Page 37 of Lock ’N’ Load

“I’m not staying here. I want to go ho—” She had no home. Not anymore. Everything she owned was probably burned to ashes in the fire. Her clothes, her books, photos, mementos. Her phone had been stolen, and her laptop had probably melted inside the cabinet where she’d stashed it. She didn’t even have any food for Poofy, or a litter box.

“Oh, honey.” The nurse laid her hand on Trista’s shoulder. “Do you want to call your family?”

“No. My only family is, literally, on the other side of the world.” And they were probably incommunicado on an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Tears welled in her eyes, making them itchy, and she blinked them back. Along with cat food, kitty litter, and clothes, she’d also have to get new glasses, contact lenses, or both. The lenses she still wore were irritating her eyes, but if she took them out, her world would go blurry.

“How about friends? Is there someone nearby you can stay with?”

“Maybe.” She could take Bonnie or Kevin up on their offers to stay with them, but she wouldn’t dream of taking advantage of their generosity for more than a few days. “I’ll come up with something.” She forced a smile, genuinely appreciative of the nurse’s concern.

“Are you up for visitors?” She canted her head to the three men hovering outside the curtain. “That detective wants to ask you some questions, and your boyfriend seems pretty worried about you.”

“My what?” She stared at the nurse as if she’d grown two heads.

“Your boyfriend.” She glanced to where Matt and the other men stood, then squeezed a generous blob of white ointment from the tube. “The big handsome guy who hasn’t stopped pacing since you were brought in. He’s been interrogating the nurses every five minutes for an update on your condition. If he wasn’t so darned good looking, we would have tossed him into the waiting room.”

She looked through the curtains at Matt, who was deep in conversation, a dark, brooding look on his handsome face. Despite her mantra, she couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to be his girlfriend. Would he be attentive and loving? Or aloof and hard, like so many law enforcement officers tended to be?

Taking a shallow breath so as not to induce another fit of coughing, she sighed. “He’s not my boyfriend.”

Without looking up from dabbing ointment onto Trista’s cuts, the nurse uttered a high-pitched laugh. “Coulda fooled me, honey. He sure acts sweet on you. But if he’s not yours, can I have him?” She winked. “While the doctor was examining you, I cleaned and bandaged the cuts on his hands and chest, and OMG. If I had a man with that body and that face looking at me every morning at breakfast, I’d never leave my house.”

Matt sweet on me? Ridiculous. Surely the nurse had mistaken Matt’s professional interest in her well-being for something else. Processing that absurd notion was about as realistic as the internet going away, and—

“Wait.” She grabbed the nurse’s arm. “He was hurt?” She hadn’t known that, but he was standing right outside the curtain, and he seemed okay.

“Don’t worry.” She patted Trista’s arm. “He has a bump on the head and some cuts on his hands and torso. The gashes on his hands are deeper than yours, so I wrapped them in gauze to heal for a couple days. But they’re not as bad as they look. I understand he saved your cat.”

“He did.” That must have been when he’d been cut, going back through the window to save Poofy. The more she thought about it, she doubted she could have managed to re-enter the house and get both her and Poofy back out on her own.

The anger she’d been harboring against Matt began slipping away. If her beloved cat had died, she would have been heartbroken. Because of Matt, Poofy was safe and sound.

Why was he at my house in the first place?

“There.” The nurse capped the tube, handing it to her. “Apply this twice a day to all the cuts to ward off infection.

“Thank you.” She watched the nurse leave and speak briefly to the men waiting outside.

She picked up a Styrofoam cup of water to ease the dryness in her throat. Through the open curtain, she caught Matt looking at her, and she froze with the straw between her lips. The scowl on his face was unmistakable. He was angry. On the other hand, he scowled quite a bit. But on him, a scowl looked good.

He turned as three more people joined the group—her supervisors, Wayne Gurgas and Genevieve Grujot, and Buxton McIntyre, Langley’s chief of security. “Oh, boy,” she muttered, as the entire group amassed inside her small, curtained ER room. Matt stood to one side of the gurney, Detective Sorensen to the other. Langley’s chief of security and her two supervisors stood at the foot of the bed.

Whirring came from the overhead vent as the AC took that moment to blast her with more freezing air. Instantly, her nipples began to pucker and harden. She crossed her arms over her breasts, knowing full well it was already too late to hide her body’s responses. She would have reached for the blanket at the foot of the bed, but that would only give everyone present a better opportunity to look down the top of her camisole.

As if reading her thoughts, Matt reached over and grabbed the blanket, draping it around her shoulders. Seeing the white gauze wrapped around both his hands, her heart squeezed at what he’d done to save Poofy. After pulling the ends of the blanket across her chest, she glanced up at him. Who would have known the big bad cop had a sweet, thoughtful side? “Th-thank you.”

Nodding slightly, he still didn’t look happy. He wasn’t exactly scowling anymore, but his jaw was tightly clenched and the intense gleam in his eyes was one she hadn’t seen before.

After Wayne, Genevieve, and Chief McIntyre expressed their concern and condolences over the loss of her house, Detective Sorensen began questioning her.

“Ms. Gold.” He flipped open a pad. “I’d like to ask you some questions if you’re up to it.” When she nodded, he continued. “Did you see the fire start?”

“No.” She shook her head. “When I went to bed around midnight, everything was fine. I don’t really know what time it was when I smelled smoke. Poofy—my cat—woke me up and then all the alarms went off.”

Detective Sorensen scribbled on his pad. “Cats and other animals can often sense even the smallest amount of smoke long before humans do. What happened next?”

“I opened my bedroom door and realized the house really was on fire. I was going to get the fire extinguisher, but it was too late to be of any use. The front door, all the curtains, and most of the furniture were already ablaze.”

Pausing, she reached for the cup of water and positioned the straw in front of her mouth, but her hands were shaking.