Once a Hero. Lisa Childs

it up. “This is not fair to you. You’re taking another bullet that isn’t meant for you.”

      Kent grinned. “Oh, I have a feeling this bullet is meant only for me.”

      “Why?”

      He shrugged. “I don’t know, but I’m going to find out. It’s past time I learned.” He was going to take Billy’s advice, polish up his rusty investigative skills and finally figure out what Erin Powell’s problem was with him.

      “Be careful, Kent,” the chief advised. “You haven’t been out in the field for a while.”

      “Doesn’t matter.” He waved dismissively and headed for the door. “I’ve been dodging Erin Powell’s bullets for a year now.”

      “You haven’t dodged them all, Bullet,” the chief reminded him. “Be careful.”

      ERIN JOLTED, and her computer slid from her lap onto the floor in front of the couch. “Da—” She swallowed the curse as the door rattled again under a hammering fist. She scrambled toward it, pulling it open with a “Shh…!”

      Her heart pounded harder at the sight of the man leaning against the jamb. Instead of his black uniform, he wore faded jeans and a black leather jacket over a T-shirt that had molded to the impressive muscles of his chest. His hair was a darker blond, damp from a shower.

      She swallowed a traitorous sigh. “Oh, it’s you….”

      “You shouldn’t open your door before you know who’s on the other side,” Sergeant Terlecki chastised her.

      “You’re lucky I didn’t know who was pounding down my door,” she pointed out. “What do you want, Sergeant?” She noted the wrinkled newspaper he clutched. “Are you here to congratulate me on my new column?”

      He crumpled the paper in his fist. “What I want is a retraction.”

      She shook her head, then tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. “I can’t.”

      “What do you have against me, Erin? What have I ever done to you? I’m too old to have gone to school with you and ignored you.”

      Just. He was only five years older than she was, but she refrained from mentioning that.

      He leaned closer until his handsome face was mere inches from hers. “And if I’d gone to school with you, I know I would never have ignored you.”

      She couldn’t fight the smile curving her lips. So his new method for handling her was to turn on his infamous charm, which served him so well with the network reporters. “You’re flirting with me now?”

      “Don’t act so surprised,” he admonished with a grin of his own. “I’ve flirted with you before.”

      “You have?” She widened her eyes in disbelief. “When was that? When you dragged me into an empty room? When you pinned my picture to a dartboard?”

      “You didn’t know I was flirting?” He clicked his tongue against his teeth. “I must have gotten rusty.”

      “No, I can’t believe…” She lifted her hand to push back her hair again, but this time her fingers trembled, so she propped her hand on her hip. She couldn’t let him get to her. “Why—why would you flirt with me? You must hate me.”

      That steely gaze of his focused on her. “You want me to hate you.”

      No, she wanted to hate him. How could she not, after what he’d done?

      “I should,” he said. “It’s pretty clear you have it in for me.” He tossed the torn newspaper atop the cluttered table just inside her foyer. “I want to know why.”

      “I thought you knew.”

      He grinned. “That you’re ambitious, that you’ll do anything to get ahead? Yeah, I know that. But I think there’s more to you, Erin Powell—more to us.”

      She started to swing the door shut on his handsome face. “There is no us.”

      He pressed his palm against the panel, holding it open. “Oh, there’s something here.”

      “Hatred, remember?” She levered her weight against the door, but it still didn’t move, his hand holding it effortlessly.

      He shook his head. “I don’t hate you.”

      “Give me time.”

      His brow furrowed with confusion. “So you are out to destroy me?”

      “I think it’s only fair.” Since he had destroyed her brother’s life and a little boy’s whole world.

      “Why, Erin?” Kent asked, as if it bothered him, as if he cared what she thought, what she felt. “What did I ever do to you?”

      Maybe she should tell him, so he would understand that flirting with her was a waste of his time and hers. She only wanted one thing from him—the truth. “You—”

      A cry caught Erin’s attention. The fear in it had her whirling away and racing down the hall, calling out, “It’s okay. I’m here….”

      Stunned, Kent stepped inside the open door. It hadn’t occurred to him that she might not live alone. She didn’t wear a wedding band or even an engagement ring. He had checked the first time he’d met the beauty at a press conference—before she’d started with her impertinent questions.

      Curious, and concerned about the cry, he followed her. He stumbled over toys in the hall outside the doorway where she’d disappeared. Inside the room she knelt beside a twin bed, her arms wrapped tight around a small, trembling body.

      Kent slipped quietly into the bedroom. She was totally unaware of his presence as she focused on the boy, who must have been about five or six. Since speaking at school assemblies was part of his duties as public information officer, Kent spent a lot of time around kids now. Before he’d been injured, the thought of doing so would have scared him more than getting shot, but talking to schoolkids had actually become one of the high points of his new job. The children sometimes asked tougher questions than reporters, though. Well, all reporters besides Erin Powell.

      He never would have imagined that aggressive journalist was the same woman who cuddled the crying child, soothing him with a calming voice and a tender touch. A part of Kent had suspected there was more to Erin Powell, something softer and more vulnerable—something that had attracted his interest in spite of her animosity toward him.

      She pressed her lips to the boy’s forehead. “Shh…”

      Now Kent understood her shushing him at the door. She hadn’t wanted to disturb the boy. Was he her son?

      “Go back to sleep, Jason,” she urged the whimpering child. “Everything’s okay.”

      The boy sniffled. “I heard somebody yelling.”

      “It was nothing, honey,” Erin said, her voice filled with a gentleness Kent would not have considered her capable of. “Nothing for you to worry about.”

      “But I heard a guy,” Jason said, as if having a man in Erin’s apartment was unusual. “He was yelling at you.”

      “I’m sorry about that.” Kent spoke up from the shadows of the room.

      Both the child and Erin tensed and turned toward him. “You shouldn’t have followed me,” she told him. “You shouldn’t have just walked in.”

      “I’m sorry,” Kent repeated to the boy, ignoring her irritation that he had let himself inside her apartment. He would not argue with her in front of the child.

      She opened her mouth, then closed it, as if coming to the same realization.

      “I wasn’t yelling. Really,” Kent assured the child. “I was just talking loud. I didn’t know you were sleeping.” He hadn’t known about the kid at all.

      “Who