here, it’s faster. Take the next left. Run the yellow.”
“Joe?”
“Yeah?”
Lucas glanced at him. “You want to get there in how many minutes?”
“I’d do it in ten,” Joe said.
Lucas nodded. “If you shut the fuck up, I’ll get you there in eight.”
So Joe shut the fuck up. And Lucas got them to the hospital in the promised eight minutes.
But it was several hours before Joe got to see Kylie. She’d needed to be sedated to remove the drywall that was still embedded in her leg. Several other cuts, including the one on her temple, had needed stitches.
In the meantime, it was the dreaded waiting room for him, which had filled up. Kylie’s entire gang from the Pacific Pier Building was there, including his own sister, who gave him a big, hard hug and then smacked him upside the back of his head.
“That’s for Kylie,” Molly said.
“Hey.” He rubbed his head. “It’s not my fault she’s in here.”
A lie. He’d let her down. He’d let them both down and he didn’t know how he could forgive himself.
“That’s not what I meant,” Molly said and then sighed and hugged him again. “Joseph James Malone, Kylie being in here isn’t your fault.”
She hadn’t middle-named him since they’d been young so she clearly meant business.
“And I smacked you,” she went on, “because the rumor mill says you waited until she was passed out to tell her you love her.”
He gaped at her and then whipped around to look at his guys.
Lucas. Archer. Max. Reyes.
Lucas waved.
Joe flipped him off.
“Oh please,” Molly said. “Don’t even try to blame any of them for your idiocy. We talked about this too. You’re still too slow on the trigger.”
“Wow,” he said.
His sister went hands on hips. “Did you know that no one says ‘wow’ better than a guy who’s been accused of something he actually did?”
Joe pulled out his phone and looked at the dark screen. Where the hell was a call when you needed one?
“Sorry,” Molly said. “But the person you’re hoping is going to call you has been sedated, and even if she wasn’t, she’d be ignoring your sorry ass.”
Joe turned and walked out of the room. Because once again his sister was right—not that he could tell her so or she’d gloat. But he had indeed been way too slow, on several counts. He was supposed to protect Kylie. Instead he’d kept her out of the loop and she’d gotten hurt—on his watch. That was going to eat at him for a good long time.
He paced around and finally bribed a nurse he’d dated the year before to direct him to Kylie’s room. He waited there until her mom left before slipping inside himself.
Her eyes were closed and she appeared to be sleeping peacefully enough, so he dragged a chair as close to her bed as he could get and sat.
He didn’t realize he’d dozed off until he heard her low, raspy voice murmur, “Go home, Joe.”
She was sitting up carefully, hair wild, moving slow enough to tell him she hurt from head to toe. Her body was a tightly coiled spring, whether from the pain or stress he had no idea. Both, no doubt. “How do you feel?” he asked.
“Better than you. You look like hell.”
Yeah, well, the past twelve hours had nearly killed him.
She stared up at him and then closed her eyes. “We’re not doing this,” she whispered.
“Not doing what?”
“You think it’s your fault I got hurt,” she said. “So now you’re going to change your stance on wanting a relationship with me out of guilt. But I won’t do it, Joe. I don’t want you under those circumstances. I want you to have wanted me all along.”
Heart heavy, he shook his head. “It’s not that, Kylie. I—”
“Oh my God, you’re awake!” Her mom came back into the room with a relieved smile. “I brought Jell-O. Red, green, yellow . . . all the Jell-O!” She set a tray on Kylie’s lap. “And I just talked to your doctor. He says I can bust you free in a few hours. And then I’m taking you out of town to recoup for a few days. I’ve got a friend in Aptos who’s letting us use his beach house!”
Kylie grimaced. “Mom—”
“Please, Kylie.” She sat at Kylie’s hip and took her hand in hers, gripping it tight, pressing it to her chest. “Please let me do this for you.”
Kylie stared at her mom and then nodded. Then she leaned back and closed her eyes—without looking at Joe again.
“Kylie,” he said.
“My head hurts,” she whispered, and just like that both he and her mom were ushered out of her room so she could rest some more. And later, when she was discharged, she left town with her mom and what was left of the tatters of Joe’s heart.
Chapter 33
#OfAllTheGinJointsInAllTheTownsInAllTheWorld
One week later
Kylie carefully navigated her way out of the Uber in front of her place. It wasn’t easy with her bag and her crutches—she wasn’t supposed to put weight on her leg yet—but she managed because.
She needed to be alone.
Or more accurately, away from her mom.
They’d had a surprisingly and shockingly good time at the beach house. Her mom had been sweet and attentive and helpful, all new traits. She’d even cooked for Kylie. And they’d had to call the fire department only one time and that had been mostly because her mom wanted to see if Aptos had any cute new firefighter recruits, so she’d burned some cookies and set off the fire alarm.
But it was time for Kylie to get back to her life. Her friends missed her. Gib missed her. Work missed her. Vinnie missed her.
She wanted to get back to normal. Or as normal as her life could be. To say she still felt off balance about how everything had gone down would be an understatement. The boat was still off limits due to the ongoing investigation, so she had no idea what, if anything, had been recovered. But as far as she knew, the penguin hadn’t been found in the fire and that was devastating. Still, now she knew she didn’t need it to remember her grandpa by.
Kevin, who’d not been injured beyond minor smoke inhalation, was cooperating fully, and for that she was grateful. But it was far more than the fire that had her spinning. It was her broken heart. She’d done her best not to go there all week with her mom, but just walking up to the front of her place was like ripping off the Band-Aid.
Memories flooded her as she walked inside. Joe, and all those times he’d stood on this very porch right at her back, watching out for her. Joe, gently nudging her inside and then up against the wall, where he not so gently kissed the daylights out of her. Joe, tipping his head back and laughing at something she said. God, she loved his laugh. Joe, buried deep inside her, his hands on her face, eyes locked on hers, revealing emotion that he never seemed to have the words for.
With a shuddery exhalation, she made her way through the living room. When she heard something behind her, she turned to find Joe standing in the doorway as if she’d conjured him up.
He was in his usual work gear, loaded for bear, clearly straight from the job and appearing as if maybe he’d just walked off the cover of Guns & Ammo.
He looked like the best thing she’d seen all week—not that she wanted him to know it, so she steeled both herself and her heart. Clearly he’d set some sort of security or alarm to alert himself to her arrival and that should’ve infuriated her. But be still her beating heart . . . he seemed to be holding something. “Is that a bag of Tina’s muffins?” she asked, trying to remain unmoved.
“Your mom said you hadn’t been eating very much.”
“You’ve been talking to my mom?”
He shrugged. “You weren’t answering my calls or texts.”
She let out a deep sigh. “What are you doing here, Joe?”
“I needed to see you.” He hadn’t moved from where he stood against the opposite doorway. “I needed to see for myself that you were alrigh
t.”
She spread her arms. “Almost good as new.”
He gave a small smile. “It’s really good to see you. I missed you, Kylie.”
“I know.”
He seemed surprised and she smiled. “I guess you don’t know that you actually aren’t that hard to read once you let someone in, although your expression when you look at me is usually mostly either bemused or confused.” She shook her head. “I was never sure what to make of that, but the girls told me it’s a look of love.” She kept her gaze level on his, daring him to disagree with her, but he didn’t.
This gave her a surge of hope that her poor body didn’t know what to do with. So she mixed it in with her lingering anger and it was like a chemistry experiment. It exploded inside her. “I’d take heart over that except then you go and do stupid things like that night at my place when everything came to a head. You made me so angry when you lied to me, telling me you’d let me be involved—No,” she said when he opened his mouth. “You lied, Joe, by omission or whatever. Don’t even try to deny it. And that’s not even the worst part. You sleep with me, and it’s not just sex. You touch me and kiss me and look at me in a way that tells me it’s so much more, but you deny it. You want me to think it’s just a toss in the hay that you could walk away from at any point. But it’s not.” She had to stop there and swallow a ball of emotion stuck in her throat. “And that’s not something you do to a friend,” she managed to say, although she was no longer speaking all calm and quiet. “That’s something you do to a one-night stand. And I won’t be someone that you don’t have the decency to tell the truth to, or someone you just sleep with when it’s convenient. I won’t be a toy, Joe. Not even for you.”
He finally pushed off from the doorway and stalked toward her, eyes glittering dangerously. “You’re not a toy, Kylie,” he said in a very serious voice. Maybe the most serious voice she’d heard from him yet. “Not even close.” He came to a stop right in front of her. He set the bag of muffins aside and drew a deep breath. “With the exception of my dad and my sister, I’ve always been alone—” He set a finger over her lips when she started to speak. “I’ve never done relationships,” he said. “I’ve never lived with a woman. I’ve never gotten attached to anyone because it’s easier to keep them all distant than to let them in and be vulnerable because of how I feel about them. It’s not right, but it’s been my MO for a long time, and it’s what makes me do things like let you think I don’t love you.”
She sucked in a breath to speak, but he applied a gentle pressure to her lips. “It’s what made me screw up that night we were going after Kevin,” he went on. “I realized it and came back for you, but you were already gone.” He paused and shook his head. “Okay, that’s not entirely true either. Molly made me realize it and she was right. You’re a part of me, Kylie, the very best part. You’re not just my friend or my lover. You’re . . . everything.”
This shocking admission had all the air in her lungs escaping out in one big, shocked rush, and she pulled his finger from her lips. “I have a question,” she whispered.
He gave a single, wary nod.
“Why did you ever agree to help me that first day, when I got the first picture?”
At first he didn’t respond, but she forced herself to wait him out. She might not be well versed in interrogation techniques, but she knew the only way to get a stubborn male to answer a question when he didn’t want to was to ask it and then remain silent. But it was the hardest thing she’d ever done and she had to literally bite her tongue to press her minuscule advantage.
“I don’t think I should say,” Joe finally told her.
She gaped at him. “What? Why not?”
“Because I don’t make a habit of giving my adversary information that can be used against me.”
“Adversary?” she asked. “Is that how you see me?”
“Kylie,” he said on a rough laugh. “We’ve been in a chess game since day one and you’re winning. When I’m not looking, you sneak pieces on your side of the board. You don’t need any help from me.”
She stared at him and then found her first genuine smile in days. “You missed me,” she whispered, the knowledge giving her way too much smug pleasure. “I think I want to hear you say it.”
He was silent as he carefully scooped her up and gently deposited her on the couch. She was grateful as her muscles were quivering with fatigue. She watched from her perch as he locked her front door and checked the house.
When he came back to her, he sat on the coffee table facing her, mood still serious. “Yes.”
“Yes?” she inquired.
“Yes, I missed you. I missed the hell out of you. I missed us. This,” he said, gesturing between them.
“So there’s really a this?” she asked softly, almost afraid to talk, scared that if she did, he’d stop.
He leaned forward and once again scooped her into his warm, strong, wonderful arms. He took the spot where she’d just been, settling her in his lap. “Long before our first kiss that first crazy night, I knew there was a this.” He nuzzled at her ear. “It terrified me. I was in some pretty good denial there for a while, but I couldn’t hold on to it.” He pulled back and met her gaze. “You trusted me. You looked at me like I was something of worth to you. You believed in me, and there haven’t been a lot of people in my life to do that.” Leaning in, he covered her mouth with his.
It was a really amazing kiss and she was trying to climb him like a tree when he broke free. Her heart stopped at the look on his face. “What?” she whispered.
He sank his fingers into her hair. “I need you to tell me now, Kylie.”
“Tell you what?”
“That you love me.”
All the stress and tension drained from her as she slid her arms around his neck and relaxed into him. “I love you back, Joseph Michael Malone.”
He didn’t smile. “I wasn’t sure you heard me at the marina.”
“I did. I’ll never forget it. I also heard that Molly yelled at you at the hospital, middle-naming you. There’s a group text.”
“I’m really going to have to beat the shit out of my team,” he said mildly. He cupped her face and brought it close to his, and their next kiss was far more serious than the one before it. This time when they broke for air, clothes were missing.
“Be sure,” Joe said.
“I’m sure that if you stop, I’ll find your gun and shoot you.”
He smiled, probably at the thought of her trying to overpower him. “I meant be sure about me. You know a relationship with me won’t be easy. There will probably be days when we’ll want to kill each other.”
“There are days like that now.”
“Funny,” he said and kissed her again, stopping just as it got really good. “I almost forgot,” he said. “I have something for you.” He reached into one of his pants pockets and pulled out a small wooden carving.
She blinked. She could tell he’d carved it himself, but beyond that she had no guesses. “Did you make a . . .” She turned it around in her palm but it looked like only one thing. “A penis?”
He paused to stare at the carving and then laughed. “Okay, yeah. Let’s go with that.” He waggled a brow. “For when I can’t be with you. Beware of splinters.”
She grinned and pulled him down for another heart-stopping kiss. “Stay with me, Joe,” she said against his mouth. “Always be with me so I don’t need the wooden penis.”
He laughed again and the easy sound of it made her smile up at him. “This feels like a dream,” she murmured.
He tossed the wooden carving aside and nudged himself into the vee of her thighs. “How about this? Does this feel like a dream?”
Heat pooled low in her body and she had the sudden urge to divest him of the rest of his clothing. “Definitely not.”
“Good. Now eat your muffins. You’re going to need the energy for what I have planned.”
Liking the sound of that, she nearly swallowed a blueberry muffin wh
ole when he brought it to her. When she was done, he carried her to her bed, where he carefully set her down before slowly crawling up her body until he could look straight into her eyes. “We should discuss terms.”
“Of course,” she said, rocking up into him. “But I think I need