“Did you hear me?” Macayla had started to rise, pushing up on an elbow. “You can’t be here. How did you get in? Did the police send for you?”
His worst nightmare. She didn’t want him here.
But that thought was quickly overridden by the obvious. She was in a panic. He wondered what that was all about but didn’t ask. She’d been dreaming deeply. Probably a dream.
“Shh.” He came and sat on the edge of the bed, watching her breasts rise and fall slightly with each breath she took. He ran a palm up one of her thighs, smiling at the ripple of her body at his caress. The pleasure was returned by the twitch deep in his groin. Her skin was warmer and smoother than his memory of her.
“Aren’t you glad to see me?”
“Yes. Of course. But how did you—?”
He put a finger against her lips, leaned in, and kissed her shoulder. “Can it wait until morning? I promise I’ll answer all your questions then.”
“No. It can’t. What time is it?”
“Something after one a.m.”
“How did you get in?”
“The front door was unlocked.”
“That’s not possible!” She scrambled out of the bed, heading for the door, but he reached for her arm.
“I locked the door after I came in. You’re safe.”
She swung around on him. “I’m many things at the moment, but safe isn’t one of them.”
“That’s what I was worried about. And that’s why I’m here.”
“What do you mean? Did the police call you?”
He couldn’t see her expression well in the dark, but he felt the tension running through her arm. “I promise it’s safe for now. I’ll explain everything in the morning, and we’ll secure the place together.”
She hesitated. “I left my door unlocked?” Her voice sounded small, like a bewildered child. But he knew better. She was all woman.
“And here I thought you were expecting me. You dressed for me.”
She looked down at her open robe and quickly pulled it closed. “Not a good time for humor, Kelly.”
There it was. The spark. She warmed him in all the right places though he could tell she wasn’t there with him. Unfair to jump her bones when she was clearly half asleep and worried about other things. Better tone it down.
“Honestly, I’m dragging knuckles after my flight. I just want to share your bed.” He patted the place beside him. “I promise not to jump you.”
She sat down, her hand accidently brushing his lap, and chuckled. “You sure you can keep that promise?”
“Yes.” He took her hand and lifted it away. But if she made that sound again, that purely female response to his touch, he’d be on her like a stallion in rut.
“That’s just my dick. Thinks he’s a bloody porn star. But the rest of me is brain-dead knackered.”
She nodded and crawled back onto her side of the bed. “Just stay on your side. All parts of you.” But even as she said it, her hand found his and grasped tightly.
He squeezed back, wondering if he could keep his promise not to touch her as he lay down beside her. He really did need to sleep. He …
* * *
Macayla woke with a start at dawn. The mattress was weighted on her left side. She was not alone.
She bolted up into a sitting position even as her gaze fell on the outline of a kangaroo on the large biceps she had been leaning against. She blinked as a slow smile caught fire on her face. Oliver Kelly was back. In her life. In her bed.
She gave him a little shove. “Hey, Aussie. Wakey, wakey.”
“Thirty minutes. Macayla. I swear, I need just thirty more minutes.” His voice was all slurry and his eyes didn’t open. But he found her hand on the bed between them and pulled it to his groin. “See that? You do that to me. And, damn you, I love you for it.”
Love? Macayla knew better than to put any stock in bed talk. Especially from a half-asleep man. A loud snore issued from him on the back of that thought. Make that an all-asleep man.
She snuggled down next to him. The scent of clean male sexiness was a shock to her system. The bed was virginal. No man had slept here before. There’d not been much sex in her life during the last year. She’d never brought anyone here. Which begged the question: How had he found her, and why? Why didn’t he call ahead and let her know he was coming? Was he really that interested in her? Okay, that heavy hairy thigh pressing in against hers was saying a big hell yeah to that last question.
The heat of his bare skin seeping into hers was like a drug, a sex drug that simultaneously soothed and aroused her. She slid an arm around his waist and then across his belly and into the gap of his shorts when he exhaled. His body twitched. His breathing hitched.
He turned toward her and ran his hand up her thigh, making her butt cheeks tighten and a little laugh escape her. “Twenty-nine minutes,” he murmured.
It was only ten. At thirty minutes, he was snoring again and she was in the shower luxuriating in the mood-brightening benefits of sex before breakfast.
* * *
“I can’t believe Jefferina told you how to find me.” Mac had poured coffee for both of them, offering the container of milk and several packets of sugar, both of which he ignored.
He slurped his coffee loudly and then gave her a wink. “She’s a hard nut to crack.”
“She was a cop.”
“That explains it. Looked at me like I was a slab of meat she needed to roast and carve. Gave me the willies.”
“Have you been in trouble with the police before?”
“As a kid. Yeah.”
She wanted to ask how he had handled himself. Was he as rattled as she had been when arrested? But that question would require a whole lot of explanation that she wasn’t sure she should burden him with. “How did you get her give up my address?”
“Told her we’d met on the beach last weekend when I was in town with the Thunder from Down Under review. Sex with you was amazing. Since I have a few days off the road I wanted to hook up with you again.”
She gaped. “She believed you?”
“Every blessed word.”
“A hot hookup is not reason enough to persuade Jefferina to give my address to a stranger.”
“I wasn’t exactly a stranger by the time I had your address.” He grinned at her shocked expression, laced with threads of outrage. Jealous, maybe? “She’d run me through her system and taken video and photos of me, with and without my shirt. I told her she’d missed the best part.” He pointed to his pants. “She also fingerprinted me and took photocopies of my passport and driver’s license. She’s even got photos of Jackeroo.”
“Sounds like Jefferina.” They both glanced at Jackeroo, who was asleep on her sofa. Long plane rides seemed to wear out this SAR team.
“So why are you back?”
He took another long swig of his coffee. If she didn’t know better Mac would think he was trying to get a rise out of her with all that excess noise. But she wasn’t going to be baited by irritating behavior. “Maybe for the same reason you didn’t tell me you were attacked before we ever met.”
Macayla thudded to earth. “What exactly did Jefferina tell you?”
“Enough.” He quickly related the events the night Mac had found the greyhounds.
“Is that all?” Jefferina knew about Tallahassee, too.
He jerked in mock surprise. “Is there more?
Macayla stared at him.
“She said that your being arrested and out on bail was no reason for me to worry. She said you were a good person, when your drama is limited.”
“I’m not dramatic. I’m just—unlucky. And I wasn’t attacked. Not me personally. I saw something the night I found the missing greyhounds.”
“Something?” He put his cup down, finally giving her his full attention.
“A shooting.”
He sucked in a breath. “You’re a witness to a murder?”
“Sort of. Maybe.” She shook her head. “I thought I’d captured the shots being fired on my cell phone. But it isn’t on the video. The police haven’t found a body. No one else has corroborated my statement. And now the police think I’m the brains behind a ring of dog thieves.”
He looked at her for several long moments. “This is going to be more complicated than a cup of coffee can handle. If you have eggs and cheese, I’ll make omelets while you start at the beginning.”
Luckily, she had eggs and cheese, and a few cherry tomatoes and lots of coffee. While she began her story with her search for the stolen greyhounds, Oliver went into her small kitchen and whipped up the best breakfast she’d ever eaten under this roof. He unearthed a couple of potatoes and half an onion to make skillet potatoes to go with the cheese omelets. He was quick, efficient, not wasting a single stroke of the knife as she made her way through the events of the past three weeks. By the time she got to her arrest, they had cleaned their plates.
He hadn’t said much while she talked. Only stopped eating a few times to ask her to repeat something. That was how he remembered.
“So you see, the last two days have been a nightmare.”
He nodded. “You’ve been framed. It’s dirty. It’s brilliant.”
“What is?”
“Your enemy’s tactics.” He tapped his napkin. “He’s using your job skills and your boss’s connections against you. That takes a clever fella.”
“You could try not to look so happy about that. I could go to jail.”
Oliver shook his head. “There’s no motive. Absolutely none for you to commit these crimes.”
She drew her gaze from his. Time to tell the final part, the hardest part. The part she’d been trying to leave behind for a year. The distance made her voice hollow and her insides feel weak. But it was the final truth that made the lies close to real.
“I’m not just a Pet Detective. I’m a trained social worker. Until a year ago, I was a Trauma Services Child Specialist with Children’s Advocacy Services in Tallahassee.”
He looked at her a long time. “What changed?”
“Everything.”
“I’m listening.”
As she told that story he got up and began cleaning the kitchen, as if he realized she might not be able tell it if she had to bear the weight of his gaze on her. But the story came, shaping the horror of that day in the courtroom into words that seemed not quite enough for all they needed to tell. By the end, she was wondering, as she often had on that job, why anyone had to live lives like the ones she’d seen in the field. The abuse done to innocent children was obscene. It was inhumane. It had broken her innocence. And she’d wanted it back so badly, to piece together her popped soap bubble of ignorance. That was why she’d sealed up and put her former life on the shelf while she tried to find a new one that better fit her idea of how life should be.
She wasn’t certain how much of her thoughts she’d put into words. Probably more than was wise when a new man friend was listening.
When she paused finally, she realized that the dishes were done and that Oliver was sitting in front of her again. There was no real expression on his face beyond thoughtful interest. She couldn’t tell if he was appalled, or confused, or, “What?”
“I saw the scar the first night we made love.” He pointed to her middle. “I was a soldier. I know bullet wounds. But you didn’t say anything, and I didn’t want to embarrass you by asking about it.”
“Oh.” Macayla wrapped a protective hand over her middle. “I didn’t know what to say.”
He gave her a funny look. “You deliberately took a bullet for a child. That’s as courageous as it gets in this life.”
“No.” She stood up. “I’m not that.”
“Not what?”
“A hero.” She said the final word so softly Oliver wasn’t certain what she’d said until he played it back in his thoughts. And then he thought he understood her a little better.
He stood up, too, blocking her path. And then he gently reached out to frame her shoulders with his hands. “If I Google Macayla Burkett, what will I find?”
She shrugged under his hands, refusing to look at him.
“It will say Macayla Burkett is a hero, or heroine. Won’t it?”
She moved her head back and forth. “I never wanted that. I had already burned out long before the shooting happened. But that was my breaking point. Being celebrated as a hero seemed like a horrible joke.”
“I’m sure it was extremely hard for you.”
She looked up, her damn eyes feeling damp. “Detective Mullins says I crave being the center of attention. And that’s why he thinks I steal dogs, so that when I return them and the owners shower praise on me, it reinforces the praise I crave from once being called a hero.”
“Detective Mullins is talking out his ass.”
His blunt response startled a short laugh from her. “You’re right. If I’d wanted attention, I’d have stayed in my job. I was being asked to talk to every group in the area who needed a speaker. They wanted to know how to be brave in the face of danger, how to be like me. But I couldn’t do it, I just couldn’t.” She bit her lip, the impression of her teeth draining the color from her lower lip. “I wanted to say, I’m not brave. I was just there. Just there.”
Oliver pulled her in. She hesitated only a moment before going willingly in against his warmth. She shivered against him, shoulders heaving though she made no sounds. He held on tighter, as if he could absorb her pain and anguish into his own bigger, sturdier frame. She was small, but not delicate. There was a lion in this woman. When it had come roaring to life, she had scared herself. That’s what people forgot about bravery. It wasn’t about not feeling fear, as everyone else did. It was feeling the fear, and acting anyway. The brave man or woman dealt with that fear afterward, when the danger had passed. That became harder to do when no one wanted to hear anything but the tale of bravery.
After a minute Macayla’s shoulders stopped gently heaving and her breath evened out, but he didn’t let go even a fraction. Holding her body to his felt right, normal. Something to be repeated as often as possible. They fit in ways he couldn’t explain, or cared to try. It was enough.
Finally she unballed her fists and spread her fingers across his chest in the fractional space between them. He knew that she was about to push him away so he raised a hand to turn her face up to his. Looking down into her tear-streaked face made his gut quiver. Had he once said she was just cute? She was simply beautiful.
“I didn’t mean to break down like that.” She looked a bit ashamed.
“It’s okay not to want to be brave all the time. You don’t have to pretend with me. You can be needy. I’ll just hold you until you feel stronger.”
Pressing her cheek to his chest, Macayla allowed herself a little sigh of relief. Great sex notwithstanding, this was the best moment of the day so far. Feeling not alone.
“You’re not responsible for a man with a gun and a sick mind,” he said from someplace above her head. “You saved that child’s life.”
“It didn’t feel like that. I lost Katie.” She swallowed before going on. “Katie was my service dog. She was shot, too.” She shivered. “I couldn’t protect them both.”
“It was a horrible choice.”
“No, it was no choice at all. The child needed to live. I’d had twenty-six years.”
He clutched her a little tighter, his chin resting on the top of her head. “That’s not much.”
“It’s four times what Jily had lived.”
“The girl?”
“She’s fine. If witnessing all those terrible things could end with anyone being fine.”
“She has more years now because of your sacrifice, and Katie’s. More time to heal and build a better future.”
She looked up at him, surprised that she hadn’t thought of it that way before. “Katie was a hero, too.”
He nodded solemnly. “Why did you walk away from your life? It was more than the label hero.”
She looked away, not wanting him to see her cowardice. “I didn’t want to be responsible for any other child’s life. Ever again.”
He said nothing for a long moment. “So now you save dogs?”
“Dogs don’t have parents who think that killing them and then themselves is a good way to solve their problems.”
“The father shot himself?” She heard him expel a harsh breath that ruffled her hair.
He loosened his hold on her and she reluctantly lifted her head, ready to free him, but he held on to her. “Do you want to hear what I think? Because I haven’t been in your life long enough to have a right to an opinion.”
“It hasn’t stopped anyone else. Another reason I left.” She sounded a little defeated.
“It’s this. Stop trying not to be a hero. Because you already are one. You just have to learn to live with who you are.”
“Don’t say that.”
“There is another way. Stop reaching for the prize.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ve watched you. You’re a natural protector. It makes your heart beat. You step up every time, in every situation. The damn Pomeranian wouldn’t have made it another day if you’d given up chasing it. You face down the guys with bats then take on the local nutter Massey. If you really don’t want the title, stop stepping up.”
Macayla felt offended, right down to her shoe soles. “You just said it’s part of my nature.”
“Yeah. I did.” He was watching her with kind eyes, no laughter or teasing glint. “So what does that tell you?”
“I’m screwed.”
“That’s my girl.” Oliver hauled her in close and kissed her hard, feeling all the anger and frustration that had been building up on her behalf while he kept silent under the litany of her ordeal. It burst from his chest, powering the emotion of fierce protectiveness that was double-helixed into his own bones and blood. It was pleasure and pain to hold her and absorb her hurt. He wasn’t sure which he felt more until she groaned in his arms and he realized he must be hurting her.
He released her. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t what I meant to do.”
“It’s okay.” She pushed back shakily out of his embrace. “We got carried away. Mixed up the emotions.”
“Yeah. That’s it.” But the words surprised him. Mixed up their emotions? He’d thought until this second that they were absolutely together on the same page. “Maybe I should get out of here for a bit. Find a place to stay.”
She looked at him with large eyes brimming with possibilities but she only said, “That would be best.”
For whom? He had to wonder. Irritation burned in his chest that, just like that, she was shutting him out.
She didn’t seem to notice how hurt he was about it. Not that his face gave anything away. Yet she knew him, didn’t she? He’d decided on the flight to the States that she knew him better than anyone else in his life at the moment. And that made him vulnerable. It wasn’t a feeling he enjoyed.
He looked away, settling his gaze on the sink to keep from saying the words locked behind his teeth. She lifted him out of himself, made him want things he’d never wanted before. That scared him. Maybe instead of surging ahead, as he’d come here to do, he should take a step back. Reassess the situation. He was emotionally involved, always a dangerous position for someone making a huge decision. He wasn’t dispassionate enough to know his own mind.
His gaze dropped to Jackeroo, who had come to stand before him, head kicked over in canine inquiry. He ruffled his K-9 partner’s fur, a sign that he was okay. Jackeroo might be able to read his chemical pheromone cocktail like a road map of his handler’s emotions, but he couldn’t always know what was motivating his handler. Oliver felt old habits like muscle memory click into place. A giant step back. Yeah. That’s what he should do. Reassess.
He got as far as the door before turning around. “Fuck it. I can’t leave. Someone has made you a target for the police. We can’t wait to see what his next move will be. We need to counterpunch, and quickly.”
She stared at him in surprise, as if she’d thought he’d already gone. “But I don’t know who he is, so it’s like punching in the dark.”
“We could start with suspects. What about Massey?”
“I made a list yesterday of people I’d like to talk with.” She looked around for it.
He came toward her, feeling energized. Action was what he needed. He’d like to bust a few heads and smash a few things on her behalf. Action, he could handle. “Who’s on the list?”
She stared at him. “You really don’t mind getting involved?”
“I was coming back to see you, Macayla. I thought you understood.”
She smiled suddenly, and it broke his heart a tiny bit. “I was afraid to.”
He shook his head and rolled his eyes, not daring to be as happy as her words made him. “Women. A man’s lot always to need to draw a bloody map. Get over here, woman, and show me what you’ve got.”
She found it and they sat down together while she explained who each person was. When she was done, he was grinning.
Macayla watched him cautiously. “You see something I’m missing?”
“Not yet. But we can find some answers by asking questions. Someone on your list is bound to know something. Let’s go see a woman about a dog.”
Oliver whistled and Jackeroo jumped up, fully awake. “Let’s take a ride.”
Jackeroo barked in reply. There were few things he liked better than a ride in a car with an open window.