Carolina Blues (7 page)

But it didn’t feel right, lusting over the chief of police when Jane had just been vandalized. “I don’t want to take you away from your crime scene.”

“I’m done here. I need to get back to the office and type up my report.” He looked at Jane. “Grady has the case number. He’ll be able to file the claim today.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m giving you the phone number for Island Security Systems. They do alarm systems for a lot of local businesses. Sam Grady says they’ll give you a price break if you want to get something installed.”

Jane took the piece of paper. “Thanks.”

Jack tucked away his notebook. “Somebody from the sheriff’s department will be by tomorrow to process the scene. They’ll be out of your way before the repairman gets here.”

The paper crumpled in Jane’s grasp. “Is that really necessary? I mean, if the insurance company is paying for the damage—”

“It’s just routine,” Jack said evenly. “You got a problem with it, you need to take that up with your landlord.”

Jane’s mouth snapped shut.

“What was all that about?” Lauren demanded as she slid into the front seat of the department SUV.

Jack closed the passenger door—at least he hadn’t put his hand on top of her head as she climbed in—and walked around to the driver’s side. “Buckle up.”

She fumbled for the seat belt. “What’s the sheriff going to do, search for fingerprints?”

“That’s the idea.”

She raised her head to look at him in disbelief. “Seriously?”

“Guy did a couple thousand dollars’ worth of damage. Around here that constitutes a major crime.” Something that might have been a smile touched the corners of his mouth. “You’re not in the big city anymore.”

“Neither are you.” She studied his Great Stone Face, trying to read him. “Do you miss it?”

Jack started the engine without answering. The air-conditioning whooshed on. Lauren jumped as the dashboard blasted her with heat.

“What time did you come in this morning?” he asked.

She adjusted her vent, uncomfortable. “I don’t know. Nine?”

“You notice anything unusual?”

Her mouth twisted. “You mean, besides that it was getting really hot?”

“Any unfamiliar cars, any suspicious characters . . .”

She stopped fussing with the vent long enough to shoot him a disbelieving look. “Wait a minute. Did you just offer me a ride so that you could
question
me?”

“I offered you a ride because you look ready to fall over.” He reached between the seats and handed her a bottle of water. “Here.”

She blinked, off balance. “What’s this?”

“You’ve been working in the heat for hours. Drink.”

“Thank you.” She unscrewed the top, touched and taken aback by his care. It was so . . . sweet. So at odds with his hard-boiled appearance.
Rescue me
. She swallowed, searching for some defense against her own vulnerability. “You know, most plastic bottles end up in landfills or the ocean,” she announced suddenly. “Tap water is just as good for you and better for the environment.”

He looked at her sideways. “Have you tasted the tap water on the island?”

The air from the vents was cooling, evaporating the sweat on her forehead and between her breasts. Her spine wanted to melt into the deep leather seat. She forced herself to sit up. “The water at the inn tastes fine.”

“Probably filtered.”

“Oh.” This was one of the most inane conversations ever. But he was playing along, giving her time to recover. She was grateful for his patience. And the water. She swigged from the bottle. Licked her lips. “What about the bakery?”

Jack raised his gaze from . . . Was he looking at her
mouth
? “Same thing. Pretty much anyplace that caters to visitors is going to have filtered water.”

Well, that made sense. She drank some more, holding the water in her parched mouth, absorbing it into her tissues.

The inn was within walking distance of the bakery, a little over a mile, but the number of tourist cars and bicycles on the narrow road made the trip take much longer. She didn’t mind. The AC lapped her in comfort. She felt herself reviving like a plant out of the heat.

Jack sent her another dark, assessing glance. “You doing okay? No bad effects?”

She shook her head. “Thanks,” she said again. “I guess I was a little dehydrated.”

“I meant from the vandalism.”

She stared at him, shocked by his understanding.

She’d learned from experience that nobody—not the reporters or radio interviewers or her fellow students or her mother—really wanted to listen to Hostage Girl being insecure. They wanted her to be brave. They wanted her to inspire them. And then they wanted her to get over it, because anything else demanded too much of them.

“I’m fine,” she said, relieved because it was almost true. “I wasn’t even there when it happened.”

She wasn’t the one whose space, whose trust, had been violated. It wasn’t her trauma.

“So you didn’t see anything. Anybody.”

She rolled the wet bottle between her hands. What could she say? How much should she tell him? Not her trauma. Not her secret, either. She wasn’t bound by client confidentiality in this case. But maybe she was bound by friendship? Jane had quite clearly avoided naming her ex as a potential suspect.

“There are people in and out of the bakery all the time. I couldn’t tell you who’s a regular or who’s just visiting or who . . . or if anyone is likely to cause a problem. You need to ask Jane.”

“Her ex ever drop by? Travis Tillett.”

Lauren bit her lip. Not so much of a secret after all. “Not today.”

Jack just looked at her, the way she would look at a client who was being evasive. She would look and wait and then say,
I can’t help you if you don’t let me know exactly what’s going on
.

What would help Jane?

Lauren didn’t know Jack well enough to trust him. But she could at least cooperate in his investigation. “He came in on Friday to see Jane. She didn’t want to talk then, but she didn’t want him coming by the house, either. She left with him. She was gone about an hour. An errand at the bank, she said.”

There, Lauren thought, relieved. She’d even managed that last bit—
an errand at the bank
—without a hitch, as if the words didn’t cause a blip in her heartbeat.

She hadn’t been inside a bank building since the robbery.

Jack didn’t say anything.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“What you said. Talk to Jane.”

That sounded promising. But . . . “You know, she may not want to talk with you.”

He made a noncommittal noise. Lauren used the same sound when she worked at the family clinic, an acknowledgment token, a signal to the client to continue. It was oddly reassuring to hear it from him. Like discovering they spoke a shared language.

She took a breath and forged ahead. “A lot of women are reluctant to report harassment to the police. Especially in domestic cases.”

He slid her a look. Amused? Annoyed? “You think I don’t know this? I’ve been a cop a long time.”

“I’m sure that makes you a model of sensitivity,” she said politely.

His lips twitched.

Encouraged, she continued. “Maybe Jane thinks she can handle the situation. Maybe she’s afraid of what could happen once the authorities are called in. Once you tell someone, it’s out of your control.”

An image of black-clad figures burst into her brain. Pounding feet. Pandemonium. Voices shouting,
Police! Stay down, stay down
.

She curled her hands around the bottle, holding it tight, the condensation like cold sweat against her palms.
Once the authorities are called in
 . . .

“If her ex is vandalizing her place, she’s not controlling shit,” Jack said.

Lauren pulled herself together. They were talking about Jane, she reminded herself. It wasn’t personal. She shoved down the memory of blood sinking into the bank’s blue carpet, the betrayal in Ben’s eyes.

She took another sip of water. “You know that,” she said. “Jane doesn’t.”

“She should. Her dad’s a cop.”

Lauren’s brows drew together in confusion.

“Hank Clark, retired sheriff’s deputy,” Jack explained. “He’s part-time now with the police department. Jane and her kid live with him.”

Something clicked in Lauren’s memory.
That don’t change my rights . . . You want to have this discussion in front of Aidan and your daddy?

“Jane has a child.”

Jack nodded. “Little boy. Aidan.”

“Do you know if her ex has visitation rights?”

“I’ll find out.”

“How does Jane’s father feel about all this?”

Jack shrugged.

Of course, Lauren thought. Never ask a cop how he feels. Because they were
guys
. They didn’t sit around discussing their
feelings
.

But then Jack surprised her. “He’s worried about her. I get the impression he thought this guy was bad news from the beginning.”

“So asking for help means admitting to her father that he was right all along.”

“That’s no reason to protect this asshole.”

“Maybe she’s protecting her son. Or herself.”

Another glance from those almost-black eyes. Definite amusement this time. “You sound like a shrink.”

“I am a shrink. Although ‘counselor’ works. Or ‘therapist,’” she said lightly.

Jack frowned. “I thought you were a psychology student.”

It had been in the news coverage. She was surprised he remembered. “Graduate student. I’m getting my doctorate.”
If I ever go back
. “I see patients in a supervised clinical setting.”

Jack shook his head, like he couldn’t believe it. “A
shrink
,” he repeated.

Her heart sank a little. “Is that a problem?” she asked.

He didn’t answer right away.
So, yes
. She suppressed a sigh. And here she’d been thinking they spoke the same language. “A lot of people could benefit from counseling,” she said.

He raised one dark, sexy eyebrow. “Present company included?”

“I was talking about
Jane
. Mediation could help her if there’s a custody issue.”

“Yeah, maybe. Or I can find this guy and talk to him.”

He sounded so confident, Lauren thought wistfully. So sure of himself and the situation. Maybe he wouldn’t mind if she borrowed a little of that confidence for a while.

God, she was pathetic. She barely knew him.

And maybe that was part of his appeal. She was free to imagine anything she wanted, to invest him with all kinds of magical qualities. He could be the man of her dreams.

Harmless enough, as long as she kept him a fantasy.

“Don’t you need some kind of proof first that he’s involved?”

“I’m not going to drag him in and beat him up,” Jack said stiffly. “But there’s nothing to stop me from approaching the guy on the street and starting a conversation.”

He looked so hard and dangerous. He made her feel so safe.
Jack Rossi to the rescue
.

She fought a shiver of longing.

He must have caught the movement, because his eyes narrowed. “What?”

As if she were accusing him of police brutality when in fact she admired his ability to do his job within the constraints of the law. “I’m just wondering where you draw the line between your personal and professional life.”

His jaw set. “I don’t.”

He still sounded stiff. Defensive. Her insides squeezed in sympathy.

She nodded, emboldened by her understanding. “I guess that’s something we have in common. It’s hard sometimes to maintain an appropriate emotional distance. I mean, you have to care to do your job.”

He was looking at her oddly. “I meant I don’t have a personal life.”

“Oh.” She was embarrassed. “I find that hard to believe.” He was so attractive.

“Then you haven’t ever dated a cop.”

She didn’t date. She hung out. She hooked up. But never with a cop before.

“Cops can’t have personal lives?”

“When? Days I’m on, I work split shifts, do the rounds in the morning, another at the end of the day. So I don’t get home ’til seven, eight o’clock. I work weekends. I’m on call nights.”

“You must get some time off.”

“Sure. A couple hours in the afternoon to do paperwork, run errands.” A corner of his mouth kicked up. “And I made it a rule that if I get called out in the middle of the night, somebody better be bleeding or somebody’s going to jail.”

She smiled. “Setting boundaries.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m not very good at that.”

Another sidelong glance. “You got problems with your fans?”

“My . . . Oh, my readers? No, not really. My readers are wonderful. Aside from the occasional creepy guy at book signings. I was talking about my clients.”
And Ben
. But she never talked about Ben.

The peaked roof of the Pirates’ Rest emerged through the trees. They were almost at the inn. Disappointment curled inside her. Her moment-out-of-time with Fantasy Man was almost over.

“My wife was a cop,” Jack said out of the blue.

My wife
.

The two words punched into her midsection, robbing her of breath. A doorknob moment, they called it in therapy, when a client dropped a major bombshell admission on his or her way out the door.

Was
. Past tense.

“She’s not . . .” Lauren trailed off tactfully.

“Dead?” He pulled the SUV into a parking slot under a blooming crepe myrtle. “No. We’re divorced.”

“Oh. Good.”

He gave her an unreadable look.

Oops. “I mean, not
good
, just . . .” She pulled her thoughts together, trying to hear what he would not say. “Do you blame your job for the difficulty in your marriage?”
Your wife? Yourself?

“I’m not blaming anybody.” The flowering branches shielded them from the back of the house, filtering an incongruous pink light through the windshield. “I’m just telling you how it is.”

“Why?” Her heart slammed. Her stomach fluttered.
Why are you telling me this?
Was he trying to warn her? Or to warn her off?

Maybe she was jumping to conclusions. Other than offering her a ride—
purely in his role as public servant?
—Jack hadn’t done a thing to signal that he was interested in her personally. Which was really too bad, because he had that whole good cop/bad cop thing going on, all in one tightly wrapped masculine package—the brute muscles and cool control, the brooding intensity of his dark, deep-set eyes, the wry, amused curve of his mouth. When she climbed into the SUV, his scent had wrapped around her, soap and sweat and pheromones, until she wanted to bury her nose in the damp soft cotton of his shirt and sniff him all over.