The Ex File (Behind the Blue Line Series Book 1) (8 page)

“Of course not,” she answered immediately. “But I’m also not going to have a bulls-eye drawn on my back for the decidedly unhinged woman to aim at.”

He sighed at her words, but didn’t speak up to defend his ex, which Ellie appreciated. “Okay, I see your point.”

“Thank you.” She threw her arms around his neck and pulled him into a deep kiss. His hand on her waist slid up until he was cradling her skull in his palm, while his other hand massaged her lower back, working its way under her shirt.

When he came up for air, his eyes were a bit glazed and he was more than a bit flushed. “You’re welcome. Remind me to do whatever it was I did again. Soon.”

Ellie snickered. “Will do. I gotta head home, though. I have to pick up some groceries before I go to work tomorrow and I still haven’t touched my laundry.” She made to leave the kitchen, but he reached out and encircled her wrist with his fingers. Eyebrow raised, she waited.

He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly like he was building up to something. Finally he looked at her, all his anxieties churned up in his topaz eyes, and asked, “Are we cool?”

She brought her hand to her mouth, taking his with hers, and kissed his knuckles. “Of course we are.”

He smiled in response and let her go. It wasn’t often that the damaged parts of him showed, from the marriage, his childhood, any of it, and she felt privileged and responsible for taking care of him, at least this time. Grabbing her purse, she headed out the door, content in the knowledge that he valued her enough to be up front with her, even if she thought it was a ridiculously bad idea. She could live with that.

Monday came with boots on, angry, tall black Goth boots with steel toes. Ellie fell getting out of the shower, but managed to only sustain a few bruises. She was almost late to work due to a mix-up in her takeout order at her favorite restaurant. Sitting down, she’d found that her day shift counterpart had managed to take no reports at all, and she had four holding for her for over two hours. And as if that wasn’t enough, she got a call from Sean asking her again if she wanted to go to dinner. With Pia and him. On Thursday. Again he’d asked, and again she’d declined.

She couldn’t live with it. Ellie didn’t know what she’d been thinking, and was half-convinced that the last kiss she’d shared with Sean had robbed her of her good sense. She’d said it was fine, but the more she’d had time to think, the more she knew she’d made the right decision and less fine with the situation she was. He was going to dinner with the harpy! Voluntarily! And yes, while he’d asked her to come with him, it was only out of the misguided notion that this would somehow broker a form of peace between them and the dangerously deranged, and not put her squarely on Pia’s cruise missile radar. She’d said no, and now she had to live with it.

Ellie got up after checking to see if she had any pending reports, and finding she didn’t, walked over to the fax machine. In her irritation, she didn’t notice her foot was tangled in the cord to the phone, and when she stepped over to pick up a fax off the machine, she went down in a swearing, windmilling heap. “Mother flamin’—”

“Hey, virgin ears here.”

She looked up from her ignominious landing pad to see Josh leaning against her desk to keep from collapsing in laughter. “Fuck you and your virgin ears.” After pushing herself up from the floor, she snarled as she snatched the fax from the machine and righted the phone on the desk. “What the hell do you want, anyway? Working over today?”

Josh pulled a rolling chair over from another desk and perched, leaning over the back of it. “While I admit my coffin’s open pretty early today, it’s ‘cause I’m working for grant money.”

“Writing tickets and raising hell,” she murmured as she typed up a run from the information on the fax. She was glad that he’d been the only one to see her flop, but he didn’t need to know that.

“And you are just a little ball of sunshine.” She heard him roll over closer to her and from the corner of her eye, she watched him reach out to pinch her cheek.

Ellie didn’t look up from her work. “Not if you plan to keep that hand.”

Taking his hand back, he huffed. “Okay, what’s really going on? You are eight different kinds of evil right now, and besides that spectacular flounce to the floor, I don’t see a reason why.”

Her first desire was to growl in frustration, but that would only confirm his supposition. She finished her report and sent it off, checking for new ones at the same time. When she didn’t find one, and thus a reason to send him on his way, she dropped her chin to her chest. “I didn’t flounce, I attacked the floor,” she grumbled softly.

“Then your war cry needs some work.” Josh rolled his chair over next to hers and after a couple aborted attempts, tentatively touched her shoulder. “I’m here if you wanna talk, and I think you might need to.”

Ellie pushed back from the desk with a plaintive sigh. She felt like she was on the verge of some truly impressive whining. Still, maybe talking to Josh would get it out of her head and she could get a handle on the emotional drama enough to make the situation make more sense. “Sean invited me to dinner,” she harrumphed.

Josh stood up and spun the chair around to sit in it properly, only this time with his feet on the desk and his hands behind his head. “Well hell, sweetie, if it makes you that mad, don’t go.”

She rolled her eyes at his solution. “Oh, believe me, I’m not.”

“So then what’s the problem?”

“He’s going to dinner with Pia on Thursday.” Even just saying the words tasted awful.

“Oh damn.” Josh slowly took his feet down from the desk and braced his elbows on his knees. “He was planning on taking you
both
to dinner?
Together
? Has he lost his mind?”

Ellie laughed at the look of genuine concern for Sean’s welfare on Josh’s face. “I don’t think so, but don’t quote me. It’s just now…” She trailed off as she listlessly typed on the computer while she checked for pending reports that needed her attention. She loved working for the police department, but taking every petty harassment and theft of shrubbery report sometimes wore on her nerves. The detective aid was retiring soon, and she had already put in for that job which was little more than a glorified receptionist, but until then, she took the non-emergent reports that were called in to dispatch and put on her screen. Too bad there weren’t any, and not even the phone rang to give her something to do besides ruminate over the minefield in her head.

“Now you want to go to see what she has to say, even if it would put you in harm’s way where she’s concerned.” The problem with having a best friend who knew you was, unfortunately, they knew you. He said nothing else, but got up to pace between her chair and the fax machine. He finally stopped and opened his mouth to speak, but was waylaid by a voice on the radio asking where he was. He looked to her with his eyes full of apology, but answered he’d be on the way in a minute. “I’m sorry. I know we were in the middle of a conversation.”

“I hate it when work interferes with my personal life…at work.” She turned back to her computer and pulled up a pending report. Girl harassing her ex’s new squeeze. And the universe laughed…bastards. “Go ahead, I got this. We’ll talk later.”

Josh leaned down, and gave her a hug and kiss on the cheek. “To be continued.” He winked at her as he walked out to his car and into the burgeoning evening.

She dialed the number of the complainant and sighed. “Indeed.”

* * *

Sean sat at his desk, tossing a bouncy ball he’d gotten from a gum machine at the Italian joint on the far-east side where they’d gone for lunch. To the rhythm of the Thelonius Monk song coming from the tiny speakers on his computer, he launched it against the wall, off the desk, and into his hand, over and over again, as he thought about his situation. Of course, Pia’d made reservations at the restaurant where he’d proposed, and when he’d objected to Friday night on principle, she’d acquiesced to Thursday, as a show of good faith. His real problem was he didn’t want Ellie to feel like he wasn’t giving his all where she was concerned.

She’d expressed reservations about Pia, and was surprisingly polite about it, if a bit blunt, but Pia was his
then
and Ellie, with all her fire and spark, was definitely his
now
. If only he could get her to believe that. He’d tried again, with a text message about the dinner, but again, she’d said no. He’d hoped he’d be able to reconcile his past with his present, but it looked like both sides were intractable.

“You, my friend, look like you have to put down your dog. Are you okay?”

The quiet southern drawl startled him, and he looked up from his musing just in time to get hit in the face with his rubber ball. “Yeah, I’m okay,” he said while rubbing his nose.

Rick ‘Dublin’ Cahill was his running buddy on narcotics, the other half of the self-dubbed ‘Mick Contingent’. A thick-chested kid about five years his junior, with close-cropped blond hair, Dubs was kind of the office bruiser. Not many people got to know his philosophical side, but Sean had been the unwitting—and occasionally unwilling—recipient of his musings for a while now. “I don’t believe you.”

“I’m fine, Dubs,” he reiterated as he crawled beneath his desk in search of his ball. “Women problems.”

He leaned back against the desk and all Sean could see were his jeans and scuffed boots that may have been black at one time but were now beige in witness protection. “Too many or too few?”

Sean chuckled and backed out from under the desk. “Too many, unfortunately.”

“An embarrassment of riches,” Dubs said with a wry grin.

Sean climbed back into his chair and began bouncing the ball between his feet. “Yeah, except one of them’s my ex.”

“My condolences,” his friend answered promptly. “So what’s going on with this collection of women to make you look like you pawned your balls and they sold them out from under you?”

Sean grimaced at the analogy and put the ball away in the top drawer of his desk. “It’s not a collection, it’s just two, and it’s complicated.”

“Well—” Dubs drew out the word as he sought out a chair and pulled it over to the desk next to Sean. He dropped his big frame into the chair which squealed slightly in protest. “Why don’t you tell me what ‘it’ is, and maybe you’ll feel better enough to stop listening to this morose shit you have on your computer. Christ on a bicycle, are we going to a funeral, or what?”

Sean bumped the mouse, bringing his screen to life, and flipped to the next song. Something equally morose, but that was just how his hard drive was feeling today, apparently. He looked around the office to make sure they were fairly unobserved, and murmured, “You remember Pia?”

Dubs snorted a single laugh and blinked slowly. He’d been one of the vocal few who’d told him not to marry her, but had the courtesy not to be the one who said ‘I told you so’. “She’s back?” He, too, kept his voice low and his lips barely moved.

Sean ran both hands though his hair in irritation. “Worse, wants me back.”

“And you told her ‘no,’ right?” He said that like it was the easiest thing in the world, like there was no other answer possible.

“Yes.” That much was true. In the park, at the first available opportunity, he’d told her that he wasn’t taking her back. Pia was his past, regardless of her desires to the contrary. Nothing she could do could change that fact. So how the hell had he ended up taking her to dinner?

“Then what’s the problem? She asked, you answered, and you keep on movin’.”

“In theory,” he agreed, trying to keep the sudden bout of nausea he was experiencing at bay. He reached into the tray drawer of his desk and pulled out his favorite pen, given to him by his sister when he’d graduated from the academy, flipping it between his fingers to give them something to do.

“In practice. I mean, unless you went and did something stupid.” Dubs nodded with the certainty of a man who’d never been married, and certainly never divorced.

“I guess that depends on what you consider to be stupid.” The more he thought about it, the more tangled it became in his head, and talking about it out loud only served to underscore that. Ellie’s expression when he’d asked her to join him and Pia for dinner flashed in his head just then, a mix of mild indignance, confusion, and a touch of hurt. Though he’d only intended to put an exclamation point on his declaration of independence from Pia, he could see why Ellie was reticent to be his punctuation.

“And the new one? I mean, if it’s ‘women’ plural, and one’s your ex, at least one of them has to be new.” Faultless logic, that.

It came to him right then, with a clarity that was frightening. It was entirely possible Ellie was his future, and he was strangely comfortable with that. Regardless of what he did, she rolled with it, she accepted him for who he was, which was more than could ever be said of his ex. “She tolerates my frequent bouts of idiocy.”

A knowing smirk crept slowly across Dub’s lips. “Then I suggest you keep her.”

Their sergeant stuck his head in the room. “We gotta go. East District found a grow operation on a homicide.” He looked over the two of them and their indolent poses, and frowned slightly. “
Now
, boys. C’mon.”

Sean was out of his chair, pulling his gun from the depths of his top drawer and securing it to his hip. “I do love a good party.” He looked to the still-seated Dubs and offered his arm. “Shall we?”

Dubs put a hand to his chest and fluttered his lashes. “Oh my, Mr. O’Leary. How gallant of you.” He made like he was going to take Sean’s arm and then shoved him hard toward the door. “Let’s go, ya goober. I wanna hear more about this new one. I think I might like her.”

* * *

Ellie’s giant leather purse began to vibrate as she checked all the locks on the doors and shut out the lights to roll call. The light in the sergeant’s office was on, but when she poked her head around the corner, she found the lieutenant on the computer at the far end of the room. She waved to him as she answered her phone after a quick glance at the caller ID. “If it isn’t the second hottest detective I know.”

“Who’s the first?” he demanded immediately. Something about his voice, soft and slightly raspy, did something to her physically. Her pulse spiked just a little and her knees went all warm and wobbly.

“I’ll never tell,” she said with a smile in her voice. “How’s your night going?”

“Not too bad, off to go do a thing, you know.” She heard raucous laughter and other assorted mayhem in the background and knew he was on a job. “I was just thinking of you and wanted to hear your voice.”

She was surprised and infinitely pleased that he’d taken a moment out of an op to contact her. Trying to keep her response from bubbling over in affectionate effusion she replied, “You know I always like to hear yours.”

Ellie heard a commanding male voice in the background and the sound of the mouthpiece being muffled. “I gotta go,” Sean said suddenly, sounding a bit regretful.