Greer

I’ve been shot.

Technically.

My Kevlar vest stopped the bullet from penetrating my chest, but I’m on the ground, and I have no idea how I got here. Sure, the impact and shock of being hit by a bullet could have sent me to the asphalt. I should stand up, though. I should stand. The spot underneath where the bullet hit is stinging like a motherfucker, but I’ve felt much worse pain. In comparison, this is nothing. But I don’t get up.

Christ. I knew the suspect had a gun on him. How did he get the drop on me?

I’m tired. I’m so fucking tired lying here, I can’t find the right answer. Maybe I don’t even have the ability to do that anymore. Have I been sliding into this state of burnout so long, I didn’t see I was already there? This situation was so similar to the one where Griffin was shot and killed, maybe my head wasn’t in the right place? That day is always there, lurking in the back of my mind, ready to jump out and bite me. Why did I let it happen this time?

Shit. Shit. This is unacceptable.

A paramedic squats down beside me and begins asking me questions. That’s when I look up to find Danika standing a few yards away, stunned horror reflected in her eyes. Right where I stood while the paramedics tried to save Griffin. Jesus. I almost laugh because it’s like the universe is just trying to prove I’ve been right all along to stay away from her. To stay away from everyone. I could easily be lying here dead, setting Danika up for the same pain I live with. Or worse. So much worse. She could be lying in my spot, and I could be in her shoes, watching her leave me. That thought rips through me and damages everything in its path.

Shoving off the hands prodding at my chest, I finally stand and direct my anger at the recruit who’s wisely already backing toward my vehicle. “I told you to stay in the goddamn car.”

My roar sends her tripping over a crack in the asphalt, but she manages to remain on her feet. The horror hasn’t left her eyes yet, though, and it’s driving me crazy. Making me want to shake her. Because she seems to care? Because I want her to? I don’t have a clue.

As soon as she’s back inside the car, I force myself to focus long enough to answer a few questions and assure the paramedics that I don’t need medical attention. I oversee the suspect being loaded into an ambulance that will take him to NYU around the corner with a wound in his right leg. My officers are a little shaken up over watching me catch a bullet, so I spare a few minutes to give orders for securing the scene. To remind them I’m invincible and I do my job, no matter the circumstance. Even though I’m feeling the furthest thing from invincible right now. I feel the opposite and I resent it. Hate it.

When I get back into the car, Danika stares straight ahead and doesn’t say a word. “I’m sorry I shouted at you.”

My own apology catches me off guard. I don’t know why I issue it, I only know that shit feels shaky enough and I don’t need her pissed off at me on top of everything. “If you want to apologize,” she says, her voice husky, “apologize for lying on the ground longer than you needed to. I could kill you myself. Why didn’t you just get up?”

It feels like I’m moving underwater as I start the car and back into the street enough to be clear of the scene. My nerves are clicking. I can hear them in my ears. Every muscle strains from head to toe. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do.”

Her voice cracks and I think that’s why I crack, too, honesty blasting out of me like water from a hole in a dam. “Jesus, maybe part of me was relieved I finally made a mistake. My whole life revolves around never making them. It finally happened and I . . . survived.” I press a knuckle to my pounding right eye. “My fucking head was somewhere else. On Griffin. On you. And I hesitated because I’m just tired of seeing nothing but blood. He reached for his pocket, I saw black metal, and I’m trained to shoot to kill in that situation. And I didn’t. I didn’t want to kill him.”

“You didn’t,” she whispers, her curious stare burning me alive. “But why did your first mistake have to be when a gun was pointed at you? It couldn’t have been a freaking typo on an email or something?”

My half laugh, half scoff makes her eyes narrow. “This is coming from the girl who walked right into a robbery and didn’t even think to call the police.” My hand moves on its own, reaching out to capture her chin, lifting it. “You see now? You see how fast things can happen?”

“Yes.” Time seems to wind down as we look at one another. “I’m sorry I brought up Griffin. If that’s why you made a mistake . . . I’m sorry.”

“It never goes away. What happened to him is always there in the back of my head.”

Her head tilts a little until my fingers leave her chin to cradle it, cradle her head in the palm of my hand. “When you’re working or all the time?”

“All the time. All of it. I’m . . .” It’s a good thing we’re at a stoplight, because my eyelids grow heavier the longer she looks at me, the longer she compels me to talk, until they finally drop. “I can’t close my eyes without seeing something ugly anymore, Danika. Griffin, the cases that come across my desk. I just didn’t want to be responsible for it today.”

“I understand.”

Her voice is like ice on a burn. I sense the light has changed as the sound of traffic begins to flow around us, but no one honks at us for blocking one of the three lanes. They can either see I’m law enforcement, or they’re just so used to people double-parking, they’re resigned. For that reason and a hundred others all involving Danika, I keep my foot off the gas pedal. After the decision I made to keep our relationship strictly instructor-student, I shouldn’t be cradling her head or confiding these secrets to her. Secrets I never imagined telling anyone. But it’s like she already knows what I’m going to say before I manage to get it out. And she doesn’t judge me for any of it. She understands me because she hates making mistakes, too. Maybe. I don’t know, but I can’t move for the fucking life of me.

Especially not when she reaches toward my chest and undoes the buttons of my shirt, all the way down to my belt. She pushes open the material, and I start breathing through my nose like a racehorse after the Derby. “Danika, I shouldn’t have gone to your apartment last week. What we did was not only a violation of academy rules, but—”

The sound of Velcro being pried apart tells me she’s removing my vest. I forgot I was even still wearing it. “But what?”

I grab her wrist to keep her from pulling off the vest. If she makes direct contact with my skin, I’ll never be able to stop whatever is happening here. “I can’t be with anyone, do you understand? Especially not a cop.”

Comprehension tightens the corners of her mouth. “Because you could lose . . . that someone? The way you lost Griffin?”

“Yes.” The very tip of her index finger grazes my bare neck and I jerk in the seat, moaning with a closed mouth. “I don’t want to leave anyone, either. I could have caught that bullet in the throat or head, just as easily. I know what it’s like to be left behind.”

I must have loosened my grip on her wrist, because she slides the vest off and sucks in a breath. “Sounds like a good reason to celebrate being alive, doesn’t it?” Her finger prods the spot where the bullet hit. I don’t have to look down to know it’s red and angry. Hell, I don’t want to look away from the soft, brown comfort of her eyes or the swollen berry color of her lips. “This doesn’t have to be a relationship, Lieutenant.”

Danika

I hear the words coming out of my mouth. They could very well prove destructive, but I want this man, and I’m willing to be reckless for the chance. After the denial of seeing him on the ground passed, I was overcome with certainty. Certainty that might have come too late. He’s supposed to be in my life, in some way, for much, much longer, I’d thought. It didn’t seem fair or possible that I should be bombarded with that conviction at the exact moment he was taken away, but there it was. Maybe he’s only meant to be a fellow cop or my friend’s older brother. A mentor.

But I know he’s supposed to be here.

Do I want him? Yes. I’ve been annoyingly attracted to him since day one, even when he’s being a jerk. These things he’s telling me, though? These insights into the man and these struggles he’s been facing alone? They’re making me ache to soothe him. I want that job. I want to be his break from the reality he’s not handling very well right now. If someone else tried to take the responsibility from me, even in a casual capacity, I would throw down with them over it. So I know I have one option here if I want Greer to keep confiding in me. If I want him to touch me and let himself be touched. I have to be more than a friend, but less than a girlfriend. And for God’s sake, I have to keep my heart out of it, because I won’t be able to pry his away from him.

“What are you talking about?”

Greer bites off the question while staring at my mouth. I’m not sure how I missed the lieutenant’s sexual interest in me, or at least the magnitude of it, but he might as well be wrestling with an alligator right now. If that alligator was his lust. “I’m saying . . .” I drop the vest in the backseat and let my mouth hover closer, closer to his. “Forget the academy rules for tonight. Go back to being the Grim Reaper tomorrow.”

“One night,” he rasps. “You think that’s all this would be?”

“I don’t know.” I brush his mouth with mine. “How many nights do you need to get me out of your system?”

Something about my question upsets him. His eyebrows draw together, his grip tightening anew on my wrist. “Get back in your goddamn seat.”

“No.” Whew. I must be out of my mind. Anyone with working brain cells can see he’s about to get tough with me. Reject me. Hurt my feelings out of necessity. But something tells me I’ll never get another chance to see under his exterior if I don’t rip it down right now. So before he can open his mouth and deliver whatever lie he’s thinking, I kiss him.

And we go up in flames.

One of his hands winds up my hair, twisting, pulling my head back as he attacks from above. Growling must be his form of a password, because when he does it, my lips part automatically, letting his tongue inside where it works, works, works mine over in the rhythm of a swimmer’s stroke. Only it gets faster and more about quantity, both of us trying to get the upper hand, and for the first time, I don’t mind that I’m losing. And this is nothing like the first time he kissed me in my bedroom, because I’m not confused about the impulses he’s woken up inside me. I’m embracing them. I’m not angry at him, either, unless you count the thirty hellish seconds he spent on the ground, staring up at the sky.

I can feel those thirty seconds in this kiss. The impact of the bullet, the way he shouted at me afterward, his apology and subsequent honesty. The ugliness he spoke about. He’s telling me all about it with his mouth, so I let him communicate everything to me with hungry sweeps of his tongue, the occasional drag of his teeth down my lower lip, the hands in my hair pulling me closer, closer, until our foreheads grind together.

“Get back in your seat,” he bites out when we finally pull apart.

My heart drops into my stomach and I jerk away, throwing myself across the car back into the passenger side. Staring down the avenue, I hesitate for a few seconds, too stunned by his rejection to move. My face is fevered, and my hands are still shaking from the force of his kiss, but I grab the door handle, intent on getting out of the car and away. But Greer hits the lock. “What are you doing?”

“Seat belt,” he grits out, punching the gas.

We join the traffic on Second Avenue for several tense blocks before he hangs a left on Twentieth Street. My mouth drops open when he sails through a yellow light and turns into a closed parking lot beneath the FDR Drive. There is a loud rumble of traffic above, and in the distance, people run and bike along the East River, but we’re the only car in the lot. He either brought me here to murder me or continue the kiss he’d cut short. And when the lieutenant shuts off the ignition, turning glittering eyes and a tensed jaw on me, I’m pretty sure it’s the latter.

The steering wheel groans beneath his hands. “Tell me to drive you home.”

“No.” My heartbeat drowns out the traffic above our heads. He needs me. How have I not realized how lonely he is? Have I been just as lonely? Doing for everyone else, making people happy, then neglecting myself? Not tonight. “Forget the rules.”

“I don’t get like this with women. It’s only you that makes me fucking crazy.” A muscle leaps in his cheek. “I think. I reason. Look at me now, though. Back where I was that night at your apartment when the only way I could control myself was by taking control of you.”

Oh my God. My windpipe is down to the size of a cocktail straw. I make him crazy? No, I make him fucking crazy. Does that worry me? It should. When the man I’ve been infatuated with says things like that, right on the heels of warning me he needs to stay casual? That’s bad news. For me. Even worse news is I want him now more than ever. Because he’s being honest, because he has valid reasons for not wanting anything serious. Because I need him back.

“You know that’s what I want,” I manage. “Tell me what you want me to do.”

It’s amazing, this shudder that goes through him and leaves authority in its wake. A change comes over me, too, and I’m not going to lie, it’s still kind of a mind fuck because I’m the least submissive person I know. Or so I thought. When Greer is touching me, though, I need something else from him. All my energy goes into doing for the people in my life. Being right. Being the best and never failing. I want him to take away all my responsibilities and narrow my focus down to him. Just him.

So here I am, holding my breath and waiting for Greer to instruct me. Sort of like we’re back at the academy, except I’m the only recruit and the rules don’t exist. When his index finger taps the steering wheel once, twice, it might as well be the space shuttle blasting off. “Get in the backseat.”

Air evacuates my lungs. I push open the door, climb out and take two steps on shaking legs. Greer exits the car at the same time and we lock eyes over the roof before we both slide into the backseat of his department vehicle, the night swallowing us as I straddle his powerful hips and our mouths come together.