Hot Winter Nights

Joe sighed. Scrubbed a hand down his face. A rare tell and an admission of guilt. “In case you’re confused on the details, she dumped you.”

Lucas nodded. “I’m going to fix that.”

Joe looked at him for a long moment and Lucas knew this could go one of two ways. Either they were still friends and partners or they weren’t.

Joe sighed again. “She was here.”

“What?”

“You woke up looking for her, right?” Joe asked. “Because she was here. Pretty much the whole time, actually. Wouldn’t leave your side, and believe me, I tried to convince her otherwise, but she refused to go and get the rest she needed until she knew you were out of danger.”

Lucas’s heart squeezed painfully. “I’m going to make things right, Joe. I’m going to get her back.”

Joe snorted. “Good luck with that. Getting Molly to change her mind once she’s set it is . . . well, you’d have a better shot at getting hell to freeze over.”

Lucas shoved his feet into his beat-up running shoes. “It’s going to happen.” He straightened. “Are we okay?”

“You really think you can fix it with Molly?”

“I have to believe it.”

Joe stared at him for another long beat and then nodded. “Then we’re okay.”

Two days later Lucas showed up at the office. Once again he wasn’t yet cleared for work, but also once again, he was going batshit crazy at home with nothing to do.

Especially when everything he needed was here.

He walked up to Molly’s desk. She lifted her head and met his gaze, and for a beat he saw so many emotions there he couldn’t breathe. But in the next beat, she shut herself down and gave him a look utterly clear of any emotion.

“You’re not cleared for work,” she said. “Doctor said you have to stay off your leg.”

“I know.”

She arched a brow. “And yet you’re on your leg. Where’re your crutches?”

“Probably wherever your cane is.”

She sighed and went back to her keyboard, her fingers moving at the speed of light, but he could tell she wasn’t in it. Her attention was still on him.

Good, because he had something to say. “You were looking for an out, and when you found one, you took it. Tell me that’s not what you did.”

She opened her mouth and then closed it. Her eyes too. Then she drew a deep breath and opened them again. “I can’t tell you that,” she admitted. “Because that’s what I did. But for whatever it’s worth, I regret it and I’m sorry.”

He nodded, accepting that for gospel, because another thing Molly didn’t do was lie. Feeling tentatively hopeful for the first time in days, he set an iPad down in front of her.

“What’s this?” she asked warily.

“Why don’t you look?”

Instead, she stood and walked around the desk toward him. She was limping pretty badly, more than he’d seen in a long time, and he reached for her.

She let him pull her in and he let out his first real breath since that night in the bingo hall, the one that was haunting him because she’d gotten hurt on his watch.

“You’re shaking,” she murmured and pulled back an inch to look into his face. “Are you okay?”

His throat went tight. She’d been through hell too, and yet she wanted to know if he was okay. He ran his hand up her back and into her hair to palm the back of her head, holding her to him. “Better now,” he said, wondering if she’d let him hold her like this for the rest of time. “You turned off your phone. Didn’t answer your door. When I went to your dad’s, he threatened to shoot my balls off from where he sat.”

She gasped. “He did not!”

“He did. And I risked said balls to ask him to get you to call me.”

She shifted free of him and looked away. “He told me that part.”

“You didn’t call.”

She bit her lower lip. “I almost did.” She turned to her desk and the iPad he’d set on it. “But I needed to think.”

“About . . . ?” he asked.

“Relationships. How I self-destruct them when I’m scared.” She slid him a look. “You lying to me . . .”

Ah, and now onto the gut-wrenching portion of the day. Reaching for her hand, he tugged her back into him, waiting until she met his gaze. “We already talked about this,” he said quietly. “I didn’t lie to you. I will never lie to you. I did withhold the truth. I had my reasons at the time, but I regret them too. Deeply.”

She stared at him, her thoughts hidden. “Keep going.”

“Yes, I was asked to watch after you. I was happy to do so. I didn’t consider it a betrayal, I considered it a job—”

She sucked in a breath.

“—Which lasted about two seconds,” he said. “Until I realized that not only did you have a real case, but that you weren’t going to let it go until you’d done right for Mrs. Berkowitz and her friends, and that scared me.”

“I thought you weren’t scared of anything,” she said.

“You thought wrong. I’m scared of plenty. One of which is letting you get hurt.” He let out a deep breath. He hated facing his fears, much less admitting them. “Another is losing you.”

“I understand that,” she said quietly, surprising him. “You’ve had losses, too many. Carrie. And Josh . . . But you need to know, Lucas, I’m not them. I’m . . . me.”

“I know.” He cupped her face and pressed his forehead to hers. “And I was working through all of that, about how I’d buried my emotions deep, how I’d closed myself off . . . it was all coming to a head for me right about that very first night when I woke up with you in my bed—all over me like white on rice.”

She narrowed her eyes. “That did not happen.”

He lifted his hand as if taking an oath. “All over me.”

She blushed. “Whatever. You sleep like a furnace and my feet were cold.”

He smiled. Her feet hadn’t been cold. His smile faded as fast as it’d come. “You have a lot of people who love and care about you very much, Molly.”

She rolled her eyes. “Some of them are way too overprotective. Joe and I are going to work on that together, probably the hard way. Now tell me something I don’t know.”

“I’m one of those people. It’s in my nature to protect and defend. It’s ingrained deep, and I won’t apologize for it. What I will apologize for is not fully understanding just how strong and capable and amazing you are.” He paused to let that sink in. “You don’t need someone to stand at your back, Molly. But I’d sure like to stand at your side, if you’re done self-destructing us.”

She just looked at him. Not angry and closed like before, but not quite on board with him yet either.

“Look at the case file I brought you,” he said, nudging his chin toward the iPad.

She swiped the screen active and skimmed the summary sheet. “This is a custody case gone bad. We don’t take these kinds of cases.”

“No,” Archer said, coming into the room from the back. He nodded a greeting at Lucas and they fist-bumped. “But our newest investigator does.”

Molly sucked in a breath and lifted her gaze. Not to Archer, but to Lucas, an entire world of hope in her eyes and he felt his heart swell. “New investigator?” she whispered.