Page 64 of Second First Kiss

“You’ll get him next time.”

“What? And just hope in the meantime that he doesn’t sell bad drugs to some kid or up his game from vandalism to assault?”

“Ah.” Eli laughed. “This is more about the girl than the case.”

Nolan began to deny it, but that would be a lie and they both knew it. That was another example of how he’d asked for too much, too soon.

Kat needed time to face what was happening between them. Instead of giving her what she’d asked for, he’d pushed hard enough to scare her off.

It had been five days since their night together. She’d gotten the job at the lodge but besides watching her skitter away every time he entered the office, he hadn’t seen more than a glimpse of her. Jax joked that he’d been ghosted. To Nolan it felt like he’d been abandoned.

What he’d felt couldn’t have been one-sided. Could it?

“Want to talk about it?” Eli asked.

Nolan wasn’t one to kiss and tell, but he needed advice and who better to have his back than his partner who’d been blissfully married for fifteen years.

“I think I blew it. She told me upfront she wasn’t looking for anything serious. Then I get my chance to crack the door open a little and ended up kicking it in like a no-knock warrant. I took it from casual to serious in one sentence. Now she’s avoiding me like the plague.”

“What did you expect?” Eli asked. “You hooked up with a woman who is notorious for hooking up. Hell, she wrote the woman’s guide to leaving them wanting more. Half the regulars at the bar have a thing for her.”

A zing of jealousy shot through him, which was irritating. Nolan didn’t do jealous or have caveman possessive tendencies. Either a woman liked him or she didn’t. He never tried to change their opinion of him. But with Kat, her opinion meant more than it should.

“That’s not who she is,” Nolan argued, and in his gut he knew it. She wasn’t some siren luring men to their death, she was a woman who’d been hurt. Badly. He didn’t know much about her dating history before she moved back to Sierra Vista, but he’d seen the heartache in her eyes when she’d returned home. It was the kind of heartache that could take a person out at the knees and erect walls nearly impossible to scale.

Nolan had those same walls. A parting gift from Nina, but he’d like to think that he’d worked through that. He no longer mourned her, but did mourn the dream of finding his person. Over time he’d started to take down those walls, brick by brick, until he could finally see over them. And what he saw was a sexy and stubborn smart-ass, who’d been burned by love.

Nolan wasn’t thinking about love. They barely knew each other. What he did know about her he liked—it made him want to explore more. And not just the physical more. He wanted to get to know everything about her.

“Then who is she, Dr. Phil? I mean besides a bad choice for someone in law enforcement?” Eli asked.

Nolan’s quills stood at attention. “What do you mean, bad choice?” Even the words felt like acid on his tongue.

Eli held up a hand in I come in peace. “Whoa, I didn’t mean it that way. I just meant that she’s hot-headed, makes rash decisions, and has a checkered past. You do know that she was arrested for hacking into the SAT servers.”

It reminded him of what Kat had said. That she pops off because people are always trying to knock her down. He was starting to see how impossible it would be for her to change what people thought of her when her past was constantly thrown in her face.

“It was just a test and she was a kid. We’ve all done stupid shit when we were younger.”

“Name one thing you did when you were a kid that reflects badly on you now?”

Nolan opened his mouth and closed it. He wasn’t a perfect kid by any stretch, but as the mediator of the family he did his best to stay out of trouble.

“Exactly. And you’re talking about a woman who should have been charged with assaulting a customer.” Eli took another sip of his drink.

Nolan rolled his eyes. “We both know that R. J. baited her.”

“But she took the bait, man. Do you really want to have to defend your girlfriend every time she spouts off? How would that look on you? To the department?”

“Isn’t that what we get paid to do, defend people? What’s so wrong with wanting to have her back? Did part of me want to find the knife in R. J.’s shit so I could link him to her car? Hell yeah, I did.”

Nolan wanted to nail the prick and then put him away for vandalizing her car, not to mention other things. But he really wanted to prove to Kat that she wasn’t alone. That it was okay to rely on someone else. That he meant what he said and he was going to do everything he could to earn her trust.

“What more could you do? You paid for the damages and at the speed that she got her car back, I’m betting you paid extra.”

Double. Nolan had paid double to get her car back that quickly. But the morning after their hot tub tango, he’d found his truck in his driveway with the keys on the floorboard and a simple note:

Thanks for everything.

---