“What do you mean, how badly you screwed up?” she asked. “You saved that girl’s life.”
Alex gave her a wry smile. “I might have saved Jessica, but her mother most likely died while I was out on the street, wasting time.”
“You couldn’t have known that,” Lacey protested.
“No, but that doesn’t keep me from blaming myself anyway.” His jaw clenched. “If I’d driven a little faster, used my sirens, kicked in the front door right away—done something—Jessica wouldn’t have lost both her parents. Jessica’s life changed forever that night because I didn’t get there in time.”
Lacey hated seeing Alex in pain, and it was clear to her that he was. It was the kind of pain that came when you blamed yourself for not doing enough to save another person’s life, even if there wasn’t anything you could have done. She knew a little something about that kind of pain. It could be a heavy load to carry, making you doubt yourself in almost every way that mattered.
Lacey scooted closer to Alex. “You know that I’m speaking from experience when I tell you that guilt can really mess with your head, right? That it will make you doubt yourself at the worst possible time?”
“Yeah, I know. Maybe after we get your sister back, we can get a reduced rate on therapy sessions. Cooper knows this really great shrink.”
She laughed, amazed she could even do that with everything going wrong in her life. But it felt nice to be this close to Alex again. “That could be fun.”
His mouth quirked. “I don’t think a shrink session is supposed to be fun.”
“But it could be,” she said.
Then she kissed him.
It was sudden, spontaneous, reckless, and probably stupid. But when their lips met, all the silly crap that had been going on between them disappeared.
The kiss deepened, and in a flash, Lacey was transported back to that first date, that first kiss, that first moment when she thought Alex was a guy worth spending time with. Why, exactly, had she been so stupid and let him go?
She was still trying to come up with an answer to that when the phone rang.
* * *
Alex disengaged himself from Lacey with a growl and dug his cell phone out of his pocket before it went to voice mail, even though he would have preferred kissing her to talking to whoever the hell had called him. He wasn’t exactly sure what had just happened, but it seemed as if a small corner of the polar ice caps had warmed up a few degrees.
Brooks’s name showed up on his phone’s screen, and he thumbed the button. “What’s up, Brooks?”
“Is Lacey with you?” The senior corporal’s deep voice vibrated through the phone. “If so, she’s gonna want to hear this.”
Alex glanced at Lacey to see her sitting there with a concerned look on her face. “I’m putting you on speaker now, Brooks.”
“Max and I stopped by Lacey’s apartment earlier to drop off some food and decided to search Kelsey’s room while we were there. We came across something we thought you should know about.”
Lacey’s brows shot up. “Wait a minute. You searched my apartment? Who let you in?”
Brooks hesitated. “No one. Max was on the wrong side of the law before he became a cop. He picked the lock.”
Lacey did a double take. “And Leo didn’t care?”
“Nah,” Brooks said. “He met us last week at the engagement party, so he was cool with it.”
On the floor beside them, Leo opened one eye to look at them, then closed it again.
“What did you and Max find in Kelsey’s room?” Alex asked.
“Birth control pills.”
Lacey’s jaw dropped. “What?”
“Before you get all upset and lose it over the fact that your baby sister had birth control pills, you might want to focus on the real reason I called,” Brooks said. “Becker did some of that hacker crap he does and found out that two of the other missing girls—Nicole Arend and Abigail Elliott—had prescriptions for birth control pills from the same doctor Kelsey used.”
“Shit,” Alex muttered. The odds of three college-age girls being on the pill wasn’t that high. But all three of them getting the pills from the same doctor in a city the size of Dallas couldn’t be a coincidence. This was the break they’d been waiting for. “What do we know about this doctor?”
