“You heard me. We need your mind.”
She laughed. “I’m a medical examiner, Baldwin, or I was. Not a field agent. For starters, I hate guns.”
“I know. That’s not a problem. You’d be an official consultant, mostly with me and my team, but with other parts of the Bureau, too, depending on the cases. You’d need to go through some training at the Academy in Quantico, to make it all official, but you’ll be able to work on cases again. Sam, you can’t tell me you don’t miss it.”
“I don’t. Not at all.”
“You’re lying to yourself.”
Watching the students wander the campus, Sam wondered if he was right. Did she belong here? Innocent faces glued to smartphones, earbuds firmly embedded in ears, an insouciant walk; these kids didn’t seem to have a care in the world. What if she wasn’t cool enough for them?
“Right. There’s the thing to worry about. Being cool.”
She settled at the desk and opened her laptop. Debated putting in her own earbuds; decided she was being silly. She knew her lesson plan cold, but giving it one more look wouldn’t hurt; she hated using notes. Regardless of the doubt she was feeling, she was here to engage these young doctors, intrigue them, but also allow them a glimpse into the real world of forensic pathology. Not the exciting, tumultuous world they saw on television, but the bloody, messy, heart-wrenching process of dissection, both of bodies and of lives. To show them the hardest truth of all: the dead have no secrets.
But the living do.
Forget the notes. Maybe she’d just read for a bit, settle into her office. Adjust to the sights and sounds of her new life.
She was deep into an article on forensic ballistics when a soft knock pulled her from her review. She looked up to see Xander in her doorway, a grin on his face.
“Hey,” he said.
Her stomach flipped, as it always did when he caught her unawares. A biological response to an emotion none truly understood. An emotion she was grateful for, because she knew the depth of it had saved her from sinking into the deepest abyss.
Alexander Whitfield. Known to his parents and family as Moonbeam, or Xander Moon. A true misnomer for a tough former army ranger. And Xander was still a ranger through and through: intense, alert, always combing the background for unseen threats. Romantic, and a fatalist. Just like her.
He was a different man now than the one she’d met several months before. More open, more forgiving. Happier. They’d settled into a version of domestic bliss, splitting their time between her Georgetown town house and his cabin in the backwoods of the Savage River Forest.
He’d separated from the army the previous year after the terrible cover-up of a friendly fire incident that had killed one of his best friends. He’d run to the woods, disengaged from the world and would have stayed there, lost and alone, if it weren’t for Sam. Two broken souls, made whole by their joining.
Xander wasn’t fully ready to reenter the world, but he was coming back, a bit at a time. Though he’d done his best to hide it, she knew he was happy she had turned down Baldwin’s job offer.
“Hey,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“I thought I’d bring you lunch. I know how you can lose yourself in your work. What is it today? Blood spatter?”
“It’s eerie how you do that.” She turned the laptop around and showed him the article. “I was just starting the section on backspatter.”
He didn’t pale, but his lips tightened together in a grim line. He’d spent most of his life behind the trigger; he was more than familiar with the concept.
Sam glanced at the screen, saw the full-color image of a man at the wrong end of a shotgun and slammed the laptop closed. “Sorry. What’s this about lunch?”
Xander’s dark hair flopped onto his forehead. “You’re not one of those M.E.s who can eat a tuna sandwich standing over a corpse, are you?”
“Highly unethical behavior, tuna eating. I’d stick with cookies or crackers myself. The crumbs are easier to brush away.”
He laughed, deep from his belly, which made her smile. She loved his laugh.
“I wouldn’t kick you out of bed for eating crackers.” He glanced over his shoulder at the open office door. “Maybe we should inaugurate your office.”
He kissed her, long and lingering, and she was damn close to saying lock the door when another knock sounded, this one accompanied by a high-pitched throat clearing. They jumped apart like teenagers caught making out on a porch, and Sam smoothed her shirt down—good grief, one of her buttons was undone; how had he managed that?—before turning to see who’d so rudely interrupted them.