Marie Ferrarella - Second Chance Colton

No, whatever else he might feel about Susie Howard, he knew that she had a great deal of integrity. He was allowing his imagination to run away with him, something that didn’t happen very often. He would be the first to admit that the situation had made him desperate.

He forced himself to remember that Susie wasn’t the kind of person who would let her feelings get in the way of her work—and she certainly wasn’t the type to frame an innocent person, no matter how much she might want to because she was in effect jilted by that person’s older brother.

That wasn’t the way Susie operated. Her sense of honor was something that he’d found admirable about her all those years ago.

Since he knew that Susie wasn’t responsible for the results that were damning his sister, that left Ryan clinging to the only possible excuse he had left—that somehow, the periodically calibrated forensic equipment had malfunctioned.

Susie looked as if she was going to continue staunchly refusing to rerun the test. He had to get her to reverse that position.

“Do it for me,” he requested, his voice as devoid of emotion as he could possibly render it. “Run the test again.”

“Oh, well, if it’s for you, sure, I’ll run it again.” There was more than a touch of sarcasm in Susie’s voice. “And if it wasn’t for you, I’d still run the test again, just because there seems to be some sort of doubt involved here,” she went on to add icily. “I can see why finding out that your sister vandalized the family stables might be upsetting to you, so yes, I’ll run the test again,” she informed him coldly. “Now, if you don’t mind getting out of my lab, I’ll get started on that second test.”

She turned her back on him, pretending that he was already gone.

She knew he wasn’t because she could see his distorted reflection on the surface of her mass spectrometer. The machine was facing her. Her parting words to Ryan were “I’ll have someone call you with the results once they’re in.”

When Ryan’s reflection continued to remain exactly where it was, she asked in as disinterested a voice as she could summon, “Is there anything else?”

This had to be said. He knew that. If the air wasn’t cleared between them, then she might be sorely tempted not to do her best job. He felt confident she wouldn’t manufacture evidence, but he wasn’t so sure that she’d bring her A game to the case.

“Yes,” he said after a long moment, addressing the words to the back of Susie’s head since she wasn’t turning around again, “there’s something else. I want to apologize for treating you so badly when I broke it off between us. But I did it for you, for your own good.”

She almost swung around then, almost fired at him with both barrels, calling him an idiot and a fool—and a liar. Calling him an egotist for using that pathetic excuse when the real reason he had pulled his emotional vanishing act on her was because he’d obviously been afraid of commitment.

Any first-year psychology student would have been able to tell him that.

But she didn’t swing around, didn’t give Ryan a tongue-lashing and didn’t tell him exactly what she thought. What would be the point? He had his lie, which he was holding on to for dear life, and she had moved on.

Or told herself she had.

So she remained facing her workbench, acting as if Ryan hadn’t said a single word to her about their past or its abrupt ending.

“I’ll have someone call you the minute the second results are in,” she repeated.

This time, she saw his reflection retreat and then disappear.

Heard the door to the lab close again.

Only then did she turn around on her stool. “You jerk,” Susie murmured, staring at the closed door. Her voice grew louder, more heated with every word she uttered. “You big, self-centered, blind, stupid, stupid jerk.”

“Two degrees, six years in college and that’s the best you can come up with?” Harold Gould marveled as the tall, thin lab assistant stepped out from the computer tech area where he had been working.

His white lab coat hung like a bland curtain about his all but emaciated frame, giving the impression that it would begin flapping wildly about that same frame at the first sign of a breeze.

Startled, Susie’s eyes met those of her junior assistant, who was also a lab intern. The brown eyes continued looking back at her, the assistant never flinching.

“I didn’t know anyone else was here,” Susie told the intern.

“Obviously. When I saw him walk in I was going to clear my throat in case something private was going to be said. But Colton started talking right away and it sounded kind of personal from the get-go.” The look he gave her was sympathetic. “I didn’t want to embarrass you.”

“You just wanted to eavesdrop, hoping to score some juicy gossip,” Susie countered.

She knew how the man operated. Harold Gould knew more about what was going on in the precinct after being here for a little more than three months than some of the twenty-year veterans did. It wasn’t only lab procedures that he absorbed faster than a sponge.

The painfully thin shoulders rose and fell quickly, indicating that Harold had no intention of even attempting to contest her take on the situation. They both knew he enjoyed being a font of information, both technical and private.

“Yeah, well, there’s that, too,” he agreed, and then he tried to set her mind at ease. “Don’t worry, I don’t have any time to talk to anyone so this isn’t going into the rumor mill. And besides, I might be had for a song when it comes to certain things, but don’t ever doubt my loyalty.”

She liked Harold and was fairly certain that his heart was in the right place. But she’d paid the price for blind faith before and that had made her leery. Harold could just be offering her pretty words to distract her, Susie thought. “If it does hit the rumor mill, I’ll know who to come after.”

A small, amused smile played across all but nonexistent lips. “Should I be shaking in my shoes now—or wait until later?” he asked her.

“Later,” she told him. “We have work to do now.” She glanced again at the closed door. “I’m going to have you run the DNA test on the blood this time.”

“Really run the test, or...?” He raised one eyebrow, leaving the rest of the sentence unspoken but definitely understood.

Susie wanted to make one thing perfectly clear even as she cut the intern some slack because he was, after all, still relatively new.

“We don’t do ‘or’ here, Harold. We don’t even think about ‘or.’ Just one tiny instance—or even the hint of that kind of impropriety—and everything we’ve ever done here is going to be viewed as suspect and called into question. The amount of work that would be generated by something like that would be astronomical. Have I made that clear enough for you?”

She didn’t want to come off as sounding belligerent, but there should be no question about how procedures were conducted.

“Just kidding, boss lady,” Harold told her, raising his hands as a sign of surrender.

“I know. But it doesn’t hurt to reiterate how we do things out loud every so often so that we don’t ever lose sight of our function here. Because it only has to happen once and suddenly, we’ll get our walking papers and be out on the street.”

“Understood,” Harold assured her. “But even so, you could stand to improve your vocabulary,” he told her. “I could work up a whole host of multiple-syllable expletives you could hurl at yon studly homicide detective the next time your paths cross. You don’t want to be caught unarmed, do you? Or worse, tongue-tied?” he concluded, pretending to shiver at the very thought of that happening.