For a moment, she gathered her thoughts. Then she said, “You’ve lived in Chicago long enough to realize the local government is famous for being rife with corruption, right?”
“Sure. The city of big shoulders and big swindlers.”
“Yeah, well, our ward out on the South Side wasn’t any different. We had a horrible alderman. And by horrible, I mean every bone in the man’s body was crooked. He was taking kickbacks from wealthy businessmen in exchange for favorable zoning. When a slum lord who made millions putting up cheap housing took a shine to the corner my father’s shop was on, the alderman was quick to get the space rezoned for residential use instead of commercial use.”
“Oh, for the love of Montgomery Scott,” Ozzie muttered, having seen the worst of humanity, all the violence and suffering and greed. In war, those things were normal, expected even. On the streets of the Midwest? It was a damned travesty.
“My dad was desperate to save his shop.” Samantha’s voice shook when she continued. “He tried for months to block the zoning change, but he was one little man going up against these pillars of the city. He finally decided the only way he could stop this alderman was to expose him as the corrupt asshole he was. Dad made a few anonymous tips to the police that ended up going nowhere, and he came to believe that a lot of the local cops were in on the racket. He didn’t know who to trust, and things were coming down to the wire. The rezoning was about to go through. In a strange twist of fate, he’d just fixed the car of a fresh new reporter for the Trib. And he thought, aha! A tell-all in the paper. The reporter’s name was Donny Danielson, by the way.”
“Ah, yes.” Ozzie nodded. Samantha had talked a lot about Donny over the weeks and months, but this morning was the first time Ozzie had the pleasure of meeting the man. And he got why Samantha loved him. Donny struck him as honest and true and, above all, straightforward. “Mr. Boyfriend Material.”
He could feel her mouth curve into a smile. “None other. Anyway, Donny told Dad he couldn’t write an exposé without irrefutable proof that the alderman was on the take. So, my dad being my dad, he bought a camera with a zoom lens and followed the alderman around for a week getting evidence of his malfeasance. Stuff like handshakes with criminals, money exchanges, that kind of thing. Then one night, Dad didn’t come home.” Her voice thickened. Hearing it, a lump formed in Ozzie’s throat.
“His body was found in the middle of the sidewalk in front of a coffee shop the following morning. He’d been shot through the heart. His camera was broken. All his film was missing. And there were no…” Her voice broke. Ozzie was pretty sure his heart followed suit. “No witnesses,” she finished.
For long moments, the only sound that intruded on the silence of the gym was the R & B drifting in from the speakers outside. Otis Redding crooned about when a man loved a woman. For the first time in Ozzie’s life, he understood the line about a man trading the world for the good thing he’d found. If Samantha would only love him, he would trade it all, trade—
“I was eighteen when it happened. A senior heading off to college to major in English on a scholarship. I was going to write the next Great American Novel.” She chuckled as if amazed at the naïveté of her younger self. “Like you said, I’ve had a killer instinct from the beginning. I was going to massacre those bestseller lists. But”—she blew out a breath—“Dad’s death… It…changed everything. It changed me.
“Suddenly, I wasn’t satisfied with fiction. I wanted to uncover truths, to expose corruption. But I still loved the written word, and then there was Donny. Even though he never advocated for my father to go all vigilante and try to gather the evidence against the alderman on his own, he still felt responsible for Dad’s death. So he sort of took me under his wing. He became one part mentor and two parts friend.” She lifted a hand, let it fall back to his chest. “So here I am, all these years later. An investigative reporter.”
Tragedy had shaped both their lives, made them the people they were today. And maybe that was why he had felt a kinship with her from the beginning.
“Have you tried to use the sources you’ve amassed over the years to bring down the alderman?”
“Luckily, I didn’t have to.” She absently circled his nipple with her finger. Even given the topic of conversation, his areola contracted. The muscles in his stomach did the same. Her touch, no matter how innocent, sent an erotic blast of sensation through his body. “Donny did that for me. He was dogged in the two years following Dad’s death. He turned over every rock until he finally had enough to write an exposé. A trial followed; a conviction was handed down. The alderman will spend the next fifteen years finishing out his sentence. If he lives that long. Last I heard, he was undergoing treatment for liver cancer.”
Her throat clicked with dryness when she swallowed. The story didn’t end there. She had more to tell him. He waited, gently trailing a finger over her delicate spine and the tattoo on her lower back. The ink was a pen lying across a sword with scrolling letters that read: How I Change The World.
Little does she know that she’s already changed mine.
Eventually, she said, “He was never convicted of my dad’s murder though. Donny doesn’t think he was the triggerman. Figures it was one of the alderman’s hired thugs who did the actual shooting. Over the years, I’ve tried to find the culprit, but”—she shrugged one shoulder—“so far, nothing.”
There were a million things he could have said. All of them seemed trite. So he went with the tried and true. “I’m so sorry.” Sorry she’d had her heart broken. Sorry she’d had no real closure. Sorry she would carry the wound of her loss for the rest of her life.
She pushed onto her elbow, gazing down at him. “I am too.” There was a sheen in her eyes, the echo of tears long since shed.
He wanted to go back in time, go back to every moment she had ever cried and take her in his arms. Hug her and kiss her and protect her from the horror of the big, wide world. Then when she said, “Kiss me, Ozzie,” he realized there was no place he’d rather be than right here, right now. With this woman…
* * *
There were a hundred different ways for two people to kiss…
They could kiss with passion. With hello or good-bye. With joy or sorrow. Hell, even with anger. But as Ozzie’s lips moved over Samantha’s, it was the first time she knew what it was to kiss with love.
At least on her part, there was love. Huge, crashing waves of it that washed away the ghosts of the past. There was so much tenderness in the stroke of Ozzie’s tongue. So much caring in the brush of his big, warm hands down her back and over her hips that she dared to hope there might be a little love on his part too.
“Samantha,” he whispered against her lips, his breath hot and sweet, a world of understanding, of longing in his tone.
“Ozzie, I—”
“Hey, you two!” Emily yelled from the other side of the door, making Samantha squeal in alarm.
When Emily followed with a loud knock, Samantha bolted upright, grabbing the edge of the blanket and wrapping it around herself. She wasn’t sure if she should curse Emily to hell and back for the interruption, or kiss the woman smack on the lips. Because she was pretty sure she’d been a second away from confessing her love to Ozzie. She was so swollen with it that she’d nearly allowed it to explode out of her like an overfilled water balloon. Just…bam! And as with most explosions, she figured the outcome would have been painful and bloody.
Holy shit, Sammie. Get your head on straight.
Good advice. Trouble was, when it came to Ozzie, her head wasn’t in charge. At first, it’d been her hormones running the show. Now, it was her heart. Her silly, hopeful, desperate heart.
