Emilie Rose - A Cop's Honor

He assembled the clues. “The master bedroom is downstairs.”

Her gaze flicked away then returned—evasive, like her son’s. “I can hear the children better up here.”

“What happened to that fancy monitor I gave you when Belle was born? Camera, sound and the whole deal?”

She shifted, drawing his attention to her legs. He hoisted his gaze north. “I’d have to come up anyway if they needed me during the night. It’s easier not to have to race up the stairs when I’m groggy.”

She no longer slept in the downstairs master suite she’d shared with Rick. “When did the move take place?”

“Does it matter, Brandon? We have work to do. Belle’s room will probably take several coats...unless you’re not up to it.”

A challenge to distract him. He recognized the technique but followed Hannah into Belle’s room without comment. The six-year-old stood in front of an easel with a paint-by-number set attached. “What’s that?”

“While we’re painting the walls Belle will be creating artwork to hang on them.”

“It’s going to be a ballerina,” the girl said and twirled, making her little plastic paint smock fan out. “Like me.”

“I’m sure it’ll look great.” He turned his attention back to Hannah, who’d bent over to open a can of paint. The pose hiked her shorts up, revealing even more leg, and caused her shirt to gape. Her bra was pink. The knowledge paralyzed him.

“Honey, run down and eat your lunch. I left it in the refrigerator for you. You can paint when you’re done.”

Belle skipped off.

Brandon pulled himself together. “Mason says he’s going to work on his project instead of helping.”

“That’s right. He has a paper due Friday.”

“But you’ll be up here.”

Her eyebrows dipped. “Yes.”

“That means he’ll be unsupervised on the computer.”

She bit her lip again then took a deep breath, stretching the worn-thin shirt. “Only for a little while. Your point?”

“You can’t watch your kids one hundred percent of the time. No parent can. Let me install the software.”

“No. Absolutely not. Do not bring it up again, Brandon. I’m going to grab a sandwich. You can get started or wait for me.” Then like Mason, she walked away, deftly avoiding the conversation.

Which left Brandon back at ground zero. With nothing. He was certain the boy was up to something, but pushing would get him booted out and ruin any chance he had of keeping his promise to Rick.

Chapter Three

HANNAH SWALLOWED THE last of her sandwich and tried to diagnose her reluctance to return upstairs.

Touching Brandon had been...unsettling. And that made no sense. As a physical therapy assistant she touched people all day, five days a week. She’d dealt with plenty of men as attractive, if not more so, than Brandon, but none of her patients had ever elicited a frantic pulse or the shakes.

Maybe her jitters had been caused by low blood sugar. She hadn’t eaten since before Sunday school. And if that was the case, then she’d have no problem with him while they painted.

Satisfied with her explanation, she released a pent-up breath and directed her attention to her daughter. “You all set, sweetheart?”

Belle scrambled up from the table. “Yes, Mommy.”

“Then let’s go paint your room.”

Together, she and her daughter climbed the stairs. Brandon had taped off the windows in their absence. When she met his hazel gaze her heart thumped an extra beat and her pulse kicked up. Then her hands started shaking. If it continued she wouldn’t be able to paint straight lines along the ceiling and baseboards. She needed to give her blood sugar time to level out before attempting something that meticulous.

“I’ll roll if you’ll cut in,” she suggested.

“Got it,” he replied and positioned the stepladder in the far corner.

She took one final look around the room. The last time she’d decorated in here had been a month after Belle’s birth. She and Rick hadn’t wanted to know their baby’s sex before delivery. That meant no personalization. Afterward, caring for two children with Rick’s hectic schedule, not to mention their tight budget, had limited Hannah’s decorating to hanging a border of pastel merry-go-round horses on the builder-beige walls. Now her baby girl wanted pink walls with ballerina pictures. That was no surprise considering she’d started dance classes this spring.

“Are you starting here?” Brandon stood beside her, one dark eyebrow cocked.

She startled over his proximity. How had he crossed the plastic drop cloth she’d spread on the floor after removing most of Belle’s furniture so quietly? “Yes. I’ll go clockwise if you’ll go the opposite.”

She winced when she looked at his face. He had to be hurting. Each time she’d touched him he’d flinched. When she’d finished he’d been one big knot of muscles. The professional side of her had wanted to massage the kinks loose, but the personal side of her had rejected the idea. He wasn’t her patient.

Brandon was a trouper to work through the discomfort, and for that, she was grateful. But he had a point about Mason being on the computer. Under the guise of checking her email while she was downstairs, she’d ensured her parental controls were still in place before letting Mason have the laptop.

“You washed the walls after removing the border?” Brandon asked.

Of course he’d remember the border. He’d loaned her his level and shown her how to mark a straight line for hanging the paper. “Last week.”

Brandon lifted the lids on each of the paint cans and poured all three into an empty five-gallon bucket. Nine years ago she’d messed up Mason’s room because one of the batches of paint hadn’t been mixed correctly. She’d ended up with a streaky mess of slightly different shades of the same color paint on the walls. After she’d bought replacements, Brandon had shown her the trick of mixing all the buckets beforehand to ensure a uniform result. It had been an expensive lesson—that was the only reason she recalled it so clearly.

His muscles bulged as he lifted the heavy bucket and carefully poured some of the pink liquid into a rolling pan for her and then a smaller pail for himself. The veins lining his hair-dusted forearms and biceps were a sign of his good muscle tone. He’d always been brawnier than Rick, and more adept at doing the physical stuff that this old house required. And he’d never been stingy with his time even though he had his own projects.

He expertly used his brush to catch any drips then looked up and caught her watching him. “You okay?”

She blinked and felt her cheeks warm. “Yes.”

Why was she so focused on him? She had a job to do and a limited amount of time to get it done before the children needed attention. She slid a roller onto her handle and pushed it through the thick liquid and then onto the wall, but the mindless back and forth action wasn’t enough to erase the realization that Brandon had been a part of every major project she and Rick had completed together on this old house.

Brandon had been the one who’d taught both her and Rick how to paint, build swing sets, plant shrubs and grass and to safely replace faulty outlets and faucets along with countless other chores. If Brandon hadn’t known how to do it, he’d been the one to liaise with the contractors for them because he spoke their language. She and Rick would have been lost without him. They never could have taken on this house without him.

So even though she’d banned Brandon from their lives for five years, he’d been here all along, embedded into the walls and the soil around her home. But that didn’t mean she could forgive him for not watching Rick’s back—no matter what the preacher had said this morning.