, actually.
I force myself to close my eyes and hold my breath, counting to five before pushing the hard breath out.
I absorb the minimal patience the breathing exercise instills in me and scoot myself up the bed, watching from the pillow with my hands tucked behind my head as Colin focuses his frazzled energy on unpacking.
He silently empties his bag, hanging his outfit for tomorrow in the closet. The sound of him arranging and re-arranging his items on the counter echoes from the bathroom, and I lay quietly on the bed until he’s effectively run out of things to do and has to face the inevitable.
He moves toward me on the bed, lowering himself onto what I’ve decided is his side, and leans his head against the wall.
“Are you tired?” I ask, rolling onto my side to face him and tucking my hands under my face.
I look up at him, at his long, dark lashes lightly closed.
At his pink, plush lips relaxed and the stubble of a five o’clock shadow covering his sharp jaw lines.
My gaze travels to his hands resting on his stomach, the one hand that he used to subdue Max and the scabbed over cuts littering his pink knuckles.
“A bit. You?”
The sun has set beyond the drawn curtains over the window, and while it’s not nearly close to the time I’d typically retreat to my own bedroom, my mind is exhausted after all of the information Maeve laid out for me and all the time I’ve spent worrying about her throughout the day, on top of the rush of nerves I felt thinking about meeting Colin’s mother tomorrow.
“A bit,” I parrot. I let a beat of silence surround us before asking, “Why a panda bear?”
His lips pull into a smile, and he lets out a groan, rolling his head in my direction. “You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?”
“Are you kidding?” I sit up on the bed, turning to face him and folding my legs underneath me, mocking him only slightly when I puff up my body like a gorilla and say, “The big, bad Detective Colin Mills loves panda bears? Who woulda thought?”
His eyes sparkle with amusement as he watches me, trying hard to hold back the smile tugging at his perfect lips. “I’m not big and bad.”
I roll my eyes. “Sorry, cranky and rude,” I correct.
That sparkle of amusement extinguishes immediately, a blaze of darkness lighting up his pupils before he lunges himself at me, pushing me backward on the bed and digging his fingers into my sides playfully.
I’m writhing immediately, squealing and breathless as he tickles me.
“Take it back,” he orders, his features straining as I giggle and wriggle under him.
“Never!” I cry. He relieves me from the coil of joy wound in my stomach, rolling off to the side and leaning on his elbow as he looks down at me. “Don’t change the subject.”
Colin sighs heavily, his head resting in his hand, the natural smile on his face fading to seriousness.
“I didn’t have a lot of friends when I was a kid, so my mother gave me this little stuffed panda.
She said he’d be my friend, and that he’d teach me how to make friends, too.
She told me that pandas symbolize friendship. ”
“Did he help?” I ask, envisioning a small version of this man, sad and alone as a little boy who just wanted to be loved.
He nods absently. Then I ask, “And the dandelion?”
That smile straining at his lips finally pulls off to one side, his cheek creasing as his eyes seem to light up with happy memories.
“She picked one for me the next day. Told me to make a wish. I had my little panda tucked under my arm, and I wished that he would bring me friends. That I could be like the other kids who had sleepovers and a group of other kids following them around at recess.” He pauses as happy, and potentially sad, memories flash in his mind.
“It was like magic. All I remember next is forgetting I ever wanted friends. Forgetting there was ever a time in my life that I didn’t have any. ”
“You don’t seem to have many now,” I observe, tapping my finger onto his nose.
“I’ve been preoccupied.”
“With?”
“My mother,” he says. “And…” He clears this throat, perhaps not wanting to say I’ve been a preoccupation of his as well.
I smile softly, staring up at him as his focus seems to come back to my face. “Tell me about her.”
He seems surprised by the change in subject, his eyes searching mine until he rolls onto his back next to me, our heads positioned at the bottom of the bed.
I roll onto my side and watch his features tense as he stares at the ceiling.
His lips part, but he hesitates, the pause stretching between us until I think he forgot I even asked him a question.
When he doesn’t speak, I prompt him. “She’s sick,” I say, assuming. When he helped me with the deer head, he’d said he was with her for the past year. And he was gone so abruptly, I can only assume it’s because something happened.
He nods. “She has a bone disease.” His throat moves with a swallow, and then the muscles constrict, like it’s aching with tears he’s trying to keep unshed.
“She fell a year ago. It wasn’t a bad fall, and she’s not old enough for it to have had as much of an impact as it did, but she broke both of the bones in her arm.
” He absently runs his finger the length of his arm between his elbow and his wrist. “I left town to help her after her diagnosis.”
“She’s better now?” I ask, my fingers itching to reach out and intertwine with his.
He shakes his head beside me, swallowing again.
“I moved into her place to help out for a bit. But eventually, she needed more care than I could provide on my own. We moved her into an independent living community. She has her own place in the complex, but she has easy access to amenities she needs for her treatment. A pool, an exercise room, doctors. The staff are on-call twenty-four-seven in case she needs help.” Colin flinches as he says the last part, his guilt for leaving her clear as day on his features.
That he couldn’t be the one to give her all the help she needs.
I recognize it because I felt the same way about my mother: powerless.
I watched for too many years as man after man came along and stripped her of her independence until she was a shell of the mother I once knew. She was breaking, and I was losing my grip on being able to protect her.
“What about your family?” I ask, watching his face intently as he keeps it turned away from me. This story he’s telling me seems to only feature himself and his mother, and I know from high school that he had a present father and two siblings, as well.
He releases a scoff that sounds weighted with frustration, his jaw clenching so severely I think it will crack.
He stays silent, but looks suddenly far away, like whatever happened with his family is flashing in front of his eyes in painful recollections.
I reach over and run the back of my finger along his jaw-line, quietly urging him to stay here.
His jaw relaxes as he forces a breath past his lips. “My father left my mother for another woman after I graduated high school.” His words are laced with bitterness, the taste of forgiveness far from his tongue. “I haven’t talked to him since.”
“And your siblings?” I prompt, tucking my hand back under my head.
“My brother is more concerned with his own family.” He pauses.
“Which I probably shouldn’t blame him for, but I do, because he’s a shit person who cares even less about his wife and kids than he does about the house that built him.
” He hums before adding, “My sister’s an addict.
” He doesn’t elaborate, just lets the pain of that fact flit across his features before it’s gone in an instant.
He turns to face me, forcing the memories of his life out of his mind. “What about your mother?”
I roll onto my back, mimicking his position as my gaze lands on a yellowing stain of a water spot on the ceiling. “What about her?”
“You keep in touch,” he says, like he’s surprised.
“Of course, I do. Why wouldn’t I?” My eyebrows crease together, eyes tracing and retracing the misshapen circle of damage above me.
“You don’t blame her?”
He flinches when I snap my head in his direction.
“Blame her? For doing what she needed to do to protect her family?” I force my gaze back to the ceiling, my own jaw tightening painfully.
“Those men…” My voice cracks, remembering all the pain we both endured at the hands of the men who were supposed to love her.
Supposed to love us. “They were bad men, Colin. And if you would have continued your investigation into them instead of taking an easy arrest, you would have known that.” I can’t help the taste of blame from lingering on my tongue.
I may be enamored with this man, but he’s still the man who put my mother in prison, and part of me hates him for that.
Hates him for not seeing what we were always afraid to say out loud.
We needed a savior, and we had no choice but to find one in ourselves.
My mother’s lawyer was clear in the days leading up to her arrest: there were two suspects in the trail of murders in our past—me and her.
It was the video footage of me in town during the timeframe the forensics team determined Husband Number Three died that sealed the deal for the department, leaving my mother the only possible guilty party on the table.
I’ve seen the footage. I argued at the time that we should have used that in her defense, but she confessed to the police. Pleaded not guilty to the court but refused to present evidence in her defense. Shutting me out of the decision entirely.
It’s the same piece of evidence I paid her lawyer to present for her appeal.
They can’t prove it was me over her, and even if digging up that piece of evidence leaves me vulnerable to arrest, it’ll be worth it. She doesn’t deserve to sit behind bars for protecting us, and I’m willing to go down to protect her.
Colin clears his throat beside me, his eyes glued to the side of my face, the awkward tension between us deafening in its accusations.
“And your father?” he prods quietly. “If we’re going to be married, shouldn’t I ask him for your hand in marriage?”
I snort as my gaze leaves the ceiling and finds his, his soft lips pulling at an apologetic smile. His intention was to lighten the mood. I can hear the sorry he isn’t speaking out loud, though he doesn’t need to. I’m bitter, but I know he was just doing his job.
His eyes sparkle as I stare at him. “If you figure out who he is, be my guest.”