It had taken him longer than he expected to get his parents settled at the residence inn. His father demanded to see the house but his doctors recommended he wait at least a week before he subjected himself to anything that might upset him. So Scott had stayed on two extra days to make certain the details of insurance and police reports were taken care of. That required an inventory that, much as he would have liked to, he couldn’t compile alone. He hadn’t lived at home since he went to college. Things could be missing or broken that he would never remember or know were part of the household.
He had taken his mother to the house yesterday morning, after hiring a nurse to sit with his father. He had tried to prepare her, even made her promise to not tell his father the worst of it, no matter how distressed the experience made her. Teary-eyed, she’d promised. Then she had shocked him with her reaction to the cleanup.
“Who did this?” she kept asking as she wandered from room to room, astonished by the progress she had not expected. While not anywhere near restored, the house was no longer a homeowner’s worst nightmare.
He told her who was responsible.
“Nicole did this for us? Why?” That question had been on Scott’s mind since the moment Cole piled into his truck for the drive to New Jersey.
After she had finished making her preliminary list, his mother had come into the kitchen where he was sitting. “Tell Nicole thank you from the bottom of our hearts.” Her eyes had softened and she’d put a hand on his shoulder and added very quietly, “She still loves you, son.”
That couldn’t be right. Little more than two weeks ago, Cole hated his guts. She had ripped him a new one and then kicked him out of her home. His ulterior motives shot to hell, he had given up on her when she suddenly changed her mind and decided to join the task force, despite his participation. She ran hot and cold with no stops in between. Even the sex, he suspected, was a game designed to keep him off balance and at a distance. “Noel” had had sex with “Sam.”
She’d certainly worked to keep him at arm’s length at every opportunity. Until his mother’s call.
Cole had waded into his family’s disaster as if it was her own, helping out without asking. Even when he’d behaved like a douche toward her, she’d kept her temper. Through it all she’d had his back.
He felt a lump of an unwanted gratefulness forming in his throat. He wasn’t accustomed to anyone having his back. He worked best alone or with Izzy. He might not have Gabe’s finesse for making chicken salad out of chicken shit. But he knew how to survive. Until Cole.
Scott swore under his breath, reluctant to acknowledge the damn ache in his chest every time he thought about her. And he thought about her almost constantly these days.
He moved across the room to pick up one of her socks and toss it into an open drawer. Instead, he found himself gazing at a drawer of pretty but impractical underthings.
He felt like a perv but he couldn’t stop himself from snagging a pair of purple lace panties and holding them up for a better look. It didn’t take much imagination to picture what she’d look like in them or, better yet, out of them. After the other night, he’d been hard-pressed to think of anything else in the solitude of his bed. He was pretty sure he’d dreamed about her each night. This scrap of purple satin and lace was the last thing anyone would expect the sensible, logical Officer Jamieson to wear.
Yet he knew that she was wholly, sensually female.
A rush of lust pushed hard down through him. He would remember that night in the shower with her for the rest of his life. And always want more.
Scott rubbed an eye, fighting the urge to return to bed. But that wasn’t going to stop thoughts of Cole from running through his head. Was he misjudging her? In dealing with everyone else he could think of, Cole was warm and generous, if intense. Even when called on the carpet with Lattimore, she’d rallied and defended her point of view. Only around him was she defensive and hostile.
Maybe that was because she didn’t know where she stood with him. How could she? For fear of running her off before he had a chance to get close to her, he hadn’t given her anything but attitude. But she scared him this time in a way she hadn’t the first time around. She was no longer an impressionable young woman who thought he made the sun rise and rest. She’d seen and known the worst about him, and held it against him. And yet, when he needed her, she’d been there, no, insisted on being there to help take care of the two other most important people in his life. The emotions he’d felt behind that nearly undid him. And so he’d doubled down on locking out his emotions out of fear that, if she saw how really badly he wanted her back in every way, she’d run. No wonder she kept her own emotions on high alert.