True Vision (30 page)

He stared at her, realizing that that first moment of tension when she’d kissed him had been a quick trip into his head, into that moment when he’d thought she’d lost consciousness.

She started to laugh, her head thrown back, her whole body shaking.

Seeing her laugh so heartily, so carefree . . . so beautifully naked, snapped him out of his shock. He grabbed her to him and rolled her under his body while she shrieked, then buried his mouth on hers. Her laughter died in her throat, and she met his tongue with the same desperate need that he felt. He smoothed his palm over her breast, unbelievably pleased when her nipple instantly hardened against his skin and she moaned all over again.

He grinned against her mouth, teased her with his tongue. “On the brink of death only a moment ago and you’re already begging for more.”

Her soft laugh puffed air into his mouth. “I wasn’t kidding when I said you were killing me.”

“Guess it was just too much of a good thing.”

“Oh, there can never be too much of that.”

Settling down next to her, he stroked his hand over her hair, tucked a sweat-dampened curl behind her ear, then trailed the tip of his finger over her lips. She nipped at it and smiled so that this heart turned over in his chest. He needed to tell her before one of those trips she took inside his mind told her.

“What are you thinking?” she asked, threading her fingers through the hair above his right ear. “You know I wasn’t really in any danger just now, right?”

Sighing, he rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. Outside, the rain finally began to fall in great, slashing sheets.

He took a breath, held it. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

CHAPTER
FIFTY

C
harlie sat up next to him, no longer surprised at her lack of inhibition with him. Her body felt languid and relaxed, like it did after an hour of yoga. Except for the throb between her legs, the throb in her heart, reminding her what Noah was able to do to her over and over. She had to stop herself from touching him again, closing her hand over the part of him that now lay limp and exhausted against his belly. She’d give him ten more minutes, she thought, and then put her life in his hands again. Assuming he was done telling her whatever he wanted to tell her.

But then he sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. In the next moment, he was standing and pulling on his pants.

“Noah?”

He left his pants unbuttoned, God, so sexy, and drew on his T-shirt, hiding his gorgeous body. Disappointment arced through her. Surely they could take a little more time to play before getting to work. The blackmailing murderers weren’t going anywhere, were they? And wasn’t he the one who didn’t want her to be bait, anyway?

Yeah, so she was stalling. Get over it.

He cocked his head, his expression deadly serious. “I can’t focus when you look like that.”

She glanced down at her naked self, then grinned back up at him. “Good. My plan is working.”

He bent, plucked her underwear off the floor and held it out to her. “Please.”

Sighing, she got out of bed. While she dressed, he left the bedroom.

A few minutes later, she found him in the kitchen making coffee. Tension had stiffened his shoulders.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “You’re starting to scare me.”

He gestured at the table. “Let’s sit.”

She did as he asked, pressing her hands between her knees to hide the sudden tremble in them. Was it over already? Was he going to tell her he was returning to Chicago, that they were through? She’d already checked on how many newspapers Simon Walker owned in Illinois. Three. One right in a Chicago suburb, as luck would have it. If Noah wanted her to, all she had to do was pack.

Except the thought of leaving Lake Avalon, Alex, her father . . . could she do it? Lake Avalon was her home, her heart. She would have left it a long time ago if she didn’t truly love it, didn’t truly belong here.

Noah pulled a chair over so that it faced hers. He sat so that their knees nearly touched. She would have scooted forward so that they did, but he seemed to want the distance.

All the easier to leave her.

He bowed his head, as though saying a prayer, before raising it and meeting her eyes. The pain in his gaze shocked her, but when she reached out to grasp his hand, he pulled back. “Just let me . . .” He trailed off, shook his head. “Damn, this is harder than I thought it’d be.”

Okay, now he
really
was scaring her. And the nurturing part of her wanted to make it easier for him. “Hey, it’s no sweat. We’ve had a good time, right? Nothing wrong with that.”

His eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s over, right? That’s what this is about? You’re trying to tell me you’re going back to Chicago and long-distance relationships are too difficult to deal with, yada, yada, yada. I understand. I’ve thought about it myself.”

“Yada, yada, yada?” he asked, his voice dangerously low.

She shook her head, rolled her eyes. “Come on, Noah. We’re both adults. Did you think I’d be so in love with you already that you’d crush me by leaving? Come on. We’re more mature than that. I mean, it’s silly to think that this week has been about love anyway. It’s way too soon for that. What we’ve had is good sex.
Great
sex. Wow, it’s going to be tough to live without that, isn’t it?” She hoped he didn’t notice the crack in her voice that gave away how much what she’d just said hurt, how much she hadn’t meant a word of it.

He scooted back the chair and stood, paced away. “Well, okay, guess I was . . .”

“Making a big deal about nothing?”

He stopped and faced her, then tilted his head to study her. “That’s all bullshit, right? Everything you just said.”

She pursed her lips. Wow, he was good. She must have been squinting all over the place. He’d said that was her give-away when she lied. “Uh, well . . .”

He started to grin. “Okay, whew. You freaked me out a little there. What were you doing? Trying to make leaving you easier or something? What the hell?”

“I, uh, well, I thought, you know, that’s kind of what I do. Make things easier for other people.”

“Well, don’t do that with me. Ever. Okay? I mean, yeah, I’ll have to leave eventually. I have a job. But not right away. I have several weeks of unused vacation saved up over the years. And even then I don’t plan to walk away from you, from this. We’ll work something out, okay?”

She heaved out a relieved breath. “Thank God.”

His answering grin faded after a few moments, though. “Of course, you’re going to want to hear what I have to tell you before you decide you’re willing to keep me around awhile longer.”

She shrugged, tucked hair behind her ear. “Go ahead. Just try and turn me off.”

He sat down again, and she thought for a second that she saw tears in his eyes. Her heart gave an ominous thud. He was scared. She knew better than to reach out to him this time and kept her hands to herself.

He cleared his throat, craned his neck one direction and then the other as though popping kinks. When he finally spoke, his voice was low, shaky. “When I first became a cop, I was paired with another rookie. A few years older than me, but still a rookie. He was also a new father.”

She watched his face, alarmed when his complexion washed pale and his anxiety rolled over her in a wave. She moved her hands under her thighs, sitting on them to keep from touching him.

“We’d been partners for about six months when we answered a noise complaint and walked into the middle of a drug deal.”

Charlie captured her tongue between her teeth to stifle her gasp. Oh, no. Oh, God, no.

“When all hell broke loose, Brendan took the first hit. He went down while he was calling for backup, and . . .”

His breathing went deep and fast, and sitting on her hands suddenly didn’t seem like such a great idea. She started to reach for him. “Noah—”

“I turned to run,” he cut in, his tone harsh. “They shot me in the back.”

She leaned back in the chair, her heart skipping through several beats. She thought of the scar, the small, circular pucker of flesh on his lower back. He’d been shot.
Shot.
Her head started to spin.

“Have you ever seen that
RoboCop
movie from the eighties?” he asked.

She swallowed against a surge of nausea. “I couldn’t make it through the beginning.”

“That’s what those bastards did to Brendan. Two held him down, and the third used a shotgun to shoot off his hands, one at a time.”

She closed her eyes, gripped the seat of the chair with perspiring hands.

“Then his feet. I can still hear him screaming. Begging. And all I could do was lay there and watch, knowing that I was next. Knowing that instead of helping him, I tried to run. Lucky for me, our backup arrived before it was my turn.”

He got up abruptly, knocking the chair back a foot, and turned his back to her, bracing his hands on the counter as though he needed the support to keep from folding. “After I got out of the hospital, I found out that the guys who did it were informants on a huge investigation involving the DEA, FBI, ATF, you name it. In other words, they couldn’t be touched. So I hunted them down myself and . . . I killed them. Every one of them. Made it look like they killed each other, and then I walked away and never looked back.”

Charlie stared at his back, shocked.

He faced her, his green eyes piercing. “That’s the man I am, Charlie. I didn’t trust the justice system to work, and I didn’t even give it a chance. I wanted them to pay, clear and simple. And I made them pay. I don’t feel bad about it. If anything, I feel bad that I don’t feel bad. What I did was wrong. I defied everything I stand for as a cop. I did the
wrong
thing, and I’m not sure you can live with that.”

She flinched back, shocked further. “You think I—”

“I think you stand for truth and justice and doing the right thing. I’m the dirty cop you write a page-one story about and win a Pulitzer.”

She said nothing for a long moment. So he’d already decided how she would react. Did he really think things in her head were that black-and-white, no room for shades of gray? That he’d tell her what happened, and she’d instantly condemn him?

Mac hadn’t given her the benefit of the doubt, either. And her mother assumed she was trying to hurt her when she’d told her about Rena’s cancer. What was it about her that made others think she was so cold?

“Please say something.”

She shifted her gaze to Noah’s. He looked absolutely terrified of what she would say or do next, as though any moment she would yank the lever that dropped the floor out from under his feet and left him dangling from the noose. And that made her feel sick inside. He expected harsh judgment from her. And oh, it hurt.

“I . . .” She hesitated, shook her head. Lost—she was so lost. “I don’t know what to say.”

He nodded, his lips tightening into a thin line. “That’s okay. Uh, maybe we should take some time . . . you know, think about things.”

If that’s what he needed . . . Oh, God, she didn’t want that. She wanted
him
. Forever and always. Faced with losing him, it hit her like a mallet between the eyes: She loved this man. She didn’t want to live without him. But could she live with what he’d done? A part of her could understand why, but he was at least partially right. If she’d discovered Logan had done something similar, it’d be a big story about a vigilante cop and justice run amok.

“Charlie?”

She focused on him. He was waiting for her to agree to the we-should-take-some-time thing. And maybe that was the answer. Time. She gave a halfhearted nod. “Okay, sure.”

He gestured lamely toward the hall. “I’m going to hop in the shower, then I’ll run out and get the stuff we’ll need to wire you up before we go to the Royal Palm.”

She nodded again. Don’t go. Please don’t go yet. “Okay.”

He gave her a tight smile, his eyes miserable, then walked out.

Charlie’s shoulders sagged, and she looked down at her hands tangled on her knees. That hadn’t gone well. And she had no idea what to do about it.

She heard the shower come on, and her heart felt leaden. She shouldn’t have let him walk away like that, but she didn’t know what else to do. She couldn’t look him in the eye and tell him she thought it was okay that he’d killed three men in cold blood. It wasn’t okay. No matter how much she might understand what had driven him.

It wasn’t okay.

Regardless, she loved him.

Pushing up out of the chair, she headed toward the bathroom.

She shed her clothes outside the door then eased inside. Steam rose in clouds, parting for her as she opened the shower door and stepped inside. Noah, who had his hands braced on the wall, the water hitting him full in the face, turned toward her just as she slid her arms around his waist and pressed a kiss to his bare chest. His eyes were wide as he looked down at her. Hopeful.

She smiled up at him, holding his gaze, as she kissed his chest then ran a tongue around his nipple until his breathing quickened and his desire for her nudged against her belly. His hands caught in her hair, and groaning, he backed her against the wall, lifting her until her legs wrapped around his waist.

He sank into her with a sigh.

CHAPTER
FIFTY-ONE

C
an you hear me now?”

Charlie turned her back to the mostly empty lobby and lifted a hand to her right ear. The earbud tucked inside was more comfortable than she’d expected, and Noah had said the microphone he’d tucked inside her cleavage under her tank top was sensitive enough to pick up the sound of her heartbeat.

“Yes, just like I could hear you three minutes ago,” she said, careful to speak normally as he’d instructed.

Strain laced his chuckle inside her head, uncertainty. He didn’t know where they stood, and she couldn’t blame him. She didn’t know, either. “Where are you?” he asked, all business.