Page 25 of Unlikely Guardian

Jason spared her a narrow-eyed glance. “You should be sorry.”

“Well, I am.”

Another glance. Followed by an angry groan. Then he stared at her. Nope. Make that a glare. “I’m really pissed off at you right now, you know that?”

“Yes.” She softly explained, “But put yourself in my place and ask yourself if you wouldn’t have done the same thing.”

His glare didn’t soften one bit. “I’m not in the mood for reasoning here, Lilly. This isn’t about logic or validity. It’s about the love I have for that little girl across the hall.”

“It’s also about the hatred you feel for me,” she pointed out.

“I don’t hate you.”

He said it too quickly for her to believe that he’d given it any real thought. “Liar.”

“I don’t hate you,” he insisted.

“Maybe not. But every time you look at me, you remember Greg and how I could have saved him if I’d been thinking about him instead of me.”

He shrugged and propped his hands on his hips. “If you’re waiting for me to deny that, I can’t.”

“I know you can’t.” Lilly considered ending this air-clearing with that acknowledgment, but they were at an impasse here, and for Megan’s sake, they needed to get past it. “Because every time I look at you, I remember the accusations and the hell you put me through that night and all the weeks after it.”

That was only partly true. Which made it a lie. For reasons she didn’t want to explore, she no longer saw the pain of Greg’s death when she looked at Jason. Instead, she saw Jason, the man. The hot cop. The person responsible for confusing her more than she could have ever imagined.

“We need to put an end to this protective custody,” Lilly informed him. “We need to figure out who tried to kill me so we can all get on with our lives.”

No more glaring, but there was skepticism written all over his face. “I’ll listen to any ideas you have as to how we can catch this guy.”

“Any ideas?” she questioned.

He frowned. “Within reason.”

Well, that probably ruled out what she was about to say, but Lilly went with it anyway. “I’d like to go to my office and have a look around.”

He was already shaking his head before she finished. “Too risky.”

“Breathing is too risky,” she reminded him.

Jason leaned in, violating her personal space. “But some breaths are riskier than others.”

She didn’t think it was intentional, but she knew from the look on his face that he was probably thinking about that near kiss.

Yes, that was indeed one risky breath.

He was so close that she could see the swirls of gray in his eyes. Too close. Yet she did nothing to move away. It was a cheap thrill, except she knew this cheap thrill would have an enormous price tag with the potential for her heart to be broken.

“Besides,” he continued, leaning back out of her personal space, “anything you need from your office, I can bring it here.”

“You can’t bring a conditioned response to me. In other words, something there might trigger those gaps in my memory so we’ll know who’s trying to kill me. And if we know that, we can catch him.”

He stayed quiet a moment and then shook his head again.

“It makes sense,” Lilly continued so she could cut off any objection he might try to voice. “We could go to my office after hours, with a police escort and without letting anyone outside S.A.P.D. know. You could have the building and parking lot checked to make sure it’s secure.”

“But that still wouldn’t make it safe.”

“A half hour. That’s all I’d need. Just enough time to try to relive what happened that night before someone tried to kill me.”

---