Maternal Instinct

“Let go, sweetheart.” He gripped her hips and drove into her. “Let go.”

She went still in wonder as pure pleasure poured from her belly through every vein in her body. “Oh-h,” she breathed.

“Yes!” With guttural triumph in his voice, he thrust hard and fast one last time, jerked and groaned, then collapsed on top of her.

Nell wiped inexplicable tears on his bare shoulder. “Thank you,” she whispered, and didn’t know if he heard her.

HUGH AWAKENED to an aching body and head. His mouth was dirt dry and it took him a moment to work it closed. He opened his eyes, squinted against the brilliance, and, stabbed by pain, squeezed them shut again.

Damn, his neck hurt. It was bent at a weird angle, his head wedged into a corner. Where the hell had he fallen asleep? Or had he been unconscious?

An explosion. Maybe there’d been an explosion and a ceiling had fallen on him. That would explain the weight holding him down and the headache he felt waiting to erupt the second he moved the tiniest bit. He wasn’t on the bomb squad, not being suicidal by nature, but if some crazy had set one…

In a sickening wave, he remembered what the crazy had done. He lurched, his head fractured into a million atoms of pain, and somebody else gasped and shoved an elbow into his gut.

He swore and opened his eyes. A wild woman was staring up at him. Her eyes were big and brown and bloodshot, her face was puffy, her lips as dry as his mouth, and her dishwater blond hair was a snarled mess.

“Oh, my God!” she said in stricken tones.

His head clunked back against the car door and he shut his eyes.

Nell Granstrom. Naked. Lying on top of him. They hadn’t…Had they? God help him, images wormed their way through the shattering pain behind his eyes. He saw her uniformed ass sticking up between the seats, his hands on it. Him falling on her. Slow hungry kisses. Him on his knees like a horny teenager at a drive-in movie, squeezing her buttocks, slamming into her. And the single best orgasm of his entire life. He did remember that.

She was apparently frozen in the same frantic effort to remember. Or maybe horror held her paralyzed. He didn’t know. Just that all of a sudden she was scrambling to get off him, and to hell with which body parts she damaged on her way.

“I’ve got to get dressed,” she said in a high frenzied voice. “Where’s my bra? Oh, God. Where’s my bra?”

A faint memory of tossing it tickled at him. “Try behind the seat.” His voice sounded thick. Tongues needed to be lubricated to do their job.

She rose above him, and something stirred in him as he took in her long slender body and high, pale breasts. Unfortunately, she saw him looking, and she recoiled as if he were a monster.

“What are you…Oh!” Hands shaking, she put on the bra, tugged on a shirt, realized it was his and threw it in his face.

By the time he wrestled free, she was buttoning up her own, hiding the nest of dark blond curls at the juncture of her thighs.

“Get dressed!” she hissed. “You look…you look like hell!”

He reached out and fingered a mat in her hair. “Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black?”

She swatted away his hand. He caught one more forbidden glimpse as she arched to pull on her trousers and panties in one go. “Oh,” she groaned. “I’m going to be sick.”

That galvanized him. “Not in here, you’re not.”

She got open the door of the Explorer and half fell out into the alley. As he slowly, painfully pulled on his own clothes, he heard her retching. His stomach lurched in sympathy, and he gritted his teeth against a wave of nausea.

Wiping her mouth, she reappeared in the open door. The captain wouldn’t have recognized his cool, disciplined officer in this unkempt woman with a half-buttoned, wrinkled shirt, tangled hair and red-rimmed eyes. “I’m going to find my car.” She swallowed. “If—if I left anything…”

“Get in,” he said. He climbed between the seats to get behind the wheel.

She was still standing there staring.

“Get in,” he repeated, wincing at the sight of himself in the rearview mirror. “You don’t want anybody to see you. I’ll pull up right next to your car.”

Pride made her neck long, but after a reluctant moment, she did climb in and close the door.

Hugh found the keys wedged in the crack between the center console and the seat. His head was going to fall off. He knew it was. But he’d rescue her from possible humiliation first, like the gentleman he preferred to think he was.

Turning to look over his shoulder was undiluted agony, but he managed to back up, get turned around and cruise slowly into the tavern parking lot proper. “What do you drive?”

“It’s right there.” She indicated a cherry-red Subaru wagon.

He got up close, his Explorer blocking any sight of her from the tavern or the sidewalk. Not that there was any traffic at…

“Oh, hell,” he growled.

“What?”

“It’s noon.”

She half rose to look over the seat at his dashboard clock. “Aren’t we supposed to be back on duty at three?”

“That’s my memory.”

The word that came out of her mouth was fitting, if not a nice one for a lady to say.

“Go home and shower,” he said. “You’ll feel better.”

She cast him a look of disbelief.

“Or not,” he conceded.

Nell Granstrom opened the door again, climbed out, then stopped. “This never happened.”

He had to turn his head to look at her. “What?”

“It never happened. Last night.” Her eyes met his square, but red washed her cheeks. “This morning. You and me. I—I don’t usually drink.”

He wasn’t much of a drinker, either, or his head wouldn’t be detonating this morning.

“Do I have your word?” she asked fiercely. “You’ll never tell a soul? You’ll never refer to it again? You’ll forget it ever happened?”

The forgetting part Hugh wasn’t so sure about. The rest…

“I will never say a word.” He sketched a cross in the air. “On my honor.”

She sagged, bit her lip. “Thank you.”

“After what we saw…maybe we needed it. Since neither of us is married…”

Her eyes sizzled. “You said not a word. We won’t talk about why. It never happened.”

“Fine,” he said tightly. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m kinda looking forward to getting home.”

She gave a nod, flinched as if she regretted it, and slammed the door of his Explorer. He waited until she was in her Subaru and had started it. Running his hand over his unshaven jaw, he watched in his mirror as she exited via the alley. Smart.

Too bad that after a couple pitchers of beer neither of them had been smart this morning. No, what was really too bad was that his own personal history had escalated his reaction to an already horrific tragedy. Otherwise he wouldn’t have had those damn beers in the first place.

Working with a woman he didn’t like would have been bad enough, Hugh thought. Working with a woman he didn’t like but had had drunken sex with was going to be next door to hell.

CHAPTER TWO

HOW COULD SHE have done something so stupid, so humiliating, so…undignified?

Nell stood under the shower with her face upturned, letting the hot water beat over her head as though it could cleanse her inside as well as out.

How could she face him again? How could she work with a man she’d let…

Nell moaned aloud at the fresh realization of exactly what she’d let him do. Never mind what she’d done.

Her head throbbed and she tilted it sideways to let the shower spray hit first one temple and then the other. The pressure didn’t help.

Nell reached for the soap and sudsed herself for at least the third time. Then she shampooed again as well. The rinse water was turning lukewarm. She’d been standing in there for an eternity.

But not long enough.

All the while she dried, got dressed and forced her self to eat a sandwich and drink a glass of milk, Nell’s thoughts raced in vicious circles.

She could only pray he was embarrassed, too, but what were the odds of that? Hugh McLean had a reputation with women. Word had it he had a different cute, petite blonde on his arm—or in his bed—every few weeks.

“A redhead once in a while,” Joe Redding had said admiringly. “But, damn, he picks lookers.”

Nell knew painfully well that she wasn’t even close to being a looker. But she was a woman, one more notch in his belt. Hey, he was drunk and in the mood, and she’d been handy. Handy? Who was she kidding? Randy, was probably more the truth.

There in her own kitchen, she flushed hot and cold. Her behavior had been so alien for the woman she’d become. It was as if too many beers had thrown her back to the wild teenager she’d been sixteen years ago, before she learned her lesson the hard way. Forget consequences, enjoy the now.

You feel good.

She whimpered and set down the half finished glass of milk. Her stomach was not enthusiastic about even something as innocuous as milk.

Would he keep his word, and not tell anyone? Nell didn’t know him well enough to be sure either way. The few times she’d had to work with him, they’d butted heads. She thought he was a sexist, macho jerk. Please, she prayed, let him also believe in old-fashioned chivalry.

She went back to the bathroom, brushed her hair into its usual severe, workday chignon, and carefully applied enough makeup to disguise some of the puffiness and blotches. Two more painkillers, teeth brushed and she’d done everything she could short of donning a mask.

Back in the kitchen she belatedly discovered a note from Kim carelessly tossed on the counter. It read, “Mom, Colin’s taking me to the spit. Call his cell phone if you won’t be home for dinner. I can eat with him. Bye.”

Nell crumpled the note. Great. Wonderful. Her just-turned-sixteen-year-old daughter was spending the day in the wilds with her entirely too ardent boyfriend. And what in hell could she, the single mother, do about it? Forbid a sixteen-year-old from dating? Hardly. Sign her up for summer camp? Uh-huh.

“What I wouldn’t give for year-round school,” Nell told the kitchen, and went out the door.

She was one of the last in the crowded briefing room at the station, for which she was grateful. She was able to stand in the back, unnoticed.

This wasn’t the usual beginning of her shift. She and McLean had been assigned, along with ten of the others present yesterday, to work this case. Four detectives from Major Crimes stood behind the captain. One, she was interested to note, was John McLean, Hugh’s older brother. He must have spent the night at the Joplin Building, because tiredness wore lines in his face that she knew weren’t always there, and his expression was bleak.

Nobody would mistake the relationship between the two men, although subtle differences in facial structure made Hugh handsome and his brother plain in a blunt, masculine way. Hugh’s bone structure was more defined, his nose thinner, his cheekbones more pronounced. Both shared imposing height and powerful shoulders and arms.

“The dead guy right outside the elevator on the fifth floor is our shooter,” the captain was saying.

While she was deciding which brother was sexier. Feeling a flush creeping up her face, Nell made a determined effort to block out awareness of Hugh McLean, sitting in the front row.

“A dozen witnesses have positively identified him.” Tiredness showed in the deepened lines on Captain Fisher’s face, but hadn’t succeeded in relaxing his military carriage or the iron in his voice. “He died of a self-inflicted shot to the head. As you all know, he’d been shedding his arsenal as he went. It appears right now that he used up his automatic rounds on the lower floors. He started down the hall, shot one more victim, then headed back to the elevator. He might have heard sirens and realized he couldn’t walk out. Hell, maybe he intended all along to end it that way.

“His name is Jack Gann. He was not a former or current employee of Greater Northwest. We don’t know yet what the association was. We’re guessing he was pissed about a denied claim, but, hell, it could be something else. One of the victims may be an ex-wife, the boyfriend of his ex…. It’ll be your job to find out.

“At this point, we believe he was acting alone. We can’t yet be certain of that, either. His car is in the lot, but so are ones belonging to a lot of other people who won’t be driving them home, either.

“The coroner has wrapped things up at the Joplin Building. You know the drill. We need accurate floor plans, drawings, notes.” Captain Fisher paused, his penetrating gaze traveling from one of his officers to the next. “You will be acting under the direction of the detectives. When you’re done, I want to know every step the son of a bitch took. How did he get to the third floor that heavily armed without being noticed? Who did he shoot first? Second? Third? Why those victims? Were they the ones who didn’t hide fast enough, or were they chosen?” His voice became softer, colder. “I don’t just want to know what he did, I want to know what he was thinking.”

Nods all around. “Sir.”

“These are your assignments.” Like a school-teacher, he stepped from behind the podium and passed out papers. When he’d reached the back of the room and Nell, he added his usual roll-call closer. “Do your jobs and do them carefully.”

Nell was praying she and McLean had been assigned to hunt background on the shooter. Her stomach roiled at the idea of going back into the Joplin Building, of seeing again where the bodies had fallen.

No such luck. She and her new partner—her temporary partner—would be part of the team securing, searching and recording the crime scene.

She waited in the hall for him. He was one of the last out the door of the briefing room, presumably having stopped to talk to his brother. He’d hidden this morning’s excesses better than she had, Nell thought in disgruntlement, watching him approach. With his dark hair, vivid blue eyes and well-defined cheekbones, he was as rakishly handsome as ever. Right now his mouth was set in a hard line, but his jaw was clean-shaven, his eyes clear and his hair slicked back from his face. His crisp uniform fit his tall, muscular body the way it was designed to, a fact that she resented.

She tried very hard not to let pictures of the body beneath the uniform flash in her mind.

His expression was unrevealing when he reached her. “Ready?”

“Naturally,” she snapped. Did she look that bad?

“Do you want to drive today?”

Big of him, she thought uncharitably. They had to go—what?—ten blocks to the Joplin Building. No chance she’d screw up a chase or even a trivial traffic stop.

“You did fine yesterday,” she said waspishly, then was annoyed at herself for being weak enough to display sulkiness. Why give him a weapon?

He lifted a brow. “Fine.”

As they followed the rest of the officers down the hall, she wondered miserably what he was trying not to remember when he looked at her. Or, worse yet, what he was letting himself remember with secret pleasure.

Her cheeks heated in humiliation. Was he instead wondering how many beers he’d had to make him pull down his zipper for her? Flagpole tall women with no figure and hair of undetermined color had never heated his blood before.

She gave a stiff nod when he held open a door for her. Walking into the shadowy parking garage, she hated her awareness of his gaze on her back as he followed.

Damn it, she didn’t want to excite Hugh McLean, Nell thought fiercely. She didn’t like him. Last night—this morning…It was nothing. The stupid behavior induced by inebriation. The true embarrassment was discovering her behavioral control—her common sense!—could be so easily subverted.

Not until they were in their unit and pulling out of the garage did either speak again.

“Feel okay?” Hugh asked.

She felt like hell. “I’m all right.” After a too discernible pause, she added, “You?”

He shrugged. She looked away.

“Oh, hell,” he said suddenly.

“What?”

He hit the flashers and took a sharp left. “Idiot ran the red light.”

The driver of the low-slung Buick ahead had apparently not yet noticed the flashing lights. Nell radioed in the location and license tag number to dispatch.

“Violation?” dispatch asked.

She continued to give information while Hugh hugged the rear of the Buick and finally, briefly, gave a blast of the siren. For a moment the driver seemed to be giving thought to not stopping, but at last grudgingly pulled to the shoulder—without signaling. Hugh had a few choice things to say under his breath as he got out to go to the driver’s side window.

He came back shaking his head. “That woman is ninety if she’s a day. She called me ‘sonny.’”

His chagrin improved her mood. “You probably look like a kid to her.”

He held the license as though it were poison ivy. “Can you believe she still has one?” he said, passing it to her. “Doesn’t she have kids or grandkids to ride herd on her?”

“Would you let yours tell you what to do?” Nell asked, picking up the microphone.

Grandma—or Great-Grandma—turned out to have a dozen unpaid traffic tickets and outstanding warrants. Out of curiosity, Nell strolled back with Hugh to get a look at the feisty eighty-eight-year-old. So tiny she could barely see over the dashboard, she had delicate skin crumpled like tissue paper and vague blue eyes that sharpened when given the news that she wouldn’t be driving away from this stop.

“I drive just fine!” she snapped. “That light was yellow when I started across the intersection. You’re the one who needs your eyes examined, sonny.”

Hugh beat an undignified retreat, Nell hiding a grin as she followed. In the car, they waited for a patrol unit to arrive and finally handed her over with intense gratitude.

“I can’t throw a woman her age in jail,” the patrol officer was whining as they waved and pulled away.

Hugh’s hands relaxed on the steering wheel. “I need more sleep to cope with senile old ladies.”

“I feel sorry for her,” Nell admitted. “She’ll lose her license this time for sure.”

He gave her an incredulous stare. “She’s a menace with that damn boat of a car.”

“But that car is her freedom.” Nell caught his gaze and interpreted it correctly. “Of course we have to take her license. I’m not arguing! I’m just saying I sympathize with her. Who wants to wake up one day and say, ‘Gosh, I’d better not get myself to the store or the doctor anymore. I’ll just depend on other people’s kindness from now on.’”

Hugh squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Can’t we just make a traffic stop without delving into the life problems of everyone we ticket?”

She opened her mouth, closed it. Opened it again. “I’m just saying…”

“I know what you’re saying,” he snapped. “I heard you.”

They drove the five blocks to the Joplin Building in thick silence.

“Oh, hell,” said Hugh again, as it came in sight. The sidewalk was thick was reporters who surged toward the police car before it came to a stop.

“Were you on the SWAT team that first went in yesterday?” reporters yelled. A forest of microphones surrounded Hugh and Nell as they moved grimly toward the front steps. “Can you describe the scene?”

“Was there one killer? Can you confirm rumors that he’s dead?”

“We’re working a crime scene,” Hugh said. “I’m sorry, we can’t comment.”

They broke out of the crowd and gratefully ducked under yellow tape, Nell a little shaken by the shoving bodies, the heavy TV cameras and the urgency of the demands. Port Dare had catapulted into the national news.

The instant they walked into the lobby, Captain Fisher stalked toward them. “Where the hell have you been?”

“Old lady ran a red light right in front of us,” Hugh said expressionlessly. “Sir.”

“Goddamn it, you’re not on patrol!”

Hugh said nothing; of course they couldn’t have let a serious violation like that slide.

He scowled, looking more than ever like a bulldog. “Get the hell upstairs for your assignment!”

They were able to ride one of the elevators; the second was still disabled until the evidence techs were done with it. Alone with him, Nell stared straight ahead as if she were enclosed with a stranger and meeting his gaze was bad manners if not dangerous. But when the doors began to open, she hesitated, not in any hurry to offer her memory banks a second glimpse of the horrors she’d gotten drunk to forget.

It seemed to her that Hugh hesitated as well. His back looked rigid when he went ahead of her. Nell took a deep breath and made herself buck up—she was a police officer. Which didn’t prevent a wash of relief when she saw that the receptionist’s body no longer slumped over her broad desk.

A bagged body on a gurney was waiting to be wheeled onto the elevator.

“What’s the count?” Hugh asked a lieutenant, nodding at the gurney.

“Twelve.” His mouth twisted. “Another one died this morning at Mercy.”

Nell let out a breath. To have miraculously survived the carnage and then die on an operating table or in a hospital bed seemed unbearably cruel.

“Three others are in critical condition.”

“All for what?” Hugh asked. He made a sound in his throat. “Let’s get busy.”

They spent the next hours running tape measures, sketching rooms and hallways and the angles at which bodies had fallen or weaponry had been abandoned. No mysteries in the blood spatter patterns—all were consistent with the victims having been shot with automatic fire at close range.

Nell remembered to call Kim—via the boyfriend’s cell phone—to inform her that she wouldn’t be home for dinner.

“Is Colin taking you out?” she asked.

“Mrs. Cooper said I could have dinner with them,” Kim told her. “We’ll be chaperoned, Mom.”

Nell ignored the sarcasm. “Be sure and thank her.”

“Mo-ther.”

She sighed. “Sorry.”

Her daughter’s voice became tentative. “Are you at the Joplin Building?”

Hugh, waiting a few feet away, watched her, which made Nell edgy.

“Unfortunately.”

“Is it…is it really gross?”

Nell’s gaze was inexorably pulled to the dark stain down the hall. She stripped her voice of emotion. “That’s one way to put it.” She rubbed the back of her neck. “I’ve got to go, Kim. I won’t be in until late tonight. I assume we’ll be back on regular shifts tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Kim said, sounding subdued. “I love you, Mom.”

Tears stung her eyes. “I love you, too.”

Hugh’s astonishingly blue eyes met Nell’s as she stowed her cell phone. “Your kid?”

“Daughter. Kim’s sixteen.”

“Do you have others?”

Was he really interested? She couldn’t imagine.

Nell shook her head.

“You’re divorced?”

“Never married.” Let him make of that what he would.

She felt him studying her, but he didn’t pursue the subject. “I’m glad you can draw better than I can,” was all he said. “I seem to have two thumbs.”

She couldn’t keep a sardonic note from her voice. “Lucky thing women have some useful skills besides empathy.”

“I didn’t say—”

She cut him off. “I know you didn’t.”

The afternoon and evening passed in a blur. Flashes burst on the edges of her vision as the photographers worked. Grey fingerprint powder added its dour presence to the rust-brown stains on the carpet and papered walls. Nell’s head pounded and she worked in dogged silence. One office looked like the next, one hall turned into another. They were going to be here for weeks, she could see already. This was a crime scene of a size so far beyond anything they’d ever managed, it would be a miracle if they were done that soon. And if they didn’t screw up the preservation of evidence.

Not that there’d be a trial, Nell reminded herself wearily. This was all an academic exercise. The killer was dead, already executed by his own hand. So why go through all this?

She knew the answer, of course. At its deepest level, they were after the truth. Without all the puzzle pieces identified and locked into place, they would never have it.