of it for eight years, thank you very much.”
“No, you’ve been hiding out. Big difference. Grow a pair, Brown. It’s past time.”
He opened his mouth. Shut it. Whipped his head toward the opposite window and clamped his fingers around his thighs to keep from clamping them around her throat. Talk about tossing a glass of ice water on a lit match. He wasn’t thinking about sex anymore. Oh, no. He was thinking about murder. If she’d been a man, he’d have dropped her.
And if she’d been wrong, he admitted as a flood of self-disgust washed over him, he’d have stopped the cab, gotten out, and told her to go preach to another choir.
Can I get a hallelujah?
He stared blindly out at the shadowed urban landscape scrolling by in the dark. But she wasn’t wrong, was she? She was so not wrong.
In fact, she was so flat-out, dead-on right, it shamed him. Kicked him in the head, punched him in the gut, and shamed him into finally admitting the truth.
For eight years he’d been running. For eight years he’d been telling himself it didn’t matter, he couldn’t change it, couldn’t make it right. He’d only been partly right. He couldn’t change what had happened, couldn’t bring those men back.
But it did matter. On that he’d been head-up-his-ass wrong. It had always mattered. Every second, every minute, every hour of every freaking day. Mattered to the point where he’d run and denied and become so mired in the game of avoiding the truth, that he’d totally lost sight of it.
Here, now, was the truth. He was an innocent man. Taggart and Cooper were innocent men. And just because his balls had been nailed to the proverbial wall all those years ago didn’t mean he had to be held hostage by lies now.
An even sadder truth? Nothing but his own stubborn determination stopped him from breaking free.
He glanced at the woman responsible for upsetting his cart full of rotten apples. Gave her her due. She was wrong about a lot of things, but she was right about the one thing that counted.
He was a coward.
Had been for eight long years.
He set his jaw, breathed deep, and made that final leap from resistance to resolution.
That all changed right now.
As of now, he was officially back in the game, because this lying, conniving, sexy-as-ever-loving-sin, wack-job of a woman had dragged him out of his hidey-hole.
So . . . did he thank her or throttle her? And what in holy hell was he supposed to make of her? Though her conspiracy talk was off-the-charts crazy, that gunman had been sent by someone. Someone she’d either pissed off or someone who wanted her silenced—or both.
He scrubbed a hand over his face.
Okay, so if he bought into her conspiracy theory—and that was a big if —who was behind it, and what was their endgame? It was bad enough that he’d lostfriends that day. Bad enough that he’d taken the fall. But if she was right—if it was far bigger than an operation gone sideways—then it meant that his being framed was only a microscopic blip on the radar of a far bigger plot. Which reduced the importance of what had happened to him to less than nothing.
And that really pissed him off. Because he was more than nothing. His team had been more than nothing. And suddenly, because of her, if it was the last thing he did, he wanted not only justice for them, but he wanted this bastard taken out. And he wanted to be the one doing it.
“All right, Ms. Hot Tamale Diaz,” he said, deciding to give her what she wanted. “We’re going to play this out. We are going to proceed as though we have our fingers on the trigger of a gun that’s going to go boom in the face of the man who killed a lot of good men, a lot of innocent people, and ruined my life.
“But so help me God,” he warned her when relief and satisfaction filled her eyes, “if you don’t deliver the goods—”
“I’ll deliver,” she promised. And though he had a shitload of reasons not to trust her, the conviction in her words
“No, you’ve been hiding out. Big difference. Grow a pair, Brown. It’s past time.”
He opened his mouth. Shut it. Whipped his head toward the opposite window and clamped his fingers around his thighs to keep from clamping them around her throat. Talk about tossing a glass of ice water on a lit match. He wasn’t thinking about sex anymore. Oh, no. He was thinking about murder. If she’d been a man, he’d have dropped her.
And if she’d been wrong, he admitted as a flood of self-disgust washed over him, he’d have stopped the cab, gotten out, and told her to go preach to another choir.
Can I get a hallelujah?
He stared blindly out at the shadowed urban landscape scrolling by in the dark. But she wasn’t wrong, was she? She was so not wrong.
In fact, she was so flat-out, dead-on right, it shamed him. Kicked him in the head, punched him in the gut, and shamed him into finally admitting the truth.
For eight years he’d been running. For eight years he’d been telling himself it didn’t matter, he couldn’t change it, couldn’t make it right. He’d only been partly right. He couldn’t change what had happened, couldn’t bring those men back.
But it did matter. On that he’d been head-up-his-ass wrong. It had always mattered. Every second, every minute, every hour of every freaking day. Mattered to the point where he’d run and denied and become so mired in the game of avoiding the truth, that he’d totally lost sight of it.
Here, now, was the truth. He was an innocent man. Taggart and Cooper were innocent men. And just because his balls had been nailed to the proverbial wall all those years ago didn’t mean he had to be held hostage by lies now.
An even sadder truth? Nothing but his own stubborn determination stopped him from breaking free.
He glanced at the woman responsible for upsetting his cart full of rotten apples. Gave her her due. She was wrong about a lot of things, but she was right about the one thing that counted.
He was a coward.
Had been for eight long years.
He set his jaw, breathed deep, and made that final leap from resistance to resolution.
That all changed right now.
As of now, he was officially back in the game, because this lying, conniving, sexy-as-ever-loving-sin, wack-job of a woman had dragged him out of his hidey-hole.
So . . . did he thank her or throttle her? And what in holy hell was he supposed to make of her? Though her conspiracy talk was off-the-charts crazy, that gunman had been sent by someone. Someone she’d either pissed off or someone who wanted her silenced—or both.
He scrubbed a hand over his face.
Okay, so if he bought into her conspiracy theory—and that was a big if —who was behind it, and what was their endgame? It was bad enough that he’d lostfriends that day. Bad enough that he’d taken the fall. But if she was right—if it was far bigger than an operation gone sideways—then it meant that his being framed was only a microscopic blip on the radar of a far bigger plot. Which reduced the importance of what had happened to him to less than nothing.
And that really pissed him off. Because he was more than nothing. His team had been more than nothing. And suddenly, because of her, if it was the last thing he did, he wanted not only justice for them, but he wanted this bastard taken out. And he wanted to be the one doing it.
“All right, Ms. Hot Tamale Diaz,” he said, deciding to give her what she wanted. “We’re going to play this out. We are going to proceed as though we have our fingers on the trigger of a gun that’s going to go boom in the face of the man who killed a lot of good men, a lot of innocent people, and ruined my life.
“But so help me God,” he warned her when relief and satisfaction filled her eyes, “if you don’t deliver the goods—”
“I’ll deliver,” she promised. And though he had a shitload of reasons not to trust her, the conviction in her words
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