Count to Ten (38 page)

She sucked in a breath when his thumb found her most vulnerable spot. “I wondered how you’d manage this,” she said. “I mean, given the whole...” She jerked back against him with a hard shudder. “Dexterity thing. Damn.”

“I manage just fine,” he said, stroking her, enjoying the way her body felt as she undulated. “I woke up wanting you again.” He’d woken reaching for her, his heart easing when his hands grasped her flesh instead of empty air.

She tried to roll over, but he held her firmly in place.

“No.” He pulled her leg back over his hip. “Let me. Let me.” She yielded completely, moaning when he pushed into her. “Let me, Mia.”

She grabbed him around his neck as she worked her hips like pistons. “I am.”

She was. She’d let him do everything, responding with an intensity that made him feel like he’d conquered a continent. This time was no different and she came hard around him, pulling him into his own climax with enough force that it was a wonder his heart didn’t stop. They lay panting and her laugh filled the room. “You woke me up.”

He pressed a lazy kiss to the side of her neck. “Should I apologize?”

“Would you mean it?”

“No.”

She laughed again, softer this time. “Then don’t.” He held her to him, stroking the length of her thigh when he noticed the bruise on her arm in the dim glow from the streetlamp outside. Appalled, he switched on the light. “Did I do that?”

“What? Oh, that. No. I bumped into something on my way out of the office tonight.”

“Good. I didn’t mean to be rough with you.”

“You weren’t. It was just right.” She sighed, content. “I think we’ve both got a lot of need stored up. It hasn’t been six years, but it’s been a while for me, too.”

She’d been engaged. Suddenly he needed to know why she hadn’t gone through with it. “Mia, why didn’t you get married?”

She was quiet for so long he thought she wouldn’t answer. He was kicking himself for asking when she sighed, this time pensive. “You want to know about my ex.”

“What I really want to know is why you said you didn’t want to want this.” He pressed a kiss to her shoulder, made his tone light. “You’re so good at it, after all.”

But his teasing tone did nothing to lighten hers. “Sex has never been my problem, Reed. Guy never complained about that.”

His name was Guy then. A French name. He couldn’t see Mia with a French guy named Guy. She wasn’t the roses and romance type. Still, jealousy speared at him and Reed pushed it away. Guy was gone after all. “What did he complain about, then?”

“My job. The hours.” She paused. “His mother complained, too. She didn’t think I was good enough for her baby.”

“Mothers often don’t.”

“Did your mother think Christine was good enough for you?”

He remembered their relationship fondly. “Yes. Yes, she did. Christine and Mom were friends. They went shopping and did lunch and all those things.”

“Bernadette and I never had that kind of relationship.” She sighed. “I met Guy at a party. He was fascinated with my job. The whole
CSI
thing. And I was interested in his.”

“What did he do?”

She flipped to her back and looked up at him. “He was Guy LeCroix.”

Reed had to admit he was impressed. “The hockey player?” LeCroix had retired the season before, but he’d been magic on the ice. “Wow.”

Her lips curved. “Yeah. Wow. I got great seats, right behind the penalty box.” The smile faded. “He liked introducing me as his girlfriend, the homicide cop.”

“So why did you get engaged to him?”

“I truly liked him. Guy’s a nice guy and while he was playing, things were good. He wasn’t home enough to make demands. Then he retired and things changed. He wanted to get married and I got sucked into the flow. Then Bernadette got involved. She had very specific ideas about how weddings, and wives, should be.”

“I take it you didn’t fit her requirements.”

“No,” she said wryly. “Anyway, I’d canceled one too many fittings for my dress and Bernadette threw a fit. I found out about it the next night when Guy took me to this fancy place downtown with linen and crystal and waiters who hovered.” She grimaced.

She’d hate a place like that. He stroked her chin with his thumb. “And?”

“And Guy informed me that I’d canceled seventy-three percent of the appointments his mother had set for the wedding and then he got stern and added that I’d broken sixty-seven percent of our dates. That our dates came second was telling. Anyway, he insisted I ‘improve my performance.’ Yeah, I think that’s how he phrased it.”

“And did he have any coaching tips on how you should do this?”

Her lips quirked up in amusement. “Of course.” Again the smile faded. “But the biggest gist of it was that I was to transfer to another department. Or better yet, quit altogether. I wouldn’t be able to work once I was pregnant anyway.” She stared straight up at Reed, defiant challenge in her eyes. “I’d been honest about that all along. I didn’t want kids. He’d conveniently forgotten that fact or thought he could maneuver me into changing my mind. I reminded him and we had one major argument. And when it was done, I’d given him back his ring. He didn’t think I’d do it in a public place like that with the china and linen.”

He felt a stir of pride at her stand. “He was wrong.”

“Yeah, but I hurt him. I didn’t want to and I didn’t mean to, but I did. He wanted a home and a wife and in the end he got a homicide cop.”

It was too much of who she was to change, but he could feel some sympathy for LeCroix. “I should say I’m sorry.”

One corner of her mouth lifted. “Would you be?”

He ran his fingertip under the fullest part of her breast, watched her areolae pucker and her nipples stand erect. She had incredible breasts. “No,” he said huskily.

Her eyes darkened in response. “Then don’t. Anyway, I think Guy was less impacted by the whole breakup than Bobby was.”

Ah.
Now they were getting somewhere. “Bobby. Your father.”

Her smile was brittle. “My father. He liked the thought of having Guy LeCroix as a son-in-law. I think in his mind it was the best thing I’d ever done.”

He frowned at the bitter hostility in her voice. “Better than being a cop?”

“I was never a cop to him. I was just a...
girl.
” She spat it, like the worst of epithets. “Good for marriage. If he got good hockey seats out of the deal, all the better.”

Reed reached over her, pulled the old chain with its dog tags from the nightstand where he’d dropped them earlier. He’d thought it odd that she’d worn them as she’d never been in the military. He held them up to the light.
mitchell, -robert b
. “They’re his. Why do you wear them if you hate him?”

Her brows crunched. “Your mother...did everyone know she was abusive, or did she have a nice face she let everyone on the outside see?”

The need to know that had spurred him on suddenly froze. “Mia, did your father... ?”

Her eyes shifted, then came back to him, shadowed and full of guilt. “No.” But he didn’t believe her and his stomach rolled at the images his mind stirred up. “No,” she repeated, a little more forcefully. “He mostly just hit. When he got drunk.”

His first impulse was to draw away, afraid of breaking her, but he didn’t. Knew he couldn’t. He swallowed back the queasy bile that burned his throat. Because he thought she needed it, he pressed his lips to her temple and held them there. “You don’t have to tell me any more, Mia. It’s all right.”

But she kept going, her eyes now glued to the dog tags he still held in his hand. “When I was a kid, I used to think that if I was fast enough, smart enough, good enough...that he’d stop drinking. Be the father to us that he pretended to the rest of the world that he was. I was the star athlete in high school. I thought it would make him care. When I realized that he wasn’t going to change, the sports became my ticket out.”

“You went to college on a soccer scholarship,” he remembered. “You got out.”

“Yes. But Kelsey was still home, getting wilder and wilder.” Her lips pursed and he wondered what it was that she wasn’t letting out. “It was her way of punishing Bobby. She couldn’t make him stop, but she could embarrass the hell out of him, and once Kelsey got something in her mind, she wouldn’t let it go.”

A family trait,
he thought. “She got in trouble.”

“Oh, yeah. Took up with this addict named Stone. I tried to stop her, but she... wanted nothing to do with me. By the time she was seventeen she was hooked. By nineteen, she was in prison. For the first three years she was in, she wouldn’t even see me. Then she did and...” She let the thought trail. Swallowed hard. “She’s all I have left. If Marc can’t get her transferred...”

“Has Marc Spinnelli ever lied to you?”

“No. I trust him more than any man I’ve ever known. Except maybe Abe.” She drew a breath and let it out. “And I suppose, you. I’ve told you things I shouldn’t have.”

Something inside him shifted. “I won’t tell. I promise.”

“I believe you. I think tonight put me on edge more than I’d like to admit. I really hate getting shot at.” She flicked the dog tags in his hand. “But I never answered your question. The day I got my badge my father took me out with his cop friends at their bar. I was one of them then. A part of... something. Do you understand what that means?”

He nodded. To be a part of something close-knit and supportive when you’d been alone for so long. He’d had that with the Sollidays, then with the fire department. Then with Christine. “It was like being in a family. Finally.”

“Yeah. Anyway, Bobby was in his element, showing off. It was a big day, he said. And in front of everyone he gave me the dog tags. Said they’d kept him safe in Nam and hoped they’d keep me safe on the force. What was I going to do? I’d grown up with most of these guys but none of them ever knew what really went on in our house.”

“Or they chose not to,” he murmured and she shrugged.

“Who knows? Anyway, I put them on, intending to take them back off, but before I made it home I was in an accident. My car was totaled and I walked away without a scratch. I thought maybe the dog tags had some luck after all. And over the years, I’ve been lucky more times than I want to count.”

He pressed a kiss to her shoulder where a puckered scar had formed. “Murphy told me about the other time. When your first partner got shot. He said they almost lost you.”

“I was lucky then, too. Bullet hit me right here.” She touched her abdomen. “Went straight through, missed every major organ. It was then I found out that I was missing a kidney. I’d been born without one, so there was nothing there to hit. The bullet sailed through and I was good as new.” She looked away. “And Ray died. After that I had to add on the medic alert tag because of the kidney. A few times I almost took the dog tags off, but never did. I guess there’s enough superstition in me to keep them on.”

She’d put the engraved medic alert tag behind her father’s dog tags. He wondered if she even knew she’d done so. “Or maybe a part of you still needs to please your father,” he said and her eyes went flat. Carefully she slipped the chain around her neck.

“You sound like Dana. And you could be right. Which, Lieutenant Solliday, is the real reason I want no strings. I’m too fucked up not to hang myself with them.” She rolled away and sat on the edge of the bed, alone, and his heart wanted to break.

“I’m sorry, Mia.”

“Really?” Her voice was harsh.

“This time, yes. I am. I—” Her cell phone started to ring. “Dammit.”

She grabbed her phone from the nightstand. “It’s -Spinnelli.” Eyes on Reed’s, she flipped it open. “Mitchell.” She listened and the air rushed out of her lungs. “I’ll call him. We’ll be there in under twenty.” She snapped her phone shut. “Get dressed.”

He already was. “Another one?”

“Yeah. Joe and Donna Dougherty are dead.”

His eyes shot up, his hands paused on his belt buckle. “What?”

“Yeah. Apparently they moved out of the Beacon Inn.” She pulled her shirt over her head and her eyes flashed. “Apparently they were the original targets after all.”

Friday, December 1, 3:50 A.M.

He
hadn’t come home. The child lay in his bed, curled into a ball, listening to the muffled sounds of weeping down the hall. It wasn’t the first night his mother had cried in her bed. And he knew it wouldn’t be the last. Unless he did something.

He
hadn’t come home, but his face was on the news. He’d seen it himself. So had his mother. That’s why she’d cried all night.
We have to tell, Mom,
he’d said, but she’d grabbed him, her eyes wild and scared.
You can’t. Don’t say a word. He’ll know.

He’d stared at her throat, the top of the mark showing above her dress. The slice was long and deep enough to leave a scar.
He’d
done that to his mother, the very first night. And threatened to do worse if they told. His mother was too scared to talk.

He tucked himself harder into the ball, shaking.
So am I.

Friday, December 1, 3:55 A.M.

The front of the house was intact. Two firefighters were coming from around the back, pulling the hose. The odor of fire still hung in the air. Mia made her way past the fire truck to where two uniforms stood talking to the ME tech. It was Michaels, the guy who’d processed Dr. Thompson’s body less than twenty-four hours before. Behind him were two empty gurneys, each with a folded black body bag.