Perhaps realizing he had nowhere to go, he launched himself at me. As though he stood a chance against my superior size and bulk.
Operating on instinct, I dropped low, then punched up into his ribs, forcing all that forward momentum into his lungs as the bones cracked around my fist. He flew back and landed in a lump against the rail.
The entire sequence took a couple of seconds, tops, but time didn’t catch up until the sheriff’s deputies rushed the scene. Despite the wheezing and obvious pain, Jesse never broke eye contact with me.
The judge gaveled everyone to order. “Officers, make sure Mr. Travis gets the medical attention he needs.” She turned her focus on me. “Detective Rafferty? Are you okay?”
I checked my reddened knuckles, then straightened my suit and quipped, “Yes, Your Honor. All in a day’s work.”
The shocked gallery laughed at the mild joke while the silently livid Mr. Travis was led out of the courtroom. Just before the door closed, his dark eyesfound mine one more time, the burning rage in them a silent threat.
Enough to make me doubt he’d been trying to escape at all.
I rarely feared the criminals I dealt with, but in Jesse’s case, I could admit I was thankful that he’d be going to jail for a very long time.
A sheriff’s deputy approached me with a paperwork grimace, and I groaned in anticipation of a late night of filling out forms in triplicate.
The paperwork was indeed atrocious, but that part, at least, was normal. Getting in my truck and driving through my north Austin suburb with its tasteful Christmas decorations felt surreal in comparison. I pulled into the driveway and…shit.
My husband was waiting for me at the door with his arms crossed. I’d choose a literal mountain of paperwork over dealing with whatever’d pissed him off this time.
“Heard you were a big hero down at the courthouse today.”
Marcus was a high-powered attorney who’d lusted after the way I looked in my dress blues. I’d been blinded by his hotness and willingness to let me take charge in the sack. Both of us mistook that for love, and four months into our affair, we found ourselvesin Vegas.
Six months later, we were discovering we had nothing in common outside of the bedroom. I hated schmoozing at fancy dinners with lawyers and CEOs, and Marcus despised pretty much everything that made me a cop.
“Not a big deal,” I answered, trying to sound casual. I’m not sure I succeeded. “And that stunt’s gonna add a few more years to his sentence.”
“Good.” He drew himself up a little taller, a little more self-important. “But no more of these dangerous cases.”
I sighed. Now was not the time to tell him that the head of the GSU—Austin’s Gang Suppression Unit—had stopped by my desk this afternoon and offered me a job on her team. Not only did they work on gang-related violence, but they also focused on prevention with younger gang members, giving me the opportunity to work with these young guys before they became someone like Jesse Travis.
Considering Marcus’s frustration with my job, and my ambivalence about the state of our relationship, I decided to leave it until after Christmas.
Things would either get better, or they wouldn’t.
2
JESSE
AUGUST
Leg day was a bitch,whether you were in an expensive air-conditioned gym or in a cracked-dirt prison yard in the triple-digit heat. Of course I’d rather have the air conditioning, but that wasn’t exactly on the menu.
Most guys skipped yard time in favor of their cells on days like this and an abandoned yard was a safe yard. Besides, I still had three pounds of muscle to put on if I wanted to reclaim the ten I’d lost in my first three months of incarceration.
Everything that went down in the courtroom was my fault, I guess, but the confusingly hot Detective Fucking Rafferty broke three of my ribs, punctured a lung, and left me to the tender mercies of the prison healthcare system.
My cousin Kyler once asked if I’d been trying to escape or if I’d intended to go after the detective who put me in jail, and I didn’t know what to tell him.
Gun to my head, I still couldn’t come up with a decent answer.
All I knew was that the number of times I’d jerked off to the thought of Rafferty fucking me into the mattress was not a small amount.
Maybe it was the violence of the takedown that had me jerking it to the memory of the good detective’s unfairly plush lips, maybe it was Rafferty’s refusal to file charges against me, maybe it was the lack of fuckable men on the inside. Or maybe it was because my father, after forcing me into this godforsaken life, had written me off the second the cuffs landed on my wrists.
I’d given up on trying to make it make sense.
