Once a Hero. Lisa Childs

in my life now,” Billy said, sinking deeper into the couch. Exhaustion blackened the skin beneath his eyes, making him look older than his twenty-six years. “You know how vice is….”

      Deep cover. Streets. Bars. Abandoned houses and back alleys. Late nights and dangerous people. Kent had loved his years in vice. That was where he had made the majority of his arrests. Erin was delusional to think he’d had to frame innocent people; he hadn’t met many innocent people during that time. Or now. Somehow he suspected she was every bit as dangerous as the criminals he’d dealt with during his stint in vice.

      She sure had it in for him for some reason, finding fault with everything he said or did.

      “How come you came home?” Kent asked.

      Not that Billy spent every night in the drug house the department had set up in the seedy area of Lakewood. The cover wasn’t so deep that the officers weren’t entitled to some downtime. Some officers even worked a regular twelve-hour shift. Billy wasn’t one of them.

      The other man yawned and flopped his head against the back of the sofa. “I wanted to get some sleep without having to keep one eye open to watch my back.”

      “I remember feeling like that,” Kent sympathized.

      “You should still feel like that,” his roommate warned him, “with that reporter out to get you. Why the hell did you okay Erin Powell getting into the CPA?”

      He sighed. “I wanted to prove to her that the department has nothing to hide.”

      “She’s not as interested in the department as she is you, Bullet,” Billy warned him. Some of the weariness left his dark eyes as he leaned forward and studied Kent. “You’re not interested in her, are you?”

      Kent choked on a laugh. “Talk about having to sleep with one eye open…”

      Not that he expected they would do much sleeping if they ever stopped fighting. Erin Powell was one passionate woman. Too bad her passion was hating him.

      “We’re talking Fatal Attraction, huh?” Billy chuckled.

      “Oh, yeah,” Kent agreed. For me. How the heck could he be attracted to a woman who obviously couldn’t stand him? Especially since he really didn’t like her much, either. But she was so damn beautiful….

      “So why the hell did you bring her to the ’house?” Billy asked again, too good an officer to give up.

      But after serving as public information officer for three years, Kent was good at sidestepping questions he didn’t want to answer. “She saw the picture you pinned to the dartboard,” he said instead.

      Billy chuckled again. “That should be a warning to her to lay off. You showed her?”

      “Your mom did.”

      The younger man sighed. “Yeah, now that my mom knows where the ’house is, there’ll be no escaping her.”

      “Your mom is great,” Kent countered, staunchly defending Marla Halliday. “And tough.” She’d had Billy when she was seventeen, and had raised him all by herself.

      “She’s not your mom,” Billy reminded him.

      That hadn’t stopped Kent from wishing he’d had someone like her in his life—someone who actually gave a damn about him. “You’re lucky.”

      His friend sighed. “Yeah, I am. Too bad you didn’t have better luck.”

      As well as not being a hero, he wasn’t a martyr, either. He refused to blame anyone else or make any excuses for what had happened to him. “We make our own luck.”

      “By letting Powell into the program, you made yourself some bad luck, my friend,” Billy warned. “You’re going to have no escape from her now.”

      It didn’t much matter where Erin went. He already had no escape from her. She was in his head…and under his skin.

      “Why’d you bring her there?” Billy persisted.

      Kent shrugged, keeping the grimace from his face as muscles tightened in his back. “I don’t know.”

      “You want to get her to change her mind about you,” the younger officer guessed correctly.

      “About the department,” Kent insisted, unwilling to admit everything.

      After all the things she’d written about him, Erin Powell should be the last woman to whom Kent was attracted. But his instincts told him there was something more to her, something she didn’t want him to know. And he’d never been able to resist a mystery. Of course, his instincts had gotten too rusty to trust, so he could be wrong. He might have just imagined the hint of vulnerability in her brown eyes.

      His roommate remarked, “Seems like her biggest problem is with you.”

      “Seems like,” he agreed.

      Billy leaned back on the sofa again and closed his eyes, almost idly asking, “So are you going to finally find out why she has a problem with you?”

      “How?” She was too stubborn to tell him.

      “You may have been desked, but you’re still one of the best cops Lakewood’s ever had. You know how,” his roommate insisted.

      “Beat a confession out of her?” Kent asked with a laugh. “That’s the kind of cop she seems to think I was.”

      “She doesn’t know a damn thing about you.”

      “No.” And she seemed to think he didn’t know a thing about her. Maybe it was time—past time, actually—that he did. He wanted to know everything there was to know about Erin Powell.

      Chapter Three

      Erin’s hand trembled as she closed it around the door handle of the editor-in-chief’s office. When she had come into the Chronicle—late again—she had found a note on her desk ordering her to see Mr. Stein immediately. He stood in front of the windows looking out over the rain-slicked city of Lakewood, his back to her. Quaint brick buildings lined the cobblestone streets, and in the distance whitecaps rose on Lake Michigan, slapping against the shoreline.

      She cleared the nervousness from her voice. “Sir? You wanted to see me?”

      “You finally made it in?” he asked, without turning toward her.

      “I was working from home, sir,” she said, hoping to pacify him with the partial truth. “I do some of my best work from home.”

      The heavyset man finally left the windows and dropped into the leather chair behind his desk. On his blotter was a printout of the article she had turned in the day before: Public Information Officer Admits Cushy Job a Made-Up Position. “The reason I wanted to talk to you is because I’ve been getting complaints about you.”

      So she wasn’t being called on the carpet over her tardiness this time. She winced as if she could feel the dart between her eyes. “Let me guess—Sergeant Terlecki?”

      “No, surprisingly,” Herb Stein said as he leaned back, his chair creaking in protest due to his substantial weight. “I think he’s the only one who hasn’t complained.”

      Erin’s face heated. “Then…who?”

      “Just about everyone else down at the department, and quite a lot of the general public.”

      She wasn’t surprised. She hadn’t been welcomed very warmly by anyone at the class or the bar afterward a few days before. But still it stung, having people dislike her. Yet she hadn’t joined the CPA to make friends; she was after the truth.

      “I had some serious doubts about hiring you,” Herb admitted. “You didn’t have much experience, going from college directly into the Peace Corps.”

      “I was a journalist with the college paper,” she reminded him. “And I wrote several freelance