Линси Сэндс - Meant to Be Immortal [calibre]

“Really?” she asked, setting the carafe on the burner and turning on the coffee machine. Then she turned and let her gaze slide over his beautiful body. One she’d enjoyed a great deal over the last two weeks, and in various and sundry places. They’d made love on the beach, in her fishing boat, in the lake, and every room in the cottage. Actually, they’d made love every chance they’d got, which hadn’t been much during the day unless it rained thanks to Marguerite, Julius, Bricker, and Decker living just next door in the RV. But she could only think that was a good thing, otherwise she suspected she and Mac would have spent the full two weeks in bed, and that wouldn’t have been very helpful in finding out if he liked the island as he was now claiming. Clearing her throat, she asked, “You don’t find it too slow and quiet?”

“Are you kidding?” he asked on a laugh as he stopped in front of her and drew her into his arms. Bending, he kissed the tip of her nose, and assured her, “After ten years in New York, this is heaven. No honking horns, no shouting, no crowds to try to navigate everywhere you go.” Hugging her tight, he rested his chin on her head and murmured, “Just you and peace and quiet and sunshine every day.”

“It’s rained four times in the last two weeks,” CJ pointed out with amusement, slipping her arms around his waist.

“Yeah, but then we got to read and do jigsaw puzzles and make love. I liked the making love best,” he admitted with a grin, pulling back slightly to tell her seriously, “I could live here year-round, I think, if I didn’t worry that getting daily deliveries would be a pain.”

“Oh,” CJ breathed, and then admitted, “I’m glad. I was worried you wouldn’t like it. Billy, my ex-husband, didn’t.”

“Your ex-husband was an idiot,” Mac assured her. “As proven by the fact that he let you get away.”

CJ didn’t respond; she merely leaned her head against his chest and tightened her arms, hugging him closer.

“You never talk about him,” Mac said quietly. “Did he hurt you terribly?”

CJ hesitated, and then instead of addressing that, said, “You’ve never asked me how I got HIV.”

He could have pointed out that she’d never questioned him on the subject either, but instead said, “I just assumed that you got it on the job. Maybe getting stuck by a dirty needle while you were trying to subdue a drugged-out perp or something?”

“I wish,” she said with a snort. “At least that way I’d be a wounded warrior rather than a pathetic idiot.”

Mac leaned back again, his expression full of sympathy, then he said softly, “Tell me.”

CJ wanted to refuse and tell him it didn’t matter, it was what it was. But more than that, she wanted to tell him the truth. CJ had no idea why. Normally, she didn’t want to talk about it at all. In fact, she’d gone to counseling because of it exactly once, and hadn’t been able to bring herself to talk about it, even to a therapist. But she wanted to tell Mac, and for once in her life she didn’t question the why or whether it was the smart thing to do. Instead, she pulled out of his arms, poured coffee into the two cups she’d fetched earlier, and fixed them both before pushing his toward him. Claiming her own, she then led him to the small kitchen table.

“My father, Johnathan Cummings, was the best man I’ve known in my life,” she stated quietly once they’d sat down across from each other. “I always felt loved and safe with him around. He was kind, caring, an amazing father, and he became a police officer because he wanted to make the world a better place. He was a good man. The best.”

Mac didn’t comment, but nodded encouragingly.

“I actually became a cop to honor him,” she admitted. “So maybe it isn’t surprising that I wanted to marry a man just like him.”

“Of course,” he said as if that were the most natural thing in the world.

CJ nodded. “Unfortunately, to me that meant marrying a police officer,” she said unhappily, and when his expression turned quizzical, she explained, “In my mind, I equated all of his wonderful qualities with his being a police officer. I assumed all police officers must be good men trying to better the world like him.”

“Ah,” Mac breathed with understanding.

“Yeah. It was pretty naïve of me,” she admitted. “I mean, a lot of them are like that. But not all of them, and being young and stupid, I fell for a police officer who was one of the ones who weren’t, one who was the exact opposite of my father.” CJ turned her coffee cup on the table, enjoying the heat emanating from the ceramic and warming hands that she suddenly noticed were icy cold. “William Carter, better known as Billy, was seven years older than me, good-looking, and worked undercover for the police drug squad. All the female officers were gaga after him, and the men liked him. He was really good at his job, broke up more drug rings than anyone else, and was always the life of the party.”

Her gaze flicked up to his face and back down before she admitted, “I was shocked as hell when he turned his attention on me. It was like being noticed by a rock star. It was exciting, flattering, and raised me up in the eyes of my peers.” She grimaced and then glanced up again as she added, “It was also a whirlwind. He’d be away on his undercover assignments and then blow back in once they were done and want to celebrate his win with parties and marathon sex sessions, and then be gone on the next assignment.”

CJ saw Mac wince at that, but ignored it and continued, “We dated a year before he asked me to marry him, which sounds all right, but when I look back at that period, I realize I probably only saw him the equivalent of a month or two during that time. A night or two here, a night or two there, a whole week a time or three, and then he’d be off on assignment again. He was always volunteering for extra assignments. He said he wanted to buy a house to raise a family in, and house prices in Toronto were crazy expensive even back then so I understood. I even admired him for it despite the fact that it meant not seeing him as much as I’d like. Besides, he made up for it with loads of texts and emails.”

Smiling grimly, CJ told Mac, “Billy gave really good email. They were romantic and passionate, going on about how he missed me. How I was the only thing that got him through his crazy dangerous assignments. I was beautiful and smart and he was so damned lucky to have me to come back to.” Her mouth twisted. “Basically, everything a young woman wanted to hear. Or read as the case may be.

“We were trying to arrange the wedding, picking out invitations and venues and not really settling on anything because he was there so rarely. On top of that, I had just made it to homicide detective and was working crazy hours trying to prove myself, so didn’t have a lot of free time to taste cakes and look over menus,” she said, but didn’t admit that maybe a good portion of the time she spent working was to avoid having to deal with the wedding details. It was a lot of work, and she hadn’t felt right doing such things without him anyway. It was his wedding too, after all.

“Anyway, that went on for a while and then, about six months after proposing, he whisked me away for a weekend in Vegas. And in the midst of gambling and drinking and having a desperately good time, he convinced me to forgo all the fuss and stress and marry him there.”

CJ blew her breath out and shook her head unhappily. “It was one of the biggest mistakes of my life, second only to agreeing to date him.”

She paused to take a sip of her coffee and then cleared her throat and said, “It took twenty minutes to get the license and ten minutes to find a chapel he liked, and just like that, I was Mrs. CJ Carter. After that it was twenty-four hours of celebration and consummation and then we were on a plane back home. But we’d barely landed back in Toronto before he was off on another assignment, and I mean that literally,” she added, meeting his gaze. “We landed, he turned on his phone while we were waiting for our luggage, and it immediately started to ring. He hung up two minutes later and left me to wait for our things while he ran off to the station to talk to his team. I rounded up the luggage and caught a taxi home, and he came back several hours later with the news that he was going undercover again the next day.”