The Strong Silent Type

They’d finally made it to the landing. He’d gone as slowly as he dared. Hawk brought her over to the elevator. Angling for the best position in order to get at the button, he raised Teri up slightly in his arms, then pressed. He’d bench-pressed twice her weight just yesterday. Didn’t she eat?

“I have no intentions of calling your father.”

No, he wouldn’t, she realized. He wouldn’t see the need for it. Hawk didn’t understand the kind of closeness a family like theirs generated. She wondered if he’d ever experienced anything remotely resembling closeness amid all the foster families he’d been shipped off to during his youth.

Probably not.

She felt something stir in her heart. It wasn’t pity, just an overwhelming amount of sympathy, but he probably wouldn’t have understood that, either. In an odd way, he appeared to be content in his life with things just the way they were.

But she wasn’t.

“Sorry, I forgot who I was talking to,” she mumbled. Teri withdrew her arms from his neck, but he made no move to set her on the floor. Given a choice, she would have rather remained this way, in his arms, for a host of reasons. But it ate at her independence. “You can put me down now,” she said softly.

His eyes met hers and she almost expected him to try to argue her out of it. He didn’t. Instead, without a word, he allowed her to test her own legs.

And find herself wanting. Teri’s knees all but buckled out from under her.

“Any other bright ideas?” he asked as he picked her up into his arms again.

“Several, but they all involve less clothing.” She gave him a sexy, sidelong glance to mask the pain she felt shooting up and down her entire left side. It was a joke, purely a joke, or so she told herself. But for one moment, something telegraphed itself between them, something almost erotic. The next moment, it was gone and he was looking at her with what appeared to be confusion. “Gotcha,” she muttered in triumph.

He made no comment. With Teri, it was safer that way. He glared instead at the light, which testified that the elevator car had not left the second floor in all this time. More than likely, it’d temporarily been commandeered by the officers going over the victims’ apartment. There was no telling when they would release the elevator. Probably not before checking out the rest of the building in case the burglars had accomplices who had fled to other floors.

He also didn’t know how long he would be required to remain standing here with Teri. And she was in no shape to wait indefinitely. Making up his mind, Hawk headed back toward the stairwell. When he reached it, he pushed open the door with his back.

Teri stared at him. “Where are we going?”

“To never-never land,” he said between clenched teeth. There she went, asking more questions, butting heads with him at every turn. Why couldn’t she just be cooperative and pass out like any normal person in her place would have?

Teri blinked. “A joke. You made a joke. I must be dying. Is it that serious?”

Hawk sighed, trying hard not to jostle her any more than he had to. He didn’t even look at his partner. “If I said yes, would you shut up?”

She wanted to thread her arms back around his neck to secure herself, but she felt that if she didn’t keep pressing her hand against her side, everything would come tumbling out. “Now you’re starting to hurt my feelings, Hawk. And just when we were getting so close, too.”

“We’re not getting close,” he informed her tersely, taking the next set of stairs down. “I don’t get close.” And because there was a real danger of that happening here, he put out a special effort to keep her at arm’s length.

Deep down, he didn’t really believe that, she thought. It was just something he’d talked himself into. “Even the Lone Ranger had Tonto.”

This time he did look at her. “I’m not interested in having anyone.”

She thought of the way the women at the precinct looked at him when he wasn’t paying attention. Which was all of the time.

“Oh, well, that’s a shame, because there are plenty of people interested in having you.” Determined not to let him know how much this was hurting, she pushed harder against the wound praying it would stop radiating pain.

He almost slipped and told her she was delirious again, but stopped himself in time. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She gave him that smile, that knowing, almost smug smile that said she was privy to some kind of inside information that he wasn’t. The one that never failed to test the parameters of his temper and find him seriously lacking. The one that got under his skin no matter how much he tried to keep it out.

“You know,” she said in an almost breathless manner that concerned him the moment he heard it, “for a police detective, you’re not very observant. Female people,” she finally elaborated. “You don’t seem to notice all the heads that turn whenever you come into the room, partner. You definitely raise blood pressures.”

He gave her a look that would have silenced a babbling brook, but had no effect on her. “You’re raising mine right now.”

She chose to interpret his comment the way she knew would drive him crazy. “What a lovely thing to say, Hawk.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

Why did five flights feel so endless? She was surprisingly light, even in boots and a winter jacket, but he was being careful not to jostle her any further, and that took time and effort. He wasn’t happy about having to hold her against him like this. He had her so close, the blood from her wound had gotten onto his clothing.

It wasn’t the blood he was concerned about. With a little cold water, a lot of soaking, blood washed out. It was breathing in that cologne of hers—the one she swore she didn’t wear—that was getting to him. It made the closed-in area of the stairwell almost suffocating for him. He responded to her in ways he didn’t want to even think about.

In ways he didn’t want to respond. He couldn’t think of her as a woman, he reminded himself.

He couldn’t not.

Teri took a deep breath. The dizziness was beginning to pass slightly. Maybe she was getting her second wind, she reasoned. She looked at Hawk. “Let me walk down the rest of the way,” she said. “I don’t want you naming your hernia after me.”

This wasn’t even up for discussion. If he let her try to stand up, he was fairly certain she was going to go down like a stone. He would have bet his next month’s pay on it.

“You weigh twelve and a half pounds—don’t worry about it.”

She wasn’t exactly worried, but this definitely had the makings of something he was going to use to his advantage throughout their partnership. “This isn’t something you’re going to let me live down.”

She was out of her head, wasn’t she? he thought. Other partners had rapports where there was a certain amount of give and take, of banter. He would have liked nothing better than to spend his time with her in completely silence except for the dispatch radio.

“This isn’t something I ever intend to talk about. Ever,” he underscored.

She tried to guess at his reason. “Don’t like people reminding you that you’re kind?”

“Don’t like people being pains in the butt,” he countered.

Jack Hawkins was a hard nut to crack, she thought. But here he was, being nice to her. He could have waited for the elevator, could have waited for the paramedics to arrive on the roof, for that matter, instead of taking it upon himself to carry her down five flights of stairs to the ground floor. Six if they counted the set of stairs that had led from the roof to the fifth floor. Which meant the big lug cared.

“You can huff and puff all you want, Hawk, but I’ve got your number. You’re not the big bad wolf you pretend to be.”

Reaching the final landing, he paused long enough to look her right in the eye. She had to get over this noble image of him she was trying to paint. It got in his way.

“I don’t waste my time pretending.” So saying, he pushed down on the door handle with his elbow, opening the door that led out into the lobby.

Hawk could protest all he wanted; she knew better. But she played along, her mouth curving. “What you see is what you get, huh?”

He didn’t bother looking at her. Instead, he walked by the doorman, whose mouth dropped open when he saw the wounded woman in Hawk’s arms. “Right.”

“Wrong,” she countered just as the ambulance came into view.

Seeing journey’s end, Hawk almost sighed with relief. Not long now.

The doors of the stark-white vehicle with its red letters popped open. One of the two paramedics assigned to it jumped out.