Shades of Grey(61)
“Now I’m not so sure. It was actually the night you came into the bar when I had this moment of realization that I was still living in the past by hanging around in Denver. There’s nothing for me there. No reason to stay. No ties. Nothing. At least here I’d be closer to work if nothing else.”
“You’d have me,” he said.
She lifted her gaze to his and their eyes locked. He didn’t flinch away. Didn’t try to hide anything from her.
“I don’t want to screw up our friendship. I can’t lose that, Cole. It’s too important to me. It’s why I reacted the way I did the morning after, because all I could think was how stupid I’d been to risk something that means so very much to me.”
“You aren’t going to lose me, P.J. Don’t doom us before we even give it a shot.”
She dropped her gaze and returned it to the pond again, counting the fireflies as they danced through the air. More and more were popping into view, and the sounds of night grew louder. In the distance, an owl hooted, sending an eerie shiver down her spine.
Was he right? Was she guilty of not even giving them a shot? Of shooting them down before they even gave it a chance?
She was being a total chickenshit and offering up lame excuses when at the heart of the matter she was just . . . afraid.
“What if it doesn’t work out?” she asked, voicing one of those fears. “What if things end badly between us? We still have to work as a team, and if we fuck things up, it creates tension for the entire team yet we have to work together. Our camaraderie is what makes us so damn good. We could fuck up not only ourselves, but the entire team. Worse, we could end up getting one of the others killed. I don’t think I could live with that.”
“If it ever comes down to that, I’d be the one to leave,” he said quietly. “I’d never force you out, P.J.”
“It would still devastate me,” she whispered.
“Don’t you believe in forever?” he asked. “What about all those romance novels you read? Don’t they preach the happily-ever-after message?”
His words put an ache in her heart. She wanted happily ever after more than he could possibly know. She wanted forever. Problem was, she just wasn’t sure she believed in it anymore. It was why she clung to her fiction so much. She immersed herself in books because there she could be anyone and it was easy to believe in love and happily ever after.
“You’d make an awesome romance heroine. I’m just saying.”
She smiled. “You’d make a pretty badass romance hero too.”
“See? It’s fate. Or destiny. Whatever you want to call it. We’re meant to be together. Wow, I’m starting to sound like a total pussy!”
She laughed, but the problem was, she was beginning to feel the same way. Cole just . . . fit. There wasn’t anything she didn’t like about him, even when he was annoying the shit out of her.
It was fun to bicker and snipe with him. He gave as good as he got but he never carried a grudge. Never took it too seriously. And he didn’t let his ego get in the way of things. She’d saved his ass plenty of times and he never resented her for it.
Her KGI team was everything her first team wasn’t. Loyal. They respected her. They stood by her even when it meant putting their jobs on the line.
The sudden thought occurred to her that she was a flaming hypocrite. It was like being blindsided by a right hook. Her thoughts must have been reflected on her face, because Cole’s brow wrinkled in concern and he sat forward.
“What’s up, P.J.? You okay?”
She let out a disgusted sigh and rubbed her forehead in agitation. “I was sitting here comparing S.W.A.T. with KGI and I was being all smug and self-righteous thinking that my team here is everything my old team wasn’t. I’ve been so pissed at them for so long, but it occurred to me that I’m a huge fucking hypocrite.”
He reared back in surprise. “Why the hell would you think something like that?”
“I turned my lover in for being dirty. I was so self-righteous and so ‘must do the right thing’ and I was so black-and-white back then. There were no reasons, no explanations. No excuses. You were either right or wrong. No in between. And yet here I am, having murdered three men in cold blood and casually plotting the death of a fourth. My hands are so stained with blood that I’ll never wash them clean. At least Derek wasn’t hurting anyone. He didn’t kill anyone. He stole money from losers and drug dealers.”
Cole scowled, his face darkening as he stared back at her. “You aren’t comparing yourself to that asshole.”