Falling for Her (23 page)

Jamie kicked at the freshly mown grass. “I know you can’t afford to send me to college.”

“If that’s what you want, we’ll find a way. Just know this, Jamie. Your life will be what you make it, and I for one believe in you.”

His parents had believed in him, even when he’d given them reason not to. Looking back, Jamie realized he had been meant for something different than sports, pot, and partying. Instead, he’d joined the SEALs, had done some good in the world, and still did. If not for his injury, he would probably be playing pro ball.

Yet, he was glad he wasn’t, and that enlightenment had taken ten years in coming. For that, he had to thank Sugar. She’d crashed into his life—almost literally if he considered the beer truck incident—and had sent him to questioning everything he thought he wanted.

What he wanted was her. What his parents wouldn’t have wanted was for him to stay stuck in their lives. He surveyed the furniture that belonged to the past and wondered what kind of style Sugar liked.

Junior jumped onto the sofa and stood on his hind legs, butting Jamie’s cheek. A plaintive wail sounded from the cat. Jamie knew just how Junior felt.

“Do you know why I don’t cuss, Junior? Well, until recently, anyway. No? I’ll tell you why. It’s because my mother raised me right. She would’ve loved Sugar.” Both his parents would have loved her feistiness, her quick humor, and the kindness residing at her very core.

“Mowl.”

Her cat missed her and so did he.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

W
hat just happened?” Sugar asked as the door closed behind Jamie.

Maria rolled her eyes. “Men can be such idiots when they’re in love. Believe me, I know.”

“He’s not in love with me. He can’t stand the sight of me.” What else explained him stomping off like that? She eased up and leaned back on the pillow. “I need to go home. Junior’s there by himself.”

“Who’s Junior?”

“My cat.” Poor baby, he probably thought he’d been abandoned. She pushed off the covers and swung her legs over the side of the bed, then winced. God, moving hurt her side.

“Oh, that’s his name. Jamie took him home with him.” She put her hands on Sugar’s shoulders and pushed her back onto the bed. “You’re not going anywhere until the doctor says you can.”

Too weak to protest, Sugar let herself be fussed over as Maria put the covers back and tucked her in.

“He hates me.”

“Junior? I doubt that.” Maria’s grin said she knew exactly whom Sugar meant.

Although she wanted to pour her heart out, Sugar never had a best friend, and didn’t know how to be one. “When can I get out of here?”

“Do I look like a doctor? Everything’s being taken care of, Sugar.
You just need to relax and trust us.” She pulled the chair close to the
bed and sat, tucking her feet under her. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Trust
. She hadn’t trusted anyone since her mother died. But she wanted to, and had thought she trusted Jamie. But she hadn’t really, at least not enough to tell him all her secrets. It would probably go down as the biggest mistake of her life.

Maria’s warm brown eyes stared back at her, offering friendship and a sympathetic ear.
Accept what she’s offering, Sugar. Tell her everything.
“I was fifteen when—”

The door opened, and a woman in a lab coat with a stethoscope draped around her neck walked in. Twenty minutes later, Sugar lay back exhausted from being poked and prodded. Why was she getting tired so easily? Oh, right, she’d been shot. By her bastard of a husband. At least, the doctor had said she could go home the next day if she didn’t have a fever. Damned if she would. There were things she needed to do.

She fell asleep as the glimmer of a plan formed in her mind.

The chattering squirrel was back. Sugar floated between sleep and wakefulness, listening to the pink lady.

“You boys remind me of my Henry when he was young and virile. So handsome he was. First time I saw him, he was the best man at my cousin’s wedding. Lordie, I couldn’t take my eyes off that man in his dress uniform. He was in the marines. Decided right then and there he was going to be mine. You boys marines?”

Boys? Who was there? Sugar slitted her eyes open to see Pink Lady craning her neck to peer up at the boss and Jamie. Both men stared down at the miniscule woman with amusement on their faces.

“No ma’am,” Kincaid said. “We’re not military.”

“Could’ve fooled me. You both got that look about you.”

“They used to be navy SEALs.” That came from Maria, curled up in the chair. The boss shot his sister a glare, and Maria responded with a mischievous wink. “Just trying to be helpful.”

“I knew it,” Pink Lady said with a dainty grunt of satisfaction.

Sugar half listened to the banter, her attention on Jamie. After the way he’d walked out, she hadn’t expected to see him again, at least not while she was in the hospital. He was so gorgeous, so damn hot, she could drool like a baby just looking at him. She’d known that body intimately, had felt the rock-hard abs as she’d pressed her fingers over them, had climaxed while he had held her close and whispered in her ear.

And it would never happen again because he hated her. Biting down on her bottom lip to keep from crying, she hungrily soaked in the sight of him while she still could. As soon as he realized she was awake, he’d likely storm out again.

As if sensing her scrutiny, his blue eyes locked onto hers before she could pretend to still be asleep. Caught in his gaze, she waited for him to leave, expected it. His attention on her was so intense that she felt an electrical current of some sort sizzling in the air between them.

He wore his warrior face, and what was going on inside his head, she couldn’t fathom, but he didn’t leave. The boss stepped into her line of vision, cutting off the connection between her and Jamie. Air swished out of her lungs as she realized she’d been holding her breath.

“I have a few questions if you feel up to it.”

“Sure.” Surprised when Kincaid sat on the edge of her bed, she pushed up against the pillows. The man made her nervous. There was a dangerous edge to him, and he rarely laughed. Although she’d never seen him with his wife, she’d heard he was putty in the woman’s hands. Sugar found that hard to believe.

“We’ve been busy since the ambulance carried you away, and we now have a background report on you. What that means is we know who you are, who Vanders is, and that your father works for him as a cop.”

Not sure how she felt about them digging into her life, she remained silent. He must have sensed her uneasiness as he gave her a rare smile, his eyes softening just a little.

“You were shot, Sugar . . . is that the name you prefer?”

She nodded.

“We take care of our own, and when our own are threatened, we get busy. Information is vital to the success of any operation, and because you were pretty much out of it, we didn’t feel we could wait. So we started investigating.”

Interesting that he didn’t apologize for nosing into her business, but her mind stuck on one word. Were they planning an operation on her behalf? She glanced at Jamie, and he nodded as if he could read her mind. Such a feeling of gratitude for these men of K2 welled up that she couldn’t utter a word. If she tried, she’d blubber incoherently.

“Let’s give her a few minutes,” Maria said.

Sugar shot her friend a look of appreciation for understanding she needed time to collect herself.

“Not you,” Maria said, grabbing Jamie’s arm when he turned to leave.

Alone with him, she searched for something to say to the man who’d stolen her heart. For his part, Jamie seemed as much at a loss for words as she was.

Sugar sucked in her breath, steeling herself to take a blind leap off a cliff. He’d either catch her or let her crash on the rocks below. Either way, at least she’d know what the future meant for them.

“I love you, you know.” There, she’d said it.

He said nothing back. Only stood just out of her reach and gave her nothing from his unreadable blue eyes. Damn and hell and damn. She should’ve done as Hannah would have and pulled the sheet over her head until he’d gone away.

At her words, ones Jamie had never thought to want from her, the last piece of the block of ice that had frozen him in place for ten long years melted away. Although she’d said it before, she had just been shot, and it could have been her fear talking. But this time she’d said the words while alert and aware. His feet took one step toward her, his heart joining in the march at his second step, his mind giving up the fight the moment he touched her.

“Sugar,” he said, and wrapped his arms around her as he pushed his way onto her bed. “My sweet Sugar.” He curled around her and pressed her head onto his shoulder. Nothing in his sorry life had felt better than how she trustingly nestled into him and sighed his name.

Still cocooned together when Kincaid and Maria returned to the room, Jamie slid out of the bed. Although no other words had been said between them, he hoped she understood he’d just given her his heart. He’d almost told her he loved her, but as the words reached the tip of his tongue, a way to show her occurred to him, and he stayed quiet. It would be much better than confessing his love in a hospital room. He hoped.

“Are you ready to help us put a stop to your bad cop, sweetheart?”

“He’s not mine, and I never wanted him to be.”

“Then let’s make sure he understands that.” If there were any other way, he wouldn’t put her through the questions they needed answers to. “We need to know everything there is to know about Rodney Vanders. We’ve had a chance to dig a little into his personal affairs, and there’s some interesting stuff. It would speed things along if you know anything.”

Her harsh laugh grated in his ears, and he glanced at Kincaid, who nodded that he, too, understood the implications of her response. She knew enough to take the man down.

At her hesitation, Maria placed her hand on Sugar’s blanket-covered foot and squeezed. “We’re your friends, Sugar, and we want to help. You can trust us.”

“I know,” Sugar whispered. “It’s just that it’s been so long since I could trust anyone, and your stepping up to protect someone you barely know is hard to believe.”

Jamie squeezed her hand, and she took a deep breath and started talking. As he listened to her speak of how the Vanders family had ruled the town for generations through intimidation, threats, and blackmail, Jamie’s urge to wrap his hands around the man’s neck grew with each word. Even if the man had been taught from birth he was entitled to take what he wanted by whatever means he wanted and didn’t know any better, Jamie felt no guilt over what they had planned for him. Evil was evil no matter how it got to be evil.

“The first time I met him, I was fifteen. If I . . . if I had known then what he was and that he’d decided the moment he set eyes on me that I belonged to him, I would’ve run away from home.” One shoulder lifted in a small shrug, then her gaze traveled over Kincaid and Maria. “There’s personal stuff I’m just not willing to talk about.”

Nor did he want the boss to hear intimate details of her time with Vanders. “That’s okay, baby, you don’t have to.” Believing she would respond to him best, they’d decided before entering her room that Jamie would ask the questions. “What we really need to know about is the money he stole, and I’m sorry, sweetheart, but you’re going to have to tell us about the woman he claims you killed.”

Indignation flared in her eyes. “Is that what you believe, that I’m a murderer?”

There was his Sugar Darling, the woman who’d defied the devil in the disguise of a man by trying to make things right, then had managed to hide herself for two years. “Did you miss the part where I said he
claims
you did it? No, I know you didn’t, so you can quit shooting fire at me with those beautiful eyes of yours.”

He’d not missed her slight wince when she’d moved too fast, and he put a hand on her shoulder, leaving it there. “Easy. You’re going to hurt yourself moving around like that. What happened, Sugar?”

“She was so nice to me, and h-he k-killed her.” With that, she burst into tears. He got back on the bed with her and wrapped his arms around her as her cries grew until she was sobbing. Hearing a whimper, he glanced up to see tears streaming down Maria’s face. When she pressed her hands over her face, he lifted his chin at Kincaid, who nodded and stood.

“We’ll be outside,” he said, grabbing Maria’s hand and towing her out of the room.

Not caring that she was soaking his shirt with her tears, he held the woman who’d snuck her way into his heart and marveled at how right it felt. When he’d entered the room and stood beside her bed, staring down at her, he’d known then he would never let her go. There was the problem of her having a husband, but she could remedy that with a quick divorce. Once Vanders was behind bars, she’d finally be free of the man.

With her face buried against his chest, she started talking. “Her name was Mrs. Lederman, and she was homebound. Rodney started taking me to her house in the afternoons after I got out of school. I was a senior then. He said she was lonely and needed a friend. I didn’t suspect his real reason at first.”

“To steal her money?” he asked when she paused.

“Yes, to steal her money. It was only when he gave me the name of an attorney to recommend to her that I got suspicious, but by then I was too afraid of him to refuse. I don’t know how they managed to trick her, but somehow, Rodney ended up as her beneficiary. Then one day he arrived to pick me up, and he told me to go to the car. I didn’t though. By then, I knew what kind of man he was, and I didn’t trust him. So, I tiptoed down the hall and peeked into the room. He-he had a pillow over her face.”