Tara Quinn - Trusting Ryan

Still, a little resentment, in exchange for the ability to live her own life, was a small price to pay.

When her phone rang again Monday morning at the time Ryan was due off shift, she picked it up with far too much vigor. And flooded with warmth when she heard his voice.

Get a grip, my girl , she admonished herself. He’s a friend. Nothing more .

“Do you have any free time this week?” he asked after a brief hello. He sounded as impatient as she felt over the past weekend’s misses. Not angry. More like…needy.

Or maybe she was projecting her own eagerness onto him?

“I have a couple of hours between court hearings tomorrow, starting around eleven, but you’re sleeping then,” she told him.

“I’ll stay up.”

“What—and get yourself killed tomorrow night?”

“I can sleep after lunch.”

“Are we having lunch?”

“I think so.”

“Okay.”

AND THEY DID. She had a quick dinner with him on Thursday, too, before her guest lecture at the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State. They talked about work. About the weather and the Cincinnati Reds and about work some more.

She asked about Delilah.

They didn’t talk about each other. And the more they didn’t, the more Audrey wanted to.

What was the matter with her?

She’d never needed a man to complete her before. To the contrary, she did better, felt stronger and more capable, when she wasn’t with a man.

So why couldn’t she stop looking at him? Whether he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, exhausted and on his way to sleep, or wearing a jacket on his way to work, the man looked like an art sculpture to her. Legs that were long and lean and nothing but delineated muscle, shoulders that blocked the clouds from her view when he stood in front of her, eyes that smiled, or admired, or sympathized without guise, and a butt that—

No. She wasn’t going to think about that. Wasn’t going to think that way. She wanted a friendship.

She didn’t want sex. Didn’t want to be that vulnerable. A man might be able to join his body parts with a woman, share pleasure with her, and get dressed and walk away, but not Audrey. Nope, she’d open her heart right along with her legs, then she’d be right back where she’d been at sixteen. Craving love. Needing validation from someone who could give it, or take it away, without notice.

No butt looked good enough to risk that.

RYAN STAYED UP on Friday after work. He had two days off, plans to see Marcus Ryan—because he couldn’t seem to stay away from the baby recently born to the biological parents he’d met the previous year—to go to a Reds game with the dad who’d raised him, and have some of his mom’s home cooking. He needed to be on the same time as the rest of the world.

He also needed to shop and clean his place before Audrey showed up at six expecting steaks on a grill he didn’t yet have. He didn’t have the food, either, or furniture for the patio, but those were minor details.

Things to take his mind off the rape victim he’d watched being loaded into an ambulance at three that morning. What in the hell a middle-aged married woman had been doing out in a deserted school parking lot by herself in the middle of the night, he didn’t know.

But he hoped to God she lived to tell him. One way or another, as the newest detective in the Special Victims Unit, he was going to find out.

His place was ready, new furniture assembled, grill put together, salad made and steaks marinated by five. Up in the master-suite loft, Ryan showered, pulled on some jeans and a black T-shirt, ran his fingers through his hair—then decided to shave again. Just for something to do.

Ten minutes later he still had forty minutes to kill. Avoiding the king-size bed, avoiding thoughts of his dinner guest in that bed, he checked his cell phone for messages.

Nothing from work. Good. Sometimes it was nice not to be needed.

Needed . He adjusted his jeans. Ryan wanted to be needed. Bad.

He needed his watch.

Walking around the massive bed to the nightstand where he’d left the timepiece his father had given him when he’d made detective—it had a tiny recording device built into it—Ryan glanced at the comforter.

It was clean. The browns and beiges were kind of masculine, but then, he was a guy. Guys tended to be masculine.

The sheets were light-colored. While he tried to see them from a woman’s perspective, a thought occurred to him. He hadn’t changed them in a while.

Never seemed to have the time.

He had twenty minutes right now.

Only because he so rarely had extra time, only because he needed to take advantage of that time to accomplish something, Ryan changed his sheets.

He’d just finished when the doorbell rang.

HE’D SEEN HER in jeans before. Several times. Just didn’t remember them fitting those long, feminine thighs quite so well. The white, short-sleeved T-shirt covered the waistband. As long as she didn’t move.

“Wine?” he asked, handing her a glass as she sat in the wicker rocker he’d purchased that afternoon.

She lifted her hand to take the glass. “Thanks.” Ryan had to turn away before she noticed his reaction to the thin strip of lightly tanned stomach she’d exposed.

He’d have raised his gaze to avoid that possibility, except that her breasts, which were round and full and completely framed by the tight shirt, were far too much temptation.

He was a solitary man. With a job to do. People to protect.

Maybe he should go next door. That way he wouldn’t see her. Wouldn’t flirt with temptation. He could cook on his neighbor’s grill and courier the steaks over….

“I talked to Scott Markovich today.”

The kid who’d beat up his stepdad. The bastard dad was going to live. Thank God. As it stood, Scott had been charged with assault, which was a lot better than murder.

And talking about work was a lot better than…anything else.

“And?”

“I think he’s protecting his mother.”

“She was out of town when the incident took place.”

Audrey’s hair fell forward across her shoulder as she shook her head.

“I don’t think so. I think she was there. I think she’d been drinking again.”

“I thought the court ordered that she’d lose custody of Scott if she went back on the juice.”

“Right.”

Realization dawned and Ryan blurted, “She knows what happened that night.”

“I think so.”

“And she won’t speak up because she was drunk.”

Audrey shrugged.

“She knows what that SOB was going to do to her son.”

“That’s my guess.”

Ryan swore, his mind racing ahead—and back at the same time. Going over the reports he’d practically memorized, looking for clues he’d missed. Trying to figure out how he was going to prove Audrey’s theory.

“Her sister wasn’t her only alibi. There was the bus driver who took her to Detroit,” he reminded her.

And maybe the guy was dating the sister. Or had lied for favors. Maybe he’d been drinking on the job and couldn’t remember who he’d transported and had lied to save his ass.

Maybe…

“There was the woman who sold her the ticket, too,” she added.

Didn’t mean she got on the bus. “No passengers remembered her.”

“It was the middle of the night,” Audrey said, not that he hadn’t already been thinking the same thing himself.

“There were only two of them and they were both asleep,” he finished for her.

The evidence was mostly circumstantial. But Scott had openly threatened to kill his stepdad the previous year. And there was no denying that the kid had used the crowbar on the man’s back. The only question was why.