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He’d attempted, in his own way, to make his parents come around. He’d cooked, cleaned and tried to take care of them. There were tiny glimmers, moments when he thought things were finally on the right path, but in the end, all his efforts came to nothing.
When he was just twelve, a drug dealer, enraged because his parents were into him for several hundred dollars, had killed them both. Snuffed out their lives without so much as a peep from either for them. They were that far gone into their make-believe worlds.
And he had seen it all through the crack created by the doorjamb and a closet door.
He’d tried to wake them, knowing even as he desperately shook his mother, then his father, that they were both dead. And he’d been the one who had called 911 to report their murders.
Any shred of childhood he might have still possessed died with his parents that day. He’d become a man with all the burdens, all the sorrows that entailed. A man within a boy’s body, but still a man.
Which was why he had such a hard time in the system, a hard time trying to adjust to strangers, some of whom did their best to make him feel at home. Strangers who thought their rules applied to him. They didn’t realize that it was too late for him. He didn’t fit into a family structure anymore.
That door had closed for him when he was twelve.
He’d grown up isolated, insulated, not needing anyone or anything and not allowing anyone to need him.
So what was he doing here, letting this woman hang on to his hand as if it were her tether back to life as she waited for a resident doctor to examine her? Why wasn’t he back at the apartment complex, taking down statements, doing his job? That was what he was good at—detective work, not comforting.
Hell, he wouldn’t be able to comfort someone if his life depended on it. He just didn’t know how. So there was absolutely no point in trying.
Yet Cavanaugh seemed glad to see him, glad to hang on to his hand as if it were some kind of talisman that could keep her safe. Her hand felt small within his. It made him want to protect her.
“You looked scared.” He finally answered her earlier question.
He knew it wasn’t the right thing to say, but it was why he was here. He saw no point in sugarcoating, or lying. He’d used lies to survive on the street when he’d run away from his last foster home. When he’d wound up living in an abandoned warehouse with another kid named Tierney. Used lies until the lines between reality and fantasy became completely blurred for him. He wasn’t about to go there anymore. The path back always became hard to find.
Teri’s first instinct was to say, no, she wasn’t scared. The only thing that scared her was having harm come to the members of her family. Beyond that, she was pretty much fearless—like the rest of them.
But her reaction to hospitals, to what they represented to her, wasn’t logical. It wasn’t anything she wanted to explain to Hawk. “I don’t expect you to understand.”
The nurse had returned to take her pulse, then asked her a couple of quick questions, all of which went down on her chart. “How’s the pain?” the woman asked.
“Not good,” Teri muttered.
“This’ll help.”
Before she could ask what she was referring to, the nurse had given her an injection. Leaving to dispose of the needle, she returned with a starched hospital gown and deposited it on the bed.
“Here, put this on. Someone’ll be here with you shortly.” With that, the woman promptly disappeared again.
Teri pushed the gown onto the chair.
“What are you doing?” Hawk asked.
“There’s no way I’m putting one of those things on. If they want to see this wound, all I have to do is lift up my shirt and they can cut away the bandages the paramedic put on.” She saw he was about to say something and cut him off. “I won’t be reduced to something sitting on an assembly line table.”
Color rose to her cheeks. In the nine months they’d been partnered, he didn’t remember ever seeing her get angry.
Or was that fear doing it to her? “Try me.”
“Excuse me?”
“You said you didn’t think I would understand why you’re afraid of hospitals. Try me.”
Even as the words came out of his mouth, he wasn’t entirely sure just how they got there. He made his way through life not getting involved on any level with anything but the cases he was assigned, and then only in strictly a professional way. It was more than a matter of needing to be focused or possessing tunnel vision, he just didn’t care to have people’s lives touch his. It was cleaner that way. Neater.
Getting involved in someone’s life wasn’t worth the effort or the trouble. That, too, had been a lesson he’d gleaned while raising himself in his parents’ rundown, rat-infested apartment.
Yet there was something about Cavanaugh that reached out to him.
Hawk was probably going to use this against her somehow, but since he asked, she felt she owed him an explanation. After all, he was still here, not turning his back and walking away.
“My uncle died in a hospital. This hospital,” she added. “I was twelve.”
Twelve.
The same age as he’d been when everything in his life had changed for him.
It felt odd having something beyond the police force in common with her. But then, having an uncle die in the line of duty wasn’t exactly the same thing as seeing your parents gunned down in front of you for less money than some people spent for a week’s groceries.
Restless, he shoved his hands into his pockets and wondered why he wasn’t leaving. “You and your uncle were close?”
“Not as close as I am to my other uncle. Or my father,” she added.
The time her father had been wounded in the line of duty, she thought her whole world had been shattering. She’d been so terrified, she couldn’t get herself to come to the hospital with the rest of her siblings, afraid that if she did, if she came, it would be the last time she would see her father alive.
Just as it had been with her uncle.
“My whole family’s close,” she told him. Her words echoed back to her. Because he had no family, would he take that the wrong way? Would he think she was gloating because she had such a wonderful support system and he had no one to turn to?
Hawk made it seem as if he didn’t need anyone, she reminded herself. He liked being alone.
Someone was paging a doctor to neurology. Hawk waited for the voice over the loudspeaker to fade away. “If you’re so close, why didn’t you want me to call one of them?”
“Because I don’t want them to worry.” She could almost envision the lot of them, crowding around the bed, shooting questions at her, looking like a backup for a worried Greek chorus. She could deal much better with them once she was completely patched up and this was behind her. “You, on the other hand, won’t worry. You can just keep my mind off the fact that it hurts like a son of a gun.”
His eyes narrowed. They both knew that she was responsible for ninety-nine percent of the conversations they did have. “And just how do you figure I’d do that?”
Teri grinned from ear to ear despite the pain that insisted on shooting through her with the precision of a Swiss watch. “Snappy patter comes to mind.”
The remark was so incongruous, the image so out of character for him, Hawk laughed. The rich sound encompassed the tiny area they occupied.
She thought of her father’s fresh coffee, first thing in the morning. Rich, smooth. Fortifying. “You know that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you laugh. Nice. You should do that more often.”
His face was somber again. “You do like telling people what to do, don’t you?”
“Second nature, I guess.” The pain had been melting away, but now the room was in danger of having the same thing happen to it. She grasped on to the metal railing on one side of the bed. “Damn, what did that nurse jab into me?”
“Well, if I’m lucky, something to put you to sleep.” She began struggling to get off the bed. He caught her by the arm, holding her in place. “Hey, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I don’t want to go to sleep here. I want to go home.” She was going to leave while she could still feel her legs. Sort of.
“Cavanaugh—”
She clutched his hand and raised imploring eyes up to his face. That was twice today she’d looked at him that way, and he didn’t like it. Didn’t like the position it put him in or how it made him feel—uncertain of his parameters around her. “Promise me that you’ll take me home.”
He’d seen prisoners less desperate to escape their jail cells. Hawk tried to remove her fingers and found that they were locked in almost a death grip around his wrist. Very firmly, he peeled back her fingers from his flesh. “Look, they have to stitch you up first, clean the wound—”
“Okay, okay,” she interrupted, “but I’m not staying here overnight. Do you understand?”
What he understood was that somehow, the department had paired him with a woman who was a damn good detective, but that didn’t change the fact that she was irritating and crazy to boot.
“If I say no, you’re not going to let go of my hand, are you?”
He saw Teri slowly move her head from side to side and knew that she wasn’t kidding. He could, of course, disengage himself from her. She had a good grip but she was, at bottom, absolutely no match for him. Even if he were a ninety-pound weakling, once the medication put her out, he could easily just slip away.
Again, he didn’t know why he didn’t. Maybe it was because for some reason she looked as if she needed him, and even though he told himself he didn’t want to become involved, he had a hell of a hard time turning his back on that. On her.
It was why he was in law enforcement in the first place. Because people needed to be protected. From drug dealers, like the ones who had snuffed out his parents long before they were murdered, and from burglars, like the ones they’d caught today who had gotten off on seeing the terrified faces of their victims.
People needed protecting. And his badge made him a protector.
He sighed, surrendering the battle that had never really gotten onto the battlefield. “Okay, I’ll stay.”
“And take me home when the time comes.”
“And take you home when the time comes,” he finally said after she’d pinned him with those blue-gray eyes of hers.
It was another three hours before she was finally able to get into his car again. Three hours in which she’d been tortured, injected, stitched and finally bandaged. Three hours in which she’d hovered between pain and a drug-enabled euphoria.
She was still somewhere in the region of the latter. Stretching as best she could, she sighed and leaned back against the seat.
“God, I feel like I could just leap off the top of something and fly,” she said.
Knowing that a silly grin had taken over her face, and not caring, Teri turned to flash it at her partner. She congratulated herself for finding a soft spot within his hard exterior. It made her feel giddy. She liked getting to him. Because he sure as hell had gotten to her.
Cavanaugh wasn’t even attempting to put on her seat belt. Probably out of her head, Hawk decided. Reaching over her, he took hold of the seat belt and pulled it around her until he could fit the metal tongue into the groove and snap it in place.
“You feel that way because they pumped you full of Vicodin.” He snapped his own seat belt into place, then looked at her. A tinge of amusement came out of nowhere and almost made him smile. She looked as if she didn’t have a care in the world. “You don’t have much tolerance for medication, do you?”
“Nope,” she breathed, watching as the word floated away from her. She could almost see it. “But I can tolerate pain pretty well. And pain-in-the butts,” she tacked on, looking at him significantly. Her grin widened, then narrowed as she attempted to pull thoughts together. It was like trying to corral six-week-old puppies in an open yard. “You know, you’re a pretty nice guy when you let yourself.”
Hawk began to thread his way out of the small side parking lot. He wasn’t about to let her get sloppy on him. He was already having a hard enough time dealing with her and the strange undercurrent of feelings bubbling within him, as well. “You didn’t leave me any choice.”
“Oh, c’mon, Jackie, we both know better.”
His spine stiffened at the sound of the name. He stepped a little too hard on the brake at the light. “Don’t call me that.”
His mother had called him Jackie when he was very, very young. Hearing the name set off chords he didn’t want touched.
Her head spinning and bursts of joy throbbing through her veins, Teri backed off. “Sorry. ‘Hawk’ just seems too harsh for someone who held my hand.”
“I didn’t hold your hand, you held mine,” he reminded her. It wasn’t strictly true. He’d held hers while the doctor had stitched her up. “And it’s Hawk. It always has been.”
She sighed, cotton beginning to spread itself all around her as she sank back in the seat. The scenery was whizzing by her at a rate that made it hard for her to fully absorb. She still had trouble putting the sequence of events in order. Everything seemed to be vying for the same exact place. Holding her head didn’t help. “My brain feels like mush.”
He laughed under his breath. “And this is different from normal—how?”
Even in her present state of confusion, she was aware that he was trying to regain ground, trying to come off like the fire-breathing prince of darkness he always was. Too late.
“Sorry, I’ve seen your underbelly. You can’t retrace your steps.”
She was babbling. It was probably the codeine the doctor had injected her with. But, God help him, she’d aroused his curiosity. “Retrace my steps? What are you talking about?”
“I’m on to you, Jack Hawkins. You come on like some Clint Eastwood knockoff, snapping out eight, nine words a day and keeping everyone at bay, but inside, you’re a decent guy.” She turned to look at him. “Just like your alter ego.”
“What alter ego?” Bullet wound or no bullet wound, he was quickly losing his patience with her. “Cavanaugh, what the hell are you babbling about?”
It was as clear as a bell to her. “Clint Eastwood’s a really nice guy when he’s not playing tough guys. I heard somewhere that he’s a real pussycat.”
There was traffic on the road at this hour, which meant that he was stuck in the car even longer than he could tolerate. Served him right, he thought darkly. No good deed ever went unpunished.
“Cavanaugh, get this through your addled brain. I am not interested in your font of useless knowledge or your Vicodin-laced attempt at psychoanalysis. Now why don’t you be a good little detective and just pass out the way the doctor said you would?”
“And make it easy for you?” she scoffed gleefully. “Nope. I want to enjoy this little breach.” The sound of her own voice egged her on. “Don’t get me wrong. I like tough guys. My cousin Patrick could spit nails—until his fiancée came into his life.” And good luck to her, she thought. She adored her cousin, but living with him was going to be a tough thing. Patrick had his demons.
Not unlike the man next to her.
He had to stop her before she was off and running in another direction. He’d thought she was bad before, but that didn’t hold a candle to the way she could run off at the mouth with this painkiller in her.
“Look, I don’t know what gave you the idea that I’m interested in your family history, but I’m not, so save your breath.” He glanced at her as he came to a light. She was smiling broadly at him. “Now what?”
“It’s not working.”
He knew he should just keep quiet. After all, that was his way, wasn’t it? Allowing himself to enjoy silence? But something about the look on her face had him ask, “What’s not working?”
“Your tough-guy act. I’ve seen the light.”
He just bet she had. And it was probably all the shades of the rainbow. “That’s the pain medication. It distorts things.”
“Not enough to fool me.”
There was no point in arguing with her. He’d already learned that she could argue the ears off a stone statue.
“Look, Cavanaugh, just save your breath,” he repeated. “Okay?”
“Okay.”
He’d won that round. Hawk found that difficult to believe. She never retreated like that. It wasn’t like her. As he came to a stop before another light, wondering if she was all right, Hawk looked at her.
The next thing he knew, Teri was kissing him.
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