In Your Wildest Dreams (33 page)

"Was," he confirmed, lifting his gaze to hers just briefly. To those blue, blue eyes. But he discovered he couldn't look at them right now, so he lowered his back to the bedcovers, slouching down until his head met the pillow. "She died."

"I'm
...
sorry," she murmured, her voice gone soft and pained for him. But how sorry for him would she feel when she found out
why
Becky had died?

"It was my fault," he said in more of a rush than he meant to. He stared at the white ceiling, wishing the lights were out like earlier, that he could look for angels in the room to distract him from the truth.

"H-how? How was it your fault?"

"I was workin' undercover," he began, thinking,
Get through this. Do it quick, then it can be over.
"Tryin' to infiltrate a local drug ring. She didn't want me to do it," he remembered aloud, swallowing again past that damn lump blocking up his throat. "Thought it was too dangerous. But I was
...
so
fearless.
Thought I was the king of the fuckin' world or somethin'. I told her I
had
to do it—it was my job. I thought I was gonna save people, all the people who'd buy the drugs I was gonna get off the street.

"The plan was that I'd pose as a low-level, independent dealer, then get hired on by the organization. Our target was the kingpin, identity unknown, except to his closest associates. The guy goes by a code name—Typhoeus.

"I'd spent a couple months at it and was gettin' somewhere—buildin' trust, movin' up the ladder—when I got pulled out. Tony was workin' the case from the outside and got wind they'd found out I was a cop.

"I was pissed about all the wasted time and effort, but once I was out, we figured that was the end of it. We hadn't gotten Typhoeus, but we'd come at him from another angle sometime down the road.

"Then one night..." His stomach clenched and he felt close to retching, just thinking back to it.

Stephanie reached out to hold his hand, and he took a deep breath and tried to go on. "One night I took Becky out to dinner. We went to Arnaud's, in the Quarter—her favorite place. My idea, my little way of celebratin' that the job was over, celebratin' for
her,
'cause it made her so damn happy. And while we were at dinner..." He stopped again, cleared his throat because something was clogging it up even more. "At dinner she told me she was pregnant. We hadn't been tryin', but we hadn't been
not
tryin', either. Still, it came as a shock. In a good way. A better-than-I-expected way."

Damn it, this was so hard. He closed his eyes against the emotions.
Don't feel. Don't feel.
He'd been telling himself that for two years, though, and what good did it ever do?

"On the way home, we stopped at a light on Canal Street and another car pulled up beside us
...
and by the time I saw the gun, it was too late."

Next to him, Stephanie flinched.
"What?"

"Guy shot her," he said, his mouth feeling numb, his mind too. "Was goin' after
me,
but she got in the way."

"Oh Jake." Stephanie's voice wrenched with a pain he knew all too well. "Oh God, Jake."

"She just looked at me," he said, remembering it like a dream. "And I kept sayin', 'It's gonna be all right, honey, it's gonna be all right,' but there was so much blood, Steph...." He glanced up at her, somehow needing to feel her presence now. "So damn much blood. In my heart, I knew it was useless. I was tryin' to get to my cell phone, callin' 911, at the same time tryin' to cover up her neck—that's where the bullet hit her—tryin' to cover the hole, stop the blood, but it was everywhere."

He let out a shaky sigh. "That's what I remember the most. All that damn blood. Like it could soak the entire world. And her eyes were so panicky—she knew she was dyin', but I just kept lyin' to her, and I guess I was tryin' to lie to myself, too. Just kept tellin' her it would be all right. But it
wasn't
all right."

He went quiet then, his body going hollow, his limbs too light. Somewhere during the story, Stephanie had sunk down next to him, so that when he turned to her, their faces were only inches apart. "She was dead by the time the ambulance came," he whispered. "And it was my fault."

Stephanie shook her head profusely, her eyes racked with sorrow. "No, Jake, there was nothing you could have done. You can't blame yourself."

"I
do
blame myself. For bein' a cop. For takin' an assignment she asked me not to take. For bein' so goddamn arrogant as to think I could take my wife out to dinner like normal, knowin' I'd just been made for a cop by a drug ring, too stupid to realize Typhoeus would want to make an example
outra
me. I shoulda laid low." He sighed. "Shoulda done a
lotta
things different."

She ran comforting fingers back through his hair, and her touch
...
helped.

That was a hard thing to grab onto and acknowledge, because it was the first time
anything
had
ever
helped.

But it didn't take away the sting of the truth. He'd brought about Becky's death; if it wasn't for him and his job, she'd be alive today, and they'd have a kid, and life would be fine. Better than fine.

The thought wrenched his stomach even harder when he remembered he was lying naked in bed with another woman. A woman he kept having some damn intense feelings for, whether or not he chose to admit it to himself.

He'd just never thought he'd care about anyone else in that way. He'd thought sex now would be an occasional one-night stand, or a
one-hour
stand, for all he'd cared— he hadn't wanted anyone new in his life. He couldn't believe he'd
let
someone into his life.

He couldn't believe how good the sex was, how often she made him smile, how much she lightened his heart. And that made him hurt for Becky—it brought that same familiar sense of betrayal closing in.

"You made her happy," Stephanie said.

He lifted his gaze. How did she know? "Yeah, I did. I made her
damn
happy. Then I got her killed." He looked away. "So now you know—why I act like a bastard half the time, why I don't give a shit about anything, why I quit the force. Because I spend most of my time feelin' guilty about her, and about our baby." He shook his head, incredibly tired. "My life felt like it pretty much ended with hers."

"You don't."

"Huh?"

"You don't act like a bastard so much. Maybe when we first met, sometimes, but not lately."

He gave a short, somber nod against the pillow. It was true, he supposed. Like caring about food again. The food thing was small, but the not-acting-like-a-bastard part was bigger. He'd been happier lately.

"You'd have liked her," he said without planning it, the notion just entering his head. He could see the two of them being friends.

"I'm sure I would have."

"She was a lot more
...
genteel than me. Raised in a big house in
Métairie,
rich parents, country club—but she was the most down-to-earth person you could ever meet. And she kinda
...
pulled me up, made me believe I could be more than I thought I could."

"What do you mean?"

He cast her a glance. "Despite my
mamère,
I grew up pretty tough. When I was a teenager and started gettin' in trouble—fightin', raisin' hell—
Mamère
said I should use the roughness in me for good and become a cop. She made me promise on her deathbed that I would, so I did." He stopped, swallowed, remembering the guy he'd been in those in-between times—after
Mamère,
before Becky. Trying like hell to be good, but still bad to the bone inside. Too angry over his father, his mother, the loss of his grandma.

"So I was already a cop when I met Becky, but she made me a
good
cop. Until then, it'd been a job, a way to feel important, shove my weight around. But Becky turned me into a better man, somebody who wanted to help people and believed I could. Truth is, I guess Tony had a hand in that, too. But it was mostly Becky. Wantin' to prove to her I could be the person she thought I was."

"And now?"

"Now what?"

She touched his arm. "/ see that man in you, Jake. Even when you
do
act like a jerk, you still help me. But I'm just not sure...."

"What,
chèreV

She let out a sigh. "I guess I'm still a little puzzled about why you traded in being a cop for tending bar at Sophia's. I mean—you're so much more than that, and at Sophia's, you're only ..."

He didn't make her finish, didn't make her tell him what a worthless existence he led now, because he already knew. "It's because I don't care anymore. Don't give a damn, about
anyone
or
anything.
Because carin' only gets you kicked in the
couilles."

"Always?"

"For me, yeah—always. You care about somebody and they either die, or they die
inside
—like my mother, or they let you down. Carin's a lost cause."

Her sigh said she thought he was wrong, but she hadn't been where he'd been—she didn't know. They stayed awkwardly silent for a few minutes, until she said, "How did you end up working at Sophia's anyway?" He suspected it was an attempt to alleviate the tension now permeating the air.

He could go for that, too. "My friend Danny, who manages Sophia's—he knew me when I was a cop, and he knew I was down and needed an easy way to pay the bills."

"So no one at Sophia's cared that you used to be a cop and now you're serving drinks to people who are doing something illegal?"

"Nobody knows. To everybody on the third floor, I'm just a bartender named Jake."

"They didn't recognize you from—" She stopped abruptly, then let out a heavy breath, not quite meeting his eyes. "Well, I'm guessing Becky's death made the news."

He couldn't quite meet hers, either, now that they were back to
this.
"The media was good enough to keep my face out of it—they'll do that for cops sometimes in especially hideous situations. And I had a beard and longer hair at the time, for the undercover work—just hadn't gotten around to takin' it off."

From his peripheral vision, he caught the inquisitive tilt of Stephanie's head. "And there's nothing inside you that
cares
about the girls at Sophia's, nothing that thinks what happens there is wrong?"

He turned to look at her again, surprised. He'd just spilled his guts to her about causing his wife's death, and she was questioning him about the girls at Chez Sophia? "What are you gettin' at,
chèreV

She lifted her gaze. "When I first met you, you didn't seem like someone who would care about that sort of thing. But now
...
now I can't help but think that, deep down, you do. You must. You're too good of a man not to."

He blinked, wondering if she'd caught him in a tie, another tie to himself. He pushed the question away. "Losin' Becky taught me one thing,
beb.
It's that you can't save anybody, take care of anybody. It's useless to try."

"You're taking care of the runaway girl," she said softly.

He shrugged, sorry to be reminded. "I shouldn't be, if I had any sense. Because in the end, it won't matter—I won't be able to help her. She needs more help than I can give."

"Every night you keep her off the street
matters,
Jake." He just shook his head, feeling resolute, and wondering exactly when he had started this business again of taking care of people, of thinking any good could really come from it.

"And you're helping
me,
too, with Tina."

Ah—
that's
when it had started. With Miss Chardon-nay. "Only so you wouldn't get yourself—"

"I know," she cut him off. "In trouble. But you're helping me in other ways, too." She reached out to touch him, her hand skimming across his chest, down his stomach. "I've never had this with a man before. You know that."

They'd had this discussion a number of times, yet something in the words made him feel a
lit
tl
e
panicky just now; he suddenly heard them a whole new way. "Never had what exactly,
chèreT