“How are you holding up?” he asked.
Patches hurried over to her side again, sitting next to Keara and staring up at her. But it wasn’t the look Patches gave when she was trying to help someone; this was his dog becoming attached.
Jax stared at Patches as Keara began to pet his dog, and new anxiety filled him. He was becoming attached to Keara, too. Whenever the end of this case came, he wasn’t sure he was going to be ready to stop seeing her every day.
Keara pet Patches for a long moment without answering. Then her troubled gaze met his. “How do you do this, case after case?”
“What do you mean?”
“This.” She gestured toward the front door. “How do you come to these scenes, tragedy after tragedy?” Her voice cracked as she continued, “How do you wade into them, again and again, hearing about the worst thing someone has experienced?”
He shrugged, gave her a small smile. “I’m good at it. Patches is good at it.”
Woof!
Another smile broke free as he told her, “That’s right, Patches.” Then he said to Keara, “It’s not easy. But knowing that I’ve helped someone makes it worthwhile. What about you?”
She laughed, but it was short and bitter. “The type of crime scene I’ve probably been called to most often in Desparre is a bar fight. This is way outside of my comfort zone. I didn’t experience anything like this, even in Houston.”
Jax flashed back to the dangerous situation in the Luna bar the day he’d met her. His arms were still healing from being sliced through with broken bottles when the drunk had yanked him off the bar. He could still feel the panic when he’d jumped into the fray, worried the mob of men was going to overrun Keara at any moment.
“I mean, how do you handle constantly running into danger?”
“It’s part of the job. I accepted the danger a long time ago, when I took the oath to become a police officer. But I’ve been at this career since I was twenty-three. I still get scared on calls sometimes, but I trust my training and I trust my officers to have my back. And I believe in what I do. That’s worth the fear.”
She frowned, staring at the ground, her hand pausing on Patches’s head. Her voice was almost a whisper when she admitted, “It’s not the physical danger that really scares me. It’s the cases I can’t solve. That’s what keeps me up at night.”
When her gaze met his again, he saw years of pain reflected back at him. “What scares me is the idea that I’ll never be able to solve Juan’s murder. And that as long as it remains unsolved, I’ll never be able to fully move forward myself.”
KEARA WOKE UP disoriented, a headache pounding at her temples and the smell of smoke lodged in her nostrils. Against her back was a strong, warm body.
In a flash, the night before returned to her. Making the short drive from the police station to her house, every second stretching out as she’d fought to keep her eyes open. Jax in the seat beside her and Patches lightly snoring in the back.
When they’d finally pulled up to her house, she’d barely had the energy to trade the uniform she’d worn to the crime scene for joggers and a long-sleeved T-shirt. She’d leaned over the sink and scrubbed her hands, face and arms, but sleep had sounded more appealing than a shower.
She’d returned to her living room to find Jax already changed into sweatpants and a T-shirt emblazoned with Fidelity. Bravery. Integrity. Apparently, he carried extra clothes everywhere he went.
In that moment, with the weight of the town’s expectations and Juan’s unsolved case, Jax—half a foot taller than she was with the body of a federal agent and the eyes of a therapist—had seemed like the perfect person to help her shoulder some of it. So when he’d walked over and put his arms around her, she’d sunk into his embrace.
She vaguely recalled him walking her over to the couch and coaxing her to lie down against him. As soon as she’d laid her head on his outstretched arm, the exhaustion had overcome her.
Despite the horror of the day before, despite the gnawing worry about her ability to solve Juan’s case so many years later, it was the best she’d slept in years. She glanced at the floor below her, where Patches was just starting to stir, her feet twitching and her eyes opening.
When she met Keara’s gaze, her tail started to thump against the wood floor and Keara whispered, “Shhh.”
Nerves made her feel clumsy as she slowly slid forward on the couch, carefully lifting the arm draped over her waist. She barely breathed as she tried to slip away from Jax without waking him.
It had been seven long years since she’d woken up with a man’s arm draped over her.
She finally took a deep breath as she sat up and Jax didn’t move behind her. Carefully setting her feet down so she wouldn’t step on Patches, she slid forward, hoping to stand without disturbing him.
“It’s morning already?” Jax asked.
His voice was slightly deeper with sleep, and it sent a jolt of awareness through her, even as she cringed at having woken him.
“Yep,” she said, her voice too cheery. She stood, heading toward the connected kitchen and resisting the urge to run a hand over her hair, which felt like a tangled mess, the bobby pins half out of her bun. “Coffee?”
Patches leaped up, racing after her, sliding as the planked wood floors of her living room gave way to slicker tile in the kitchen.
Keara couldn’t stop the laugh that escaped as Patches ran around her in a circle, tail wagging. She looked more like a puppy than a therapy dog and Keara knew Patches was catching her nervous energy.
“Sounds good,” Jax said from the living room.
She could
