laughed. He’d never been very good at small talk. As he recalled, neither had she. “Must have been the company I kept.” He looked at her for a long moment. Something was bothering her. Did it have to do with one of her kids? “You were never known for beating around the bush, either.”
Lila inclined her head, honey-blond bangs falling into her blue eyes. She moved them impatiently out of the way.
“Touché.” She glanced at the chair that stood before his desk and nodded toward it. “May I sit?”
He gestured for her to do just that. “You don’t have to ask. We are friends, remember?”
In a fluid motion, Lila slid onto the chair. Her figure was still fighting trim even though she spent her days behind a desk now. From a distance, she could have been mistaken for one of her daughters. All four of the McIntyre offspring were here, on the force, all bravely ignoring the hail of insinuations and slurs regarding their father’s character until it had finally run its course.
Though he’d never really liked Ben McIntyre, he had come to the man’s posthumous defense. There was not enough proof to convict Ben or Dean Walker, his dead partner, of the whispered accusations. Brian was a firm believer in the “innocent until proven guilty” aspect of the law no matter what his personal feelings might be. Shortly before Ben’s death, the man had accused him of sleeping with Lila.
Susan had voiced the same accusations, but in Susan’s case, her insecurities and demons put words into her mouth. In Ben’s case, it was just unfounded jealousy. Even so, Brian wouldn’t allow that to dictate his feelings about Ben’s complicity in the missing drug money. Just because Ben was a poor excuse for a human being didn’t mean he was a dirty cop, as well. And thus far, there wasn’t enough evidence to convict him or absolve him.
“Yes, we are,” Lila was saying. “Friends.”
Banking down a sigh, Lila raised her eyes to his. She had no idea where to start, how to phrase this without sounding like some old woman who habitually checked beneath her bed each night for intruders before going to sleep.
She knotted her fingers together in her lap, searching for the right words.
Brian frowned slightly. Her body language spoke of feelings that seemed the total antithesis of the woman he’d once known. Known her as well as he’d known himself.
“Are you nervous, Lila?”
Even as he asked, it seemed impossible. One of the first things he’d ever taken her to task for was that she didn’t have the good sense to be afraid. She was fearless—and this tended to get rookies commendations…and killed.
Denial instantly sprang to Lila’s lips. But this wasn’t something to lie about. Especially not to Brian. Not to her old partner.
She looked down at her knotted hands, then raised her eyes to his again.
“Yes,” she answered, her voice so soft it almost disappeared into the atmosphere without leaving behind a sound.
Concerned, he leaned forward, the very movement creating an intimate space between them. For more than six years, they had had each other’s backs, gone into dangerous situations without knowing if either one of them would make it back alive. There was a time when there was no one he trusted more than Lila. They’d been so in-tuned to one another, they literally ended each other’s sentences.
The look in her eyes took him back to those days. But there was something else, as well. Fear? What in God’s name could have been responsible for that?
“This is me, Lila. Brian. Talk to me. What’s wrong?”
Lila lifted one shoulder in a half shrug, then let it drop. She valued his opinion of her. “I don’t want you to think I’m an idiot.”
“You’re a lot of things, Lila, but you’re not now, nor have you ever been, an idiot.”
There was gratitude in her eyes when she smiled this time.
“Don’t be that hasty to absolve me, Brian.” She took a breath, then shook her head. She shouldn’t have come. She was being a coward. There was no point in burdening him with this nonsense—and it was nonsense. Just crank calls, nothing more.
“No, never mind. You’re busy and I’m letting my imagination run away with me.” But as she started to get up, Brian caught her wrist, preventing her from making a quick getaway.
For a single moment the gentle pressure of his fingers against her skin generated a warmth that shot out in both directions from the point of contact. Her thoughts scattered even as she became acutely aware of how long it had been since there had been a strong man in her life. She was proud of her sons, fine officers both, but it wasn’t the same thing as having a man to respect, to turn to, on a regular basis.
A man to be partners with in life.
Oh God, she thought, she was being overwrought. She needed to pull herself together. The sleepless nights were getting to her.
“You never had an imagination,” he pointed out with a grin.
When he grinned like that, it took her back. Back to when they’d first met during a briefing session, her detective shield still warm from being issued. He was the veteran detective who balked at having such a “newbie” to work with. He was polite and respectful, but there was no actual on-the-job respect given her—until she’d earned it. Which she did, but it hadn’t been easy.
And all the while, after putting in all those hours on the job, she would come home to Ben’s unflattering implications that she was sharing more than just a working relationship with Brian. She put up with it as long as she could, assuring Ben that he was imagining things. Until the day she’d lashed out at him. Lashed out because, secretly, she had harbored thoughts about Brian, thoughts that could never go anywhere, could never see the light of day because they were both married and between them there were eight innocent kids to think of.
“We’ll debate that some other time,” she told him.
She was conscious of forcing a spasmodic smile to her lips. One look at Brian’s face told her she wasn’t fooling anyone. Okay, she was here, she might as well spit this out. He’d probably say something like it was nothing to worry about and she would be on her way.
Lila sat down again, perching on the edge of her seat. “I’ve been getting calls.”
She captured his interest immediately. Lila wasn’t the kind to spook. “What kind of calls?”
Lila watched his face for the first sign of annoyance or disappointment. Or was it already too late for that? “The hang-up kind.”
His face appeared unreadable to her as he asked, “How often?”
She wasn’t going to bore him with numbers, even though she had counted. It might make him think she was obsessing over nothing. “Often.”
His eyes never left her face. “When did the calls start?”
She thought for a minute. “About five, six weeks ago. Always late at night,” she added before he could ask. Why did things that happened in the night always seem so much more threatening? What was it about the lack of sunlight that
