LITMIR.BIZ

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she slid off the gurney and onto the hospital bed. Her body hated her for it. “It’s not like I stood there, daring the guy to shoot me. Hawk. I took a bullet for you.”

      Guilt corkscrewed into him a little further. “Yeah, you did.”

      Sitting on the bed, she read the look in his eyes. “And you feel guilty, don’t you?”

      “Guilt’s not in my file folder.” He wasn’t about to have her poking around in his head, thinking she could read him. There were things there she couldn’t see.

      Teri laughed shortly. “Don’t tell me that. I’ve seen it often enough on the faces of my brothers to know guilt when I see it.” Pain dragged spiked shoes across her side. Teri waited to catch her breath. It wasn’t easy. “No need for guilt. You would have done the same for me.” And then she surprised him by taking hold of his hand in hers. “Thanks.”

      The simple gratitude he both saw in her eyes and heard in her voice stirred something within him and made him uneasy. He shrugged her words away.

      Emotions of any kind, other than cold, steely anger, made him uncomfortable. They always had. He’d never had any outlet for them. The parents he’d once wanted so desperately to notice him, to get themselves clean and turn him and them into a real family, had rejected him. They had ignored him for as far back as he could remember. Instead, they had more interest in the drugs that could remove them from their world and take them to somewhere he had no desire to go.

      Even as a kid, he’d known that drugs were bad. He’d watched firsthand as first his father, then his mother became firmly entrenched—because of drugs—in the land of the living dead.

      He’d attempted, in his own way, to make his parents come around. He’d cooked, cleaned and tried to take care of them. There were tiny glimmers, moments when he thought things were finally on the right path, but in the end, all his efforts came to nothing.

      When he was just twelve, a drug dealer, enraged because his parents were into him for several hundred dollars, had killed them both. Snuffed out their lives without so much as a peep from either for them. They were that far gone into their make-believe worlds.

      And he had seen it all through the crack created by the doorjamb and a closet door.

      He’d tried to wake them, knowing even as he desperately shook his mother, then his father, that they were both dead. And he’d been the one who had called 911 to report their murders.

      Any shred of childhood he might have still possessed died with his parents that day. He’d become a man with all the burdens, all the sorrows that entailed. A man within a boy’s body, but still a man.

      Which was why he had such a hard time in the system, a hard time trying to adjust to strangers, some of whom did their best to make him feel at home. Strangers who thought their rules applied to him. They didn’t realize that it was too late for him. He didn’t fit into a family structure anymore.

      That door had closed for him when he was twelve.

      He’d grown up isolated, insulated, not needing anyone or anything and not allowing anyone to need him.

      So what was he doing here, letting this woman hang on to his hand as if it were her tether back to life as she waited for a resident doctor to examine her? Why wasn’t he back at the apartment complex, taking down statements, doing his job? That was what he was good at—detective work, not comforting.

      Hell, he wouldn’t be able to comfort someone if his life depended on it. He just didn’t know how. So there was absolutely no point in trying.

      Yet Cavanaugh seemed glad to see him, glad to hang on to his hand as if it were some kind of talisman that could keep her safe. Her hand felt small within his. It made him want to protect her.

      “You looked scared.” He finally answered her earlier question.

      He knew it wasn’t the right thing to say, but it was why he was here. He saw no point in sugarcoating, or lying. He’d used lies to survive on the street when he’d run away from his last foster home. When he’d wound up living in an abandoned warehouse with another kid named Tierney. Used lies until the lines between reality and fantasy became completely blurred for him. He wasn’t about to go there anymore. The path back always became hard to find.

      Teri’s first instinct was to say, no, she wasn’t scared. The only thing that scared her was having harm come to the members of her family. Beyond that, she was pretty much fearless—like the rest of them.

      But her reaction to hospitals, to what they represented to her, wasn’t logical. It wasn’t anything she wanted to explain to Hawk. “I don’t expect you to understand.”

      The nurse had returned to take her pulse, then asked her a couple of quick questions, all of which went down on her chart. “How’s the pain?” the woman asked.

      “Not good,” Teri muttered.

      “This’ll help.”

      Before she could ask what she was referring to, the nurse had given her an injection. Leaving to dispose of the needle, she returned with a starched hospital gown and deposited it on the bed.

      “Here, put this on. Someone’ll be here with you shortly.” With that, the woman promptly disappeared again.

      Teri pushed the gown onto the chair.

      “What are you doing?” Hawk asked.

      “There’s no way I’m putting one of those things on. If they want to see this wound, all I have to do is lift up my shirt and they can cut away the bandages the paramedic put on.” She saw he was about to say something and cut him off. “I won’t be reduced to something sitting on an assembly line table.”

      Color rose to her cheeks. In the nine months they’d been partnered, he didn’t remember ever seeing her get angry.

      Or was that fear doing it to her? “Try me.”

      “Excuse me?”

      “You said you didn’t think I would understand why you’re afraid of hospitals. Try me.”

      Even as the words came out of his mouth, he wasn’t entirely sure just how they got there. He made his way through life not getting involved on any level with anything but the cases he was assigned, and then only in strictly a professional way. It was more than a matter of needing to be focused or possessing tunnel vision, he just didn’t care to have people’s lives touch his. It was cleaner that way. Neater.

      Getting involved in someone’s life wasn’t worth the effort or the trouble. That, too, had been a lesson he’d gleaned while raising himself in his parents’ rundown, rat-infested apartment.

      Yet there was something about Cavanaugh that reached out to him.

      Hawk was probably going to use this against her somehow, but since he asked, she felt she owed him an explanation. After all, he was still here, not turning his back and walking away.

      “My uncle died in a hospital. This hospital,” she added. “I was twelve.”

      Twelve.

      The same age as he’d been when everything in his life had changed for him.

      It felt odd having something beyond the police force in common with her. But then, having an uncle die in the line of duty wasn’t exactly the same thing as seeing your parents gunned down in front of you for less money than some people spent for a week’s groceries.

      Restless, he shoved his hands into his pockets and wondered why he wasn’t leaving. “You and your uncle were close?”

      “Not as close as I am to my other uncle. Or my father,” she added.

      The time her father had been wounded in the line of duty, she thought her whole world had been shattering. She’d been so terrified, she couldn’t get herself to come to the hospital with the rest of her siblings, afraid that if she did, if she came, it would be the last time she would see her

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