Beneath the Badge (First Responders 4)

“Maybe.”

He nodded slowly. “The heavy bag the other night…I never did tell you what it was really about.”

She remembered being curious about why there was such a desperate, angry edge to his punches. It hadn’t been just a workout. It had been trying to forget, or trying to get even, or both. With whom or what?

“I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer, so I didn’t ask.”

“Maybe I want you to know now.”

Her heart hammered against her ribs. She wasn’t ready for this. This felt like relationship stuff. Besides, if he confided in her, she was involved. Responsible, somehow, for making it all right. She didn’t want that…

“Does it have something to do with your dream?” she asked, barely above a whisper.

His gaze delved deeper into hers for several seconds. “It does. Which surprises me. I thought I’d be able to leave it behind when I came here.”

“Nothing ever gets completely left behind. Believe me, I know.”

“It was the puppy mill that did it,” he said, seemingly unaware of her inner turmoil. “It took me by surprise, really. I’m a cop. I deal with stuff a lot worse. Or at least I did. It’s been pretty quiet since I moved here. Traffic violations, the odd break and enter or possession charge. So I wasn’t prepared.”

“The dogs?” she asked. Granted, she’d spent a lot of time angry at the abuse humans doled out to their pets. Her heart had always been soft that way. Animals couldn’t speak for themselves, so they needed someone to speak for them. Especially when an owner broke trust and didn’t care for them as they deserved.

Which was why she insisted on her clinic helping the local shelters.

“They were so sad, Lindsay. So beaten. Defeated. It made me angry. And it scared me, because I’ve seen that look before.”

He rolled to his back and stared at the ceiling. “I’ve tried to forget it. God knows, I’ve tried. It’s why I took this job in the first place. No stress. No…darkness. But it’s everywhere I go.”

“What about a psych evaluation?” She puckered her brows. “I don’t know what happened, but you always hear about cops having to go to counselling after something traumatic.” As long as he talked to anyone but her. She wasn’t prepared to play therapist.

He nodded a little. “Just because someone can check all the right boxes doesn’t mean that things stay in those boxes all the time. There are some things I can’t forget. Things I don’t want to forget. It seems, I don’t know, disloyal to think of letting it go.”

“Letting what go?”

He sighed. “Can you come a little closer? Let me hold you. I think I’d feel better with you close to me.”

She scooted over until she was wrapped in his warm arms, one strong leg draped possessively over hers. “That’s better,” he murmured.

It was, which was surprising in itself.

“You know I did some time undercover. There’s an underbelly to crime that’s not pretty and definitely not glamorous. One of my assignments I was under for over a year.”

“Was it dangerous?”

He let out a dry laugh. “Just being in the same breathing space with those people was dangerous. If I’d been made, I’m pretty sure no one would have ever found the body.”

She shuddered, feeling suddenly cold despite the warm summer breeze floating in through the window. “Then why do it?”

“Because someone has to. Because if I didn’t someone else’s body would be missing for sure. This particular ring was into everything. Guns, drugs, human trafficking, each leveraging the other to make it work. I did pretty well dealing with the weapons and drugs, but it was the girls that got to me. Most of them didn’t even speak English. Some were runaways off the street. And I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.”

He went quiet suddenly, and very still. Lindsay took shallow breaths as she waited to see if he would go on, or if that was it. All he could say.

“This case…this guy…he’s a monster. We were so close to being able to make an arrest when I discovered the cages. There were girls inside. He was keeping them in cages like animals. They were cramped and dirty and the smell…”

She heard him swallow.

“There was one woman. Helen. She’d been working for this guy for a while, but she was foolish. She’d tried to cheat him and she wasn’t good at it. I made her promise that if she ever needed help, she would come to me and I’d do what I could. When she disappeared I figured he’d had her killed. I felt terrible about it, but nowhere near like I did when I realized she was alive and in one of those cages. I promised her I would get her out of there.”

Lindsay swallowed. He had cared about this woman. On one level it was hard to imagine, left her wondering who exactly Matt Parker was, this was so far removed from the life she knew and understood. On another level though, she was starting to see that beneath the smiling, charming exterior was a man who was capable of deep compassion. Who tried to distance himself from his emotions perhaps as much as she did.