Deadly Temptation. Justine Davis

he was proud of you. He told me so.”

      He blinked. “What?”

      “He told me that he’d been horribly disappointed at the time, but that he had to admire you for standing up to him and going after what you wanted.”

      “He…told you that?”

      “He did.” She reached out then, put a hand gently on his arm. “And that he’d come to be very, very proud of you. He was afraid you were going to die before he had a chance to tell you.” She frowned then. “In fact, he did tell you. I heard him talking to you as I left the room.”

      “I don’t remember.”

      “It was only the third day. You were pretty out of it.”

      And you were still there, he thought, while my supposed fiancée couldn’t be bothered. Not once did she set foot in that hospital room.

      He quashed the thought; Lisa’s desertion was old news. She’d passed it off, the few times she’d called him, as a pathological hatred of hospitals. He’d let it go, telling himself he understood. But he’d seen the looks in the eyes of his fellow cops, when they realized the woman he’d been living with and was set to marry hadn’t even visited him when his survival was in doubt.

      “How’s your mother?” he asked hastily, feeling a bit ridiculous talking about such things but needing to get his mind out of the old rut. “And your little brother?”

      “Not so little anymore,” she said with a smile. “He’s a freshman in college now.”

      He remembered the antsy boy at the awards ceremony. He’d guessed he was about ten or eleven, and apparently he’d been right. He’d commented then on the age gap between them, and Liana had laughed and called him their parents’ excuse for teasing her unmercifully; it had taken them fifteen years to recover from her enough to try again, they’d always told her.

      “Mom’s doing as well as she can, I think,” Liana answered his first query then. “She’s on her annual Christmas trek to visit my aunt in Iowa. Mostly she leads a quiet life, her garden, her friends, and she works part-time at the library. She still misses my father horribly.” She gave a sad little smile and lowered her eyes. “You don’t lose a hero and go on easily.”

      He knew she wasn’t exaggerating about the hero part. Her father, James Kiley, had indeed been just that, a hero hailed across the country some twenty years ago when he’d risked his life and suffered burns that scarred him for the rest of his days pulling survivors out of the inferno of a plane crash.

      “You lost him, too,” he said softly, something in that sad smile reaching a part of him he’d thought numbed for good.

      She looked up at him then, and he saw the shimmer of unshed tears. “Yes,” she said. “And he left me forever wondering about the nature of such men, who would die for people they don’t even know.”

      She didn’t add, “Like you,” but he heard it as clearly as if she had. And it hit him then, hard.

      So that’s what this is all about. She’s got a bad case of hero-worship, because of what happened that day.

      The realization that there was a simple, concrete, understandable reason for why she wanted to help him made him relax a little. This, at least, was more comfortable than the tangle of confused feelings he’d been wrestling with since Tony Alvera had unexpectedly dropped her name back into his conscious thoughts.

      What wasn’t so comfortable was the small, niggling sense of disappointment he felt.

      Liana didn’t know quite what to think. She’d assumed her visceral reaction to seeing his photograph in the paper was simply shock at the accusations against him. Whenever she’d thought of him—and that had been all too often—she’d assumed the rush of feeling that flooded her had been gratitude. Spiked, she had supposed, with a healthy dose of the admiration she always felt for anyone who had committed the kind of heroics he had, but nothing more complicated than that.

      But now she wasn’t sure. He hardly cut a heroic figure now; he looked tired, edgy and beaten down. He hadn’t shaved for a couple of days, and with hair now down almost to his shoulders he looked like a biker in that leather jacket, or perhaps a bad-boy rock star the morning after a wild night. Hardly her type. And yet she couldn’t help wondering about the way her pulse leaped, and how the air in the room had seemed thinner from the moment he’d walked in.

      “Liana,” he said, and she took a quick breath at the sound of her name in his voice. “Look, I appreciate the thought, but there’s really nothing you can do.”

      “Me, maybe not. But don’t underestimate Redstone. I did a lot of homework before I took this job. You wouldn’t believe some of the things Redstone Security has accomplished, the criminal cases they’ve cracked while working on their own cases.”

      “I’ve heard,” he admitted. “It’s why they get more cooperation from cops than any other private security firm you could name. But this is different.”

      “Why?”

      “This is pure drugs and money. Somebody with resources or sources is gunning for me, and it’s going to take heavy police work to get out from under.”

      She studied him for a moment. “And who’s doing that work? From the sound of that article, the department is already convinced of your guilt.”

      A grimace flickered across his face, and she knew she’d struck home.

      He feels betrayed, she thought.

      She doubted someone who hadn’t been part of that kind of brotherhood could ever really understand what it was like. She’d watched, during those days in the hospital after he’d been shot, and marveled at the constant changing of the guard; there had been at least one cop there every minute of every day. She’d commented on it to one of them, a gray-haired veteran who had smiled wearily when she’d brought him a cup of bad hospital coffee.

      “We bleed blue,” he’d said quietly. “No matter who or where or how, when one of us is hurt, we all are.”

      Her voice was soft, gentle when she said, “I would have thought, after what I saw in the hospital, that they’d be lining up behind you to help.”

      The harsh laugh he gave held more than a touch of bitterness. “You’d think,” he muttered.

      “There must be some who don’t believe you’re guilty.”

      “Probably. But nobody wants to get close to a dirty cop. It might rub off.” He rubbed his eyes. “To be fair, some did believe in me, in the beginning. But there’s so much evidence now, even I’d doubt me if I didn’t know.”

      “Don’t you have…a partner or something?”

      He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “We’re a small department. We pretty much run solo. My bad luck. If I had a partner to back me up, they’d know I didn’t do it.”

      “And the cops investigating you think you did.”

      He lowered his head and rubbed his eyes, and she wondered if he’d had any sleep at all since this had all come down. “Seems that way.”

      “Then you need help. All you can get.”

      His head came up. One corner of his mouth quirked in what appeared to be bemusement. “You’re determined, aren’t you?”

      “I’m not the scared weakling I was eight years ago,” she said.

      “You may have been scared,” he said softly, “but you weren’t weak. You acted, which was more than anybody else in there did.”

      “So let me again. Maybe Redstone can help, and they won’t hurt.”

      “I’m not sure even the all-powerful Redstone can help,” he said, sounding suddenly exhausted.

      A voice from the doorway