Once a Hero

“But other departments that aren’t even as big as ours have public information officers to deal with the media, and we should, too,” Frank insisted. “We needed one. We needed you.”

Kent stopped his pacing and held the man’s pale blue gaze. “You didn’t create the job because…”

“Because you took a bullet for me?” The chief shook his head. “Son, I’d take it back if I could.”

“The job?” He deliberately misunderstood, his lips twitching into a smile.

“The bullet.”

“Nobody can take the bullet out.” Not without a seventy-five percent chance of leaving him paralyzed. Those weren’t odds Kent was willing to take a risk on; as Billy had said, he wasn’t lucky.

“Have you checked with a surgeon recently?” Chief Archer asked. “There are new medical advances all the time. You could go to the University of Michigan or the Mayo—”

“I’m fine, really,” he assured his boss, whom he also thought of as a friend. Despite Kent’s insistence, he knew that Frank Archer would always feel guilty that Kent had gotten hurt while protecting him.

“You’re bored out of your mind in this job,” the chief stated.

Apparently Kent hadn’t done very well hiding his dissatisfaction. He tapped a finger against the newspaper he held. “Erin Powell keeps things interesting.”

The chief’s pale eyes narrowed. “Not interesting enough, I suspect. I know you, Kent. I know you’d rather be back in the field.”

“So put me back in the field,” Kent snapped, tired of hiding his feelings to spare others’ guilt.

Betraying his inner torment, the chief closed his eyes and shook his head. “God, I wish I could, Kent, but I can’t, not without medical clearance.”

“I’m sorry,” Kent said, as his own guilt coursed through him. He hadn’t wanted to make the chief feel worse than he already did. “I know you can’t.” With the bullet so close to his spine, he was too much of a liability.

Even without surgery, there was a risk of paralysis from scar tissue pressing on nerves or the bullet moving and irrevocably damaging his spinal cord. It wouldn’t be fair to his fellow officers—the ones he might need to back up—or to the civilians he might need to protect if he was on the job. Erin had been exactly right the other night when she’d claimed that his badge was just for show.

The chief sighed, then forced a smile. “At least Erin Powell keeps you from being bored senseless in your cushy job.”

“That she does.” Kent gripped the paper tighter and glanced down at the picture of her next to the byline of her new column. While he didn’t betray it to his boss, anger gripped him. He wanted to wring her pretty little neck. She had deliberately twisted every damn word he’d spoken to her the other night.

“You should tell her,” the chief advised.

“How I came by my nickname?” Kent shook his head. “No, we agreed to keep that from the public.”

“Back then. Three years ago. Keeping it secret was your first decision as public information officer.” The chief’s eyes filled with pride. “You were on your way to surgery at the time.”

The surgery hadn’t removed the bullet, though the doctors still claimed they had saved his life. But Kent couldn’t do his job anymore, so he had no life. At least not the life he used to have—the one he wanted.

“It was a good decision,” Kent insisted. Keeping the attempt on the chief’s life quiet had been a good decision, but maybe he should have had the bullet taken out, and risked paralysis.

“You really don’t want the public to make you a hero,” the chief mused, shaking his head.

“Not when someone else has to be the villain.”

“But the woman shot you!” The older man’s voice shook with emotion.

“She was trying to shoot you,” Kent reminded him. “I think we both agree that Mrs. Ludlowe paid for what she did. It wouldn’t be fair to open up all that pain again.” And reporters like Erin Powell would be only too happy to do that. He tossed the paper onto the chief’s cluttered desk.

Frank leaned back in his chair and sighed, then grabbed the paper and crumpled it up. “This is not fair to you. You’re taking another bullet that isn’t meant for you.”

Kent grinned. “Oh, I have a feeling this bullet is meant only for me.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know, but I’m going to find out. It’s past time I learned.” He was going to take Billy’s advice, polish up his rusty investigative skills and finally figure out what Erin Powell’s problem was with him.

“Be careful, Kent,” the chief advised. “You haven’t been out in the field for a while.”

“Doesn’t matter.” He waved dismissively and headed for the door. “I’ve been dodging Erin Powell’s bullets for a year now.”

“You haven’t dodged them all, Bullet,” the chief reminded him. “Be careful.”

ERIN JOLTED, and her computer slid from her lap onto the floor in front of the couch. “Da—” She swallowed the curse as the door rattled again under a hammering fist. She scrambled toward it, pulling it open with a “Shh…!”

Her heart pounded harder at the sight of the man leaning against the jamb. Instead of his black uniform, he wore faded jeans and a black leather jacket over a T-shirt that had molded to the impressive muscles of his chest. His hair was a darker blond, damp from a shower.

She swallowed a traitorous sigh. “Oh, it’s you….”

“You shouldn’t open your door before you know who’s on the other side,” Sergeant Terlecki chastised her.

“You’re lucky I didn’t know who was pounding down my door,” she pointed out. “What do you want, Sergeant?” She noted the wrinkled newspaper he clutched. “Are you here to congratulate me on my new column?”

He crumpled the paper in his fist. “What I want is a retraction.”

She shook her head, then tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. “I can’t.”

“What do you have against me, Erin? What have I ever done to you? I’m too old to have gone to school with you and ignored you.”

Just. He was only five years older than she was, but she refrained from mentioning that.

He leaned closer until his handsome face was mere inches from hers. “And if I’d gone to school with you, I know I would never have ignored you.”

She couldn’t fight the smile curving her lips. So his new method for handling her was to turn on his infamous charm, which served him so well with the network reporters. “You’re flirting with me now?”

“Don’t act so surprised,” he admonished with a grin of his own. “I’ve flirted with you before.”

“You have?” She widened her eyes in disbelief. “When was that? When you dragged me into an empty room? When you pinned my picture to a dartboard?”

“You didn’t know I was flirting?” He clicked his tongue against his teeth. “I must have gotten rusty.”

“No, I can’t believe…” She lifted her hand to push back her hair again, but this time her fingers trembled, so she propped her hand on her hip. She couldn’t let him get to her. “Why—why would you flirt with me? You must hate me.”

That steely gaze of his focused on her. “You want me to hate you.”

No, she wanted to hate him. How could she not, after what he’d done?

“I should,” he said. “It’s pretty clear you have it in for me.” He tossed the torn newspaper atop the cluttered table just inside her foyer. “I want to know why.”

“I thought you knew.”

He grinned. “That you’re ambitious, that you’ll do anything to get ahead? Yeah, I know that. But I think there’s more to you, Erin Powell—more to us.”

She started to swing the door shut on his handsome face. “There is no us.”

He pressed his palm against the panel, holding it open. “Oh, there’s something here.”

“Hatred, remember?” She levered her weight against the door, but it still didn’t move, his hand holding it effortlessly.

He shook his head. “I don’t hate you.”

“Give me time.”

His brow furrowed with confusion. “So you are out to destroy me?”

“I think it’s only fair.” Since he had destroyed her brother’s life and a little boy’s whole world.

“Why, Erin?” Kent asked, as if it bothered him, as if he cared what she thought, what she felt. “What did I ever do to you?”

Maybe she should tell him, so he would understand that flirting with her was a waste of his time and hers. She only wanted one thing from him—the truth. “You—”

A cry caught Erin’s attention. The fear in it had her whirling away and racing down the hall, calling out, “It’s okay. I’m here….”

Stunned, Kent stepped inside the open door. It hadn’t occurred to him that she might not live alone. She didn’t wear a wedding band or even an engagement ring. He had checked the first time he’d met the beauty at a press conference—before she’d started with her impertinent questions.

Curious, and concerned about the cry, he followed her. He stumbled over toys in the hall outside the doorway where she’d disappeared. Inside the room she knelt beside a twin bed, her arms wrapped tight around a small, trembling body.

Kent slipped quietly into the bedroom. She was totally unaware of his presence as she focused on the boy, who must have been about five or six. Since speaking at school assemblies was part of his duties as public information officer, Kent spent a lot of time around kids now. Before he’d been injured, the thought of doing so would have scared him more than getting shot, but talking to schoolkids had actually become one of the high points of his new job. The children sometimes asked tougher questions than reporters, though. Well, all reporters besides Erin Powell.

He never would have imagined that aggressive journalist was the same woman who cuddled the crying child, soothing him with a calming voice and a tender touch. A part of Kent had suspected there was more to Erin Powell, something softer and more vulnerable—something that had attracted his interest in spite of her animosity toward him.

She pressed her lips to the boy’s forehead. “Shh…”

Now Kent understood her shushing him at the door. She hadn’t wanted to disturb the boy. Was he her son?

“Go back to sleep, Jason,” she urged the whimpering child. “Everything’s okay.”

The boy sniffled. “I heard somebody yelling.”

“It was nothing, honey,” Erin said, her voice filled with a gentleness Kent would not have considered her capable of. “Nothing for you to worry about.”

“But I heard a guy,” Jason said, as if having a man in Erin’s apartment was unusual. “He was yelling at you.”

“I’m sorry about that.” Kent spoke up from the shadows of the room.

Both the child and Erin tensed and turned toward him. “You shouldn’t have followed me,” she told him. “You shouldn’t have just walked in.”

“I’m sorry,” Kent repeated to the boy, ignoring her irritation that he had let himself inside her apartment. He would not argue with her in front of the child.

She opened her mouth, then closed it, as if coming to the same realization.

“I wasn’t yelling. Really,” Kent assured the child. “I was just talking loud. I didn’t know you were sleeping.” He hadn’t known about the kid at all.

“Who are you?” the little boy asked, staring up at Kent with wide eyes that were the same shade of chocolate-brown as Erin’s.

“I’m Serge—”

“He’s a friend,” Erin interrupted. “Now you have to go back to sleep, honey. You have school in the morning.” She pulled the covers up to the boy’s chin and kissed his forehead. With his dark hair and those eyes and delicate features, he looked very much like Erin.

A pressure shifted in Kent’s chest, releasing some of his resentment toward her. He’d been right—there was much more to Erin Powell than she was willing to reveal.

She rose from her knees and reached out, grasping Kent’s arm to pull him from the room. He could have resisted her effort to give him the bum’s rush, but he followed, admiring the swing of her narrow hips beneath her cotton pajama bottoms. Instead of a matching top, she wore an old gray sweatshirt.

She didn’t speak until they’d left the hall and returned to the living room. “You need to leave,” she told him. Although she kept it low, her voice vibrated with anger. “You shouldn’t have come here. You have no right to barge into my home.”

“You just called me a friend,” he reminded her with a grin.

Her eyes narrowed with irritation. “I lied.”

“To your son?” Kent had to know—was the boy hers? With the similarity between them, he had to be.

“You have no right to interfere in my life,” she protested as she headed straight to the door and opened it. “Where I live, who I live with is none of your business.”

“You made it mine with every venomous word you wrote about me.” He closed his hand over hers and pressed the door closed. “You’re my business now, Erin, so I’m going to find out everything there is to know about you.”

She turned toward him, her eyes wide. “You can’t—”

“I can,” he assured her. “Despite what you think, I’m still a real cop.”

“Have you forgotten a little thing called freedom of the press?” she asked. “I won’t stop writing about you. You can’t intimidate me.”

“No, I can’t,” he agreed. “Unless you have something to hide, something you don’t want me to find out.”

Chapter Four

“I have nothing to hide,” she lied, her breath catching. She didn’t want him to know anything about her, most especially not about her brother. If Kent knew what she was after, he would cover his tracks even better than he already had. She’d gone over and over all his arrest records and had found nothing to help Mitchell. Yet.

She tugged her hand free of Kent’s and stepped back, trying to put some distance between them.

But he moved closer, his shoulders casting a wide shadow in the foyer. “Nothing?” he asked. “The fact that you have a son is nothing?”

She glanced back at the hall leading to Jason’s bedroom. “I never said he’s my son.”

“He’s not?”

She lifted her shoulders in a noncommittal shrug. “I could just be babysitting.” Which she was, until she found proof that Terlecki had framed Mitchell.

“He looks so much like you that he must be a relative,” Kent said, with such certainty that she lifted a brow.

“My nephew,” she admitted, although she had grown to think of him as more than that over the past year.

“And you’re not just babysitting him.”

She swallowed, her mouth watering from nerves. “You think you know everything,” she scoffed, but she was afraid that he soon would.

“Not everything,” he said, shaking his head. His hair had completely dried, the strands a pale gold color again. “I know the boy lives with you. He has his own room, and there are toys all over.”

“Maybe I’m just a really loving aunt.”

“I don’t doubt that,” he admitted. “I can tell the two of you are very close. Too close for you to be just babysitting. You’re obviously his principal caregiver, or even his guardian. How did that come about?”

She decided to tell him what she told anyone else nosy enough to push for an answer. “His parents weren’t able to care for him anymore.”

“What happened?” Kent pressed. “Did they die?”

“They’re not dead.” Not yet. Although Mitchell had been in prison for four years already, she worried about him being able to survive there much longer. Certainly he wouldn’t last the rest of his ten-year sentence.

“Then why can’t they care for him anymore?”

Her heart thumped hard. For a year, with no success, she’d been trying to learn Kent’s secrets. After less than an hour in her home he was entirely too close to learning hers. “That’s none of your business.”

He shook his head. “We’ve been through this already. You’ve made yourself my business, Erin—” he stepped nearer, his chest bumping her shoulder “—with every article you’ve written attacking me. And now this column of yours—Powell on Patrol…” He snorted in derision.

“You just can’t take the truth,” she snapped, refusing to allow him to intimidate her. She planted her feet on the hardwood floor so she wouldn’t move back, even though her pulse raced with his nearness.

His gunmetal-gray eyes narrowed. “No, I think you’re the one who can’t take it.”

Did he already know the truth? Was it possible that he had talked to her mother?

“Just because someone wants you to believe something doesn’t make it true,” she insisted, tilting up her chin with defiance and pride.

“I hope everyone who reads your articles and your new column realizes that.” He lifted his hand and slid his thumb along her jaw. “I’m not the bad guy you want everyone to think I am.”

Not everyone. Just herself. She wanted to believe he was the bad guy, but his touch, so gentle against her skin, distracted her.

“You’re flirting with me again,” she said, reminding herself that turning on the charm was probably just another of his tactics.

“That’s not flirting,” Kent said as he lowered his head, his face nearing hers. “This is flirting….” His mouth touched hers, lips brushing across lips.

Erin’s heart shifted, then beat hard and fast. She reached out, intending to push him away, but her palms pressed against the hard wall of his chest. His heart was racing as frantically as hers.

He closed his arms around her, pulling her tight against him, and deepened the kiss.

Erin’s lips clung to his, returning his passion with a surge of her own. She opened her mouth, and the tip of his tongue slid across her bottom lip. Heat flashed through her body, yet she shivered.

“Erin…” he murmured, as if uncertain that she was really in his arms.

What the hell am I doing? Disbelief doused her desire. She shoved her hands forcefully against his chest, pushing him back. “No!”

“Erin—”

Remembering her nephew, she lowered her voice and said, “Please, get out….”

She closed her eyes, shame washing over her. How had she forgotten about Jason? How had she forgotten about Mitchell and what Kent had done to him? Taking him away from his son, from her?

Kent’s hand, shaking slightly, closed around the doorknob. “Erin—”

“Just leave….”

She didn’t open her eyes again until she heard the door close behind him. Tears of guilt blurred her vision, the mahogany door wavering in and out of focus. She lifted a hand to her mouth, intending to wipe away every last trace of his kiss, but her lips still tingled with the sensation of his mouth against hers. She licked her lips and tasted him.

How could I have enjoyed his kiss? How could I have kissed him back?

She latched the chain and bolted the door, wishing she could lock him out of her mind as easily as she could her apartment. Yet he wouldn’t leave, not until she got justice for her brother.

She walked back to her nephew’s room, leaning against the doorjamb to study his face in the faint glow of his night-light. He slept peacefully, blissfully unaware of what his aunt had done, and whom she had allowed into their home.

The man who had taken away his father. The man who had given Jason nightmares, because the child had been there four years ago when Sergeant Terlecki, working vice, had led a special response unit into their home. The team had broken down the door and, with their big guns and loud voices, had stormed the apartment.

Just a toddler, Jason had been too young to have a clear memory of that day when Kent had arrested his father. But ever since then, the little boy had had nightmares and a paralyzing fear of police officers.

Erin hadn’t feared Kent Terlecki—until tonight. Until he kissed her. And she didn’t actually fear him as much as she feared what he had made her feel. Desire.

WHAT HAD HE BEEN THINKING?

He walked into the Lighthouse, grateful for the noise that surged out of the open door like a wave. Hopefully, it would be too damn loud for him to think, to replay in his mind what he’d just done.

He had kissed Erin Powell, the reporter determined to destroy him and the department. Or maybe the department was just collateral damage. He would bet that her real intention was to ruin him.

Was that why she’d kissed him back? To trick him, to mess with his head? The kiss had been even more effective at doing that than anything she’d written. Yet he suspected he hadn’t been the only one that kiss had rattled.

Nodding at people who waved or shouted in greeting, he made his way through the crowd to the bar. The bartender, an auburn-haired beauty named Brigitte, greeted him with a smile. “Hey, Sarge, your usual?”

His usual was Bloody Mary mix on ice, without the alcohol. Tonight he felt like he needed the bloody. The bloodier the better. He shook his head. “Shot of tequila.”

Brigitte, whom he thought he’d seen the other night at the CPA, lifted a brow. “Really?”

“Really?” Paddy parroted as he swiveled the stool he was sitting on toward Kent. “You don’t usually imbibe.”

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