Need You for Keeps (Heroes of St. Helena, #1)(31)

He dropped his eyes to that top, the one that didn’t require a bra. She elbowed him in the ribs.

“What? If you’re going for accuracy, then it is my duty as an official card-carrying member to set the record straight.” When she raised a single brow, he added, “Ten out of ten men would agree.”

They would also agree, he wanted to point out, that sex ranked even higher, but sex didn’t start with a B so he kept that to himself.

“I don’t think boobs would inspire Kitty Fantastic to come down any quicker.”

Jonah looked at that top again, obviously designed to drive men crazy, and grinned. “You can give it a shot.”

“I like this Jonah,” she said, the evening summer breeze gently rustling the few hairs that had escaped her ponytail. “Fun, flirty, and knows when to pull the police stick out of his ass and hang it up with his fancy gun.”

Jonah laughed, something he seemed to do a lot of around her. Shay Michaels was unpredictable, unapologetic, and a startling breath of fresh air.

“Can you bring him around more often?”

He’d bring anything she wanted as long as she kept smiling like that.

“You bet,” he said, and there it went, that thing that simmered between them. A whole lot of untapped chemistry. Only tonight it felt like more. And truth be told, it turned him on as much as it terrified him.

Mew.

The cry was small and desperate—breathless, as though it was a struggle for his little lungs to get even that out, and Jonah knew this had the potential to end badly.

For both the cat. And him.

Shay looked up at the tree, her heart in her eyes as the cat tried to move, causing the flimsy branch to sag and sway. After a moment the cat made it to the trunk and sagged his little body against it.

“He’ll come down,” she whispered. “He just needs time to understand we are here to help.”

“What if he doesn’t?” he asked softly, wanting to prepare her. He was afraid the cat needed more than time. The ratty thing was terrified to the point where helping him would likely send him leaping to his death, and if he was hurt badly enough, he might not be able to make it down on his own.

She turned her face, resting her cheek on her knee, and looked at him. And just like that, her eyes sucked him in and all that distance he’d been working so hard to maintain evaporated. “Just because he doesn’t do trust . . . that shouldn’t mean he doesn’t deserve to be safe and loved.”

There was so much rawness in that statement, it had his ribs doing a stupid viselike maneuver that pissed off his chest and made him wonder, not for the first time, just how many *s she’d been forced to deal with in her life. Shay had a way of pulling people in with her big heart while keeping them at a distance. It was a mechanism someone used when they’d been burned, as Jonah well knew. There was no doubt in his mind that Shay had been burned badly, and that bothered him more than it should.

“I’m sorry,” he said, not wanting to be one of those people in her life. “About your report being released the way it was.”

“I know you didn’t release it,” she said, and it felt good to hear that she didn’t think he would let something like that slide under his watch. “I doubt you even knew it was out there until after I did.”

“Even though the report is a public document, available to anyone who knows where to look for it, it was unprofessional to have it released that way. Especially since Estella is just using it to win her stupid fight.”

“Well, it’s working. I am banned from Bark in the Park indefinitely, and now she has potential applicants so scared that the dogs are either stolen or from a puppy mill, they are withdrawing their applications.”

He leaned in closer, giving her a little bump with his arm. “Is there anything I can do to help?” She looked at him as though accepting help was too painful to contemplate. He laughed. “Come on, I’m Mr. Fix-It, remember? Me and my cape?”

She grinned. “Okay, when you get that cape back, can you write me a note on official superhero stationary explaining that the sheriff’s department isn’t going to start confiscating dogs adopted through St. Paws? Then Ms. Abernathy can come and get Yodel. He’s been waiting for a long time for his home, and he shouldn’t have to wait a day longer.”

“Done,” he said, giving her another little bump, this time not moving away, so that their arms continued brushing. “Anything else?”

“Come through on that and then we’ll talk.”

“Following through is who I am,” he said more lightly than he felt. And because he was stronger than how he’d been acting, he said, “I also wanted to apologize about the other day. I know you were caught off guard by the citation and it put you in an impossible situation.”

She’d thrown him for a loop too, hiding all of those kittens, but this moment was about showing her that he was the kind of guy who fixed his mistakes. The kind of man who his father had raised him to be. He might not be the right guy for Shay, but he was determined not to be the wrong kind either.

She shrugged. “You were just doing your job.”

“Yes, but I could have handled it better,” he admitted.

“Or you could have let someone else handle it,” she said, sitting up, and he heard a little of that bite in her voice he was so familiar with. Then, as if remembering she was mad at him, the fire in her eyes came back. “And the army of squad cars, Sheriff. Really? Talk about making Estella’s case.”