hardhat and a green canvas coat that was a bit too big for her. Beautiful, even battered and bruised and shaken from the inside out.
He'd almost lost her. Again. Forever. The idea struck him with the force of a hammer to the solar plexus about every five minutes. He'd almost lost her in part because he hadn't been able to see right in front of him the monster he was supposed to know as well as any man on earth.
“Hey, pretty,” he said. He dropped his bags on the ground, took her into his arms, and kissed her—not in a sexual way, but in a way that gave them both comfort. The hardhat tipped back on her head and fell off, letting her hair cascade down her back. “How's it going?”
“It sucks. I hate it,” she said plainly, Kate-style. “I liked my house. I liked my stuff. I had to start over once. I don't want to have to do it again. But life says, ‘Tough bounce,' and what are my options? Take it on the chin and keep marching.”
She gave a shrug and broke eye contact. “Better than the deal Angie got. Or Melanie Hessler.”
Quinn took her stubborn chin in his hand and turned her face back to his. “Are you beating yourself up, Kathryn Elizabeth?”
She nodded and let him wipe the tears from her cheeks with his thumbs.
“So am I,” he confessed, and found a wry smile. “We're a pair. Think how great the world would be if you and I really did control it.”
“We'd do a better job of it than whoever has the job now,” she promised, then shivered. “Or I'd blow it, and people I cared about would get hurt.”
“Well, here's an ugly rumor I heard today: We're only human. Mistakes come with the territory.”
Kate knitted her brow. “Human?” She took his hand and led him to the old weathered cedar garden bench. “You and I? Who told you that? Let me go melt their brain with death rays.”
They sat, and his arm automatically went around her shoulders, just as her head automatically found his shoulder.
“Hey, you. You're early,” she said.
“Well, I didn't want to miss Turkey Wake,” he said, deadpan. “Happy to see me?”
“Not after that answer.”
He laughed and brushed a kiss against her temple. They sat in silence for another few minutes, staring at the blackened back door of the house where Quinn and Kovac had carried her out.
“I came back here and built this very specific life,” Kate said softly. “Thinking if I did it that way, I could have control of it, and bad things wouldn't happen. How's that for naive?”
Quinn shrugged. “I thought if I could grab my world by the balls, I could ride all the demons out of it. But it doesn't work that way. There's always another demon. I can't count them all anymore. I can't keep them straight. Hell, I can't even see them right in front of me.”
Kate could hear the hint of desperation underlying the toughness, and knew his faith in his abilities had been shaken too. The Mighty Quinn. Always right, always sure, moving forward like an arrow. She had always loved his unfailing strength, had always admired his bullheadedness. She loved him as much for his vulnerability.
“No one saw this coming, John. I hated the guy from the day he took the job, and not even I suspected
She stared at the garden, dead and brown, surreal in the fading light. “Imagine the most horrific, repulsive cruelty one human being can commit against another. Someone's out there doing it right now. I don't know how you stand it anymore, John.”
“I don't,” he admitted. “You know how it is when you first come on the job? Everything gets to you. You have to toughen up. You have to get that emotional armor on. Then you reach a point when you've seen so much, nothing gets to you, and you start to wonder about your humanity. Stay at it long enough, the armor starts to corrode, the evil starts to eat through it, and you're back where you started, only you're older and tired, and you know you can't slay all the dragons no matter how hard you try.”
“And then what?” Kate asked quietly.
“And then you either step aside, or you eat your gun, or you drop in your tracks like Vince Walsh.”
“On the surface that choice would seem like a no-brainer.”
“Not when the job is all you've got. When you bury yourself in it because you're too afraid to go and get the life you really want. Portrait of me for the last five years,” he said. “No more. As of today, I am officially on leave. Time to drain the strain, get my head screwed on straight.”
“Decide what you want,” Kate offered to the list.
“I know what I want,” he said simply.
He turned to her on the bench and took her hands in his. “I need something good in my life, Kate. I need something beautiful and warm. I need you. I need us. What do you need?”
Kate looked at him, her destroyed home in her peripheral vision, and thought, of all things, of the phoenix rising from the ashes. The events that had brought them to this place in this time may have been devastating, but here was their chance for a new beginning. Together.
For the first time in five years she felt a sense of warm, sweet peace in place of the hard, aching emptiness she'd grown almost numb to. She had spent the years without him, merely existing. It was time to live. After all the death, literal and metaphorical, it was time for both of them to live.
“I need your arms around me, John Quinn,” she said, smiling softly. “Every day and every night of my life.”
Quinn let out a pent-up breath, a grin splitting his handsome face. “Took you long enough to answer.”
He took her into his arms carefully, mindful of her wounds, and held her close. He imagined he could feel her heart beat even through the heavy canvas of her coat.
“You've got my heart, Kate Conlan,” he said, burying his cold nose in the thick silk of her hair. “You've had it all this time. I lived too long without it.”
Kate smiled against his chest, knowing
“Well, tough, John Quinn,” she said, gazing up at him in the last light of sunset. “I'm not giving it back.”
BANTAM BOOKS BY TAMI HOAG
DARK HORSE
DUST TO DUST
ASHES TO ASHES
A THIN DARK LINE
GUILTY AS SIN
NIGHT SINS
DARK PARADISE
CRY WOLF
STILL WATERS
LUCKY'S LADY
SARAH'S SIN
MAGIC
And coming soon in hardcover
KILL THE MESSENGER
TAMI HOAG
DARK HORSE
“A thriller as tightly wound as its heroine . . . Hoag has created a winning central figure in Elena . . . Bottom line: Great ride.”—
This is her best to date . . . [a] tautly told thriller.” —
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