Once a Hero

Kathryn stepped closer and sniffed her hair. “You smell like you’ve been in a bar instead of a classroom.”

Erin shook her head. “Restaurant. It was easier to do interviews there than at the police department.” Or it would have been if she’d actually managed to speak to anyone without Sergeant Terlecki’s interference.

“You’re wasting your time,” her mother claimed. “If what you’re really looking for is some evidence to clear your brother, you’re not going to find anything.”

“Mom, I have to help him.” She would never be able to turn her back on her half brother the way her parents had. “Not just for Mitchell but for Jason, too. He can’t keep losing people he loves.”

That was why her nephew had become so attached to Erin—he was afraid she would leave him, as his father had four years ago and then his mother just last year. Mitchell’s girlfriend had found someone else, someone who didn’t want to raise another man’s child. So except for Erin’s parents, who tended to be more disapproving than affectionate, Erin was all the little boy had now.

“If you want to help your brother,” Kathryn advised, “then get him to admit the truth.”

“He’s not the one lying.” Kent Terlecki was. He had to be, or else her brother was one of those many people of whom Kent had spoken who committed crimes. And her older brother, her hero growing up, could not be a criminal.

A CURSE BROKE THE SILENCE in the living room, then books and CDs toppled to the hardwood floor as someone banged into a table in the dark. Kent snapped on a lamp, the light revealing the intruder: a tall, wiry guy with dark hair and a beard, dressed in dark clothes.

“What the hell—” Billy griped as he rubbed his knee. “Why are you sitting up in the dark?”

“Couldn’t sleep.”

“Your back bothering you?”

Kent shook his head. “Nope,” he said, ignoring the twinge along his spine. He had grown used to it over the past few years. “That’s not the pain keeping me awake.”

“The reporter?” Billy asked, snorting with disgust.

He nodded.

“I heard you brought her to the Lighthouse.” Billy dropped onto the old plaid couch across from the leather chair where Kent sat.

“You talked to your mom?” He grinned as he thought of Marla Halliday and how she’d led Erin to the dartboard. “Did you know she was joining the class?”

Billy shook his head. “I wish Paddy would’ve given me the heads-up he gave you about Powell.”

“You’re lucky you have a mom who wants to be involved in what you’re doing,” Kent told him. He’d been estranged from his folks since he’d chosen to go to the police academy instead of continuing the Terlecki tradition of working the family farm in northern Michigan.

“Mom can’t be involved in my life now,” Billy said, sinking deeper into the couch. Exhaustion blackened the skin beneath his eyes, making him look older than his twenty-six years. “You know how vice is….”

Deep cover. Streets. Bars. Abandoned houses and back alleys. Late nights and dangerous people. Kent had loved his years in vice. That was where he had made the majority of his arrests. Erin was delusional to think he’d had to frame innocent people; he hadn’t met many innocent people during that time. Or now. Somehow he suspected she was every bit as dangerous as the criminals he’d dealt with during his stint in vice.

She sure had it in for him for some reason, finding fault with everything he said or did.

“How come you came home?” Kent asked.

Not that Billy spent every night in the drug house the department had set up in the seedy area of Lakewood. The cover wasn’t so deep that the officers weren’t entitled to some downtime. Some officers even worked a regular twelve-hour shift. Billy wasn’t one of them.

The other man yawned and flopped his head against the back of the sofa. “I wanted to get some sleep without having to keep one eye open to watch my back.”

“I remember feeling like that,” Kent sympathized.

“You should still feel like that,” his roommate warned him, “with that reporter out to get you. Why the hell did you okay Erin Powell getting into the CPA?”

He sighed. “I wanted to prove to her that the department has nothing to hide.”

“She’s not as interested in the department as she is you, Bullet,” Billy warned him. Some of the weariness left his dark eyes as he leaned forward and studied Kent. “You’re not interested in her, are you?”

Kent choked on a laugh. “Talk about having to sleep with one eye open…”

Not that he expected they would do much sleeping if they ever stopped fighting. Erin Powell was one passionate woman. Too bad her passion was hating him.

“We’re talking Fatal Attraction, huh?” Billy chuckled.

“Oh, yeah,” Kent agreed. For me. How the heck could he be attracted to a woman who obviously couldn’t stand him? Especially since he really didn’t like her much, either. But she was so damn beautiful….

“So why the hell did you bring her to the ’house?” Billy asked again, too good an officer to give up.

But after serving as public information officer for three years, Kent was good at sidestepping questions he didn’t want to answer. “She saw the picture you pinned to the dartboard,” he said instead.

Billy chuckled again. “That should be a warning to her to lay off. You showed her?”

“Your mom did.”

The younger man sighed. “Yeah, now that my mom knows where the ’house is, there’ll be no escaping her.”

“Your mom is great,” Kent countered, staunchly defending Marla Halliday. “And tough.” She’d had Billy when she was seventeen, and had raised him all by herself.

“She’s not your mom,” Billy reminded him.

That hadn’t stopped Kent from wishing he’d had someone like her in his life—someone who actually gave a damn about him. “You’re lucky.”

His friend sighed. “Yeah, I am. Too bad you didn’t have better luck.”

As well as not being a hero, he wasn’t a martyr, either. He refused to blame anyone else or make any excuses for what had happened to him. “We make our own luck.”

“By letting Powell into the program, you made yourself some bad luck, my friend,” Billy warned. “You’re going to have no escape from her now.”

It didn’t much matter where Erin went. He already had no escape from her. She was in his head…and under his skin.

“Why’d you bring her there?” Billy persisted.

Kent shrugged, keeping the grimace from his face as muscles tightened in his back. “I don’t know.”

“You want to get her to change her mind about you,” the younger officer guessed correctly.

“About the department,” Kent insisted, unwilling to admit everything.

After all the things she’d written about him, Erin Powell should be the last woman to whom Kent was attracted. But his instincts told him there was something more to her, something she didn’t want him to know. And he’d never been able to resist a mystery. Of course, his instincts had gotten too rusty to trust, so he could be wrong. He might have just imagined the hint of vulnerability in her brown eyes.

His roommate remarked, “Seems like her biggest problem is with you.”