When Night Falls (11 page)

“There’s a difference between carelessness and calculated risk,” he said as levelly as he could. You think your father didn’t know that? You think he always followed the rules?”

Jessica eased the flyaway hair from her face. “Everything I know about right and wrong, about rules, I learned from him. The structure and procedure, the safety net. Without them, we’d have nothing but chaos, and you’d never get your daughter back.”

“You’re a smart woman—don’t tell me you really believe that.”

“I said it, didn’t I?”

“You said it, but you’re also standing on my front porch in the middle of the night with a piece of evidence in your purse. What do the rules say about that?”

Her mouth tumbled open. “Don’t—”

“I think you know as well as I do that rules are for the weak, and that’s what you’re fighting. Because you’re not weak. You’re strong. You were taught one thing, but instinct, your heart, tells you something altogether different. You realize rules hold us back, put parameters and restraints on desire like a wet straitjacket.”

A strangled noise tore from her throat.

“You’re actually going to stand here and tell me you reject rules because they’re like a strait-jacket to
desire?”
She looked like she wanted to press her hands to his chest and shove him backward, but she didn’t. She just glared at him with those magnificent, expressive eyes of
hers, her
chest rising and falling with each jerky breath. “You? The one who calls himself entrepreneur and father, but not man? The one who keeps every crumb of desire locked so firmly away you might as well be a eunuch?”

Everything inside him went very still. “A eunuch?”

“A man who can’t—”

Instinct took over. Need. Without thinking, he took her shoulders in his hands and pulled her against him. Her eyes flared wide. Her breathing caught. She stared at him, lips parted, as though he held a switchblade in his hands, not the soft wool of her sweater.

Primitive satisfaction at finally rattling the unflappable detective spurred him on. Blood roared through his ears like a battle cry. His vision blurred.

“Let there be no mistake, Detective. I can. And I do.” His mouth came down on hers then. Hard.

Chapter 9

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S
hock streaked through Jess. Hot. Swirling. She lifted her arms to push Liam away, found her hands curling around his biceps instead. The heat of his flesh seared into her, and the night no longer seemed quite so cold.

She’d been rash to come here and push a man like William Armstrong so hard. She’d been reckless to let emotion override logic. And now, she would have called the crush of his mouth to hers punishing if it hadn’t been so desperate. The man kissed like he ran. Full throttle. She tasted the need. Even more, she tasted the desire, the barely concealed restraint, and something deep inside reached for him.

A raw cry tore from her throat, and she opened to the demands of his mouth, sliding a hand along the warm flesh of his shoulder and into the thick strands of his hair.

She refused to think that she was holding him as close to her as possible.

What was it Kirby had said that afternoon? That she looked like she was lying on the ground, bleeding, searching for someone to find her, but scared they wouldn’t?

He’d been wrong, she realized as Liam mirrored her movements and slid a hand along her neck. She felt his fingers weave into her tangled hair, felt his palm cup her head. She wasn’t the one bleeding; Liam was. From his heart, his soul. But it wasn’t blood he was losing, it was hope, the indefinable part of him that made him appear bigger than life. She was the one reaching out to him, stanching the flow.

His kiss was hot and hard, deep, almost desperate. He kissed her as though his life depended on it. On her. The cop in her struggled to refute the ridiculous notion, but the woman at her core refused to let thinking dismiss feeling.

And she felt so damn much. Not just the physical promise of his lips, the strength of his body pressed to hers, but the emotional thread between the two of them, the one that pulled her to his house in the middle of the night even when caution warned her to stay away. The one that strengthened with every moment in his presence. His arms.

His mouth ground against hers; his whiskers scraped the sensitive skin of her jaw. She reveled in it, found power in the raw noises tearing from his throat, the fact that he needed her. A woman could lose herself in the promise of his lips, she realized in some barely functioning corner of her mind. A woman could fall into believing she was vital. That she mattered.

God help her, she wanted to matter to this man.

The rush of awareness pummeled her like an avalanche, deceptively beautiful, seductively dangerous. She knew she should run before the sensation smothered her, but there in Liam’s arms, she realized there was nowhere else she wanted to be. She would make it better—

He tore his mouth away and swore softly. The fierce blue of his eyes glittered at her. “Still think I’m a eunuch?”

The hurt was instantaneous. A lesson, she realized numbly. That’s all his kiss had been. His way of proving a point. “You bastard!” she cried, and slapped him hard.

His hand caught hers and held it to his cheek. “A man, Jessica, that’s what I am. I’m well aware of that fact, just like I know damn good and well you’re a woman.” His gaze dipped over her furiously rigid body, then lifted to her eyes. “No man alive could spend one second with you and not see what a beautiful, smart, sexy woman you are. But you’re also the cop who’s supposed to find my daughter.” He paused, injected something uncomfortably intimate into his gaze. “The man knows, Jessica, but so does the father. How can I let the man see you as a woman when the father sees you as his only hope?”

His only hope.
The detective in her knew good and well how he meant the words, but the woman caught fire. “Liam—”

“My daughter is missing,” he said point-blank. “She could be hurt, in trouble, scared. I don’t have time for desire right now. I don’t have time to hold hands and whisper secrets. What kind of man would that make me? What kind of father?”

“Human, I’d say.” She pulled her hand from under his and pressed it against the corner of her mouth, still bruised from Braxton’s punch, bruised again by this man’s shattering kiss. “There’s nothing wrong or shameful about accepting comfort and help, about needing other people.”

His eyes went wild. He took her arms in his hands and pulled her close. “I need you, all right. I need you so damn much it scares the hell out of me.” He paused, sucked in a breath so roughly his nostrils flared. “Is that what you wanted to hear? Does that make you happy?”

Her heart thrummed hard and deep. Caution flowed thick. The simple word
happy
didn’t come close to describing the maelstrom of emotion barreling down on her. Nonsensical ideals like right and wrong crashed down like broken branches. The force buried logic like a dead weight.

Need drove her forward. She pushed up on her toes and brushed her lips across his. “Let me help, Liam…”

“Don’t.” He stepped back as though she’d tried to slip a knife through his heart. He didn’t let go of her, though. He held her arms in his hands, keeping her at a distance. “On the streets. That’s where I need you. Looking for my daughter. Not in my bed.”

Hurt stripped away the haze. Alarm bled through. For ten years she’d trained herself to feel nothing. Need nothing, no one. To be strong and independent, to wall herself off from those around her, particularly the cases on which she worked. But as she looked into Liam’s ravaged eyes, she felt the punch of his words clear down to the core of who she was.

He was right. She wanted to reach out to this man every way she could, professionally, personally, physically, emotionally. She wanted to do whatever she could to ease his pain, and for a blind moment, the desire to do so had obliterated her deepest, most finely honed survival instincts.

Never need a man who believed himself an island.

Standing there in the dead of night, the frigid wind blowing against them, Jess realized the truth. The man let himself feel nothing, need nothing, give nothing. Only a granite man could stand in subfreezing temperatures in nothing but faded blue jeans and not even shake. Even if Liam’s daughter was safe and sound and sleeping upstairs, nothing would be different. The man had nothing but stolen moments to parcel out, and she’d long promised herself to never settle for crumbs.

Emotion scratched at her throat. “I’m here to find your daughter, Liam, not for stolen kisses or to save your soul. I’m on your side. I’m not the enemy.”

With a lost laugh, he lifted his hands and turned them palm down. “Are you done lecturing me, Detective, or would you like to take a ruler to my knuckles, too?”

Jess pulled the sash of her coat tighter. “God only knows why I thought I could help, why I even wanted to. You can throw up shields of duty and fatherhood all you want, but they don’t change the truth.”

“And just what truth is that?”

She took his hand and led him toward the light spilling out the open front door. He didn’t resist her, but nor did his fingers curl around hers.

Inside, the heater’s warmth washed over her like a lover’s caress, but Jess knew it would take more than processed air to thaw her out. She led Liam to the marble-top console table she’d seen on her first visit and glanced at the ornately framed mirror hanging just above.

In the reflective surface, Liam’s blue-hot gaze met hers. She tried to hold on to her objectivity, the message she wanted to convey, but it was hard to look at a man like William Armstrong and breathe, much less think rationally.

“Did you bring me inside for a reason, or are we back to playing games?”

She tried to summon the anger, the cop’s objectivity, but the woman drank in the sight of their faces side by side in the mirror. She saw her expression, the determination in her eyes, her flushed cheeks, her tangled hair. He looked equally on edge, his expression uncompromising, his dark hair rumpled, his jaw unshaven. His chest was bare, his jeans unfastened.

“Look in the mirror, Liam. Take a long, hard look.” She paused, trying to concentrate on the hard lines of his face, not the blue of his eyes. They reminded her of an ocean with a storm gathering on the horizon, deep and turbulent, restless, dangerous, and with them, he watched her as steadily as she watched him. The air around them seemed to thicken. The heater’s warmth turned punishing, and the hand in which she still held his grew hot and damp.

Or at least, that’s what she told herself.

The manufactured heat was far less dangerous than the physical kind. The heater could be turned off.

“You just told me why you reject rules,” she said softly. “You said they limit possibilities, that they stagnate us. Hold us back. But you’re living by your own set of rules—about fatherhood, involvement, need, proper and productive uses of time—and they’re destroying you.”

Deep inside, something started to tear. She felt herself reaching for him, more emotionally than physically, and knew she was in way over her head. “You’re so lost in your rules, you can’t see the fabric of your life, the threads that tie everything together, that make us human.” She let go of his hand and stepped away, too aware of the desire to touch him with more than her gaze, her words.

Oddly, he said nothing.

“Fatherhood, involvement, time, they’re all related,” she continued. “The more you have, the stronger the fabric. But if you keep them separate, your life becomes as sparse and threadbare as a wool blanket left in a closet full of moths.”

In the mirror, Liam’s gaze darkened. She waited for him to say something, to tell her to mind her own business, that she had no idea what she was talking about, that she was wrong. But he didn’t. He just stared at her, his eyes curiously unreadable.

Jess swallowed against the tightness in her throat and tore her gaze away from their reflections. Looking at the cold white marble at her feet, she realized how close to the edge she’d stepped. How steep the fall.

Stolen moments, she reminded herself. Stolen moments were not worth the pain of the fall.

She glanced one last time at Liam’s gaze—he hadn’t spoken one word since she’d led him inside—then lifted her chin and pivoted toward the door. Part of her wanted to feel his big hand on her shoulder, to hear his raspy voice tell her to stay. But with each step she took away from him, she knew they were better off if she left.

“Jessica—”

The sound of her name pierced like an arrow to the back. Her knees went weak. More than anything she longed to turn toward him, but she kept right on walking toward the frigid night air awaiting outside.

He caught her at the door. His hand curled around her arm in a grip that was shockingly gentle, considering the strength she knew he possessed. “Jessica—”

“Don’t.” She ignored the impact of his tired, hoarse voice, the note of pleading she wanted to believe she heard. She didn’t trust herself to look at him.

“I’m sorry.”

She stiffened. Emotion bled through her crumbling defenses. She wanted to ask him what he was sorry for—for kissing her like he meant it, for pushing her away, for being cold, for not letting her reach out to him—but she didn’t want to hear him say any of that. She wasn’t a woman for punishment. She didn’t need the words when she already felt the truth deep in her heart.

“So am I,” she said. For everything. But most especially, for the man who wouldn’t let himself feel. Need. She swallowed, spoke before he could say anything else. “Let me go, Liam. Let me do my job.”

A tense moment spun out between them, and the world around them slowed—the wind blowing through the naked branches of the cedar elms, the cloud of vapor left by her breathing. Even the silence. It deepened and intensified, making Jess acutely conscious of the pounding of her heart.

She drew in a deep breath, felt the sting of the cold deep inside. She waited for him to say something, to turn her toward him, touch a hand to her face, pull her inside and close out the cold night air.

His fingers slowly uncurled from around her arm.

He said nothing.

Moisture flooded her eyes, as though his hand had been pressed against cracks in a dam, rather than the wool of her sweater. She refused to turn around, though. Refused to say anything further. She’d already said too much.

Head high, shoulders straight, Jess walked into the night. She waited to hear the door close behind her, wanted the knell of finality. Instead she felt the heat of William Armstrong’s gaze track her down the walkway to her car. Only when she slipped inside and slammed the door shut, cranked up the engine and put the car into gear, drove down the street and far, far out of his sight, was she able to breathe.

And then she did something she hadn’t done since the night she’d held her father’s hand as he drew his last breath.

She cried.

She pulled the sedan to the side of the road and left the engine idling, rested her head against the steering wheel and let the pent-up emotion come pouring out.

She didn’t know why.

She didn’t want to, either.

* * *

“Mind telling me what went down between you and William Armstrong yesterday?”

The booming request snapped Jess to attention. She lowered the report she’d been reading and pushed at her glasses, then glanced up to find Commander Ben McKnight towering over her. His question had been hard, but his eyes twinkled. She still wasn’t used to thinking of the man who’d once bounced a young Jess on his knee as her commanding officer. He’d been her father’s best friend, but his style was as different from her father’s style as day was different from night.