“I’m going to have a tap put on your phone,” Brian told her. “See if we can find out who this night caller of yours is and ‘politely’ suggest he get his entertainment some other way—or face prosecution.”
She didn’t want it to come to that. She just wanted it to stop. More than likely, it was someone who thought she was somehow involved in the mess that had ended Ben’s life. So many rumors abounded around that time. Some had her killing Ben herself and using the drug cartel scandal as cover. Others thought she was as deeply involved as they said Ben was, taking money from the drug dealers to look the other way. There were as many different rumors as days of the week. She learned not to pay attention to any of them and waited for the air to clear. And eventually it did. But some rumors died harder than others.
She wondered if Brian had been tempted to believe any of them. But this wasn’t the time to ask. So she nodded in response to his offer.
“I’d appreciate it.” And then she hesitated. “Brian, you won’t…”
“Tell anyone?” he guessed. “I’ll have to tell the guy running the tap, but I’ll swear him to secrecy,” he quipped. “I’d offer to blindfold him if you like, but then he might not do the best job.”
Brian smiled at her understandingly. He could only guess at what she’d gone through. If she hadn’t been so damn stubborn, he might have been able to help long before this. But then, he supposed, she wouldn’t have been Lila. Independent as hell.
“It’ll be off the record,” he assured her. He saw a hint of skepticism in her eyes. “You don’t put in as much time on the force as I have without gathering a few favors to call in.”
He liked the way relief softened her expression. “I really appreciate this, Brian,” she repeated. “I know you probably think I’m overreacting.”
“Lila, when we were partners, I learned to respect your gut instincts. You never overreacted then and you’re probably not overreacting now.”
She caught the one word he had glossed over. “‘Probably.’”
Brian smiled. The wording was a result of on-the-job indoctrination. “Being the chief of d’s has taught me to be cautious.”
Brian set down his mug, finished with his beer, but she was still nursing hers. “Well, I’m glad something finally did. For a man with four kids, you were always a little reckless,” she remembered, then took another long swig of the amber brew.
As he recalled their partnership, Lila was always the one to rush in where angels feared to go, not him. “Look who’s talking.”
She had the good grace not to argue. “Maybe you have a point.”
Folding his hands before him, he watched her for a long moment. Humor faded in the face of more serious memories. “If you’d been a little less gung ho, I would have been the one who caught the bullet that night. And a lot of things might have been different.” For one thing, she would have continued on the job and he would have refused to retire, the way Ben had made her do. They would have continued working together and she would have never withdrawn from him.
Lila could almost hear what he was thinking. No point in going there, that path led nowhere. So she did her best to lighten the moment. “Yeah, you would have been dead because blood makes me squeamish. I could have never done what you did, put my hand over the hole to try to get it to stop bleeding.”
Brian knew better. Knew that when they were partnered, she had always been there for him. That she had his back no matter what.
“Somehow, I don’t think so.” He paused for a moment, debating whether to take on more serious subjects. There was so much to talk about. So much to try to catch up on. Even after their partnership had terminated, even after she clearly began to avoid him—because of Ben, he’d like to believe—he’d thought about her. Thought about her a lot if he were being honest with himself. He’d wondered what she was doing, how she was getting along and if he should take it upon himself to barrage into her self-imposed solitude.
He never did. Maybe he should have. Because God knew he’d missed her.
Impulse, something he rarely experienced and even more rarely gave in to, had him asking, “Listen, would you like to have dinner sometime?”
Lila’s mouth curved slowly, like a flower responding to the first rays of the summer sun. “Sometime,” she echoed.
Heartened, Brian pressed on. “How about tomorrow night?”
She blinked. “‘Sometime’ came fast.”
He spread his hands, taking care not to knock over the empty mug. “Hey, if this business has taught me nothing else, it’s that you never know how much time you have left—” he eyed her intently “—and personally, I think that I’ve lost too much time with my best friend already.”
Best friend. He probably had no idea how comforting that sounded to her. Or how much she had missed him, Lila thought.
“Me, too,” she agreed softly. And then, because she thought that maybe she’d admitted too much, she focused on what he’d said about the capricious nature of the kind of life police officers led. “When the kids all opted to go into the force, I was both so proud and so scared. A big part of me just wanted them to be safe. To sit in cubicles where nothing more serious than a paper cut threatened them.”
“You sit in a cubicle,” he reminded her, humor framing his mouth. “How do you like it?”
Lila laughed. Checkmate—or was it touché? she wondered. In any case, he had her. “I hate it.”
He nodded, knowing that she did. He couldn’t help wondering why, after Ben had died and the man’s hold over her went with him, she hadn’t asked to be put back in the field in some capacity.
“Wouldn’t wish an existence they’d hate on your kids, would you?”
“No.” Which was why she’d never told even her daughters, Riley and Taylor, how she felt about their choice of a vocation. “But I still get knots in my stomach at times, worrying.”
“All parents worry—if they’re worth their salt.” It was a given. He worried about all of his kids, even Janelle, who was an assistant to the D.A. All of them dealt with the criminal element every day. There was nothing reassuring about that. But some things were just out of his hands.
However, the direction of the conversation was not and he got it back on track. “So, what’s your answer?”
Lila raised her eyes to his quizzically. Something quivered in his gut. “My answer?”
She did innocent well, Brian thought, amused. “I wasn’t distracted by the sidebar, Lila. Dinner? Tomorrow?”
Lila moved the mug aside. She’d had enough beer. Taking in a breath, she let it out slowly, as if by doing so it somehow signaled the beginning of a new journey. One that promised to be far more pleasant than the one she’d just been on.
“Dinner. Tomorrow,” she echoed, confirming the engagement.
Something like the burst of sunshine went off in his chest. He didn’t try to explore the reasons
