Deadly Past. Kris Rafferty

a few months ago they’d been as close to inseparable as friends could be. Friends. Just friends. Whatever had prompted his drive to her apartment—at nearly the crack of dawn—had him upset enough to interrupt his morning routine. He’d foregone his shave. Cynthia hadn’t seen him unshaven since…well, since the accident, and that was ten years back. The scruff was a menacing layer to his full-bodied frown. Boots braced shoulder width apart, Charlie towered over Cynthia’s five-feet, six inches, intimidating her, though he’d be the last person to admit that was his endgame.

      “You look like shit,” he said. His biceps twitched as he rolled his shoulders, as if working out a kink.

      “Kiss my ass.” She nudged a matted lock of hair behind her ear, hating that he was right. Hating that he looked sexy and fit in his dishevelment, while she not only felt like hell, he’d assured her that she looked like it, too. She walked to the couch, peeled off her ruined suit jacket, and then sat, using her jacket to protect the leather from her disgusting hair.

      “Where have you been?” Charlie lived for his job and his family, and not in that order. He was taking her absence personally. She wanted to throw a denial in his face, to tell him he had no right to worry about her, but she knew it wasn’t true. They didn’t share so much as a DNA strand, but Cynthia was family by default. Terrance’s little sister. Terrance, who’d died ten years ago, after wrapping his new roadster around a tree with his best friend, Charlie, in the passenger seat. “I’ve been waiting here since eleven last night,” he said.

      “Who asked you to?” Cynthia hated the guilt he easily summoned. “Since when do you show up unannounced at my apartment, using a key I gave you only for emergencies, by the way, and question my whereabouts?”

      “Cynthia—” Her name left his lips on a growl.

      “No, really, Charlie.” She felt at a disadvantage—sitting, while he towered over her—so she flavored her tone with belligerence to hide her weakness. “What if I’d pulled an all-nighter last night with a strange man I picked up in a bar? Then I find you here when I return home, making things all awkward. I could lie to you, of course, and pretend it didn’t happen. That I wasn’t doing the nasty between the sheets with some dude named Jeff. Should I? Should I lie?”

      She hated that he’d just assumed she’d be here when he showed up last night, as if she had no personal life. Odds were nil she’d do the nasty with a stranger, named Jeff or otherwise, but damn. A woman had her pride and he had no right to assume her sex life was dull as dishwater. That was Cynthia’s sad little secret. She wasn’t even sure he was listening, because he seemed fascinated by her hair, his anger expanding his chest and widening his eyes.

      On a sharp exhale, he said, “Your head is bleeding.”

      “Huh?” She pressed her palm to the top of her head, instinctively trying to hide the evidence, which was stupid. No hiding that she’d been roughed up.

      He finally met her gaze, and looked ready to explode. “Are you telling me Jeff did this to you? You had sex with a ‘Jeff,’ who did this to you?” Shock nudged aside irritation, and now that she thought on it, it wasn’t unreasonable for Charlie to draw that horrible conclusion from her hypothetical social life with the nonexistent Jeff.

      “No.” She bit her lip, recoiling from the thought. There it was again: guilt, guilt, guilt. There seemed to be guilt connected with every damn interaction they’d had lately. “No, Charlie. I’m sorry. Forget I said anything.” Yada yada yada. Her head hurt. She didn’t have any more energy to wade through another emotional quagmire. When would she learn to just shut her mouth?

      “So Jeff,” he said, allowing his words to hang as he waited for more information.

      Cynthia waved him off. “Doesn’t exist. Forget it.” Flushed, she felt stupid now that her Jeff example had blown up, especially since it seemed like a clinical example of a blatant cry for attention. Almost as if she’d wanted to make Charlie jealous. She peeked at him from behind a lock of hair hanging over her right eye, wondering if he was…but that would be insane, because they were just friends. She wanted to change the subject. Not easy, under the pall of Charlie’s dark frowns and him looming over her, making it hard to think.

      Especially since the last time they’d talked, really talked, she’d been quite drunk on tequila and had kissed him: a full-throttle, moan-inducing, tongue-thrusting, hips-grinding kiss. Just thinking about it mortified her. Well, not the kiss so much as what had happened afterward. The damn man pushed her away, and the kiss had gotten off to such a great start, too. Hot. Sexy. Bone-meltingly arousing. She could tell he’d liked it, too, because when her hips ground against his rock-hard erection, he’d moaned, too. It was the sexiest, most arousing sound she’d ever heard in her life. Then he rejected her.

      Rejected her kiss, and more importantly, rejected everything the kiss would have preceded. She’d been drunk, so she’d respected his integrity and everything, but Cynthia’s pride still stung. And despite all attempts to avoid him since, Charlie kept pushing, pushing, and pushing past every roadblock she’d erected between them. The guy refused to give her privacy to lick her wounds and move past his rejection, and insisted on hovering, worrying, trying to gentle them back into the comfortable “friendship” they’d enjoyed since the accident.

      But she wasn’t ready. Every time she looked at him, she remembered how she’d revealed herself. She’d been emotionally naked, and he’d pushed her away. How did a woman move past something like that? She didn’t.

      Cynthia went so far as to decline invitations to his parents’ house to protect her pride. Even that backfired. Delia and Paul Foulkes, his parents, kept sending Charlie to her house, demanding to know why she was avoiding everyone with the last name of Foulkes. Well, Charlie knew. Actions had consequences. Rejecting her kisses had consequences. And the man had to learn.

      “What do you want, Charlie?” His deep blue eyes bored into hers and narrowed, telling her he was irritated with her tone. Well, duh. That had been the point of her tone.

      “You called me,” he said.

      Charlie’s shirtsleeves strained as he adjusted his arms, folding them more firmly over his chest, making his biceps pop. His thigh muscles stretched the fabric of his jeans also, and his waistband rode low on his hips, revealing a strip of muscled lower abdomen, that tasty bit of belly that separated the “six-pack” from “the package.” Cynthia loved that strip.

      Charlie was large, mere inches from being “too muscular,” though she’d yet to hear a woman complain. No, women didn’t complain about Charlie, but they talked. Lots of talk. If Cynthia had to hear one more woman at the precinct swoon over the sexy Boston Police Department forensic pathologist, Cynthia was going to spit, because she knew any one of them had more of a shot with Charlie than she did.

      “I called you?” When Cynthia found her cell in her car, it had been predictably dead.

      “Last night.” He stepped close, his boots between her shoes, trapping her on the couch, forcing her knees to widen or risk touching his legs with her inner thighs. A glance told her he was examining her for damage, noting every tear in her suit, every smudge on her face. “What’s with the blood?” He pulled her head forward and none too gently examined her laceration.

      “Hey!” Cynthia slapped at his hands, but he easily maintained control of her head, poking at her scalp.

      “Stop it. Let me see,” he said. She felt him pick aside her blood-matted hair. “It’s not bleeding anymore, but you still might need a stitch or two to help it heal correctly.” He palpated the rest of her scalp, then drew his warm fingers down her neck and checked her pulse with one hand as his other moved to her shoulder, stopping her from squirming. His touch felt like a caress, and his nearness made her feel all weak inside, and vulnerable. “You hurt anywhere else?” He lifted her hands, his touch gentle, almost reverent, as he studied them. She leaned back in the couch, needing to put distance between them. He was making her feel things she didn’t want to feel.

      “What are you doing?” she said, loving how his strong hands enveloped