Chapter 15
Miles made it as far as the back of Walsh’s truck before he stopped.
He was fucked. No matter how much he wished he could let this go, he couldn’t. He’d rushed over here to get answers. But after moving Tabitha’s furniture into her new apartment, he’d told himself he knew everything he needed to know.
She really was here.
She really was staying.
Nothing else should matter.
Spying Walsh rounding the corner of the house, his dog at his side, Miles walked down the sidewalk, meeting him in front of the porch. “Where’s Tabitha?”
Walsh brushed past him. “Changing.”
Miles stepped in front of the kid, blocking his path. “Take off.”
Walsh bristled. The anti-authority gene was strong in this one. “What?”“You can leave. I’ll get Tabitha home from Bissett’s.”
“No.”
“That wasn’t a request.”
“You going to arrest me?” When Miles remained silent, Walsh smirked. “Guess it’s a request after all.”
“What’ll it take?”
Christ, but he’d sunk low. Bartering with Reed Walsh. Willing to give him whatever he wanted short of breaking the law, going against the code of ethics, or anything having to do with his sister.
“Give me a reason.”
“What?” Miles asked.
“Give me a reason why I should step back. A good one.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of me giving you fifty bucks.”
The kid snorted. “Must be a Jennings family trait.”
Miles narrowed his eyes. What the hell did that mean?
“Better hurry up with that reason,” Walsh said, settling his hand on his dog’s head.
“We have a history,” Miles admitted. “Me and Tabitha.”
“From what I hear, you had a hook-up.”
His sister had a big mouth.
“I want to be the one to help her.”
He needed to be.
“Why don’t we wait until she gets down here?” Walsh asked. “Let her decide.”
They could do that. They should do that. Miles had no right to take this decision from her. To make it for her.
But he knew she’d say no.
From the look on Walsh’s face, he knew it, too.
Miles didn’t want to risk it.
“Please.”
It came out more growl than sound, but if Walsh’s shit-eating grin was anything to go by, he heard it crystal clear.
“Got you by the short hairs, doesn’t she?” Walsh murmured.
Miles’s first instinct was to deny it, but if there was one thing he knew, it was that too quick of a denial, too vehement of one, often came across as a lie.
Instead, he glanced pointedly at the living room window where Verity stood in the window watching them. “That really somewhere you want to go with me?”
The kid flushed, his mouth going flat.
Then deliberately turned away from the house and walked toward his truck.
“Why did you tell Tabitha you’d ask Ian to watch your dog while you drove her home?” he asked as Walsh opened the passenger side door of his truck.
The dog in question hopped onto the seat and Walsh shut the door. “You’re a detective,” he said, walking around the front of his truck to the driver’s side. “Figure it out.”
Miles watched the kid get in his truck and drive away.
Fucking smartass.
He paced from the porch to the driveway, then back again, the hot sun beating down his head. He was on his third loop when Tabitha stepped into view.
She’d changed into a green cotton dress with skinny straps and sandals. Had redone her hair, the strands smooth and pulled back into a ponytail. She looked even prettier now—and she’d looked damned good in those leggings and that clinging tank top—her cheeks flushed, her lips a glossy pink, the hem of her dress swishing above her knees.
A hunger rose inside of him, swift and sharp. One he was afraid he’d never be able to satiate. Not with any other woman but her.
He still wanted her, and that pissed him off.
But what terrified him was the way his heart picked up speed when she lifted her gaze and met his eyes, how it thumped in time to the sway of her hips as she walked toward him.
Like it beat on her command.
Or worse.
Like it beat for her.
Only for her.
She closed the distance between them. Stood close enough for the awareness between them to arc and crackle, bright and powerful and dangerous, like lightning splitting the sky.
Longing filled him, sweeping through his veins and rooting in his bones with a deep, sweet ache. Reminding him that no matter how many times he dug it out, no matter how often he tried to kill it, he’d never fully gotten rid of it.
It still had the power to grow.
And if he wasn’t careful, if he didn’t prune it back, it would consume him.
“You can follow me to Bissett’s,” he said.
She frowned. Glanced around as if just noticing they were alone on the street and Walsh’s truck was gone. “Where’s Reed?”
“I told him I’d give you a ride.”
She raised her eyebrows. “And why would you do that?”
He scowled. Was she fucking serious? “We need to talk.”
“We do need to talk,” she agreed in a gentle tone that set his teeth on edge. “But I think it would be better if we do it another time when our emotions aren’t quite so high.”
When it came to her, that’s all he was. Emotions. Any logic or reason, any sense of control was swept away by a toxic mix of anger, betrayal, and grief.
And those were only the emotions he’d admit to having.
The ones that didn’t scare the shit out of him.
“There won’t be a later time. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no reason for us to see each other again, let alone have a conversation. You lied. That night at the bar. When you told me you were just passing through town. You knew you were moving here.”
“Yes.” She shook her head. “No.” She stopped. Shut her eyes on a deep inhale. Opened them to meet his. “I knew there was the possibility that I’d be moving here. I was in town for a job interview.”
“A job you obviously got.”
She nodded, slow and hesitant. “I did.”
“What job?”
Another hesitation. Another careful breath. “I’m a social worker.”
Fuck.
The Mount Laurel Police Department often worked with the city’s department of human services. He wouldn’t be able to avoid her. Not completely.
“Did Hayden tell you I was the assistant chief of police?”
Her flush deepened. Turned blotchy. “No.”
He waited, but she kept silent. It was another way for her to withhold the truth. To keep on lying.
But he was used to asking questions. Didn’t mind putting in the work to get the answers he wanted.
Even if they were answers he wouldn’t like hearing.
“Did you learn of my position before or after you interviewed for the job?”“Before. I…” She stopped. Licked her lips. “I saw it on the MLPD’s website when I researched the job.”
He’d known from the start she was lying. But he hadn’t pushed. Hadn’t tried to get to the truth because he’d wanted her too much.
“I wanted to tell you,” she insisted. “But you were so angry with me, I knew you wouldn’t listen.”
“I’m listening now. Tell me everything you should have told me that night. All the things you kept from me ten years ago. Let’s start with something easy. Let’s start,” he continued, shifting closer, “with how you got this.”
And he barely, barely grazed the tip of his forefinger over the scar on her chin.
She went still, her lips parting on a soft exhale, her eyes wide, the blue of them darkening. It was another mistake, getting this close. Touching her. It made it all too real, the pull between them. Amplified it so that it seemed the tip of his finger burned from the heat of her skin. Vibrated with the slight tremble of her lower lip.
He pressed down gently and her lips instantly drew farther apart. He made a sound, a low grunt of approval. His cock twitched.
Christ, but she was such a good girl.
He sucked in a breath between his clenched teeth. He wanted to put his previous theory to the test. Again.
Let’s see how good you can be.
But they were in the middle of the sidewalk on a bright and sunny Sunday morning with people driving and walking by and, undoubtedly, his sister still watching them from her spot at the living room window.
Now was not the time for wayward thoughts or a fucking hard-on. It wasn’t the time for him to be pulled under her spell again.
Now was the time for him to press his advantage.
He dragged his fingertip down to the point of her chin. Used it to nudge her head back as he shifted even closer. Couldn’t stop himself from sliding his fingers around, lightly cupping her throat, his thumb pressing against the base, his fingertips capturing the quickening beat of her pulse.
He leaned down, ducking his head so they were eye-to-eye. Mouth-to-mouth. Dropped his voice to a low, husky whisper and asked the question that had always haunted him. “Who hurt you, baby?”
She inhaled, sharp and swift, studying him like she’d looked at Walsh’s dog. Warily. Frightened.
Her throat worked under his hand as she swallowed, and he had to bite back a groan as he was hit with the image of her doing that exact same thing, of him feeling it with his fingers, while she swallowed around his cock.
But the twitch of his fingers, the heat in his gaze must have given his true thoughts away, because she went rigid, disappointment flickering in her eyes before she dropped her gaze to his chest. She took a slow, deep breath and then a long, deliberate step back.
Forcing him to let her go.
“I fell and hit my chin on the corner of a coffee table.”
It was the same story she’d told him when he’d first asked about her scar ten years ago.
It could even be true.
But something told him it wasn’t.
“You really are nothing but a fucking liar, aren’t you?” he murmured.
But he was worse. He was an idiot for believing he held any type of advantage here.
For thinking she might trust him now when she’d never trusted him before.
“What do you want from me?” she asked shakily.
“I want you to tell me something true.”
His words were soft, barely a whisper. He told himself they were a command, much like the ones he’d issued that night at his house. That he’d only blurted them out to disarm her. That it was yet another attempt at dismantling her.
But there was no denying what they really were.
A plea.
And she knew it. She fucking knew it, her eyes going soft with sympathy.
“You first.”
Rage rumbled through him, like thunder after the lightning strike, shaking him to his core. How dare she ask him for something? Something she didn’t deserve?
Something she hadn’t earned.
He didn’t owe her anything.
Sheowed him.
He’d already given her too much. Had shared his thoughts and feelings with her while she’d withheld every one of her own.
He’d given her his heart.
And he’d never gotten it back.
Goddamn her.
“I was fucked up after you left,” he admitted, not fighting the edge of pain that crept into his voice. “Everywhere I went, there was a memory of you. The coffee shop where we met. The grocery store we shopped at. The diner we ate breakfast at on Sunday mornings. I couldn’t spend more than an hour at a time in my apartment because you were everywhere I looked. In the kitchen, barefoot, making cookies. Curled up on the couch reading a book. Naked and smiling at me in my bed.”
He’d felt haunted.
Cursed to repeat the same grief, the same torment he’d felt those horrible first days and weeks and months after his parents died.
“Every day I’d find another piece of you that you’d left behind,” he continued. He wondered, as he had at the time, whether she’d been so desperate to leave him, in such a hurry to get as far away from him as possible, that she’d overlooked them.
Or if she’d left them on purpose to further torture him.
“A pair of earrings on the dresser. One of your T-shirts at the bottom of the hamper. Your favorite coffee mug in the back of the cabinet. I threw out my sheets because even after washing them, they still smelled like you.”
She shook her head, the pink in her cheeks now a guilty flush. “Miles, I—”
“You wanted that,” he pointed out mildly. “You wanted me ripped open and bleeding after you left. Don’t act squeamish about it now.”
“I never wanted that. I never meant to hurt you. That’s the truth.”
“The worst,” he went on as if she hadn’t spoken, “were the mornings. Those few moments before I was fully awake. I’d turn to you, expecting you to be there, lying beside me, only to realize you were gone. And each day, it would hit me, like a hammer to my chest. An unexpected blow blindsiding me again and again. Every. Fucking. Day. And while it eventually faded, it didn’t go away. Not completely. Not until I graduated and came home. It helped that you’d never been here. That I had no memories of you here. It helped to know that if I ever thought I saw you walking toward me in the sunshine wearing a green sundress and looking so fucking beautiful it hurt just to breathe, it was nothing but my imagination.” He paused. “Until now.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, visibly shaken. “I should have told you that night at the bar that I’d been to a job interview here.”
“But you didn’t. You blindsided me. Again. That’s the thing about the choices we make. We think they won’t affect anyone else, but they oftentimes do.”
“If we could talk about this later, I can explain. Maybe we could get some dinner—”
“No.”
“It doesn’t have to be tonight. It could be whenever you’re free.”
“I’m not free. Not for you. I might not have a choice in where you get a job or where you live, but I can choose how much of my time, my attention, and my thoughts I give you. And you’ve officially reached your quota of all three.”
“Now who’s the liar?” she whispered.
Eyes narrowing to slits, he stiffened, wanting to deny it.
Instead, he’d have to prove it.
“Stay out of my way,” he said, low and harsh as the front door opened and Verity stepped onto the porch. “Because I’ll for sure be staying out of yours.”
“I really hate to interrupt,” Verity called down to them, “but Bissett’s closes in fifteen minutes. Might want to put a pin in this whole super intense, dramatic, and sexually charged thing you’ve got going on and revisit it at a later time.”
“No need to revisit anything,” he told his sister.
He glanced at Tabitha, hoping she got his message loud and clear.
“We’re done.”