Once a Hero. Lisa Childs

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СКАЧАТЬ I ask a question?” Erin asked, her stomach knotted with frustration over how close she’d come to learning one of his secrets before he’d thwarted her again.

      “You have to be careful of this one,” Kent said to Marla Halliday. “She tries to interview everyone.”

      “No interview here,” Marla said. “We were just going to play darts.” Her blue eyes twinkled. Kent grimaced, but she ignored him. “Here, Erin, why don’t you go first?”

      Erin closed her fingers around the proffered bunch of brightly colored darts. She chose one to throw, then turned to the board to find someone had pinned a blown-up picture of her there.

      Not someone. Him.

      Kent Terlecki was no hero.

      Chapter Two

      A chuckle at the shocked expression on her face rumbled in Kent’s chest, but he suppressed it. Instead he moved up behind her, then closed his hand around her fingers holding the dart.

      “See?” he said as he lifted her hand and guided the throw. “A bull’s-eye is right between the eyes.”

      “My eyes,” she muttered. As the dart pierced the paper across the bridge of her nose, she winced.

      “Your chin and ears are five points, your mouth and cheeks ten and your—”

      “I get the idea,” she interrupted, tugging her hand free and stepping away.

      He hadn’t realized he was still holding her. Or that Billy’s mom had left them, to return to the others. Maybe it was good he wasn’t out in the field anymore. His instincts were not as sharp as they’d once been.

      “And I get to you,” she said, “whether you’re willing to admit it or not.”

      “Why?” He asked the question that had been nagging at him for a year.

      “Why do I get to you?” she asked, her lips tilting up in a smug smile. “Or why aren’t you willing to tell the truth?”

      “Why do you want to get to me?” he wondered. “I’m always the victim of your poison pen.”

      “A little paranoid, Sergeant?” she teased, her dark eyes gleaming with amusement. And triumph.

      He shook his head. “No. I used to think it wasn’t personal. That I was your target just because I represented the department.”

      “Now you’re a martyr,” she quipped.

      Remembering all those people who had tried to make him one, he suppressed a shudder. “God, no.”

      “Oh, I forgot. You’re a hero,” she said. “That’s what Mrs. Halliday called you.”

      The act that others called heroic had been sheer instinct—an instinct every cop had. He didn’t doubt that any one of his fellow officers would have done the same thing he had. “I’m no hero.”

      “You don’t have to tell me that.”

      He clenched his jaw so hard that his back teeth ground together. The woman was damn infuriating. “So it is personal.”

      “You’re paranoid,” she said, but her gaze slid away from his.

      “I heard what you said to the chief,” he admitted. “That you think I got my job by arresting innocent people. Why would you ask that?”

      Sure, a lot of people claimed innocence, but no one he’d arrested had ever gotten away with their crimes. There’d always been too much evidence.

      She shrugged. “How else would you have racked up the arrest record you have?”

      “Because a lot of people commit crimes, Ms. Powell.” He stated what he considered obvious. “And I’m good at catching them.”

      “Not anymore,” she taunted. “You sit behind a desk now. Your badge is all for show.”

      Damn, she had struck that nerve he’d sworn she couldn’t. But she had actually spoken a grain of truth for once. Sometimes he did feel as if his badge were only a prop.

      Her eyes sparkled as if she’d picked up on her direct hit to his pride. “Isn’t that what you wanted?” she asked. “To move up in the department, to get ahead?”

      Getting desked was the last thing he’d wanted, but she was the last person to whom he would make that confession. “I know what you think of me, however unfounded,” Kent said. “Do you know what I think of you?”

      “I can guess,” she replied, gesturing toward the dartboard.

      He shook his head. “That wasn’t my idea. Someone else blew up the photo that runs with your byline, and pinned it there.” For him. He couldn’t claim that he hadn’t appreciated the gesture, though.

      “I don’t care what you think of me, Sergeant,” she insisted.

      “I’m going to tell you anyway,” he assured her.

      “On the record or off?”

      “Everything seems to go on the record with you.” Which he would come to regret, he knew.

      “The public has a right to know….”

      “Do they know about you?” he wondered. “That you’re ambitious to the point of ruthless? That you’ll use anything and anyone to further your career?”

      She shook her head. “The person you just described sounds more like you. You don’t know me at all, Sergeant.”

      “Then I guess we’re even.”

      He finally admitted to himself the rest of his reason for allowing her into the program. He hadn’t wanted to change her opinion of just the department—he’d wanted to change her opinion of him, too. After a year of trying to deal with her, he should have known better. She was a lost cause.

      ERIN TIPTOED INTO her dark apartment as if she were a kid sneaking in past curfew. And just like when she was a kid, she got caught. A lamp snapped on and flooded the living room with light.

      Was this actually her apartment? Someone had tidied up. Books had been put back on the built-in cherry-wood shelves. Nothing but polish covered the hardwood floor. Even the cushions were on the couch. If not for having just unlocked the door, she would have suspected she’d stumbled into the wrong place.

      “You’re late,” Kathryn Powell pointed out from where she sat primly, with her ankles crossed, on the sofa. Had her mother been sleeping like that or just sitting in the dark, waiting for her?

      Erin blinked against the glare of the halogen bulb of the floor lamp. “I’m sorry.”

      She should have called, but she hadn’t planned to go anywhere after class. Once she’d arrived at the Lighthouse, she hadn’t dared to call, what with the rowdy background noise. Her mother would have gotten the wrong idea. She tended to think the worst of her children.

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