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Baker hauled himself up the front steps and gripped the front door handle with one hand. The oversized picture window stared back at him from his left, and he couldn’t help but let his senses try to penetrate through the glass. As though his sister would be waiting for him to come home on the other side as she had so many times before.
Jocelyn followed his hesitant footsteps. “We can still turn back...”
No. As much as he wanted to pretend the past didn’t affect the present, his body kept score.
Baker slid the key into the deadbolt. “Don’t you know by now, Carville? There is no going back. Not for people like us.”
Hinges protested as he pushed inside. A wall of stale air drove down his throat. The breeze cut through the opening in the front door and ruffled the plastic coating the furniture, and an instant hit of warmth flooded through him. He tugged the key from the deadbolt and moved aside to let Jocelyn over the threshold, flipping on the entryway light.
“It’s much bigger than it looks from the outside.” She carved a path ahead of him. Her bootsteps echoed off the hardwood floors and tall ceilings. Taking in the stretch of the great room and the fireplace mantel he and his sister had crafted by hand, Jocelyn moved as though she’d been here before. “You built all this?”
Baker shut out the cold, letting the entire space seep into his bones. “Me and my sister. I did most of the heavy lifting. She picked out all the extras. The color of the floors, paint on the walls. A time or two I’d needed her help framing out the closet or installing the toilets. She really could do it all.”
“What was her name?” Jocelyn carefully ran her hand the length of the mantel, as though she knew that was the final piece he’d installed in this house.
“Linley.” It’d been so long since he’d let himself speak her name, it tasted foreign on his tongue. Though not as bitter as he’d expected. “She had a talent for stuff like this. I always told her she could be a designer, but she loved horses more.”
Jocelyn intercepted the single framed photo and lifted it off the mantel. One taken of him and Linley, each holding hammers in a ridiculous power pose in front of their finished project. “Is this her?”
“Yeah.” He maneuvered around the sectional, his thigh brushing over plastic, and took the frame from her. “This was the day we officially finished the house. We were trying to pose like those brothers on the renovation show, but we couldn’t stop laughing because every time we set my phone up to take the picture on top of this bag of concrete, it fell off. I ended up cracking my screen, but we somehow managed to make it work.”
Heat seared through him as Jocelyn’s arm settled against his side. The need for something familiar didn’t seem to have as great a hold on him. Not with her here. “She looks like you. Same eyes. Same smile. She’s stunning.”
“Does that mean you think I’m stunning, then, too?” Where the hell had that come from? And what did he care what she thought of him?
“I wouldn’t call you ugly.” Jocelyn backed off, hands on her hips, and he swore a flush rushed up her neck. “Unless you piss me off.”
Baker pressed his thumb into the corner of the framed photo. “Well, I wouldn’t want that. Who else is going to feed me something other than prepackaged ramen noodles?”
Her smile did more to light up the room than the light-fan combination above them. “Oh, is that all I’m good for? You got what you wanted out of me, and now I’m back to being the mercenary who bakes?”
“Nah. Once you survive a bombing together, you can never go back to being acquaintances.” Baker set the photo back on the mantel. He liked this. The back and forth they’d shared since this morning. It came with a weird sensation of...lightness. Like he’d been cutting himself off from everything that made him happy as some kind of penance. “You heard from Animal Control?”
“Yeah. Socorro’s vet picked Maverick up a little while ago,” she said. “He’s got a slight limp, but for the most part he’s fine. Should be back to normal in a couple days. Just needs a bit of rest.”
“He’s not the only one.” He prodded at the lump behind his left ear. It’d kept itself in check for most of the day, but after coming here, his nerves had reached their end. “If the hospital hadn’t told me otherwise, I would’ve sworn I cracked my head open.”
“Your head hurts?” She moved in close. Close enough he caught a hint of color in her eyes before she raised her hands to him. Angling the side of his head toward her, she framed his jaw with one hand while sliding her fingertips against his scalp. “I don’t see any changes in the bruise patterns since we left the hospital. We’ve been running on fumes most of the day. I’m sure your body is just trying to get you to slow down. I can keep watch if you want to grab a couple hours of sleep.”
His scalp tightened at the physical contact. At the way she kept her touch light. It shouldn’t have meant anything, but for a man starved of the smallest comforts and pleasures since he’d lost everything, it hit harder than he’d expected. And he liked it—her touching him. “You noticed my bruise patterns?”
“Isn’t that what partners are for?” Jocelyn moved to retreat, only he wasn’t ready for the withdrawal. “To notice each other’s wounds and then poke and prod at them?”
Baker caught her wrist, tracing the edge of gauze across the back of her hand. Warning speared through him. Because just as he’d found himself reliving the worst seconds of his life back at the station, Jocelyn had her own regrets. Of not being there for her husband when he’d died. One touch was all it’d taken to send her running, and he didn’t want that. For the first time in ages, he couldn’t stand the thought of being alone. “I’m pretty sure if I prod your wound, you’re going to bleed out.”
Her breath hitched. “That’s possibly the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me.”
A laugh took him by surprise, and he released her. A frenzy of feeling rushed into his hands, as though his body had been craving the feel of her skin.
“I’m glad you brought me here.” She threaded an escaped strand of hair back behind her ear. Such a soft thing to do in light of all the weapons and armor she wore. A welcome contradiction to everything he thought he’d known about her. “I can tell how much you love this home.”
“Home.” The word tunneled through the drift-like haze clouding his overtired brain, but he forced himself to focus on the present. “Back at the station you said it takes years for lieutenants like Marc De Leon to rise up Sangre por Sangre’s ranks, that the organization tends to protect them because of what they know. The cartel provides their lieutenants security, income, even compounds. But that they aren’t untouchable.”
“Yeah,” she said. “There have been times when the lieutenants let the power and ego go to their heads. They take on their own agenda and use cartel resources as their own personal arsenal. I’ve seen it before. The soldiers—no matter how far they are up the ladder—are usually punished by upper management.”
“You mean executed.” He latched on to her arms as the burn of anticipation sparked beneath his skin. “If our theory about who planted that bomb at the station is right, that means the cartel ordered Benito Ramon to destroy evidence De Leon killed that woman. They know he stepped out of line, but they haven’t put him down. Why?”
Jocelyn shifted her weight, the first real sign that the day was getting to her as much as it had to him. “I don’t know. It makes sense they’d want to tie up that loose end before it unraveled their operation. Unless...he actually was ordered to kill her.”
