Chalk Dirty to Me (Madd CrossFit 3)

Her father was where all six of them got their dark looks and perpetually tanned skin from, that was for sure. He was well over six feet, just like the boys, had dark hair, dark eyes, and a black few-days-old beard that told me he didn’t feel like shaving, but most of the time he did.

He looked exactly like his children.

His wife on the other hand? If I hadn’t heard they belonged to her, I wouldn’t have ever pinned her as being related at all.

Reedy snickered. “If it makes you feel better, he saw each and every one of them come out of my body.”

I shook my head. “I have kind of the same thing going on with my nieces. Only they look like my sister. Curly brown hair and pasty white skin that’ll never hold a tan for the rest of their life if they’re anything like me. All I do is burn. Their daddy, though? Looked so much like…”

“I knew you were familiar,” Derringer snapped.

We then went on to have a short discussion of how I was acquainted with them in a roundabout way.

“Broke my heart when they died,” she whispered. “I’d love to see those girls.”

I smiled then. “They’re on vacation with my parents. They’re actually living it up in the most expensive motorhome that middle class money can buy. I’ve gotten blurry pictures from pretty much half the country these last two weeks.”

Reedy smiled, and then gestured toward the parking lot. We’d all gathered outside of the hospital doors the moment that Cannel was discharged.

“We’re in town for a reason,” Reedy looked at Cannel. “Y’all want to head back to the cabins? Daddy found some news out today.”

I didn’t think I was going to like this at all.

I was right.

I really fucking didn’t.

CHAPTER 14

Life is too short to remove a USB safely.

-Will to Cannel

WILL

Two days later, I was still thinking about what to do, and coming up empty.

“You’re being awfully quiet today,” Brianna mused.

I grunted instead of answering her, not liking how pissed I was, and how much she was getting on my nerves without even trying.

Today, thankfully, was officially my last day to work with her.

Tomorrow, I’d be on my own, and I couldn’t thank the captain more for that announcement as I’d arrived at work today.

It’d come on the heels of a quiet, tense night—sex free due to my inability to do anything with her despite her assurance that she was okay—and that set the pace of the whole day.

After spending the last couple of hours with Brianna, I was fairly certain that she knew exactly what she was doing.

She was rubbing salt in the wounds.

“Nothing of importance,” I found myself saying, wanting the day to end.

I had about six hours left to deal with her, then I’d be done.

At first, when I’d started at Paris PD, I hadn’t realized the ‘looks’ that I’d gotten. Or understood the comments.

But now? Now I knew.

Just yesterday, one of the older detectives had commented about Brianna being a ‘vow breaker.’ At the time, I’d thought that he’d meant that she was a rule breaker.

But now I understood. Brianna liked to break up relationships.

I’d done enough of my own detective work over the last couple of days to finally understand all the offhanded comments that were made about her. For instance, when I’d come in off my fourth or fifth shift with her, there’d been a mid-to-late thirty-year-old woman sitting next to a male cop—Brewster. She’d taken one look at Brianna, and her face had shut down, going completely blank. Brewster looked like he was about to start crying.

And it was only now that I knew that at one point in time, Brewster and Brianna had a fling.

A fling that had only lasted a couple of days because it had been cut off quickly the moment that the woman found out about Brianna.

Hell, from what I understood, Brewster and his wife were still going to marriage counseling.

And that hadn’t been the first relationship that Brianna had helped break up.

All of a sudden, I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “Brianna, why do you sleep with married men only? Or men that are in relationships?”

The silence in the car was heavy as that question sank underneath the surface.

Then Brianna said, “I like the thrill of it. The secrecy. I cheated on my own husband for fifteen months, and he didn’t even notice. That’s why I asked for a divorce.”

There was a long, pregnant pause as we both took in her words, and then I said, “Why? Why do you do it at the office where you work? These men and women have to have your back. If you stick a knife in every one of them, they’re not going to come to your aid if you’re hurt.”

“They’ll come,” she disagreed. “It doesn’t matter that I burned a few bridges. What matters is that we’re all cops. In this together.”