It Had to Be You

Leah stared at him for another moment, then nodded. “See that it is.”

Ali had no idea what to make of that exchange, but apparently Leah didn’t have the same problem. She flashed Luke a small, but much warmer, smile and then vanished into the night.

In the dark interior of the car, Ali closed her eyes. “You didn’t go. Why didn’t you go?”

“I couldn’t leave you.”

Oh. Oh damn, that was good. “Luke—”

“What are you doing here?”

“Aubrey called. Bree’s gone off the deep end. I think she’ll come here.”

“I told you she was under surveillance.”

He had told her that. Why hadn’t she remembered that?

“Listen to me, Ali,” he said, all cop again. “Teddy’s car, house, and office are under surveillance too. Half the police department is staking out Town Hall. Bree’s already been there. Aubrey finally left work for the night, and Sawyer’s covering all the bases. We’ve got someone in place in Teddy’s backyard. No one’s home that we can see.”

“So…you want me to go.”

“I want you out of here, yes. I want you safe. Bree’s moving the money tonight. We’re sure of it. She needs to get rid of it since the word is out about an arrest first thing in the morning.”

Ali nodded. She understood all that, but she didn’t move. She couldn’t take her gaze off his face. “I really thought you were gone,” she said softly. “Oh, Luke. Your job. Your review—”

“It’ll have to wait.” He paused. “Or not. Ali,” he said very seriously, “I know that the men in your life have f**ked you over. I promised myself that I wouldn’t do that to you. I didn’t want to get involved.”

She tried not to react to that blow. “I know.”

“But things change.”

She tried to see his expression, but with little to no ambient light in the backseat, she couldn’t see it clearly. “Your job, your life, is in San Francisco.”

“As it turns out, only the job,” he said. “And it also turns out that I’m not just the job.”

She wasn’t sure what that meant, whether to accept the odd surge of hope that suddenly blocked her throat or go with the panic licking at her gut. She worked at getting herself calm and wasn’t entirely there yet when she said, “I’m sorry I said you’re distant and that you don’t feel. I shouldn’t have. I picked a fight because I was hurt.”

“I know. But you did mean it, and that’s okay. It’s true. And I want you to say what you mean, always. I can take it.” He paused. “We can take it. We’re tougher than words, the two of us.”

Ali’s heart stopped and then started again in staccato beat. “Luke—”

The front passenger door jerked open. Cool night air rushed in and so did a figure.

A female figure, but not Leah.

Luke squeezed Ali’s thigh, but she didn’t need the warning to be quiet.

There was a fiddling in the front seat and a very small beam of light. The woman had a flashlight.

Bree.

“Shit,” she muttered when she couldn’t get the glove compartment open. “Shit, shit, shit…” Then the thing suddenly opened and some stuff fell out.

“God, he is such a slob,” she said, dumping everything in the glove box to the floorboards. Then she began to stuff something back in there from the duffel bag in her lap.

Money.

Chapter 26

Ali couldn’t believe it. Bree was working on getting money—and lots of it—into the glove compartment. But then she couldn’t get it closed, no matter how much she pushed and shoved and swore. Bills were sticking out, and Bree swore at them too. Finally, she used the heel of her very wicked-looking boot to kick it closed.

Luke was doing something with his phone. Ali was working really hard on holding her breath, because Bree’s perfume was getting to her. She was running out of air…

And then it escaped, a very loud, unladylike sneeze.

With a startled shriek, Bree whirled around, penlight in her mouth.

And a gun in her hand.

“Oh for God’s sake,” she muttered when she saw who it was. “Could this get any worse? Hands up,” she ordered, swinging the gun back and forth between Ali and Luke like a pendulum.

Ali raised her hands, but Luke was slow to respond.

“Now,” Bree warned him.

“You need to put the gun down, Bree,” he said calmly.

She didn’t. “What the hell are you two doing here?” she asked. “Especially you,” she said to Ali.

“Me? What about you?”

“I’m having a fucked-up day, obviously!” Bree yelled. She blew a strand of hair out of her face, which was damp. In fact, she was uncharacteristically ruffled from head to badass-boot-covered toe.

“Put the gun down, Bree,” Luke said again.

“Well, I can’t now!” She glanced at Ali. “You screwed everything up. Everything,” she said. “You and your stupid, sweet, easy-going, artsy-fartsy ways. This is all your fault, you know that? Teddy was mine. And then you fell for him, and he couldn’t resist you, another sweet little thing who thought he walked on water. He was mine first, dammit!”

“But”—Ali stopped to sneeze again, twice in a row—“you’re married to the mayor.”

“Yeah. And he’s also a financial planner, don’t forget. I can’t, because he’s always working. He’s a workaholic whose lover is his job. And the great thing for him is his lover doesn’t care that he stopped working out and snores.”

Ali just stared at her. “So you started sleeping with the town clerk?”

“Teddy fell in love with me,” Bree said, jabbing the gun near Ali’s face. “Said he needed a seasoned woman, one who knew what to do with a man. He said that no one else could keep up with him. Well I managed to keep up with him just fine. I gave him whatever he wanted.”

Ali didn’t want to think about what that meant. She sneezed again.

“Stop that!” Bree yelled.

“It’s your perfume. And you’re making me nervous. Why do you even have a gun?”

“We live in Washington. Everyone has a gun.” Her eyes were dialed to straight-up, bat-shit crazy. She was flushed, and her hair was sticking to her face. “Is it hot in here? It feels hot in here. Fucking hot flashes. It’s the twenty-first century, and we can’t cure hot flashes.”

“I wasn’t the only one Teddy was with,” Ali said. “You know that, right? He was cheating on all of us, Bree, not just you.”

“He told me you two were just roommates,” Bree said. “And I didn’t know about Melissa until the night of the auction, that skinny, young, taut-skinned bitch. I wanted to kill him, but he told me that it didn’t mean anything, that I was still his one and only.”

“So you forgave him by stealing the money?” Luke asked.

“Hey, sometimes a woman snaps, okay?” She swiped her forehead with her free hand. “My God. Someone open a f**king window!”

“Put down the gun, and I’ll open all the windows,” Luke said.

She jabbed the gun at him again. “Listen, smartass, you might be sexy as hell, but I’ll shoot you if I have to. Dammit!” She fanned her face. “This is out of control. All I wanted was to be in a position to frame Teddy so he’d straighten up. But you!” She whipped the gun back to Ali. “You went into his office and blew it.”

“Hey, half the town was in his office that night.”

“But you took the pot, the one I’d put the bill wrapper into,” Bree said. “To frame him, not you.”

“Yeah,” Ali muttered, “I’ve really got to stop doing that.”

“Marshall’s not worth this, Bree,” Luke said. “It’s not too late to stop. Give me the gun.”

Bree’s face crumbled a bit, but she kept the gun level at his face. “The heart wants what it wants,” she said. “And I wanted Teddy. Only he turned out to be as big an ass as the rest of them. Hell, look at his life. He’s sleeping with half the women in town, and no one even knows. I tried to frame him, and he walks. Shit just doesn’t stick to him. And the bastard never breaks a sweat. He’s like the Energizer Bunny; he can keep going and going. A girl can’t do that. We get bladder infections.” Bree swiped her forehead again. “Tonight was the night that his luck was going to change. I put the money in here, and I was going to call the police.”

Luke had been slowly lowering his hands. Ali was going to trust that he knew what the hell he was doing, because she could scarcely draw air into her lungs. It was the gun. Every few seconds, it swung from Luke to her, back and forth. It was one thing to see it happen on TV, it was another entirely to be faced with the reality of it.

“Stop moving,” Bree screeched, and Ali went still. Except then she realized Bree was talking to Luke. “I told you, hands up.”

Luke ignored her directive, leaving one hand half raised, the other dropping to scratch his chest. “You never said—how did you get the money in the first place?”

“After we did it on his couch, I found a red silk bra behind a cushion. Melissa’s, of course, as I learned later. So when he left the office to get rid of the condom—he thought he was being clever by doing that in the hallway bathroom so that no one would ever find out about us—I took the money from his bottom drawer and dumped it into my briefcase. I left one of the money wrappers in his stupid pencil holder so he’d have evidence on him.”

“And he didn’t notice any of this when he got back from the bathroom?” Luke asked.

“No. He suggested I leave first so that we weren’t seen together, which worked for me. I wanted him to be the last in the office—not realizing, of course, that Miss Perfect over here was going to f**k that all up. Twice.”

Ali blinked. “You think I’m perfect?”

Luke hadn’t taken his eyes off of Bree. “You’re losing it, Bree.”

“You think?” She jabbed the gun in his direction. “And for the last time, I said hands up. I mean it.” The gun shifted back to Ali. “I’ll shoot her, Luke. And I really don’t want to do that.”

Luke pressed his knee into Ali’s. For comfort, she thought, and glanced down. His phone in his pocket was glowing.

He’d gotten it on somehow. He’d been a busy guy, because he’d also tugged up his pant leg, revealing an ankle holster and the gun he had there.

Oh, God. Did he really expect her to grab it? She glanced at him and found his eyes on hers, steady and sure.

Yes. He did. Because he believed in her.

I’ve got you.

His words, he’d said them to her several times now. She hadn’t been in a place to fully believe him before, but by now, she absolutely believed him.

He nudged her again.

Right. The gun. She didn’t have to fake the next sneeze, but she added a dramatic head toss to go with it, bending forward with the momentum. She was wrapping her fingers around Luke’s gun when Bree yelled “Hey!”

Luke, apparently tiring of waiting for Ali to get the gun, made his move without her. Lunging forward, he reached over the back of the seat to grab Bree’s wrists and shoved upward.

Bree’s gun went off, blowing a hole in the car’s roof.

“Ali,” Luke said, “get out of the car, take cover. Can you do that?”

Ears ringing from the close-range gunshot, Ali stared at him still strong-arming Bree’s hands above their heads with the back of the seat between them. “Y-yes.”

“Excellent,” he said calmly. “Do it now, Ali.”

Oh, God, she couldn’t leave him. Wouldn’t leave him. He was in an awkward position trying to control Bree from the backseat. And then she realized he was holding back, waiting for her to get to safety so that a stray bullet couldn’t hit her.

Reaching behind her, she opened the car door and stumbled out, still holding Luke’s gun. She couldn’t use it. She had no idea how, plus she couldn’t see in the dark to aim. She crouched behind the back rear tire, her fingers shaking so badly it took three tries to pull out her phone.

She knew Leah would have called the police by now, and surely the cops in Teddy’s backyard would be coming any second, but she still hit 9-1-1.

From the inside of the Lexus, the gun went off.

Oh, God…

“9-1-1 emergency dispatch,” a disembodied voice said in her ear. “What is your emergency?

“Sh-shots fired,” Ali said through chattering teeth. “Off-duty officer and a crazy woman with a gun.”

“Location?”

Ali gave the street name and the Lexus’s license plate. “Hurry,” she said, and peeked around the back of the car.

No one had emerged.

She crawled to the open back door, using the light from her phone to see with one hand, pointing the gun with the other.

Luke was still sitting in the backseat, sprawled out now with Bree’s gun in his right hand pointed at her.

The streetlight shined into the interior of the car, highlighting Bree in bold relief. She was still in the front seat on her knees facing Luke, hands raised. Her hair was crazy, her makeup smeared, her eyes shiny with unshed tears.

No gunshot holes.

The streetlight didn’t light up the backseat, so Ali couldn’t see Luke’s face at all, but there was a stillness to him that terrified her. “Luke?”