Chapter 1
Ryan
* * *
Saint or sinner—I wasn’t sure which this guy was yet. I could understand his actions completely. I definitely could.
If I’d been away with the Marines and came home to find my wife cheating on me with my brother, I knew without a shadow of a doubt I would flip out too. I would have gone crazy and most likely killed one of them.
Was it wrong that I was giving this guy credit for not taking that path? He’d beaten his brother within an inch of his life, torched his car, and wrecked the whole house with a baseball bat. Then he’d topped it off by shooting the place up.
That was what he’d done, and that last part was why we had been called in. Patrol cops had said they needed more muscle, which meant me and my partner, Aaron.
Didn’t matter that we were up to our eyelids with work for an ongoing investigation that was already requiring far too much work for my liking, and it didn’t matter that we didn’t deal with shit like that anymore. In our precinct, a cop was a cop whether he pushed pencils behind a desk or had moved up the ranks and become a detective, like we had.
It was just that lately things had become more crazy, and always on a Friday—always on a fucking Friday.
Mondays were shit, but people already knew that. Fridays, though, had become everyone else’s Mondays for me.
It was a day I hated for two reasons.
The first was this crazy madness that had suddenly taken off. The next item on my agenda of crap was I was certain Aria, my sixteen-year-old daughter, was ditching school to see some guy behind my back.
I was a damn good detective and I mostly loved my job, but it was difficult to stay focused when my girl could have been getting up to God knew what. I had to somehow know what to do on my own.
No one had to tell me it was wrong for me to be fixated on her right then instead of doing my job, or that it was wrong for me to be looking at the clock wondering how much longer I’d have to be there at Lieutenant Burt Rollings’ house questioning his wife, who was shamelessly flirting with me while Aaron questioned her husband in another room.
The brother had been taken to hospital.
“Mrs. Rollings, last question: do you consider your husband to be a violent man?” It was a question we were required to ask in these sorts of domestic disagreements.
This was where I needed to separate fact from my opinion. It didn’t matter what I thought of a situation, even if I could understand why it had happened.
What mattered was what had actually happened, the views of the people involved, and the way things played out based on the emotions that existed at the time of the incident.
Steadying my pen, I held up my notebook and got ready to write down her answer—except what I saw when I looked at Mrs. Rollings wasn’t a woman who was as devastated as she’d claimed to be.
“You know what, I wouldn’t even consider us married. Our relationship is very open. So, I’m not even sure why he behaved that way.” Her eyes sparkled as she looked me over.
We were sitting in the living room, while Aaron had taken her husband into the kitchen to question him. They were in there with Sean, the patrol officer who’d been nearby when shit went down.
The whole time I’d questioned Mrs. Rollings, she’d been giving me that look—that look of interest most women had given me all my life, the brave women who could match my wild streak.
Well…that was the old me, the person I’d been before I changed, before my world changed and handed my eighteen-year-old self a daughter.
It wasn’t that I’d lived my life like a priest or had become some saint, but even I thought this woman was a piece of work. Alas, it was perhaps a bad idea that I’d interviewed her while she wore that barely there negligee. It was just how we’d found her.
“So you have an open marriage?” Trying to be professional, I wrote that down, even though I didn’t believe it.
“We do. Does that help you in any way?” she cooed, leaning forward onto her elbows to give me a good view of her cleavage, which appeared to be enhanced by what had to be multiple surgeries on her tits. She flipped her dark hair to the side and pursed her lips together. Looked like she’d had some shit done there too. “If I asked you out for a drink, would you say yes?”
God…why?
I sighed, wanting to roll my eyes, but I restrained myself.
“No, I would not say yes. I would sayno.” I sounded like my father, who used that tone when he was pissed. He’d skip past abbreviations and emphasize his syllables for effect, just like I did.
“Really, you’d turn me down? No man in their right mind would turn me down.” As she tilted her head to the side, the strap to that skimpy thing she wore fell down her shoulder, now giving me a good view of most of her breast, all but her nipple exposed.
