Page 55 of Shadow Justice

The problem wasn’t only that Reid had come back, or that she still wanted him. The problem was that some foolish, frightened part of her was beginning to believe he meant to stay.

CHAPTER TEN

The quiet morning didn’t last.

Reid hadn’t expected it to. Quiet was usually a loan, not a gift, and after a dead man, a staged cup, and a kiss he could still feel whenever Holly came too close, he knew better than to trust a few minutes of sunlight at the dog park.

Still, for the length of Blue’s wild circuit around the grass and the drive back through Blackridge, Reid let himself pretend the world had narrowed to ordinary things. A retired judge with muffin demands. A dog exhausted by joy. Holly in the passenger seat, her hair coming loose from its ponytail, one hand resting near Blue’s muzzle when he leaned between the seats as if supervising Reid’s driving.

She’d told him he was under her skin. He was carrying that sentence like evidence too fragile to bag. He kept replaying the way she’d said it, not as an accusation exactly, and not as surrender. More like a confession she didn’t know where to put.

Reid understood that too well. Holly had been under his skin for years, a memory he’d told himself had dulled with time because calling it anything else made him the kind of fool he’d worked very hard not to be.

The kiss had proven otherwise.

The problem was that he had a job to do, and the woman he wanted was the woman in danger. Those two facts didn’t politely stand on opposite sides of the room. They kept colliding, harder and harder, until every instinct he owned pointed toward Holly.

Protect her. Tell her the truth. Don’t take more than she chooses to give.

Don’t leave.

Back at Sanctuary, Holly unlocked the rear door, and Blue shot inside first. He trotted into the back hall, satisfied and exhausted. Through the sliver Reid could see of the shop, sunlight lay across the empty tables, making the room look peaceful.

Holly paused, Blue’s leash in her hands, and looked at it too. Reid watched the pause travel through her body, not as fear, but as the effort of returning to a place that had been made strange without her permission.

She glanced back at him. “I need to restock a few things.”

“It’s Sunday.”

“Which is when I restock a few things.”

He almost argued that he’d handle it so she could go upstairs and rest. He knew that would piss her off. “What can I do?”

Her expression softened in a way that made the question worth asking. “You can put clean mugs on the shelf and not reorganize them according to whatever military-court logic lives in your head.”

“Hey, it’s efficient.”

She rolled her eyes and escorted Blue upstairs.

He took the crate of mugs, and she returned without her jacket. For twenty minutes, they moved through the shop together. It shouldn’t have felt absurdly domestic, given the case hovering over them, but it did. Holly filled sugar canisters, checked syrup bottles, and made a list on a yellow legal pad. Reid stocked mugs, napkins, and lids.

They didn’t talk about the kiss. They didn’t talk about the dog park conversation either, though Reid felt both between them every time Holly reached around him for a tin of tea or brushed past him to open a cabinet.

Avoidance usually irritated him. In court, silence could mean strategy, fear, ignorance, guilt, or all of the above, and he’d trained himself to press at it until it gave him something he could analyze. With Holly, silence had texture. He wanted to push, to get her talking again, but that was the exact wrong tactic.

His phone vibrated while Holly was in the kitchen, turning on the oven. He pulled it from his pocket and read the message from Jasper twice, the muscles in his shoulders tightening before he could stop them.

Got something from the footage. Sending clips and a timeline. You’ll want coffee.

Holly saw him staring at the screen. “What is it?”

“I sent the security footage and information on Hoyt to our tech specialist at SPS. He says he has clips and a timeline for me to look at.”

She turned the oven off. “Upstairs or down here?”

Reid looked around the shop. Too many windows, too many sight lines from the street. “Upstairs.”

They hurried up the private stairwell and settled at the breakfast bar. Blue was sleeping in his bed, snoring loudly.