Flirting With Disaster (15 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

T
OM
STARED
AT
the text from Isabelle, willing it to go away so he could practice some self-control. He’d hoped she wouldn’t get in touch. The sex had been casual. She’d made that clear.

But then she’d texted him, asking if he planned to stop by, and the push-pull of it had nearly snapped him in two.

His body was shouting yes. Screaming it, really.
Yes, stop by. Drop everything and go over now. Tell this judge and this trial to fuck off. What you really need is
that
again.

If he’d been eighteen years old, he might have imitated the Road Runner in his eagerness to indulge in a second round. A dust cloud would have poofed up around his feet.

But he had a little more control now. The bigger problem was that his brain was telling him to hightail it over there, too. To press her a little. See where she was tender. Find out if he could discover that weak point in her defenses and get her to let him in.

His body agreed, because his body still had all the nuance of that eighteen-year-old boy.

But his conscience...that was a trickier beast. His conscience told him he was an asshole. That he never should have touched her in the first place, not while he was checking up on her.

Despite that, he hadn’t had the strength to say no. So he’d given her an out instead.

I’d like to, but I’m not sure when I’ll get out of here. It could be late.

She’d say no. Or blow him off. That was what he’d told himself. She was a beautiful woman who liked to be alone; she didn’t need a half-assed offer of sex from a guy who’d leave town in a week. He was nothing to her. Last night had meant nothing.

But then she wrote back.

Late is fine with me. Just let me know if you’re up for company.

Oh, shit. Even two hours later, he could still feel the way his baser instincts had surged to life with a rough jolt.

If
you’re up for company,
she’d said.
If.
Which was how he found himself in his car at 8:00 p.m. staring at her texts and unsuccessfully trying to curb his need.

He opened the text box.

Just wrapped up the last meeting. Are you still up?

“Please don’t be up,” he said out loud, even as every nerve in his body prayed for the opposite.

He waited for a few moments, aware that his was the last car in the courthouse lot and pretending that meant he was good at his job. He
was
good, after all. Everything was in place for the protective duty tonight. The morning schedule was set up, starting with a 6:00 a.m. sweep of the courthouse and the highway leading to it. He was done. Even the boss needed dinner and sleep. Or something better.

His phone chimed. He cursed. His heart raced as he dared to look.

It’s 8:00 p.m. Of course I’m still up, silly. Come check my perimeter?

“Damn it,” he said, the words rough with strained laughter.

She wasn’t who she said she was, but she was exactly who he’d suspected. She wasn’t a criminal. Not really. She was a woman on the run from trouble.

He could just tell her the truth. He could confess. Beg for her forgiveness and tell her he was here to help.

But she’d run not just from bad guys, but from the cops, as well. The FBI had tagged her as a person of interest. She’d probably helped her father hide. And if she’d been paying taxes this whole time, then she’d stolen someone else’s identity to do it.

Even with all that playing through his head, he started his car and hit the highway toward her place.

He needed time to review the details. He needed time to think. He wouldn’t be able to think when he was near her. But in the end, he drove straight past the turnoff to the judge’s and headed to Isabelle’s place because she’d asked him to.

She answered the door with a big smile that would’ve been marred by the streak of green paint along her cheek if he hadn’t found the paint adorable.

“You’ve been plying your ghastly trade, I see,” he said.

She looked down at the spatter of white paint on her black sweater. “I have. But no cadavers were harmed in the process, I promise.” She’d been premed in college before she’d dropped out after her father had fled prosecution during her senior year. These were things he should have found out during casual conversation. Instead, he’d found them in the FBI file.

Tom ducked his head and stepped past her.

“Did you have dinner?” she asked.

“I didn’t, but I’m fine.”

“Listen, I’m no Jill, but I can make a mean grilled cheese sandwich. Assuming you like them made with American cheese and slightly stale bread. I promise you can’t even tell once it’s fried in butter.”

“Sounds perfect,” he said, happy to hear her laugh as he followed her toward the kitchen.

She got him a glass of ice water when he said he couldn’t have wine, then set a pan on the stove. “Thanks for last night,” she said, as if that were normal conversation.

Tom managed to swallow the water in his mouth with only a minimal amount of sputtering. “You’re welcome,” he rasped. “I mean, thank you, too.”

“It was nice,” she said, with a glance that swept down his whole body.

“Yes.” He was trying to think of a polite way to say, “I also really enjoyed fucking you,” but she changed the subject before he could manage it.

“Did you have a long day? You look stressed.”

“Yeah. New stuff came up.”

“That guy is pretty crazy, huh? The survivalist? And his brother, I suppose.”

“They definitely have some issues, even aside from being murderers.” That was all he was going to say, but as he watched her smear butter over the cheese sandwiches and drop them into the sizzling pan, he realized this was an in. “They didn’t have much of a chance, I guess. By all accounts their dad was a bad guy. Mom died at home, giving birth to Saul in their cabin. They were raised alone by their father, and he was a crazy son of a bitch who got in trouble with the law a lot.”

“Mmm.” She stared into the pan and didn’t respond.

“He obviously had a big effect on their lives.”

“Families are funny that way,” she muttered.

He watched her flip the sandwiches and tried to think of some other way to open her up. He knew it wouldn’t be easy. She couldn’t trust him because he was a marshal. He had to find a way to show her he would sympathize. That he understood that the world was more complicated than the law allowed.

His neck prickled as an idea occurred to him.

“Do you want something else with this?” she asked. “You probably need more than a grilled cheese to fill you up.”

“No, that’s good.” Suddenly nervous, he eased past her to get two plates from the cupboard. She checked the bottoms of the sandwiches then slipped them onto the plates before carrying them to her small table.

He brought their glasses and took a seat after she did. “My family...” he started, before pausing to wet his dry throat. “My family seemed perfect, I think. We had a good life. Stable. A house and a backyard and two parents. The American dream. But my brother had problems.”

She frowned as she chewed, looking confused. “I thought you only had a sister.”

“I do now. My brother died.”

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly, her voice alarmed, as if it had just happened.

“He was five years older than me. The firstborn. Popular. Confident. Star football player. I don’t know what happened. He made the wrong friends at some point. Partied a little too hard. Then he was tackled in a game, and his leg was screwed up pretty badly. He wasn’t the star running back anymore. He got bored and partied a little harder.”

Isabelle nodded.

“None of us realized it at the time, though. He was charming and outgoing and so confident through all of it. He graduated and went to college. I was thirteen, and he was still my hero.”

He stared at the grilled cheese in his hands for a moment before he set it down. He realized Isabelle had set hers down, too, but she still said nothing. He’d hoped that he would need to tell only a little bit. Let her know that he understood the kind of darkness family could pull you into. But he hadn’t said that word yet. Any of those words.
Heroin. Junkie. Overdose.
The words his parents would never say, even now.

“I don’t know when he started using, but he didn’t make it through his freshman year of college. He was a full-blown junkie by February.”

“Heroin?” she whispered.

“Yes. We didn’t know it at first. All I knew was he was back home and living in his old room in the basement, and I was happy about that. Can you believe it? He had free time to spend with me. I thought it was great.”

She nodded. “Of course you did.”

“But that didn’t last long. By the time I was fourteen, I knew he was shooting up. At fifteen, I was the only one in the house who would talk about it. My sister was older, but she was busy with school and not the type to confront anyone. And my parents were just...” He waved a hand. “They couldn’t accept it. They refused to admit he had a problem. They said he had a lot of pain with his knee and ankle and he’d bounce back.”

Tom took a bite of his sandwich, surprised that it tasted good. He was halfway through it in a few bites, but Isabelle didn’t say a word. Why wouldn’t she talk? Why wouldn’t she offer him something in return?

“He overdosed?” she finally asked.

He’d told most of the story. He might as well tell the rest. “Yes. When I was sixteen. I found him in his room the next day.”

“Oh, Tom,” she said. Her hand came into his vision and curled around his wrist. “I’m so sorry.”

He nodded and forced a shrug. “I try not to let my colleagues know about my...phobia, but I really don’t like seeing corpses.”

“Shit,” she whispered. “I’m sorry I teased you.”

“You didn’t know. I’m sorry I overreacted. We all have our secrets. It’s not easy to talk about them.”

This was it. Now she’d tell him a secret, too. Reward him for opening up. For trusting her. But instead, she asked for more about him.

“Is that how you ended up in law enforcement?”

He couldn’t give her any more, so he shrugged. “Probably. How did you end up doing this? Were your parents artists?”

She drew her hand back. “No.”

“Doctors?” he pressed.

“No, I’m just an oddball.”

Tom felt suddenly furious. He wanted to help her, and he didn’t know how, and she wouldn’t give him
anything
. Did she think he told that story to everyone?

Just as quickly, his fury washed away on a wave of self-loathing. He had no right to be angry. She hadn’t asked for his story, and for all he knew, she wanted nothing more than to usher him out the door and tell him to take his emotional baggage with him. And if he was realizing now that it had felt good to share his secrets with her, that wasn’t her fault. If there was closeness between them, maybe it was one-sided.

All he really needed to do was tell her the truth.
I know you’re Beth Pozniak, and I want to help.
But then he’d have to admit that he’d lied. She wouldn’t trust him at all. She might even run again, and then he’d have to get the FBI involved. Even if she didn’t run, if she shut him down, he’d have to take her in and turn her over, and there was something
wrong
about it all. He could feel it.

He just wanted to get her story first, so he could decide what to do. Had she helped her father escape? Had she helped conceal evidence? Did she know where he was now?

One more day, and then he’d tell her. He just needed more information first. He had to figure out what he was missing.

He barely registered when Isabelle swept his plate away.

Her father had been a good cop, by all standards. Steady, but not ambitious. Almost anyone could’ve made sergeant after fifteen years. He hadn’t gotten there until nineteen, and he’d never bothered with a detective rank. So, unremarkable, but a decent, steady, average guy. Until he’d shot a fellow police officer to cover up a ring of cops who’d been skimming drugs and money from busts for years.

Quite a fall from grace. A jettison from grace, really, once the extent of the corruption had been revealed.

Still, it all would’ve been just another Hollywood movie script about crooked cops. Standard Chicago stuff, even if the public would be shocked to hear that. Tom had tracked down ex-cop fugitives before. There were bad cops all over the place, and in Chicago it was practically tradition.

The corruption ring would’ve carried on for another twenty years if some young idealist with a new badge hadn’t become suspicious about cocaine missing from the evidence locker.

It had been her bust. She’d been protective. She’d asked a few questions. Fine. But she hadn’t been willing to be waved off. She’d dug in. Pushed the wrong guy. Followed the wrong cop. She’d seen things she shouldn’t have seen, and it had all exploded.

The hit on her had gone wrong. It was supposed to have looked as if she’d stumbled onto a drug deal in public housing while checking an outstanding warrant. But she’d been only wounded before managing to escape from the apartment complex onto a crowded street. She would’ve gotten away and ID’d the cop who’d shot her, so she was chased down.

The eyewitnesses to the second gunshot had given chaotic descriptions of exactly how many cops had been there and what had gone down, but in the end, Sergeant Malcolm Pozniak had been arrested for the murder of a fellow police officer. And then he’d talked. Just a little. Just enough to make everyone nervous before he lawyered up.

A few weeks later, he’d run.

Isabelle slid a plate of pie in front of Tom and sat next to him at the table.

“Aren’t you having pie?” he asked. “I heard it’s your favorite.”

“It is. I had a piece for breakfast. And lunch. This one is yours. You look like you need it.”

“I don’t want to eat your pie,” he said then smiled stupidly at her when she laughed.

“Well, that’s kind of disappointing, Marshal Duncan.”

“Too easy.” He held up the spoon when she started to speak. “I meant the joke, not you.”

“Then you don’t know me very well,” she countered.