She nodded, the disdainful expression vanishing as Elijah echoed his sentiments.

"Thank you. I'll be back this fall, at the latest."

Jackson nodded. "Hope your mother and sister are all right by then."

She shook her head. "My sister should be, but I don't think my mother's long for this world. Cancer, for the second time."

Jackson offered his condolences.

"It's hard to watch something eat away at someone you've known your entire life," she said. "My dad went the same way, and he was a sh.e.l.l of his former self when it finally took him. To tell the truth, I hope she doesn't suffer like he did."

Sanders was still lingering, a hint of that stupid smirk on his face. The man truly had no shame.

Jackson did his best to come up with a reply that wouldn't make him sound like a total a.s.s, and when someone else caught the lieutenant's attention, it was a relief.

Pulling a bill out of his wallet, he slapped it on the bar. The bartender could keep the change.

"Heading home together?" Sanders said, loud enough for the people around them to hear. "How f.u.c.king cute."

Jackson spared him a last glance. "Getting out of here before you do something stupid and I have to waste my time cuffing you again."

Sanders flashed his biggest sneer yet. "What goes around comes around, Calder. You remember that."

CHAPTER 10.

It was a quarter till eight when Jackson got home from the bar. The encounter with Sanders had left him filled with a pointless anger, like toxic waste in his blood.

The only thing more potent than that anger was temptation.

Two days, and he was aching to see Belle again. He'd promised to call, and although he wasn't sure how soon she was expecting him to do that, it was hard to resist the urge any longer. The pleasure of her presence called to him like a drug, an escape from all the bulls.h.i.t.

He dialed her number.

"Belle. You up for a walk on the beach?"

A thrill raced through her, going straight to her heart as she cradled her phone. "Sure. I could use some fresh air."

"Great. I'll pick you up in fifteen minutes."

Just like that, her Monday evening went from routine to a special occasion. She'd already changed into comfortable clothing and eaten a pan-fried chicken breast and rice for dinner. Glancing down, she deliberated on whether or not to change out of her shorts and tank top.

She decided against it it didn't get much more casual than a walk on the beach, after all but took a few minutes to wash her face and apply some fresh mascara and lip gloss.

A pair of flat, jeweled sandals waited by the door. She put them on and grabbed her purse, then sat down to wait, her heart marking each pa.s.sing second as it beat just a little too fast.

Jackson arrived exactly on time, and when she saw him, she was glad she'd kept her casual outfit. He wore shorts and a grey t-shirt that stretched across his chest, molding to the muscles beneath, like all shirts seemed to do on a body like his.

"Wow," he said, his gaze sliding slowly up and down her body. He'd looked at her like that often the other night, when she'd worn the new dress.

"What is it?" she asked, her skin tingling with a pleasant, phantom heat. It wasn't as if she was dressed to impress now.

"It's like stepping back in time." He nodded at her. "You used to wear stuff like that during the summers when you were home from college, remember?"

It was true. Day after day, she'd pulled on denim shorts and thin cotton tank tops, wearing a bikini beneath instead of underwear. Those outfits had carried her through long summer days, as comfortable and as common on the beach as broken sh.e.l.ls.

"Well, I can't dress to the nines every day, and it's hot." She smiled.

"Thank G.o.d for hot weather." He smiled too.

"Are you ready to go?" She stepped outside, locking the door behind herself.

He nodded, and they walked to his car. Her feet felt light in her sandals, barely sc.r.a.ping against the asphalt. She understood what he meant about this feeling like a day out of the past. Back then, she'd lived for sunny days at the beach. She'd loved those days spent with friends days that'd always held the possibility of seeing Jackson.

"Remember how you used to show up at the beach in the evenings after work to cool off?" she asked. It was impossible to forget how he'd looked in swim shorts, his construction worker's body tanned and toned, muscles gleaming with sea water.

The sight had almost been enough to break her twenty-one-year-old heart with longing.

"I never quite succeeded at cooling off."

"What do you mean?"

He opened the pa.s.senger side door for her. "With you around in your little bikinis? I went home ten degrees hotter than when I'd shown up. Surprised I didn't die of fever, that last summer."

"Really, or are you just teasing me?" She took her seat, unable to keep from staring as he did the same.

"Cross my heart." He turned the key in the ignition. "Construction work was rough in the summer, but my apartment had central air. All it lacked was the beach view."

"Why didn't you say anything? If all you wanted was to spend time together, we could've done something indoors."

Her heart raced as she waited for his answer, much like it had years ago when she'd watched him on the beach.

"You were way too good for me, and I knew it."

She huffed, searching his face for some sign of a joke.

He was looking straight ahead at the street as he drove.

"Seriously."

"I'm dead serious. The struggling kid from the wrong side of the tracks trying to woo the smart, beautiful college girl even though he has nothing to offer her but his d.i.c.k? Sounds like a bad movie made for teen girls."

She almost laughed, but the sound died in her throat before reaching the tip of her tongue. Was that really how he'd felt?

"What do you mean struggling? And for the record, I'm the lower-middle-cla.s.s daughter of a nurse and a factory supervisor. It's not like I was some princess."

"You were to me."

Her head spun with disbelief, amus.e.m.e.nt and a surprisingly potent sadness. "Is that really how you felt?"

"Yeah. And by struggling, I mean I shared an apartment with three other guys and was still living paycheck to paycheck. Had no idea what to do with my life. I was twenty-something, and I was nothing. Far as I knew then, that'd always be true."

Belle frowned. Strong, gorgeous and hardworking, Jackson had turned heads and teased hearts everywhere. When he'd walked onto the beach, women had often sighed or sometimes catcalled in his wake. And he'd seen himself as nothing?

It boggled the mind.

He'd stood out among other guys his age, a man in a sea of boys. He'd been the polar opposite of the carefree, ent.i.tled guys she'd rubbed shoulders with at college, and his maturity had fascinated her.

"You know, the s.e.xy construction worker stereotype is a fan favorite among women. It may not beat hot cop, but it's up there."

That wrung a laugh out of him.

"Nothing s.e.xy about a twenty-something who has a GED and took the first job he could get, playing in the dirt for a living."

But that wasn't true his work ethic was and always had been something she'd admired.

"Look at you now, though. You have a totally different career. You even graduated from college."

He nodded. "Things have changed a lot."

"Obviously, you underestimated yourself. And here we are."

"Yeah. Nothing to stop me from going after you now that I'm solidly lower middle cla.s.s." He grinned.

"Well, as a.s.sistant Director of Admissions at a trade school, I probably make about as much as a city cop. So I'd say we're a pretty even match, financially."

He nodded. "If this works out, we could be living the high life together. Think about it: with our combined wealth, we could ditch our apartments and upgrade to a condo. Maybe even a little house a bungalow, or something."

She laughed. "Already talking about moving in together? I must've made quite the impression on you six years ago."

"Oh, you did, Princess." He flashed her a grin. "Don't let your guard down, or I'll sweep you off your feet and over a condo threshold before you can blink. By the time you realize what I smell like when I get home after twelve hours of sweating in Kevlar, it'll be too late."

A smile lingered on her lips for the rest of the ride. She liked his teasing. Most of the other men she'd known would've sooner eaten dirt than spoken a word about moving in together, even in jest.

She and Kyle had never even moved in together, although she realized now that his aversion to the idea had probably been because it would've made it harder for him to cheat.

"What made you want to go for a walk?" she asked when they parked in the public lot at Blue Mile Beach.

"Weird day at work." They shed their sandals and left them side-by-side in the sand by the beach access steps. "Couldn't think of a better way to get away from it all and relax."

Twilight cast the beach in soft pastel tones: shades of grey, pink and blue that blended together. Their footprints looked like shadows in the damp sand as they walked at the edge of the surf, into the wind. She hadn't put her hair up this time, and it streamed behind her.

The sea breeze combing through her hair like that and making her scalp tingle was one of the best feelings in the world.

"Anything to do with Sanders? Or don't you want to talk about it?"

"My lieutenant is taking some time off to care for her sick mother. Weeks or months n.o.body knows yet. We had a little get together to wish her well after work today met at the Due South Bar and Grill, down on the east end of the island. Sanders showed up."

"Oh." She frowned. "Let me guess he said something?"

"He made sure to rub it in my face that he'd gotten off the hook. Implied that Elijah he's my roommate I went through the academy with only supports me because we're gay lovers, then made some vague promises of retribution. The whole trifecta of petty bulls.h.i.t."

"What a d.i.c.k. I'm sorry."

"I can handle the bulls.h.i.t. I can even handle his stupid smirks. I can't handle him walking free with a badge and a gun."

"He should be kicked off the force, if not fed to sharks."

Jackson took one of her hands and raised it to his mouth.

When his lips brushed her knuckles, a hot shiver raced down her spine.

"You're a woman after my own heart, you know that?"

His smile made her feel as if he were squeezing her heart instead of her hand. G.o.d, he was hot, and that smile hit her like a freight train every time, flattening her defenses.

"I feel bad for his wife," she said, forcing her mind back into the conversation. "I bet things have been even worse for her since the arrest."

"I know it. And I feel guilty as h.e.l.l. Guilty for doing the right thing." He frowned.

"Imagine if you hadn't, though. Imagine if you'd shown up and left without doing anything. She would've known it was hopeless then. At least now she knows she has some sort of recourse, if she's brave enough to use it. You showed her that there are people willing to help."

"All I can do is write charges. I can't help her out of the situation unless she wants me to."

"That's not your fault."

"Doesn't matter. This job gives you a front row seat to all sorts of s.h.i.tty things that aren't your fault, and if the fact that you can't fix them doesn't bother you, I think that means you've turned into a useless b.a.s.t.a.r.d like Sanders."

She squeezed his hand. The fact that he cared about Kate Sanders, and all the other people he couldn't rescue as he would've liked to melted her heart.

She didn't have anything to take the edge off the truth of what he'd said, so she didn't try. The minutes ticked by, at least five before either of them spoke again.

"Jellyfish," she said, pointing toward a transparent mound in the sand. "Watch out."

They gave the washed-up creature and its trailing tentacles a wide berth, and when they were well past it, he pulled her closer and wrapped an arm around her waist.

The feel of his muscular arm circling her and his hard body against her side took her breath away for a second.

"It's almost dark," she said, "do you want to head back?"