Page 16 of Dirty Sweet Cop

She gets something else. The man underneath. The one with soft hands and quiet devotion and the capacity for tenderness I thought I’d burned out of myself fifteen years ago. She gets the promise—whispered against her skin, pressed into her belly with each kiss—that she will never face a single day alone. Not ever again.

Our child will know that promise too. Will grow up in it. Will be raised by a man who learned, too late and just in time, that some things are worth protecting more fiercely than others.

Some things are worth burning the world down for.

I press one last kiss to her stomach. To the life growing there. To the future we’re building one careful day at a time.

“Mine,” I whisper. To her. To the baby. To the life we’ve chosen.

And for the first time since I walked through that broken door and found her trembling in the corner, the obsession doesn’t feel like hunger.

It feels like coming home.

epilogue

. . .

Winny

Six months later

Six months in, and my belly is so round I can’t see my feet. Clayton finds this hilarious. He also finds it irresistible—his hands are on me constantly, cupping the curve of my stomach, feeling the baby kick, his face doing that thing where it goes soft in a way that would get him laughed out of the precinct if any of his colleagues could see it.

Good thing they can’t. Detective Holloway’s reputation is safe. The rest of the world still gets the stone-faced cop with the dead-eyed stare and the voice that makes perps piss themselves. I get the man who makes me tea at nine o’clock at night because I mentioned a craving, who hums under his breath while he does it, who looks over his shoulder at me curled on the couch and his whole face transforms like someone flipped a switch.

From killer to caregiver in 0.2 seconds. It’s my favorite trick of his.

The house doesn’t feel like his fortress anymore. It feels like ours. The cameras are still there—he’d rather cut off his own arm than remove the security system—but they’ve been joined by other things. A nursery half-painted in soft green because we’re stubbornly not finding out the gender. A stack of parenting books on the coffee table that Clayton pretends he doesn’t read but I catch him with at 2 AM, his reading glasses on, frowning at passages about sleep schedules like they’re witness statements.

My stuffed rabbit lives on the dresser now. Next to his service weapon. The juxtaposition should be disturbing. It’s not. It’s us.

He still growls. God, does he growl. The possessiveness hasn’t dimmed—if anything, pregnancy has dialed it to eleven. He follows me to prenatal appointments and stands behind the examining table with his arms crossed, glowering at the OBGYN like the man personally offended him by having hands. When a well-meaning neighbor brought over a casserole and patted my belly without asking, Clayton’s expression went so cold I thought the poor woman might freeze solid on our welcome mat.

“Touch her again,” he said, pleasant as a knife, “and I’ll introduce you to the particular set of skills that got me promoted to homicide.”

She hasn’t been back. The casserole was excellent, though.

Nights are when the animal still comes out. He fucks me with the same thorough devotion, careful of my belly, his hand protective over our child while his cock moves inside me. The praise is filthy. Constant. My good girl. My perfect girl. Taking my cock so good while carrying my baby. The words should make me roll my eyes. Instead they liquefy my spine and have me coming harder than I did before I was pregnant, which is saying something.

After, he cleans me with a warm washcloth—a ritual now—and tucks me against his chest, one big hand spanning the curve of my stomach, and talks to the baby in that low, rough voice that belongs only to us.

“Hey, kid. It’s your dad. You behaving in there? Not kicking your mom too hard? Good. That’s my girl. Or boy. Whatever you are, you’re mine, and you’re perfect, and when you come out I’m gonna teach you how to throw a punch that’ll put bullies in the hospital.”

I swat his arm. “You will not.”

“I absolutely will. First lesson: never hit first. Second lesson: if you have to hit, make sure they don’t get up.”

“That’s terrible parenting.”

“That’s practical parenting. I’m a detective. I’ve seen things.”

“You’ve seen too many things. Dial it back, Dirty Harry.”

He laughs. That sound. Rough and warm and mine alone. He kisses my temple and his hand finds the baby—who obligingly kicks, right under his palm—and his face does the soft thing again. The one that wrecks me every time.

Tonight is quiet. Rain against the windows. I’m on the couch with a blanket and a book I’m not reading. Clayton finishes in the kitchen—tea, the way I like it, honey and lemon because my throat’s been scratchy—and brings it over, sets it on the coffee table, and settles beside me.

I don’t wait for an invitation. I curl into his side, my head finding the hollow of his chest, my arm across his stomach, and his hand—that big, scarred hand—comes to rest on the curve of my belly. Warm. Heavy. Safe.