I could have called them all, but I didn’t.
Instead, I called a ghost, a man I hadn’t seen or heard from in three years. A man I’d had a crush on since I was a girl because he was everything good and straight and true. Even as a child I’d known, he was too good for me. We existed in the same world but in the way of the hero and the villain. We crossed paths but only in times of disaster, when I found my mother blue with near-death on the floor of our kitchen, when my father went to jail for manslaughter or when I stabbed a pencil into Tucker Guttery’s thigh because he stole a kiss from me in seventh grade. I was a storm of calamity, cast adrift on a sea of black doings and loosely drawn rebel rules. He was an old growth oak with roots sunk deep into rich earth, limbs stretching wide across the sky, standing sentry across centuries as the world toiled away beneath its leaves. I could whip around that kind of man, cause hurricanes with my spirit, quake the earth with my tempers, but none of it mattered. He would remain untouched no matter what I did, no matter what anyone did.
He was just so simply and profoundly good. I think that’s why I always liked him.
And it might have even been why I called him.
To punish myself by facing a man who wouldn’t disappear my sins but rectify them. It was his duty as a cop to arrest me for what I’d done to Cricket and part of me yearned for that kind of justice, and to be properly defined as an outlaw in a way that my outlaw family refused to do. To be punished for the first time in my life for all of my many misdeeds, big and small.
I didn’t expect him to answer, not really. Not after three years and no contact, not on his old number.
But he did.
“Harleigh Rose?”
I breathed short puffs of panicked air into the phone.
There was a pause and I knew that wherever he was, he would be shifting to the left, curling his shoulder into his ear to create a protective barrier, us against the world. Only then did his deep, smooth voice deepen further as he said, “Rosie? Tell me what’s happening.”
A sob bloomed in my throat, the petals clogging my airway and the thorns tearing up my throat as I choked on the wet rose of his name for me.
Rosie.
Like I was some sweet, young, innocent thing with pigtails in her hair instead of human blood and plasma.
“Lion,” I gasped through the wreckage of my throat. “I did something bad.”
These were the words I always said when I called him to get me out of trouble.
Countless misdemeanors throughout my youth: underage drinking and public intoxication, bodily assault (that pencil stabbing and some other—warranted—attacks), trespassing and some minor theft.
They were the same words but a different tone.
Usually, I was a brat, taunting him with my rebellion, trying to get a rise out of a man who was interminably calm.
Not now, and he knew it.
“You at your apartment?” he asked.
I nodded my head then realized he couldn’t see me. “Yes.”
“Twenty minutes,” he said in a way that made it a promise. “Hang tight, Rosie.”
He hung up before I could ask him how he knew where my apartment was or that I even had one.
The phone fell from my numb fingers as I looked down at Cricket again.
He was dead.
I stared into glassy brown eyes and gave into my shock.
It seemed to me that I blinked and he was there, looming in front of me like some righteous angel come to condemn me to hell. The waning sun filtering in through the windows cast a halo around his broad fame but obscured his face in a veil of shadows. I didn’t need to see it to know he was handsome. I’d memorized his features a long time ago, the broad crest of his forehead over the strong brows, the pure jade green of his eyes and the way they creased at the corners in a constant brooding squint or in a rare grin that broke open the planes of his face so that his blazing spirit poured through like light through cracks in the darkness. He was handsome enough to be famous but worn in a way that made him sexy, like a weathered cowboy or a sheriff from the Wild West. He even smelled like that, warm and comforting like sun-kissed man and freshly tilled earth.
Even submerged in a deep haze of shock, I knew him.
I’d know Lionel Danner anywhere, anytime even if I was blind, deaf, and struck dumb.
“Jesus Christ,” he cursed as I blinked up at him.
He was in front of me in two long strides, his rough tipped fingers delicately pinching my chin. I stared up at him as he took stock of me with implacable eyes, noting the blood drying on my skin and clothes, the dead carcass that was Cricket lying on the floor at our feet.
He seemed more concerned with me than the very dead body.
“What the fuck did that piece of shit do to you?” he grumbled low in his chest.
I blinked and wished that I could find my voice because I wanted to laugh at him.
I wanted to tease him and ask why he wasn’t assuming it was me, as it always had been, who had done something wrong.
I wanted to cry and ask him what hadn’t Cricket done to me?
But for the first time in my life, I had no voice.
I was just as much a body without soul as Cricket was dead on the ground.
“Rosie,” he said, more of a breath than sound.
I watched him from deep within myself as he shifted into a crouch before me and his fingers on my chin slipped in the blood splatter then tightened almost painfully.
The hurt grounded me, but it was the vivid clarity of his green eyes that pulled me like a hand from the depths of my wretchedness.
“For once in your goddamn life, you are going to listen to me and obey. I’m going to get you up out of that bloody swamp you’re sittin’ in and put you in a chair. Then I’m going to call this in. While we wait for the police to show, you’re going to look me in the eye and tell me what happened here. You hear me, Harleigh Rose?”
I was nodding before I could even process his words.
His glare hardened. “Wanna hear that voice.”
“Why do I need to look you in the eye?” I asked, surprisingly steady.
My soul felt weak and failing in my chest and I wondered if murderers killed their goodness right along with their victim.
“’Cause you don’t distract me with those pretty blues, I’m going to murder that piece of shit all over again for whatever he did that made you feel the need to stick a blade in his neck.”
Emotion rumbled under the ruins of my spirit and threatened to bubble up my throat.
Danner read the question in my eyes and his stern face softened from severe creases into smooth, rumpled silk.
“You didn’t murder him in cold blood, Rosie. I don’t need you to give me those words for me to know the truth of this.”
“You haven’t even seen me in years,” I whispered through the tears that were sudden and insistent at the backs of my eyes. “How could you know that?”
He moved his other hand around the back of my neck and wove it into the sweat damped hair there then tugged it back firmly, just enough to make me hiss in surprise. The action was oddly calming and without conscious thought, I found myself tilting my head to expose my neck to him. Taking my cue, the hand on my chin slid down my jaw and wrapped around my throat, his fingers and thumb pressing gently at my pulse points on either side of my neck.
“You think I don’t know that under all that thorny sass you got a heart as tender as a budded rose, you can think again,” he said in that flat, sure tone.