Once a Hero

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.”