The Good Daughter (35 page)

I
n the tiny 1950s-era bathroom with the pink-tiled shower, Kit turned on the water full force and stepped under the spray when it’d lost its chill.

She was so mad.

Mad at Richard for being a dick.

Mad at Jude for not getting it.

Mad at Mom for dying.

Mad at herself for being stupid
again.

Goddammit, but she hadn’t asked for much in life. In fact, if she thought about it, she’d never asked for anything. Was that the problem? That God didn’t think she needed anything? That she was content with her life and didn’t want anything?

Bullshit!

Kit threw the washcloth against the pink-tiled shower wall.
Bullshit,
she thought again, picking up the washcloth and throwing it a second time.

She was so pissed off…so angry that the future she’d spent her life waiting for, patiently (as well as impatiently), had never materialized.

Angry that she was falling for Jude, just one more guy who wasn’t going to give her what she wanted. What she needed.

And she knew that about him. She’d known it from the first time she laid eyes on him, known it from the moment she saw his house with his rusted metal chairs on his dead lawn, known it from the time he’d kissed her at her parents’ house and then walked out.

Yet here she was in Capitola with him, playing house, pretending that this was fun and good.

It wasn’t good.

This was bad. She shouldn’t have done it, brought him here, tried to make this—him—into something he wasn’t.

Kit held the soggy washcloth to her mouth to muffle the sound of her crying.

The glass door abruptly opened. Her eyes flew open. Jude was standing outside the shower looking at her.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

Her eyes met his. She pressed the washcloth even tighter to her mouth and shook her head. She couldn’t talk, couldn’t tell him. He wouldn’t understand.

But he didn’t walk away. He reached into the shower, turned the water off. “Baby, what are you doing?”

She looked at him, fresh tears welling in her eyes. “You’re right. You are completely right. You’re supposed to change your mind. You’re supposed to want me.” Her voice broke and she buried her face in the washcloth and cried harder.

W
hat?

Jude stared at her dumbfounded.

Thirty minutes ago they’d had the best sex of his life. Ten minutes ago they’d been talking and had a great conversation. She’d left him to shower and he’d thought everything was fine. Then he came in here, to surprise her in the shower, and he’d been the one surprised.

But why should he be surprised by anything a woman did? After thirty-seven years of living with and near women, he’d come to think of the female gender as a completely different species…beautiful, exotic creatures not meant to be understood, just loved. Appreciated. Protected…maybe from themselves, because good God, they were complicated, never mind emotional.

He reached for a towel. “Come on, girl, let’s get out of there.”

“Why didn’t I see it before? You’re just like him.” Her voice was muffled through the dripping cloth. “Just like Richard. You don’t want to get married either.”

Jude’s jaw tightened. Why did women do that? Put two things together that didn’t belong together and act like they were making sense? “I’m not anything like Richard,” he said, battling to hang on to his temper. Apparently today he was going to have to practice patience a long time before he got his coffee and breakfast.

He’d been so looking forward to breakfast, too. He was
hungry. They’d made love twice last night and once this morning, and it was time to refuel.

She lifted a swollen face to his. “But admit it, you don’t want to get married. You have no intention of getting married, or having children—”

He cut her off. He had to. “No, I don’t.” Because she was right. He’d been there, done that, wasn’t going to make the same mistake again. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t care about you. It just means…” His voice faded, he didn’t finish the thought, coming so close to saying,
Just means I’m not the right guy for you.
But he didn’t say it, couldn’t, for the same reason he couldn’t stay away from her.

He loved her.

And not because she was like Amy, but because she was Kit. But that didn’t change all the external factors that were making their relationship difficult, if not impossible.

He was too invested in this case. He was a man married to his work. There hadn’t been time for Amy; he’d never been there for her, not even when she was dying. Christ, but he didn’t even get her last voice mail—“Hey, honey, going to the grocery store, want me to pick you up anything while I’m there?”—until after she was gone.

But wasn’t that the story of his life? Too little, too late.

Couldn’t save his dad. Couldn’t save his wife.

So there was no way in hell he’d blow this case, not after working on it for so long. Not after sacrificing so much.

He hoped that sometime in the next six to twelve months they’d make some progress, but they’d thought that last year and then the information they had, the informers they had, fell apart and they had to start over, start building their case from the ground up again.

It was painstaking work. Brutally slow at times. Violent and dangerous at other times. And you never knew when boring and
slow would suddenly turn deadly. You never really knew for certain, you just lived day to day.

“Come on, Kit Kat, let’s get dressed, get some coffee. It’s time we talked.”

T
hey sat outside with their coffee on the deck of Mr. Toots’s. It was cool and foggy and the chilly damp air meant they had the deck to themselves. Kit pulled her thick fuzzy oatmeal sweater, her favorite beach-house sweater, closer to her body and tried not to shiver or look shocked as she listened to Jude talk.

He wasn’t a druggie or unemployed or a mechanic but an undercover narcotics officer with the Oakland Police Department. He’d been in law enforcement since he graduated from UC Davis and his goal from the beginning had been to do just this—put away the bad guys and the drug lords. He wasn’t interested in the small guys, wasn’t wanting to nail the kids or folks who smoked weed, weed was nothing to him, and Californians had been passing laws right and left to try to make it legal anyway.

No, his focus was on something bigger, darker, more destructive and insidious.

“I’m telling you this,” he said, pausing and staring out at the gray mist obscuring the water, “because I do care about you. And I don’t want to lie to you or deceive you, or hurt you in any way. But I’m not in a position where I can allow myself to be distracted—”

“I’m a distraction?”

“Absolutely.”

“But what about when you’re not working? Surely you have time off…surely you can have a personal life?”

“It’s not that simple. The bad guys I’m chasing aren’t like the bad guys in movies…they don’t look like the bad guys. In fact, to most people they look like the good guys.”

Kit studied Jude’s hard, fierce profile and felt a flutter of unease. “What are you saying? That these druggies are politicians or businessmen—”

“Or law enforcement.” His dark gaze held hers. “Last year we lost two detectives because guys who were supposed to be the good guys, the guys who were there to protect the detectives, betrayed them. The detectives were friends, colleagues, men with wives and children.”

“Detective Hernandez and Detective Johnson,” Kit said.

Jude’s eyes narrowed. “You read it in the paper?”

She nodded. “And I knew the Hernandez family. Detective Hernandez’s oldest daughter went to Memorial, and the younger ones went to the Catholic elementary school down the street. After Detective Hernandez’s death, Teresa’s mom pulled the kids out, and they moved back to Fresno to be with family.”

“Hernandez and Johnson had been on the force thirteen and seventeen years, respectively. They were professional, and experienced. And yet on the day they died, they went into a building and were ambushed…shot execution-style. They didn’t see it coming. Didn’t have a clue. Didn’t have guns drawn, weren’t even wearing vests. Which means someone they trusted set them up. Someone on the inside, someone in my department, had them killed.”

“And that’s what you’re working on? Trying to solve their murders?”

“No, that’s someone else’s job. My job is to figure out who these crooked bastards are, and collect my evidence, to build a tight case, before the crooked bastards figure out I’m a narc, too.”

“So undercover narcs don’t know who the other undercover narcs are?”

“Not always, no.”

“And what about your boss, or superiors? How do you know they can be trusted?”

He smiled but it was glacier cold. “I don’t.”

She drew a slow breath, trying to process everything he’d just told her, and finding it almost impossible. “I don’t really like your job very much.”

His shoulders twisted. “I don’t always like it either.”

“So why do you do it?”

“Because someone has to.”

She frowned, feeling as if there was more he wasn’t telling her but sensing he’d said all he wanted to say. Still, she had questions…lots of them. “Your mom,” she said carefully. “Does she know…what you do?”

“Yeah.”

“Does she like it?”

“No.”

“Has she tried to talk you out of it?”

“A long time ago, when I first left the police academy.” He stood up, held his hand out to her. “I’m starving. Let’s find something to eat.”

K
it made them breakfast at the beach house, scrambled eggs with diced ham and country-fried potatoes and thick slices of sourdough toast. Jude shot her an admiring look as she presented him with his plate.

“Smart, hot, great in bed,
and
a good cook?” he said, mopping up the rest of the hot sauce on his plate with the last remaining slice of toast.

She grinned at him. She’d loved watching him eat. He ate with relish and appreciation. “I’ll cook for you any day.”

“Don’t go teasing me like that, Kit Kat. I know you know the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.”

“I do believe I’ve read that somewhere.”

He looked up at her, expression warm. But as he held her gaze,
his dark eyes shuttered and his smile faded, leaving his face naked, stark. “I told you things this morning I’ve never told anyone, not even my mom.”

She knew what he was saying, knew what he feared. Her mother’s brothers were police officers. Marilyn came from a family of law enforcement. She might not believe that cops could be the bad guys. And if she couldn’t keep a secret, she could blow his cover, as well as risk the lives of others. “You can trust me,” she whispered.

“I hope so. People’s lives depend on me.”

“I understand.” The small dining room suddenly crackled with tension. She glanced down at her plate, noting how she’d only picked at her food, too nervous and excited being with Jude to be able to eat properly. “My uncle Jack retired from the department almost fifteen years ago, and Uncle John, my mom’s younger brother, died in the line of duty, but we don’t really talk about cops and robbers at our house. We’re more about trucks and ladders and engines in our family.”

She looked across the table at him, hoping he’d understand what she was trying to say. “My dad never talked about the bad stuff, or the scary stuff, at home. He didn’t bring that side of work home. When he talked to us about his work, he focused on the things he loved—the guys, the loyalty, the pranks at the firehouse, his softball team and how they were the best. If there were dark things, and I’m sure there must have been, he kept it to himself.”

Jude didn’t say anything and now she couldn’t stop talking.

Kit took a breath, exhaled, adding, “I won’t ask you, or expect you, to talk about your work with me. I won’t ever press you to tell me where you’re going or what you’re doing. That’s not my business, it’s yours. And to be quite honest, I don’t want to know too much about your business. It scares me. But you don’t scare me, Jude. You, for whatever reason, make me feel safe.”

* * *

T
hey spent the next twenty-four hours playing cards, having sex, drinking margaritas, having more sex. It felt like a honeymoon to Kit, as they spent more time in bed than out of it.

Sunday morning, instead of going to Mass as she usually did, Kit had an O in the kitchen, and then another, an hour later, back in bed.

“Don’t come near me again!” she said to Jude, wagging her finger at him and trying to sound stern, which was very difficult when he was lying completely naked on his side on the bed without even a sheet to cover him. He was ridiculously gorgeous, too, with that body and that face and…and oh, heavens no, the first stirrings of yet another erection. “I’m tired, Mr. Knight. And sore. And sick of sex.”

His laughter rumbled in his chest and he lifted a hand to push back his straight black hair, revealing his disgustingly beautiful bone structure. With his hand in his hair, his biceps remained bunched, and all the other muscles tightened and rippled. He looked like an ad for Calvin Klein underwear, and to think he was in
her
bed.

“Poor baby,” he said, grinning lasciviously. “Have I been too hard on you?”

As he said the word
hard,
he grew even bigger.

Kit grabbed a pillow, shoved it in front of his hips. “You boys are all the same. Doesn’t matter if you’re fifteen or fifty…all you do is think about sex!”

“True.” He didn’t even sound the least bit apologetic. “Sex is fun.”

“Depending on your experience.”

His brow furrowed, concerned. “Have you had a bad experience?”

Kit flashed to December and Parker and the fear she’d felt that
night at his place, a fear she couldn’t articulate and doubted anyone else would ever understand. Good women, smart women protected themselves, but she hadn’t. She’d become paralyzed by fear when she should have slapped Parker silly and gotten the hell out of there…

“Kit?”

“Hmm?” she murmured, struggling to find her way out of her head, and the memories, and the shame of breaking, capitulating, when she should have been strong.