“You mean talk to a couple thousand viewers who I don’t even know.”
“No, talk to me. Ava. Ignore Mihail, ignore the camera, ignore the shit that Lopez will be flinging your way before and after.”
“Who says I’ll be flinging shit?” Luc’s partner asked.
They both looked at him, and Lopez lifted a shoulder. “Okay, maybe. Probably.”
“Look, Luc, what the hell did you think was going to happen when you agreed to this?” Ava asked.
“I didn’t agree to this!”
“Well it’s happening,” she shot back. “And it’ll happen a lot faster, and a lot less painfully for everybody, if you’d cooperate.”
Luc stuck this thumbs into his belt and remained resolutely silent. He knew he was on the verge of being out of line, and he didn’t blame her for being confused. He was all over the place with her. Amiable one minute, prissy the next.
Kissing her one day.
Yelling at her the next.
A match made in heaven, they were not.
Still, in the grand scheme of things, her request should have been harmless.
But with last night’s nightmare fresh on his mind, he felt…threatened. Being asked to perform like a trick pony was bad enough on most days, but on a day when he was running on hardly any sleep and a couple years’ worth of bad memories?
Let’s just say Ava didn’t have a clue.
You could tell her.
He pushed the thought away almost as quickly as it had popped into his head. Tell a woman he hardly knew his deepest, darkest pain? Bad idea.
Telling a reporter his deepest darkest pain?
Really bad idea.
Nobody wanted to see a cop pretending to be a hero. But wasn’t that exactly what he was doing every damned day?
“Dude,” Lopez said under his breath. “You okay? I know you’re not the biggest fan of all this but you’re being kind of a dick.”
Luc almost smiled. Sawyer Lopez was completely different from Mike Jensen in almost every way…Mike had been quiet and focused, whereas Lopez was outspoken and spontaneous. Mike short and broad, Sawyer lean and lithe. Mike fair, Lopez dark.
But his former partner and current partner had one very crucial characteristic in common: they were both damned good at calling Luc on his bullshit.
“Christ,” he muttered. “Fine. Sims, let’s get this over with.”
He half expected her to continue to give him crap, but at the end of the day, Ava Sims was a professional and she gestured over to her camera crew as though there had never been a delay.
Ava spent a few minutes explaining the shot she wanted to Mihail and some other guy whose name Luc had already forgotten. Then Ava turned to Luc. “Okay, Moretti, you’re up. Nothing to it. We’ll just walk nice and slow along the river talking. I ask you questions about that day, you answer, taking me through what happened as best you can. ’Kay?”
Luc gave a curt nod.
“What about me?” Lopez asked, surreptitiously checking out a well-endowed brunette who was trying to ascertain what the camera was for.
“Watch for bad guys,” Ava said. Then she followed his line of sight. “Or go get that girl’s number.”
Luc followed Ava over to the start of the shot.
“Take a deep breath,” she said quietly.
“I’m not nervous,” he said irritably, just annoyed.
“Yeah, I got that,” she said, her mouth curving into a smile. “But it’s just me, Luc.”
It was her use of his first name that got him. He would do well to remember that they weren’t friends.
But sometimes it felt like they were.
She touched his arm briefly to indicate that they were about to start, and her fingers seemed to linger.
Sometimes it felt like they were more than friends. Definitely.
“So, Officer Moretti,” she said in her reporter voice.
Shit. Here we go.
“How many times would you say you’d walked along this very riverbank before the fateful events of February twenty-first?”
Fateful events? It wasn’t like there was a second coming.
She looked at him patiently and he realized he had to speak, or else risk looking like a mute on national television.