Superstition (51 page)

He must have gotten the message, because after a moment, he continued. His arm stayed securely around her, but he was looking up at the ceiling now as he spoke.

“They kick you out of the system when you’re eighteen. Brian is
—was—
about a year older than I am, so he left first. His birthday came and
boom,
he was gone. When it was my turn to leave, I floundered for a few months, then got my act more or less together, worked, and borrowed my way through college, became a cop. I was working vice in Trenton when I ran across Brian again. He knew I was a cop, of course. Since he was involved in just about every illegal thing you can think of, running scams right and left, you can understand why we didn’t exactly renew our childhood friendship. But we kept in touch, kind of indirectly. Then I got approached by some DEA guys I knew. They wanted me to help them take down some cops who were getting paid big bucks to look the other way while this major drug ring set up operations in our area, and I agreed. Not long after that, Brian got busted for felony drug possession. Since he was looking at some major time, he sent for me, thought maybe he could trade on our old friendship and get me to help him out with that. Bingo. I had my way in. I made a deal with Brian. He would bring me into his circle, introduce me around as a cop who wanted to make some money on the side, and if things went right when it was all over, I would see to it that the charges against him were dropped. Then, while all this was going on, Gina—remember my little sister?—found me through some damned Internet group that helps kids who’ve been adopted locate their birth families. I couldn’t believe it. All those years without a word, and with the worst timing in the world, there she was, divorced with a kid of her own, just barely making it as a waitress up in Newark.”

“Were you glad to see her?” Nicky prompted when he hesitated just long enough to make her wonder if he intended to stop right there.

“Yeah.” His voice was soft. “Hell, yeah. My
sister,
you know? When you don’t have any, family means a lot. Anyway, she was having a hard time of it financially, so I helped her out a little, went by and played with the kid. A boy, Jeff. Ten years old. Then I started thinking that maybe it wasn’t too safe for them to have me hanging around, what with everything that was going down with the drug ring, so I kind of backed off, figuring I’d pretty much stay away until it was all over. But by then, from stopping by my place, she’d already met Brian. Brian, being Brian, immediately started playing the angles. He thought he could use her to his advantage in his dealings with me. He started calling her up, taking her out. By the time I’d found out what was going on, the damage had been done. Brian, the damned fool, had been showing her off to his scumbag associates, telling them she was my sister.”

He paused, and Nicky realized that all of a sudden she could feel his heart beating beneath her hand. A long moment passed before he went on.

“Anyway, like you said, the bust was all set up. We were going to take down the cops who were taking the payoffs and the drug traffickers all at the same time, and confiscate five million dollars in drug money and five million dollars’ worth of cocaine to boot. It was going to be sweet, we thought. And it should have been. Only Brian, the son of a bitch, sold me out. He told Lee Martinez—he was the local drug kingpin we were getting ready to bust—that I was undercover DEA. We were all in the warehouse with these trucks loaded with coke, waiting for the guys with the money to get there. Agents were outside, watching for the money guys to come, because that’s when they were going to make the bust. We had just found out the location that day, so there was no time to set up any internal surveillance. The arrival of the money guys was supposed to be the signal. So we were all just waiting, there inside the warehouse, all kind of antsy, when I got the word that Martinez wanted to see me in his little office at the back. Soon as I got in there and saw that Brian was in there with this stupid little smirk he always got when he thought he’d outsmarted somebody, I knew I had trouble, and sure enough, Martinez’s thugs jumped me. Searched me for a wire, which I wasn’t wearing because Martinez was such a paranoid son of a bitch, you never could tell when he was going to get suspicious of somebody and have them searched. So there I was, on my knees, cuffed, with a gun to my head, when they brought in Gina. She was tied to one of those rolling chairs, and there was duct tape over her mouth. She was crying, no sound but big tears running down her cheeks.”

He broke off. His heart was thudding beneath her hand now. Nicky could feel it beating like a piston. His body was rigid against her, with tension emanating from him as palpably as body heat. He took a deep breath, blew it out, and went on.

“I’ll give Brian this. He looked surprised, like he hadn’t known Gina was there. See, that was the thing about Brian. The piece of shit had this positive genius for getting stuff started that in the end blew up in his face. Brian didn’t know any details about the operation we were running, ’cause I hadn’t told him. He didn’t know, for example, that the bust was going down that very night. All he was able to tell them was that I was working undercover for the DEA. So Martinez and his goons thought that they would use Gina as leverage to get the lowdown on what the feds were up to out of me. And it worked. They started making little cuts on her face with a knife, and she was just bucking and crying in that chair, and you better believe I sang like a bird. Of course, it was all lies. I was lying, and praying the whole time that the money guys would get there, that the bust would go down in time. It didn’t happen. Martinez must have gotten tired of hearing me talk, or else time just ran out for some reason, because he kicked me in the stomach to shut me up, and then somebody else hit me over the head with something that knocked me for a loop. I was down on the ground, not quite unconscious, trying to hang on, knowing that any minute the feds would be busting down the doors. Then I heard Martinez say to Brian, ‘You brought him in here, you fuck-up, you whack him,’ and I felt a gun against my temple. I kind of got one eye open and looked up, and there was Brian, standing over me, getting ready to pull the trigger. He was sweating bullets, looking scared enough to piss himself, and I remember thinking,
You asshole, you don’t have the balls.
Then, damn, he did it.”

Joe’s voice broke off and he closed his eyes. Nicky lay frozen with horror, unable to speak, unable to move. After a moment, opening his eyes again, he continued in a voice so soft that she had to strain to hear it.

“I should have been dead. I was probably about as close as you can get and not go on and die. I know Martinez and his goons must have thought I was dead. The funny thing is, after the bust was over, when the paramedics came in and were working on me, I sort of came to or something for a couple of minutes and saw everything that was going on in that office. It was like I was looking down on the action from the ceiling, and I could just see it all real clearly. Everybody in there was dead. Martinez and his thugs, Brian, Gina.”

He paused, took a breath, and Nicky realized that her own heart was pounding right along with his.

“Gina, still tied to that chair. Covered in blood, bullet through the head.” His voice was raw, and Nicky’s heart ached for him. “I learned later that the money guys had arrived and the feds had come roaring in right after Brian had shot me, and Martinez and his thugs had started shooting. Nine people ended up dead.” He took a breath. “Out of everyone in that office, I was the only one to come out alive.”

He quit talking and sucked in air. He lay there, one arm tucked behind his head, the other wrapped around her. His eyes were fixed on the ceiling. She could feel his racing heart, feel how hard he was trying to control his emotions by the unyielding rigidity of his body. He was breathing in a slow, steady rhythm, and she realized that he was deliberately controlling that, too.

“As soon as I could, I flew to California to check on Jeff, who was living with his dad. Just to make sure, you know, that he was okay. He was playing out in the front yard of this two-story brick house when I got there, everything looking good, so I walked across the grass to say hi. He looked up at me and got this really scared look on his face and said, ‘You got my mom killed. Go away!’ and ran inside the house. I don’t blame the kid: He was right. His dad came rushing out, and I could see Jeff was fine, so I left. Went back to Trenton, found out that I was stuck with being labeled a ‘dirty cop’ until the feds finished their investigation up there, which at this point is looking like it’s going to take years, and got some strings pulled on my behalf so that I could get this job down here.” He paused and took a breath. “So there you have it: the story of how a Jersey vice cop wound up as a police chief in paradise.”

The slightly mocking tone in which he said that last sentence couldn’t disguise his underlying pain. Nicky could feel it in his knocking heart, in the tension in his muscles, in the hardness of the arm around her. She could see it in the taut line of his jaw and the way he continued to focus on the ceiling instead of looking at her.

He didn’t want to look at her because he didn’t want her to be able to read the emotion in his eyes. And she realized that underneath the calm, capable exterior of this very adult man still lurked that lonely, scared but determinedly macho boy.

She realized, too, that tears were stinging her eyes—that she
cared.

“Joe.” She slithered on top of him, propped herself on her forearms, and framed his face with her hands. He met her gaze then. His hands slid down her back to rest lightly at her waist. The pillow beneath his head meant that their eyes were almost level. His cheeks were warm and faintly prickly beneath her palms. His body felt very solid and strong beneath her, and she could feel the hard wall of his chest beneath her breasts, rising and falling as he breathed. Below his boxers, his legs were hard with muscle and rough with hair.

She stroked his cheek. “It wasn’t your fault, what happened to Gina.”

“Yeah,” he said, and his voice was raw and thick. “It was.”

The moonlight filtering over the bed allowed her to see what she had already known would be there in his eyes: a deep, atavistic suffering that no words had the power to soothe. The guilt and grief were a burden he would carry with him as long as he lived, she knew.

Her throat constricted. The knowledge that he was hurting hurt her.

“Hey,” he said, in a near approximation of his normal voice. “Are those tears? Tell me you’re not crying.”

Nicky swallowed. Clearly no sympathy was going to be allowed. Of course, big, bad cops didn’t wallow in emotion. They sucked it up and got on with life.

“No, of course not.” Nicky’s hands retreated from his face to his broad, bare shoulders. She resisted the urge to sniffle or try to blink back the tears that she knew were on the brink of spilling from her eyes for fear that doing either would make them even more obvious. The thing was, she discovered, she just couldn’t stand to think of him in such emotional pain, whether he wanted her sympathy or not.

“Liar.” His eyes glinted at her. She thought she detected something like tenderness in his voice.

“So what if I am?” she said, goaded into glaring at him through the film of tears that she couldn’t hide. “I feel bad for you, okay?”

“The thing is”—he smiled at her, a sweet and charming smile the likes of which she’d never seen on his face before—“I don’t think anybody’s ever cried over me before. And you know what?” He rolled with her, pinning her beneath him in a tangle of limbs and covers. “I like it.”

Then he kissed her, licking into her mouth, and heat exploded inside her like a supernova.

His mouth was hot and wet and his body was hot and hard, and Nicky wrapped her arms around his neck and closed her eyes and kissed him back with an intensity that made her dizzy. Her flimsy nightgown was rucked up around the tops of her thighs, and she had nothing on beneath, which meant that she was all but naked. His weight pressed her down into the mattress. His body heat seeped into her pores. One of his legs was wedged between hers, and the steely muscles of his thigh pressing against her most intimate flesh made her body quake and burn. His hand slid between their bodies. It felt big and warm through her thin nightgown, and when it closed over her breast, she shivered a little. He caressed her through the silky cloth, running his thumb over her nipple, and she arched up against his hand and pressed her nails into his shoulders and squeezed his thigh with hers, suddenly so turned on that she felt as though she was melting inside.

He broke off the kiss, lifting his head.

“Joe.” It was a murmur of protest. Breathing way too fast, Nicky opened her eyes and looked up at him. He was looming over her, the hard, handsome planes of his face and the broad outline of his shoulders silvered by moonlight, and she could see the hot, dark gleam of his eyes, the sensuous curve of his mouth. His hand looked very big and dark against her ivory gown. The fact that it was curved over her breast made her mouth go dry.

“Remember how I said I don’t do relationships?” His voice sounded surprisingly normal, especially given the fact that she was practically breathless with desire. Then she remembered: This was a man who kept his emotions under control.

“Vividly,” she answered, striving for a light note, although she was on fire for him, burning for him, wanting him with a passion that was making her heart pound and her toes curl and her body throb. His leg moved so that his hard, hot thigh was pressing even tighter against her, and it was all she could do not to squirm with pleasure.

“I was wrong,” he said, his voice a little huskier now, and slid his mouth down her throat. Her skin, she discovered, was sensitive, so incredibly sensitive that the hot, wet glide of Joe’s mouth moving over it made her shiver with delight. “I want a relationship. With you.”

“You sure you’re ready for this?” It was hard to inject a dry note into her voice when he was tracing the lacy neckline of her nightgown with hot little kisses pressed into her exquisitely receptive skin and rubbing his thigh against her and caressing her breast all at the same time, but she managed. He wasn’t the only one who could be cool under pressure. “Pardon me if I’m wrong, but aren’t you the guy who said, ‘Having sex once does not make a relationship’?”