Julie Miller - Kansas City Cop

Mike Cutler. My dad. Gina’s foggy brain cleared with a moment of recognition. “Captain Cutler? Oh, God. I’m interviewing with him... Don’t tell him I got shot, okay?” But he’d left her. Gina called out in a panic. “Cutler?”

“I’m here.” Her instinct to exhale with relief ended up in a painful fit of coughing. “Easy. I was just checking your partner.”

“How is he?”

“Unconscious. As far as I can tell, he has a gunshot wound to the arm. But he may have hit his head on the door frame or pavement. His nose is bruised.”

“That was...before.” She tried to point to the house.

“Before what?”

The words to explain the incident with Gordon Bismarck were lost in the fog of her thoughts. But her training was clear. Derek was shot. And she had a job to do.

“The prisoner?” Gina tried to roll over and push herself up, but she couldn’t seem to get her arm beneath her. The snow and clouds and black running shoes all swirled together inside her head.

“Easy, Gina. I need you to lie still. An ambulance is on its way. You’ve injured your shoulder, and I don’t see an exit wound. If that bullet is still inside you, I don’t want it traveling anywhere.” He unzipped his jacket and shrugged out of it. He draped the thin, insulated material over her body, gently but securely tucking her in, surrounding her with the residual warmth from his body and the faint, musky scent of his workout. “The guy in the backseat is loud, but unharmed. The lady at the front door looks scared, but she isn’t shot. Lie down. You’re going into shock.” He pulled her radio from beneath the jacket and pressed the call button. “Get that bus to...” Gina’s vision blurred as he rattled off the address. “Stay with me. Gina?” His warm hand cupped her face, and she realized just how cold she was. She wished she could wrap her whole body up in that kind of heat. She looked up into his stern expression. “Stay with me.”

“Catnip.”

“What?” Her eyelids drifted shut. “Gina!”

The last thing she saw was her blood seeping into the snow. The last thing she felt was the man’s strong hands pressing against her breast and shoulder. The last thing she heard was his voice on her radio.

“Officer down! I repeat: officer down!”

Chapter Three

Six weeks later

“He shoots! He scores!” The basketball sailed through the hoop, hitting nothing but net. Troy Anthony spun his wheelchair on the polished wood of the physical therapy center’s minicourt. His ebony braids flew around the mocha skin of his bare, muscular shoulders, and one fist was raised in a triumphant gloat before he pointed to Mike. “You are buying the beers.”

“How do you figure that?” Mike Cutler caught the ball as it bounced past him, dribbled it once and shoved a chest pass at his smirking competitor. It was impossible not to grin as his best friend and business partner, Troy, schooled him in the twenty-minute pickup game. “I thought we were playing to cheer me up.”

Troy easily caught the basketball and shoved it right back. “I was playing to win, my friend. Your head’s not in the game.”

Mike’s hands stung, forgetting to catch the pass with his fingertips instead of his palms. He was distracted. “Fine. Tonight at the Shamrock. Beers are on me.”

He tucked the ball under his arm as he climbed out of the wheelchair he’d been using. Once his legs unkinked and the electric jolts of random nerves firing across his hips and lower back subsided, he pushed the chair across the polished wood floor to stow the basketball in the PT center’s equipment locker. At least he didn’t have to wear those joint pinching leg braces or a body cast anymore.

But he wasn’t about to complain. Twelve years ago, he hadn’t been able to walk at all, following a car accident that had shattered his legs from the pelvis on down, so he never griped about the damaged nerves or aches in his mended bones or stiff muscles that protested the changing weather and an early morning workout. As teenagers, Mike and Troy had bonded over wheelchair basketball and months of physical rehabilitation therapy with the woman who had eventually become Mike’s stepmother. Unlike Mike, because of a gunshot wound he’d sustained in a neighborhood shooting, Troy would never regain the use of his legs. But the friendship had stuck, and now, at age twenty-eight, they’d both earned college degrees and had opened their own physical therapy center near downtown Kansas City.

“C’mon, man. Don’t make me feel like I’m beatin’ up on ya. I said you didn’t have to go back to the chair to play me. I could beat you standing on your two feet. Today, at any rate.” Troy pushed his wheels once and coasted over to the edge of the court beside Mike. His omnipresent smile and smart-ass attitude had disappeared. “Losing that funding really got to you, huh? Or is this mood about a woman?”

He hadn’t put his heart on the line and gotten it stomped on by anyone of the female persuasion lately. Not since Caroline. “No. No woman.”

Troy picked up a towel off the supply cart and handed one to Mike, grinning as he wiped the perspiration from his chest. “No woman? That would sure put me in a mood.”

“You’re a funny guy, you know that,” Mike deadpanned, appreciating his friend’s efforts to improve his disposition. But he couldn’t quite shake the miasma of frustration that had plagued his thoughts since opening that rejection letter in the mail yesterday. “I had a brilliant idea, writing that grant proposal.” Mike toweled the dampness from his skin before tossing Troy his gray uniform polo shirt. “We had enough money from the bank loan and our own savings to get this place built. But it’s hardly going to sustain itself with the handful of patients we have coming in. If we were attached to a hospital—”

“We specifically decided against that.” Troy didn’t have to remind him of their determination to give back to the community. Mike opened the laundry compartment on the supply cart and Troy tossed both towels inside. “We wanted to be here in the city where the people who needed us most could have access to our services.”

“I still believe in that.” Mike stared at the CAPT logo for the Cutler-Anthony Physical Therapy Center embroidered on the chest of his own shirt before pulling it over his head and tugging the hem down to cover his long torso. “But those are the same people who don’t always have insurance and can’t always pay. I was certain that urban development grant for small businesses would help us.”

“There’ll be other grants.” Troy donned his shirt and peeled off the fingerless gloves he wore when he played anything competitive in his wheelchair. “Caroline said she’d fund a grant for us. To thank you for being there when she needed you.”

“And that would be right up until the night she turned down my proposal?” The fact that he could talk about it now told Mike that his ego had taken a bigger blow than his heart had. But that blow had been the third strike in the relationship game. He had no plans to step up to the plate and put his heart on the line anymore. If he couldn’t tell the difference between a friends-with-benefits package and a connection that was leading to forever, he’d do well to steer clear of anything serious. He’d been the shoulder to cry on, the protective big brother and the best friend too many times to risk it. He could rely on his principles, his family and friends like Troy. But he wasn’t about to rely on his heart again. “No. No asking Caroline. I didn’t propose because I wanted her money, and I’m not going to take it now as a consolation prize.”

Troy knew just how far he could push the relationship button before he made a joke. “Maybe you could hock the engagement ring. That’d keep us open another month.”