Bending the Rules (38 page)

Hohn’s voice replied from a distance.

“Call 911. We need an ambulance. Stat!” He turned his attention back to Arturo. “Come on, you sonofabitch. Don’t you die on me. I don’t appreciate being executioner.” He glanced in her direction. “Where’s Cory?”

“Somewhere in the stacks. She got away.”

Poppy could hear the man she assumed was Hohn barking directions into his phone, his voice growing clearer by the moment. He rounded the corner a second later. Looked her over with the same assessing cop eyes she was accustomed to seeing from Jason, then looked at the man on the floor. “He alive?”

“Yes. But I think I nicked something major—he’s bleeding pretty bad. I need something to compress the wound to slow it down.”

“There’s a towel under the newspaper on the couch,”

Cory’s voice said from behind yet another wall of boxes. “Though I wouldn’t cry too much if the bastard croaked. He was ready enough to kill Ms. C. and me.”

The next hour was a blur. Poppy and Cory huddled together while Jason and Hohn worked to keep Arturo from bleeding out. Then paramedics showed up and took over and soon the warehouse was swarming with cops. Hugging the teen to her side, Poppy found them a corner where they’d be out of the way.

They watched the medics trundle Arturo off on a gurney. Cory, who had been quiet, suddenly rolled her head into Poppy’s collarbone. “I’m sorry, Ms. C.”

“Yeah, I know.” She stroked the girl’s hair with her free hand. “You made some lousy choices today, but you know, everyone makes those at times. I would like to think, though, that this experience will make you stop and think before you follow your next impulse.” A lesson you might want to consider as well.

“Oh, I will. Trust me.” Pale and wan, the teen looked up at her with swimming eyes and a trembling bottom lip. “I was so s-scared. And not just for me. I’m so, so s-sorry. I never would have forgiven myself if you’d been killed because of me.”

“Cory!”

They both started at the sound of Sandy Capelli’s frantic voice calling from the other side of the cardboard barricade. Then Cory screeched, “Mom!” pulled free from Poppy’s embrace and tore across the opening to fling herself into her mother’s arms as the older woman was escorted around the wall by a patrolman.

Hohn came over to Poppy. “Jase asked me to take your statement and then see you safely home. Okay?”

“Yes.” Suddenly she was more than ready to go. She needed to step back from the day’s violence; it had left a miasma of grime on her soul and she wanted nothing more than to wash it away with a hot bath and a cool glass of wine. And once she felt clean once again, she was going to break her self-imposed isolation and call her mother. Or Jane or Ava. Or all three.

But first there was the statement to get through. Quietly, she answered Hohn’s questions until he was satisfied, then let him take her arm to escort her away.

There was no way, however, she could leave without looking back one last time. Jason was talking to a man across the room, but as if he felt her stare, he suddenly glanced straight at her. Without thinking, she gave him a tiny wiggle of her fingers.

He didn’t acknowledge the impulsive gesture with so much as a blink. She couldn’t read, in fact, emotion of any kind in his expression. He turned back to his conversation.

Poppy’s heart clenched. Forcing herself to turn and walk away, it occurred to her that this might be the last time she’d ever see him.

That he truly didn’t love her the way she did him.

And never would.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Talk about the highest of highs and lowest of lows. And all in the space of a day.

J
ASE ASSURED HIMSELF
during the drive over to Poppy’s apartment that he was just stopping by to check on her. It was the right thing to do. She’d been through a nightmare ordeal—even if it was the result of her own fricking recklessness—and someone needed to pay her an official visit to make sure she was all right. Double-check her statement.

Yeah. Climbing out of his SUV, he stared up at her apartment building, then straightened purposefully. This was business. He was doing his job, that’s all.

He only intended to stay a few minutes before he hit the road again. Hell, maybe he’d stop on the way home and pick up some KFC for Murphy—the old guy loved the extra-crispy kind in particular. The two of them could sit down and discuss Jase’s freakin’ huge backlog of cases. Murph might be retired, but Jase didn’t respect anyone more for his intelligent insight when it came to police work.

So, okay, he thought, as he paused outside Poppy’s door, the operative word here was professional. That bore repeating, he decided when he knocked on the solid fir panels perhaps just the slightest bit more forcefully than he needed to.

Then she whipped open the door and her entire face lit up at the sight of him, as if just by showing up he’d made her entire fucking day or something. It was like that little finger-wave thing she’d given him at the warehouse and it hit him like a fist to the solar plexus exactly as it had then.

And his professionalism went down the tubes.

“What the hell were you thinking?” he demanded in a growl maybe a bit too loud and definitely enraged. Grasping her upper arms, he backed her across the short hallway until her shoulders were pressed against the wall. A bright piece of framed Poppy art shifted on its hanger near her head. “Your grandma Ingles laid down the big bucks for that fricking expensive education of yours, but did you bother to exercise your brain at all? I told you to wait for me! Didn’t I tell you not go into that warehouse?” His gut iced over with the same dread he’d felt when he’d been caught in that traffic snarl, unable to stop her.

When he’d been too far away to protect her and left with nothing but the shakiest of goddamn hopes that he’d get there in time to stop her from being hurt.

From being killed.

“But did you listen?” he yelled, his nose a scant inch from her own. “Hell, no—not little Miss Leads-with-Her-Heart! You go barreling into an unknown situation armed with nothing but a quarter ounce of Mace against a thug with a fucking gun!”

“Not Mace,” she whispered, staring up at him and trembling in his grip like a cat catching a whiff of the vet’s office. “Pepper spray.”

“Well, hell, yeah. Because God forbid you peace-and-love types should actually harm a guy bent on killing you!” She trembled harder and his brows snapped together. “Don’t you shake! Don’t you goddamn shake on me now! That’s what you should have been doing in that parking lot instead of charging into the warehouse!”

“I was so scared, Jason.”

“You don’t know what scared is! You weren’t stuck miles away knowing you couldn’t stop the woman you love from walking into danger. That the job you thought was the be-all and end-all of your existence didn’t mean shit if you couldn’t protect her. You didn’t come around those boxes and see a man holding a gun to your head!” And yanking her off her feet, he lifted her to meet his furious kiss.

Her soft lips immediately yielded beneath the press of his own and he tasted wine on her tongue. She wrapped her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck and without raising his head, he gripped her butt and stumbled into the living room, careening off the archway lintel when his eyes refused to open beneath the pleasure, the sheer killing relief of having her alive and warm in his arms again.

He’d truly believed he’d never get to hold her again for as long as he lived—which, without her, he realized with absolute if sudden clarity, would stretch into an eternal empty wasteland.

“Dear God,” a woman murmured in hushed horror from only feet away. “Is that a gun strapped under his arm?”

“Beth, you can’t seriously care about a little thing like a gun,” Ava Spencer’s voice replied dryly, “when a man who can kiss like that declares his love for your daughter. Man, where’s the popcorn and Jujubes when you need ’em?”

His head jerked up and he stared openmouthed at Poppy’s two best friends and a woman who could only be Mrs. Poppy, if the chocolate-brown eyes and curls escaping a long, graying braid were anything to go by.

Jesus. He never walked into a business, house or apartment without noting everything around him. But he’d taken one look at Poppy and his never-before-failed-him second nature had taken a vacation. So there sat three women on her little couch and overstuffed chair, staring back at him with emotions ranging from fascination to doubt.

But Mama or no Mama witnessing his hands on her daughter’s ass, he wasn’t putting Poppy down. Fingers tightening around sweet firmness, he rearranged her to a more comfortable grasp. Their gazes met and he got caught up in the topaz flecks within the darkness of her eyes. “So I guess you have company.”

She licked her lips. “They were just leaving.” She looked over at her mother and friends. “Weren’t you, Mom? My sisters?”

“Oh, yeah,” Ava said at the same time Jane murmured, “Is that a desert breeze I feel?”

The redhead laughed and gently pulled Poppy’s mother to her feet. “Come on, Beth,” she said good-naturedly. “I’ll buy you a drink and tell you a story about a little girl who wanted to grow up to marry a sheik.”

“And here I thought I knew everything there was to know about my baby girl,” Beth murmured. She gave Jase and her daughter a severe look. “You two at least practice safe sex. And I’m not talking condoms. You put that damn gun up on a shelf or in a lockbox.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he heard himself agree, then watched in relief as the three women left the apartment with a minimum of fuss.

Poppy leaned back the moment the door clicked closed behind them, her fingers locked behind his neck. “Out in the hallway you said ‘the woman you love.’”

He nodded. Cleared his throat. “Yeah. Yeah, I did.”

“And that would be me?”

His brows slammed together and his hands tightened on her butt. “Of course it’s you!”

“Hey, you can’t blame a girl for being confused. That’s quite a turnaround from the last time we talked. You told me you didn’t know how to love.” But Poppy felt a lightness growing in her heart and expanding throughout her. “Let’s sit down,” she suggested softly. “You want a glass of wine or anything?”

“No.” He didn’t release her. Instead he dropped into the nearest chair and carefully arranged her legs on either side of him until she knelt over his lap, her lower legs wedged between his thighs and the soft overstuffed arms of the chair. “You got enough room there?”

She nodded. Then she patted her fingers over his face and stroked his eyebrows with her thumbs when he raised them at her. “I had quite a bit of wine when I got home,” she confessed. “I want to make sure I’m not having a drunken dream here.”

Wrapping his fingers around her wrists, he brought her hands down to press against his chest and his heart beat hard and fast beneath her palms. “Feel that? This is no dream. And you’re not drunk. Or if you are, you disguise it pretty damn well.”

Then he hesitated. Took a deep breath. And eased it out.

“You’re right, though, my attitude is a turnaround. One I didn’t even know I was going to make when I came over here. No, don’t pull away.” He flattened his palm over her hands, still stacked over his heart. “It’s not like I’ve had some sudden big change of heart. It’s more that I finally quit lying to myself.”

He laughed suddenly, a huge, uninhibited head-thrown-back guffaw that bounced off the walls of her cramped little living room. “God, I feel—I don’t know—a hundred pounds lighter! I thought I came here to make sure you were okay so I could go back to my ordered world. But when I saw you, with your joy and your generous heart, something inside of me just cracked wide-open.

“And I knew you were right, Blondie. I built a box an eon ago to keep my de Sanges impulses under lock and key. And knowing I had those walls around me helped—it kept me on the straight and narrow. But what you tried to tell me—what Murphy’s been telling me for years—is even truer. That cage is every bit as ironclad as the state pen that my dad and grandpa and—well, not Joe, I guess, since he’s out right now—but the entire de Sanges line except me has been locked in.”

Bringing her fingers to his lips, he kissed the tips that stuck out beyond the loose fist he’d wrapped around them.

Poppy’s butt hit his thighs with a soft plop, and she realized she’d been half up on her knees, which were suddenly weak, weak, weak with happiness.

His dark eyes locked with hers. “You’re the key to getting me out, Poppy. I was so fucking scared when you went in that building—so terrified when I saw you in Arturo’s clutches.”

“You didn’t look scared.” He’d looked cool and competent and detached.

“Because I shoved my emotions in that box in order to do my job and get you the hell out of there in one piece.”

“Is Arturo dead, Jason?”

“I don’t know. They took him to Harborview and I haven’t heard yet if he made it. I hope to hell he did. I don’t want his death on my head.”

“It’s on his head, not yours!”

“I know, sweetheart. But it’s never easy knowing you took a life.”

Poppy’s heart felt so full she thought it might explode. “I love you, Jason. God, I love you so much.”