“Retch tan.”

Detective John Sevier muttered the words under his breath, not really talking to anyone but himself. The fact that the color of the walls in the conference room was bothering him told him more about his mood than anything. He’d looked at these walls for years and not cared one way or another what color they were.

Still, retch tan about summed it up.

“Puke tan.”

John swung his head around. So much for not talking to anyone but himself. Nate Ryder, one of the other detectives in the Major Crimes unit of the Dark Falls Police Department was contemplating the walls as though their conversation might reveal a major secret to the universe instead of settling on the best name for the paint.

“Cat-yak tan,” someone else offered.

John shook his head. These guys could easily spend the next hour debating this. What the hell had he started?

The conference room had a table that could hold up to ten of the detectives in the unit. Of course, with ten, they’d have to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with no room to take notes or bend an arm to chug the mud-water coffee the machine in the corner spat out. Today, there were only six of them in there, so they had elbow room, at least.

Still, the room was making John edgy, and he wasn’t an edgy kind of guy. No, scratch that. It was the case they were working that had him on edge, not the room.

“Toe jam tan,” Nate said, leaning back to high five one of the others.

John cursed and reached for his coffee cup, then thought better of it when he realized his stomach felt like a bear had crapped in it at some point while he slept. Coffee wasn’t going to help that.

There was a big-screen television mounted on one wall that let the officers watch interrogations in progress in any of the three interrogation rooms assigned to their team.

John currently sat in front of the other wall—the one with a dry erase board covering the full length of it—squeezing the hell out of the blue gel ball that had started out as Nate’s but had become more of a department-wide stress ball.

Rhys Evans stood at the white board. When they wanted to get to Rhys, they called him Sport—a reference to his high school and college football days. He had that star quarterback look to him, all blue eyes and dirty blond hair.

John guessed people might describe him in much the same way. He was built, working out more than ever since his divorce meant he had no one to go home to. He had brown hair and brown eyes that one girlfriend in high school had insisted were honey-colored instead of brown. Whatever that meant.

John’s partner, Eric Cantu, was the opposite of John and Rhys’s clean cut looks. Eric was tanned with black hair that was longer than most of the unit wore it, and a nose that made his Italian heritage absolutely clear. His chin always had a bit of stubble to it. The captain gave him shit about it, but Eric swore he shaved every morning, that it grew back in on the drive to work.

Eric had rolled his chair back into a corner so he could stretch his legs out and slouch down in the chair, trying to get a nap in before the meeting started. Eric had pulled an extra shift the night before, covering for one of the guys on the night unit.

When Rhys turned around, ready to start, John tossed a pen at Eric, hitting him on the chest. In seconds, his partner straightened and pulled his chair to the table. No one begrudged any of the detectives a nap when they needed one. You grabbed sleep where you could, whether that was in the precinct or at home. Luckily, they didn’t have to worry about wrinkling their suits.

Unlike detectives on television, they didn’t wear cheap suits in the Dark Falls Major Crimes unit. Unless they were going to testify in court, they wore business casual. Most days, the men and women of Major Crimes were in button-down shirts and jeans or a polo shirt and pants. They all kept a blazer hanging in their cubicles for trips to court, but that was really the only time they put them on.

Dressing casually came in handy if they had to walk into a convenience store to scope out a suspect without anyone thinking, shit, that guy looks like a cop. They also sometimes drove around town in a soccer-mom van when they were trying to track down a suspect. There was something about the look on a scumbag’s face when the doors to the nanny-van they’d considered harmless opened to dump six guys in tactical gear at their feet. It was priceless. And it made the job worth it. Most of the time, anyway.

Rhys didn’t bother with preliminaries. They were here because their captain had ordered the Major Crimes unit to attack the jewelry store robberies that had been happening in the last few months around the city.

Rhys was probably the most buttoned up of the group. He was quiet and always looked like he was thinking about something important. The snippets of tattoos peeking out from under his short sleeves were the only giveaway that there was something more going on under that façade.

“We’re working the jewelry store robberies today, everyone.” Rhys Evans was writing what they knew about the recent string of jewelry store robberies on the white board. “Cap wants these solved and off the books before more people get hurt.”

John’s head shot up at that. He didn’t know anyone had been hurt. Flashes of a woman with big brown eyes and a wide smile standing behind a jewelry store counter taunted him.

John sat up straighter, reaching for the coffee after all. To hell with his stomach.

“We’ve had three robberies in the last three months that appear to have been committed by the same group. Four suspects. All look to be male, but they’re good at covering their faces. Actually, everything is covered—jeans, boots, long sleeved shirts, gloves, ski masks. We can’t tell if there are tattoos or identifying marks.”

“This last one,” Nate, another of the detectives, put in, “an employee at the store was hurt. No major injuries, but one of the suspects didn’t think the salesman was acting fast enough. He slammed him into a glass case, broke his nose, and he’ll likely have a few scars from where the glass cut him.”

Rhys nodded. “They’re hitting stores in less upscale parts of town. Places that won’t have a guard or panic alarm.”

And thank God for that, John thought, clenching and unclenching a fist. It wasn’t fair to the victims, but he had his own reasons for being glad these guys weren’t hitting the higher end shops yet. With a city the size of Dark Falls, there were quite a few jewelry stores they could hit.

Still, they would run out eventually. What remained to be seen was whether they might move on to something else, like pawn shops, or start hitting the higher end places.

Rhys continued, oblivious to the cramping in John’s gut as he thought of where this might go. To most of the guys, this was a typical robbery investigation.

“They spray paint the video cameras as soon as they enter. In and out in under four minutes.”

John checked his notes, shaking off the agitation he’d been feeling all day, and focused on the job. “If it’s the same group, they’re still following a pattern as far as timing. Three to four weeks between hits.” He paused and counted the days. “No, wait, this one is one day under the three-week mark. Other than the fact they’re choosing low-rent stores, there’s no location pattern. They’re spread out across the poorer parts of town, but not clumped together in one neighborhood.”

He grabbed the still shots they’d pulled from the snippets of video they had. “I’ve looked over the video footage from the scenes.”

“Anything worthwhile?” their captain asked as she entered the room. Captain Eve Scanlon wasn’t a bad captain, but she had an uncanny ability to catch a lot of a conversation when she wasn’t even in the room yet.

She was in her early forties with long, jet-black hair she kept pinned ruthlessly back in a bun. People often mistook her wide eyes and red lips as signs she wasn’t sharp and tough as hell. If they acted on that mistake, they were schooled quickly.

She’d put in her dues working as a detective before moving behind the desk. It was one of the reasons they all respected her. That, and most of the time, she let them do their jobs.

Rhys shook his head. “Shit cameras in a lot of them. One has piss poor angles, and the other has such grainy footage, it’s hard to make much out before they block them. I don’t know how these businesses were getting insurance coverage this way.”

“On top of that, as soon as our guys enter the store,” John said, “They hit the cameras with black spray paint. We get a few seconds of footage, then it’s out.”

Nate leaned forward, signaling to John with an open hand that he wanted the stress ball. “I’m reaching out to some of the other businesses in the area,” Nate said, catching the ball and tossing it from hand to hand. “There are a few places that might have an angle we can get something on. A gas station across the street from one of the jewelry stores and an ATM next to the other. Maybe they’ll have better quality.”

Captain Scanlon brought the focus back around to John. “See anything on the footage we have so far, Sevier?”

John shook his head. “Not much. Four suspects, appear to be male, but they’re making an effort to cover themselves up. Black boots and black jeans. T-shirts all have local bands on them, or no logo at all. On two of them, I can see blue or purple hair sticking out from under the masks and hoods in some of the shots.”

Gerald Osborn snorted. “Punk rockers. My nephew’s been dressing like that for the last year. Can’t get him into anything else.”

Osborn and his partner, Craig Patel, were the older guys on the team. They had a lot more knowledge than the rest of them, and were still in good enough shape to be on the streets. Didn’t mean the guys didn’t make fun of them some days for being the grannies of the group.

John nodded. “Has that feel to it. The jeans are tight, some ripped knees, that kind of thing. The boots go anywhere from ankle height to all the way up the calves. They do look like they could be in a band.”

“Maybe they are,” Eric said.

John had thought of that, too. “I checked the websites of the bands that showed up on the t-shirts a few of them had on. No matches there. Wrong heights and builds. I ran histories on the band members just to be sure. A couple of the members had shoplifting or PI arrests.” Public intoxication arrests weren’t all that unexpected among bands that played in bars and stayed out late drinking afterward.

And shoplifting didn’t really carry over into armed robbery.

John summed up his findings. “Nothing that screamed bank robber to me, but it’s possible they’re in some other band. Hell, they could be fuck-knuckles playing in their mom’s garage.” He pushed the printouts of the reports into the center of the table in the universal signal for the team to have at it. They checked each other’s work all the time. He had no issue with that.

“Tattoos? Jewelry?” another sergeant asked.

John shook his head. “All skin other than the eyes are covered up. I can tell you we’ve got at least two guys who dye their hair and we have one with brown eyes, one with hazel eyes, and two blue.”

Eric slanted his crooked grin at John and then hit the side of his head a few times, like he was trying to shake his marbles back into the right spots in his head. “Thought I woke up to a beauty pageant there for a second.” He reached for the carafe of coffee that sat in the center of the table and poured himself two cups, one for each hand.

Eric was the comic relief on the unit. He kept them all from getting too serious, until they needed to buckle down. When Eric Cantu stopped joking, you knew shit got real.

“A Point Break kind of gang? A punk band instead of surfers?” Eric asked.

John shrugged a shoulder. At this point, anything was possible.

“Still nothing in pawn shops? They have to be selling this stuff someplace,” Eric said.

Nate shook his head. “We’ve put the call out to the shops. Not getting any hits so far. Could be doing it for the thrill?”

As they moved on to brainstorm some of the other cases in the unit, John tried to shove thoughts of a certain jewelry store owner aside. Ava McNair wasn’t a part of his life anymore, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t aware of where she was and what she was doing.

He hadn’t worried so much about her when the first jewelry store heist happened, or even the second. Now that the third one hit, he was itching to go warn her.

There wasn’t a reason to stay away from her anymore. His divorce had been finalized a couple of years ago. He didn’t have to stay away from an old college girlfriend out of respect for Lucia.

Not that it would be that kind of visit, anyway. If he’d learned one thing over the last few years, it was that he wasn’t meant to be in a relationship. No, if he went to see Ava, it would only be to warn an old friend to be careful.

The meeting broke and John and Eric moved down the hall toward their cubicles.

“You good?” Eric asked, eyeing John.

“Yep.”

“I thought you were gonna bust Dahlia in there, you were squeezing her so hard.”

John stopped in the aisle between the cubicles. “Come again?”

Eric held up his hands and squeezed the air like an inept teenager might squeeze a woman’s breasts. “I was thinking, that stress ball Nate’s always got. It’s like he’s looking for a substitute woman. Thought we should give her a name. I’m trying Dahlia out.”

John rolled his eyes, but had to admit, the look on Nate’s face when he heard that one would be funny.

They settled into John’s cubicle, John in his desk chair, Eric in the corner in the single guest chair that rarely had anyone other than one of the other cops in it.

“Tell Uncle Eric all about it. What has your panties in a bunch this morning?”

“My panties aren’t in a bunch.” They were, but he wasn’t about to open up to Eric about that.

“You need to get laid. I thought you were seeing that woman. What’s her name? Lily? Lacy? Lola?”

It was Laura, but John wasn’t going to give Eric the satisfaction of correcting him. His partner was able to remember the smallest details in a case. He knew damned well the woman John sometimes slept with when she wasn’t in a relationship was Laura. He also knew damned well Laura had met someone a few months ago and hadn’t been in John’s bed since.

Eric wasn’t exactly good at hiding his strategy. He wanted John to get annoyed enough to tell him off and then start talking. The two were close, but that didn’t mean he was going to go all psychiatrist’s couch with the guy.

John stood, grabbing his wallet and keys. “Got an errand to run, then I’ll swing by and grab us lunch. Back in an hour.”

Eric raised a brow but didn’t say anything as John walked out. With the best partners, a look was enough to get the message across, and Eric’s message was clear. He knew good and well John was off his game. And a cop off his game was a danger to them all.

Ava McNair smiled as she watched the couple leave her store. She loved seeing couples find the perfect engagement ring to start their lives together. These two were young, but she could see the devotion in the way they looked at each other.

He’d come in ahead of time to choose a ring, then told his girlfriend he needed to swing by and pick up a watch his mom left to be repaired. The look on her face was priceless when he dropped to one knee after Ava passed him the ring box.

“Nice,” Kirsten James said, winking at Ava from her spot by the door. The woman might look harsh in her guard uniform, but she was as much of a softy when it came to that kind of thing as Ava was.

Ava grinned and turned to go to the back to check on her sister, but the door chimed again. What she saw when she looked back was anything but expected.

The man entering her family’s jewelry store had filled out. His face was different, worn in a way, but in a good way. At least, she thought it looked good on him. His eyes were the same, though.

John Sevier’s eyes trapped and held her, his light brown gaze doing things to her just like they had years before when she’d been stupid enough to walk away from him.

To say he was the one who got away was an understatement. She’d been so naïve and focused on all the wrong things at that time in her life. She never realized what she was losing until it was far too late for her to do anything about it.

Not that she would have been able to hold on to him anyway. Halfway through college, her life had changed drastically, and she’d had to drop out to help her dad and sister. She would have lost John then, anyway. Still, an eighties rock ballad was playing in the back of her head somewhere as she thought about not knowing what you had ’til it was gone.

Kirsten stiffened and looked ready to move into action if Ava didn’t say anything. It was no wonder. A six-foot-one man who looked like he could eat glass for breakfast if he got the craving, was standing frozen in their showroom. And Ava probably looked like a deer in headlights.

“John.” Ava breathed the word out, then shook herself to clear the fog. She waved a hand at Kirsten. “It’s all right. John’s an old friend.”

She thought she saw something flicker in his eyes at the words, but if it had been anything more than her imagination, it was gone.

“Um…” Ava looked around the showroom. One of her salespeople was on the other side of the store helping an older gentleman pick out a bracelet for his granddaughter. Kirsten was still staring at her and John.

Ava swung a hand in the direction of the workshop and offices at the back of the store. “We could, um…”

Thankfully, John nodded, seemingly unconcerned at the fact she couldn’t seem to get a sentence out that didn’t include “um.” Scratch that, she hadn’t actually gotten a complete sentence out, period.

She went to the back, hoping to pass right through the workshop where her sister, Janna, designed most of the jewelry they carried. They had other artisans who worked for them, repairing jewelry and watches and such, but Janna was their only bench jeweler. Anything in their cases that her sister didn’t make was ordered from jewelry wholesalers or outside artisans.

Janna stood at her bench, the spotlights that surrounded her all aimed at a four-inch square space in front of her as her hands worked with small samplings of metals and gems. Janna had a habit of getting lost in her work, but today when Ava hoped she might do just that, her sister looked up.

Janna’s eyes went from Ava to John and back to Ava in a comic demonstration of her surprise at seeing a man with Ava.

Yeah, it was somewhat of a shock to Ava, too.

“John, this is my sister, Janna. Janna, John and I were friends in college.” Ava watched as Janna’s eyes went wide.

John smiled and nodded. Whether he remembered Ava mentioning Janna’s issues with anxiety when they dated, or he just read people really well, she didn’t know. But for whatever reason, he didn’t offer his hand to Janna to shake. That was good. It was what Janna was more comfortable with.

Janna looked to Ava. “Big John?”

Oh Lord.

Ava’s cheeks flamed hot, and she knew they must be red. She and Janna shared everything, which meant Janna knew all about the John Ava had dated in college. She just hadn’t expected Janna to put the man standing before her together with their conversations about John in college. And yes, Janna had truly nicknamed him Big John in college, but it wasn’t for the reasons one might think.

Not that he couldn’t have earned the nickname that way. Back in the day, one of Ava’s friends had described John’s body as “call him if you need your house moved over a few inches” kind of big. She wasn’t wrong.

Ava put her hands to her cheeks, and a small semblance of a laugh slipped from her lips. She dodged John’s smiling eyes and Janna’s impish grin without answering and led the way back to her office.

She could try to explain to John that Janna had given him the nickname because that was how he’d seemed to her at the time. Ava had talked about John so much when they were dating that Janna had labeled him “big” in Ava’s world.

She didn’t know how to say all that without making the whole situation worse, though, so she clamped down on her lips, imprisoning them between her teeth as she shut the door behind them.

The look he gave her told her he was enjoying this far too much.

“For your information,” she said, crossing her arms, “Big John is another John. Not you. It’s…” she didn’t have any ideas… “someone else.”

“Uh-huh.” He matched her crossed arms and let a smile cross his face.

Ava deflated a little. It was good to see him. She’d known he moved to Dark Falls after college. He and his wife had made the city their home when he’d been offered a spot on the police force. She heard about him from time to time from old college friends, and they’d run into each other once at the farmer’s market downtown.

She’d heard about his divorce, too.

She leaned her hip on her desk and tried to get her heart to stop pounding and her hands to stop shaking. “It’s good to see you. You look good.”

Oh hell. She should just shut up.

It was true, though. He still wore his brown hair short in what she guessed was some kind of police regulation, above the collar kind of cut. His skin was tanned and scarred in some spots, making her want to trace the pattern of his history written there and ask him about every little mark. His jaw was the kind you read about being chiseled, and that mouth looked like it could do things no woman could refuse.

What was she doing? She focused back on his eyes and tried to get her inner hussy to shut the hell up for a minute.

“You, too. I should have stopped in and said hi before. I, uh…” He ran a hand over the back of his head, from the base of his neck up to the top of his head. It was something he’d done in the past, too.

“I’m sure you’re busy,” she offered. “I heard you made detective.”

He nodded. “That’s why I’m here.”

Ava tilted her head.

“I wanted to stop in and make sure you knew about the jewelry store robberies that have been happening.”

She frowned. “I think I saw something in one of the papers about a store being robbed last week, but honestly, I don’t pay a lot of attention to the news when I get busy. There are others?”

John was all business now. “Yes. There are details I can’t share, but what you need to know is that three stores have been hit. They’re all lower end stores that don’t have a guard posted. You have your guard out there all day, every day?”

Ava was stunned. She didn’t think people really robbed jewelry stores anymore. There were guards in many of them and most of the other owners she networked with had high quality cameras and good security systems.

She looked toward the front of the store where Kirsten was standing guard, even though there were several walls between them, and she couldn’t actually see the showroom from her office. “Yes, Kirsten works two days a week, and we have two others. Kirsten and one of the others are former military, and the other is a former campus officer from one of the out-of-state colleges. I don’t remember which school.”

At the moment, all she could remember was that they all had families, loved ones. She brought her hand to the gemstone on her neck. Her birthstone, garnet. “Have there been injuries?”

John looked grim. “Thankfully, only during this last robbery. One clerk was shoved into a glass case. No serious wounds, though. He’ll be fine.”

Ava stared at a spot over his shoulder. She had to wonder how fine she or any of her people would be if they were held up at gunpoint. She assumed they had guns, or a weapon of some other sort.

He went on. “They’re not hitting shops like yours yet, but I wanted to make sure you guys are on your toes. Your cameras and alarms are working?”

“Of course.”

“You’d be surprised how many times people let those go, thinking the alarm sticker in the window is enough of a deterrent. Until their insurance company forces them to get into compliance, they let things go.”

Ava blinked. “Our cameras and alarms are all working. We put paste jewels in the window displays, but that’s the only fake thing around here.”

John stepped closer, and Ava was overly aware of the small size of her office in that moment. The man had always taken her breath away, but now that he was more than a college boy, he was almost overwhelming.

She’d long known she’d been an idiot to let him go. The point was no more obvious to her than it was right now as his eyes bore into hers. Still, he was here for business reasons. She needed to remember that, even if her body seemed to have other ideas at the moment.

“Good,” he said. “I want you to be safe.”

Ava swallowed. She opened her mouth to say something—she had no idea what that would be, since the sight of him in her office after all these years had her flustered beyond reason—but the intercom on her phone buzzed.

“Ava, you’re needed in the showroom, please,” came the polite voice of her salesman. He probably had more than one customer. They knew from experience, if you let someone browse too long without helping them on the showroom floor, they’d walk out without making a purchase.

John stepped back. “I’ll let you get back to work.”

Ava nodded, trying to let the breath she’d been holding slip out slowly and quietly enough that he might not hear it.

John led the way back to the showroom, pausing to turn to her when they were in the doorway between the front and back of the store.

“You look good, Ava. Really good.”

Ava nodded again, still struck mute, it seemed.

“Stay safe,” he said as he turned away.

“You, too, John.” She echoed his words in her head. Stay safe.

Then she watched for a moment, not letting herself worry about customers and sales quite yet. She stood at the back of the showroom and watched as John Sevier walked away.