Lisa Childs - Once a Hero

Kent choked on a laugh. “Talk about having to sleep with one eye open…”

Not that he expected they would do much sleeping if they ever stopped fighting. Erin Powell was one passionate woman. Too bad her passion was hating him.

“We’re talking Fatal Attraction, huh?” Billy chuckled.

“Oh, yeah,” Kent agreed. For me. How the heck could he be attracted to a woman who obviously couldn’t stand him? Especially since he really didn’t like her much, either. But she was so damn beautiful….

“So why the hell did you bring her to the ’house?” Billy asked again, too good an officer to give up.

But after serving as public information officer for three years, Kent was good at sidestepping questions he didn’t want to answer. “She saw the picture you pinned to the dartboard,” he said instead.

Billy chuckled again. “That should be a warning to her to lay off. You showed her?”

“Your mom did.”

The younger man sighed. “Yeah, now that my mom knows where the ’house is, there’ll be no escaping her.”

“Your mom is great,” Kent countered, staunchly defending Marla Halliday. “And tough.” She’d had Billy when she was seventeen, and had raised him all by herself.

“She’s not your mom,” Billy reminded him.

That hadn’t stopped Kent from wishing he’d had someone like her in his life—someone who actually gave a damn about him. “You’re lucky.”

His friend sighed. “Yeah, I am. Too bad you didn’t have better luck.”

As well as not being a hero, he wasn’t a martyr, either. He refused to blame anyone else or make any excuses for what had happened to him. “We make our own luck.”

“By letting Powell into the program, you made yourself some bad luck, my friend,” Billy warned. “You’re going to have no escape from her now.”

It didn’t much matter where Erin went. He already had no escape from her. She was in his head…and under his skin.

“Why’d you bring her there?” Billy persisted.

Kent shrugged, keeping the grimace from his face as muscles tightened in his back. “I don’t know.”

“You want to get her to change her mind about you,” the younger officer guessed correctly.

“About the department,” Kent insisted, unwilling to admit everything.

After all the things she’d written about him, Erin Powell should be the last woman to whom Kent was attracted. But his instincts told him there was something more to her, something she didn’t want him to know. And he’d never been able to resist a mystery. Of course, his instincts had gotten too rusty to trust, so he could be wrong. He might have just imagined the hint of vulnerability in her brown eyes.

His roommate remarked, “Seems like her biggest problem is with you.”

“Seems like,” he agreed.

Billy leaned back on the sofa again and closed his eyes, almost idly asking, “So are you going to finally find out why she has a problem with you?”

“How?” She was too stubborn to tell him.

“You may have been desked, but you’re still one of the best cops Lakewood’s ever had. You know how,” his roommate insisted.

“Beat a confession out of her?” Kent asked with a laugh. “That’s the kind of cop she seems to think I was.”

“She doesn’t know a damn thing about you.”

“No.” And she seemed to think he didn’t know a thing about her. Maybe it was time—past time, actually—that he did. He wanted to know everything there was to know about Erin Powell.

Erin’s hand trembled as she closed it around the door handle of the editor-in-chief’s office. When she had come into the Chronicle—late again—she had found a note on her desk ordering her to see Mr. Stein immediately. He stood in front of the windows looking out over the rain-slicked city of Lakewood, his back to her. Quaint brick buildings lined the cobblestone streets, and in the distance whitecaps rose on Lake Michigan, slapping against the shoreline.

She cleared the nervousness from her voice. “Sir? You wanted to see me?”

“You finally made it in?” he asked, without turning toward her.

“I was working from home, sir,” she said, hoping to pacify him with the partial truth. “I do some of my best work from home.”

The heavyset man finally left the windows and dropped into the leather chair behind his desk. On his blotter was a printout of the article she had turned in the day before: Public Information Officer Admits Cushy Job a Made-Up Position. “The reason I wanted to talk to you is because I’ve been getting complaints about you.”

So she wasn’t being called on the carpet over her tardiness this time. She winced as if she could feel the dart between her eyes. “Let me guess—Sergeant Terlecki?”

“No, surprisingly,” Herb Stein said as he leaned back, his chair creaking in protest due to his substantial weight. “I think he’s the only one who hasn’t complained.”

Erin’s face heated. “Then…who?”

“Just about everyone else down at the department, and quite a lot of the general public.”

She wasn’t surprised. She hadn’t been welcomed very warmly by anyone at the class or the bar afterward a few days before. But still it stung, having people dislike her. Yet she hadn’t joined the CPA to make friends; she was after the truth.

“I had some serious doubts about hiring you,” Herb admitted. “You didn’t have much experience, going from college directly into the Peace Corps.”

“I was a journalist with the college paper,” she reminded him. “And I wrote several freelance articles while I was in the Corps.” She’d been in South America, teaching in a remote village school and helping out at the local clinic and wherever else she had been needed. She hadn’t known then how much she’d been needed back home.

“That bleeding heart stuff.” He dismissed the work of which she was the proudest. “I didn’t think you had it in you to be a real journalist. That’s why I’ve kept you on probation.”

Dread filled her, but she had to know. “Are you firing me now?”

Her boss laughed. “Hell, no. At least people are reading your byline. That’s more than I can say about some of the other staff. I hired you because I thought that even for a bleeding heart, you had potential. That you had some drive.”

Jason was her drive. Jason and Mitchell. She had to help them. “I do.”

“You’ve proved me right.”

Erin uttered a sigh of relief. “You had me worried that I was losing my job.”

“No, in fact, I like this new angle—you attending the Citizen’s Police Academy.”

“Uh, that’s great.” She actually wasn’t that certain she’d made the right choice in joining. Terlecki wouldn’t let anyone but him answer her queries, and he never answered the most important question. Then again, she couldn’t ask him outright if he’d framed her brother to pad his arrest record. He was too smart to make any incriminating admissions.

She was also worried about Jason. While the class met only one night a week, he hated being separated from her. Dropping the six-year-old at school every morning had become an ordeal. He claimed to be sick, and since he did have asthma and allergies, she was never certain if he was telling the truth. Her stomach tightened now with guilt over leaving him with his first-grade teacher. While the older woman had assured her that he was always fine the moment Erin left, she was concerned.

“Did you hear me?” Herb asked, his voice sharp with impatience.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Erin said, face heating. “What were you saying?”

Her lack of attention apparently forgiven, he grinned. “I’m going to give you your own column to report on what happens while you’re in the academy.”