Page 29 of Diesel’s Desire

“My personal life is none of your concern.”

“It is when it’s the whole department’s problem.” He steps closer, and I hold my ground, because I’ve had exactly enough of men in this town deciding what I owe them an explanation for. “You want to throw away your career over some biker you dated in high school, that’s your business. But don’t expect the rest of us to pretend it doesn’t matter when half our open cases run straight back to that clubhouse.”

“We are not doing this. Not here. Not while there’s a child missing off this road.”

That lands, at least. He looks away first, jaw tight, and I take the half-second of silence to get myself back under control before I say something I can’t walk back.

“We’ll finish this conversation,” he mutters.

“No,” I say, “we won’t.”

I turn and walk back to my cruiser without waiting to see his reaction, boots crunching hard against the gravel, hands curling into fists at my sides before I make myself unclench them. Behind me I hear him say something else, low, probably to one of the other officers, and I don’t turn around to catch it.

I get into the car and shut the door harder than necessary, and for a second I just sit there, both hands on the wheel, staring at the dashboard while my pulse hammers loud enough to hear.

He’s not wrong. That’s the part that makes my skin crawl worse than his tone did. He’s right about the conflict, and I already knew every bit of it before he opened his mouth, sitting on my floor two mornings ago with Thunder pressed against my side, running through the exact same argument in my own head.

I let Evan Cole back into my life. Into my bed. And I did it with two open files sitting on my desk that could end my whole career if anybody ever traced the line between them, and I did it anyway, because seventeen years of telling myself I was over him turned out to be the worst lie I’ve ever managed to convince myself of.

I start the engine.

Somewhere out past these trees, a six-year-old girl is missing, and that’s the thing that actually matters right now, the only thing that should be sitting in my chest instead of Evan’s hands or Johnson’s smug, righteous little speech about enemies and badges.

I pull out onto the gravel road, radio crackling with updates on the BOLO, and I drive back toward town with my jaw clenched so tight it aches, furious at Johnson for saying it out loud, and furious at myself for not having a single good answer when he did.

17

DIESEL

The station lot’s got exactly one car in it by the time I roll up, and it’s hers.

I’ve been driving past this building for two days, timing it, telling myself I’m just running errands that happen to route me down Main at eleven at night. Bullshit, obviously. Ace would call it stalking if I said it out loud, which is exactly why I haven’t said it out loud to anybody. I kill the engine outside the police station with a stolen bike report I wrote up an hour ago sitting on my passenger seat like it’s the most natural thing in the world for a man like me to walk through that door.

Wyatt’s bike really did get lifted off the lot behind the garage where he keeps it. That part’s true. Whether it needed reporting to the actual police instead of me putting the word out and letting the club handle it the way we always handle things is a different question, one I decided not to ask myself too hard on the drive over.

I grab the folder, get out, and walk toward the glass doors like I’ve got every right in the world to be here.

The lobby’s dead quiet. Fluorescent lights humming that flat, sick hum they always do, a bulletin board plastered with missing pet flyers and a wanted poster gone yellow at the edges. Nobody’s behind the front counter. I stand there a second, listening, and catch the low murmur of a radio scanner somewhere down the hall, and under that, softer, the sound of a keyboard.

I follow it.

She’s alone at her desk, hair scraped back tight, uniform creased after eleven hours on shift, a mug of coffee that looks stale at her elbow. She doesn’t look up right away. She doesn’t hear me, or she hears me and decides not to react, which would be exactly like her.

“Kind of late for a filing,” I say.

Her head comes up fast, and something flashes across her face before she gets it locked down—surprise, then something else, something that heats up under the surprise before she buries that too.

“You can’t be back here.” She’s already standing, hand going to the edge of her desk as if she needs it for balance. “This isn’t visiting hours, Evan.”

“Not visiting.” I hold up the folder. “Reporting a theft. Prospect’s bike got lifted off the garage lot two nights back.”

“There’s a night desk for that.”

“Night desk’s empty. Found you instead.”

Her jaw works. She glances past me toward the lobby, toward the empty hallway, and I watch her run the math—who’s here, who’s not, how much noise carries, how fast this could go wrong for her if anybody walked in and found the Vice President of Wicked Sinners standing beside her desk at eleven at night with nobody else in sight.

“You could’ve called it in,” she says, quieter now.