Military Man. Marie Ferrarella

      He looked surprised that she would make the comment. After all, she was the student, he the teacher. After a moment of stony silence, his rounded cheeks widened in a smile.

      “Yes, I do. Dead people don’t talk back. They don’t make comments about how little money you have or how inferior they think you are.”

      Given his size and appearance, it wasn’t a stretch for her to visualize him as an adolescent who’d spent his time on the outside of the inner circle. “The right living people don’t, either.”

      There was a warm light in his eyes as he looked at her. “You’d be surprised, Lucy. Not everyone has your keen insight.”

      She shrugged carelessly. Personal attention always made her uncomfortable. Unlike what she imagined the doctor had been at her age, she liked being the one on the outside. “I’m not that unique.”

      “I think you are.”

      She raised her eyes to his. For a split second their roles were reversed. “Dr. Daniels—”

      He laughed, shaking his head. If he’d entertained any serious thoughts about her at a given point, Lucy knew she’d squelched them by now. “Yes, I know. You don’t go out with people you work with.” He paused before donning his surgical rubber gloves. “Tell me, I’m curious. How are you going to ever find yourself a husband if you keep ruling people out like that?”

      Her voice was crisp. It was a question she’d answered before. “I’m not looking for a husband. I’m looking to finish my schooling and then start my career. After that’s established, then I might think about a relationship.”

      It was a lie. She wasn’t planning on ever looking into forming a lasting relationship, certainly not the romantic one Daniels was inquiring about. Romantic relationships resided in the land of uncertainty. Math and science were where all the answers were. And forensic medicine, her ultimate field of expertise, dealt in facts once they’d been uncovered.

      Relationships, she had learned, both through her parents—who were not stationed in the same state, sometimes not even the same country, for months at a time—and through Jeffrey Underhill, the one boy she’d allowed herself to fall in love with at the tender age of seventeen, were far from certain or even vaguely predictable.

      She liked sticking with a sure thing.

      “Shall we?” Daniels asked as he slipped on his rubber gloves.

      Following his example, Lucy put on her own set. It was time to find out if the guard’s body contained any secrets for them.

      Two

      Far from being a demonstrative person, Emmett Jamison usually kept his feelings bottled up inside. Very little made him smile or show any sort of outward reaction other than a frown. At best, there were patient expressions. Even so, when he opened his hotel room door and saw Collin, his eyes seemed to light up. Without apparently stopping to think, Emmett threw his arms around him and hugged. Hard.

      Surprised to say the least, Collin returned the embrace.

      Taking a breath, Emmett stepped back, as if to bring himself under control. “Thanks for coming.”

      Collin could hear the barely bridled emotion vibrating in Emmett’s voice.

      “How could I not come?” They weren’t just cousins, they were friends. Even when Emmett had gone off to disappear into the bottom of a bottle, from time to time he would make an effort to remain in touch. “Like you said in your phone call, you don’t ask for many favors.” His cousin looked wan, Collin thought, like a man coming out of a cave after a prolonged period of time, which, in a way, he supposed Emmett was. “As a matter of fact, I can’t recall a single time that you ever did.”

      Leaning slightly to the side to see around his taller cousin, Collin peered into the room Emmett was occupying. “Still Spartan as ever, I see.” He grinned. “You can take the man out of the hermit, but you can’t take the hermit out of the man.”

      Emmett shrugged. “It’s just a room. It suits my purposes.”

      Collin nodded. Unlike Jason, Emmett had never been one for creature comforts. He’d never required much. From the time he was old enough to purchase them himself, he owned only a sparse number of things; they never owned him.

      Collin set down the single suitcase he’d brought. “I’ll just leave my things here until I get a room of my own.”

      He’d come to the hotel in Red Rock straight from the airport. It had taken surprisingly little effort to get here. Tentatively, when he’d gone to his C.O., he’d asked for a two-week leave of absence. Colonel Eagleton had been more than happy to grant it to him.

      “I was beginning to think you didn’t have a life outside of the job,” his C.O. had said.

      It was very nearly true. His work had become his life and vice versa. There was no time, no room, for anything else. By design.

      It wasn’t just that the nature of his work took him away from the place where he hung his uniform—a place very much like the one that Emmett was currently in. Collin, like his father before him, had the gift to delve into another person’s mind, to take that person apart, bit by bit and to figure out what made that person act the way he did. Yet Collin had no such gift when it came to himself. Or, more to the point, to the women he interacted with.

      Collin had no doubts that if one of the women he dealt with on a day-to-day basis were to show up on the other side of a Wanted poster or an assignment sheet, he would be able figure out her next move with more than some degree of certainty. However, he also knew that if that same woman were sitting at a restaurant table directly opposite him, she’d leave him clueless.

      He’d long ago come to the conclusion that he had no knack for personal male-female relationships.

      If he’d had, Paula would have stayed.

      Hell, he thought as he watched his cousin put his suitcase inside the closet, Paula would have been his wife by now. He would have known enough to make her his wife instead of remaining engaged for six years and somehow just allowing the status quo to continue unchallenged.

      But maybe there was a reason for that.

      There was so much turmoil packed into his active life that when it came to the personal side of him, he craved peace. Contentment. Something to count on. He supposed wanting that made him seem dull.

      And maybe he was.

      The thought caused his mouth to quirk in a semi-smile. It always did. Anyone knowing the kind of life he led, a life that took him into unfriendly territory on a regular basis, always walking a tightrope and laboring beneath the constant risk of death, wouldn’t have said that he had a dull bone in his body. But he did, if wanting the kind of peace and quiet he only knew secondhand made him dull. The kind of life his parents had led.

      Paula would have given him that kind of life. He’d known that, felt it in his bones. But he’d allowed her to slip right through his fingers.

      Not that the slippage was swift. Paula had been nothing if not patient, determined, he now realized, to wait him out. He’d certainly had a lot of time to make known his feelings about their future. The trouble was, it was always something that he’d figured would keep.

      For them, he’d felt, there was always tomorrow. Except that when tomorrow finally arrived, it saw her on the arm of his best friend. Saying her vows.

      He’d attended the ceremony, wished them both well with all the sincerity he could muster—and then closed up the remaining exposed portion of his heart, mentally declaring himself a failure when it came to relationships.

      He didn’t blame Paula. He put the blame squarely where it belonged. On his own shoulders.

      And he missed Paula like hell, even years after she’d become Mrs. William Pollack.

      Collin roused himself. He had no idea