New York to Dallas (In Death #33)(6)

Tired, she sat. “He doesn’t want me dead, Peabody, at least not right off. He wants to show me he’s smarter than I am. He wants to humiliate me, at least for a while. That’s how he’d see this, a humiliation for me when he starts his new collection.”

“He’d have studied you. He thinks he knows you, but he doesn’t.”

“He will, before it’s over. Look, we’re getting tight on time. Go change into your uniform.”

“We can postpone the ceremony, start working the case.”

Though having a medal pinned on her chest was the last thing Eve wanted with Tray Schuster’s grieving face and Julie Kopeski’s shockglazed eyes in her head, she shook her head.

“We’re not postponing anything, and it’s not our case.” But she intended to make a hard pitch for it. “Now get out of my hair. I have to change, too. You’re not the only one getting a medal today.”

“I know it’s not your first. Is it still a big to you?”

“This one is. This one’s a big. Now go away.”

Alone, she sat a moment. Peabody was right, she thought, McQueen didn’t know her. She wasn’t humiliated. She was sick—in the heart and the belly, in the mind. And thank God, she realized, she was working her way toward pissed.

She’d work better pissed.

2

In the locker room with its familiar perfume of sweat and soap and someone’s cheap aftershave, Eve tied on the hard black uniform shoes. She hated them—always had—but regulation was regulation. She flexed her toes a moment, then pushed off the bench, reached for her uniform cap. Turning to the mirror, she fixed it squarely on her head.

She could see herself as she’d been a dozen years before, green as spring, with a shine on her shield and on those damned hard black shoes.

A cop, then and now, without any question, any hesitation over what she was meant to be. Had to be. She’d thought she’d known, but she hadn’t known, really hadn’t begun to know what she would see and do, what she would learn and come to accept. What she would live through and live with.

A lot of corners turned, she thought, and one sharp, jagged corner had been turned the moment she’d stepped into apartment 303 at 258 Murray one sweltering day in late September barely six weeks after she’d graduated from the Academy.

She remembered the fear, the coppery smear of it in her throat, and she remembered the horror like a red haze.

Would she do anything differently now, now that she did know, now that she was no longer green? She couldn’t say, she decided, and wondered why she’d ask herself the question.

She’d done the job. That was all any cop could do.

She heard the outer door open, stepped away from the mirror, shut her locker. And when she turned, there he was.

She’d told him not to change his schedule, but then Roarke most often did what suited him. Seeing him settled her, brushed away the question she couldn’t answer, dimmed the light on the past she wished she could will away.

He smiled at her—beautiful, just f**king beautiful in his slick business suit, the black mane of his hair gleaming nearly to his shoulders.

She knew every plane and angle of that amazing face, every line of the long, rangy body. And still, there were times just looking at him stole her breath as nimbly as the thief he’d once been.

“I love a woman in uniform.” Ireland wove through his voice like a shimmer of silver.

“The shoes suck. I told you that you didn’t have to come. It’s just a formality.”

“It’s so much more, Lieutenant, and I wouldn’t miss it for worlds. When I think of all the years I spent dodging cops, and never once considered how bloody sexy a woman could be in dress blues. Or maybe it’s just my woman. My cop.”

He stepped forward, brushing his thumb over the shallow dent in her chin as he lifted her face. He kissed her, very lightly, and his stunning blue eyes searched hers. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s just work.” He saw, she knew, what others didn’t. “Something came up.”

“You’ve caught a case?”

“Not exactly. I don’t have time to get into it right now. But I’m glad you came. It won’t take long. You’ll only have to put off buying a couple third-world countries and listen to the mayor make a boring speech.”

“Well worth the price.” He kept his hand on her face a moment. “You’ll tell me later then.”

“Yes.” She would. She could. He was another corner turned, the biggest and the best. She’d met him at another ceremony, one for the dead, she the primary investigator on a murder, he a suspect with a shady past, a dubious present. A man with the face of a fallen angel and more money and power than the devil himself.

Now he was hers.

She took his hands, felt the shape of his wedding ring against her palm. “It’s a long story.”

“We’ll make time for it.”

“Later.” She shrugged it off. “You’re right. This is more than a formality. It’s important for Peabody, and for Detective Strong. The moment’s more than the medal, and a hell of a lot more than the boring speech. They earned it.”

“And you, Lieutenant.”

She spoke her earlier thoughts. “I did the job.”