Armed and Devastating

“They’ll handle the briefing. But they’ll meet with me first.”

“Yes, sir.” Brooke jotted the note on the pad at her desk. Watch commander meeting—no calls but the ones that count. She set down her pen and looked up. “Any other daily routine items I should know, Major Taylor?”

“Today, just handle the phone. Get your feet under you, unpack these boxes, and we’ll figure out the rest as we go along this week.”

“Yes, sir.”

A smile softened the rugged line of his jaw. “It’s Mitch. You don’t have to use the Mister or Major or sir when it’s just us talking.” He extended his long arm across her desk. “Welcome to the Fourth, Brooke.”

She reached out to shake his hand, “Thank you, sir—” Her shaky smile relaxed into the real deal. “Thanks, Mitch.”

“That’s better.” He seemed to approve of her effort to blur the line between efficiency and informality. Pulling back the front of his jacket, he propped his hands at his waist, subconsciously emphasizing the badge clipped to his belt, and giving her a glimpse of the gun and holster he wore beneath his right arm. Mitch Taylor was clearly a man who led men, but he seemed to have a little more teddy bear in him than his grizzly reputation had led her to believe. He surveyed her office, stopping when he spotted the plants she’d set on one of the empty bookshelves. “I see you have a fan club.”

Way to impress the boss, Hansford. He’d left flowers on her desk for when she arrived that morning, and she hadn’t said boo about them. Brooke set the stack of manuals on the corner of her desk and crossed to the shelf, fingering the delicate white petals and reading the attached card that welcomed her and wished her luck.

“Thank you for the daisies. They’re…” A lovely gesture. A bright addition to the office. One of my favorite flowers. “They’re nice.”

Nice? With her back to her boss, Brooke rolled her eyes. A dozen eloquent thank-yous had run through her head, and all that came out of her mouth was They’re nice? No wonder Louise worried about her ability to carry on a personal conversation with a man.

“Glad you like them. Though, I will confess, my wife, Casey, thought of them.”

“She has good taste,” Brooke stumbled on, fighting to get her thoughts ahead of her words. She turned to face him. “Tell her thank you, too.”

“I will.” Including his wife seemed to please him, which pleased Brooke. “We’d better get to work then, hadn’t we?”

“Yes, sir.” He held up a cautionary finger, and Brooke almost laughed. “Right, Mitch,” she corrected herself.

With a wink, he opened the adjoining door between their offices and left her to get acquainted with bookshelves and file drawers, a state-of-the-art computer system and boxes of supplies that needed to find a home.

That was one. Louise better not be climbing that ladder. Brooke had only two more conversations to go.

Standing a little straighter and smiling more easily, Brooke opened the blinds covering the windows of her outer office, spying on the stream of uniformed and plain-clothes officers outside. The shift must be changing for there to be so much traffic leading from the bank of elevators to the sergeant’s desk and main room beyond. From her hallway, cubicle walls blocked her view of the detectives’ desks and interview rooms. And she already knew the conference and break rooms were around the corner down another hall. Mitch Taylor’s quick tour this morning had already familiarized her with the layout of the Fourth’s headquarters building, if not with all the people on the other side of that glass.

Turning away before her confidence wavered, Brooke took off her jacket and hung it on the back of her chair. She resumed organizing file cabinets and her desk in a way that would be most efficient for her. After depositing an armload of paper onto the bottom bookshelf, she paused to stretch and admire her flowers.

She didn’t get gifts delivered to her very often, but this morning she had three plants to brighten her office—the daisies from Major Taylor and his wife, a pot of draping English ivy from her aunts and a pink carnation with a hand-scrawled note from the pseudo big brother she didn’t have a crush on, Sawyer Kincaid. Do great, kiddo! You’ll rock the Fourth. Love ya, Sawyer.

“I love ya, too, big guy.” Atticus’s older brother Sawyer was easy to like, easy to talk to—maybe because he was so crazy in love with his new wife and stepson that Brooke knew there’d never be another woman in his life, so she never felt any pressure to fill any other role besides sister. Equally likely was that Sawyer, unlike his enigmatic brother, was always out there with his emotions. He spoke what he thought—whether he was angry or being goofy or falling in love. There were no secrets or second-guessing with him.

“Ah.” Revelation. Maybe it was her love for puzzles and the challenge of solving mysteries that fueled her crush on Atticus Kincaid.

And maybe it was the safety of knowing he was a mystery she was never going to crack that only made her think she had a thing for him. If he was unattainable, she could pine away without ever having to put her fragile sense of self out there.

And she’d called Aunt Louise a hopeless romantic.

“Too much thinking,” Brooke chided. Her overly analytical brain was great for computers, but it could wreak havoc on a gal’s love life.

Knowing that focusing on something outside herself was the best way to curtail the sabotaging train of thought, she picked up Sawyer’s gift and moved the bloom to her desk where she could enjoy it as she dove back into her work. The number of times she answered the phone and transferred or took messages over the next two hours gave her a pretty good idea of just how busy she was going to be in this new position—and how much she was going to love it.

Brooke was more than ready to take a break at eleven-thirty. She pulled a bottle of water from her bag, kicked off her pumps beneath her desk and sat back to wiggle her toes and admire her handiwork. The layout of her computer and desktop now made the best use of light and workspace. Her shelves were pleasingly arranged and gave her easy access to the items she’d need most. And her chin-high file cabinets had been alphabetized and organized within an inch of their lives.

Really, all that was left were the personal touches that would make the new surroundings feel like her own place. The flowers helped for now, but she’d bring a couple of reading books to keep on the shelves for her lunch break, maybe frame some of the photographs of the reconstruction project at home and hang them on the wall above the file cabinets.

“Ooh, my pictures.” The thought reminded her of the photos of Peggy and Lou that she liked to keep on her desk. Spinning her chair around, she picked up the box from beside the desk and pulled it up onto her lap. Smiling as she removed the lid and fingered through the precious items inside, Brooke sorted through sentimental knickknacks, framed certificates and diplomas and pulled out the two photographs. “There you are, ladies.”

Brooke propped the box on the corner of the desk as she stood, arranging the pictures at the top of her desk calendar blotter. Reenergized by the familiar memories, she continued to unpack and decorate, padding around the office in her stocking feet, finding just the right spot for everything.

But as she reached into the bottom of the box, her heart seized up. “Oh, John,” she whispered reverently. “You found it.”

She sank into her chair as she pulled out the worn leather journal where she’d kept a log about the highs and lows of her life at work. She had several similar journals locked up in a trunk at home. She’d kept many such books in the years of her life since adolescence, when a visit to the counselor over her near inability to talk at school—and the resulting ulcers and hives that were sure indicators of stress—had led to the advice that she express her thoughts and emotions in whatever way she could. She’d punched pillows and squeezed worry dolls. Shouted and cussed in the privacy of her aunts’ basement. And if she was too shy to talk, she could write things down—her dreams, her fears, her anger and compassion, who she liked at school, why her aunts were being too strict, what she and her friends had done together that was particularly exciting and more. The adolescent therapy had evolved into a personal history of sorts over the years.

This particular journal, in which she’d first conceived the idea of finding an historic structure in a quiet suburb to remake into the perfect blend of rich character and modern amenities, had gone missing a couple of months before her boss’s death. For a few awful days, Brooke thought she’d sent it out with a package of evidence reports to the state lab. She’d turned her desk and purse and file cabinets inside out, searching for the lost journal, and had even called a friend in the KCPD archives, asking her to check through the boxed-up files that had been shipped from the deputy commissioner’s office. In the end, Brooke had accepted that she’d set the book down at a lunch table or park bench and had walked away without it. It would have been thrown out by the time she went back to look for it.

But John had found it, bless his heart. A sticky note on the front read For Brooke in his slanted, distinctive scrawl. Even after he was gone, he was, “Still looking out for me, aren’t you?”

Brooke opened the book and found a second sticky note inside the front cover. Forgive me this one said. “For what?” she mused, frowning. She’d forgive him anything. “Did you stick this in your briefcase by mistake? Read a couple of pages?” She talked to the book as though the man who’d snuck it back into her personal belongings could hear her. “Trust me. The content of this book is tame compared to what I’ve got at home.” No mention of how good-looking his sons were, or how grateful she was to be accepted as part of his family. Just business stuff. Just things she didn’t mind sharing at work. She hoped.

Oh, Lordy. What if some of those really personal things had found their way in here? Like a page of curse words over a particularly frustrating day, or something equally embarrassing?

Thumbing through the pages, Brooke figuratively held her breath and reminisced. There was the day she’d first started in John’s office, replacing his retiring assistant. She’d been so nervous. John had seemed so commanding, so busy that morning. She half suspected he hadn’t even noticed that she’d arrived. He’d been in the middle of a task force investigation and something on the case had broken. After he’d snapped an order for her to get online and find out everything she could about Wolfe International’s accounts in London and the Cayman Islands, Brooke had slid behind her desk and gone right to work with little more than an exchange of names. He’d seemed pleased—even impressed—when she set the printouts on his table in the briefing room that afternoon. He’d called her into the office at the end of the day, apologized and informed her that he’d be taking her to breakfast the next morning—if she could stand to spend time with an old grouch like him.

Brooke rolled her eyes at the smiley face she’d drawn at the end of that entry. “I decided I liked you, after all.”

When she turned the page to read how much more smoothly day two had gone, Brooke gasped. There, in the margin, next to her own neat writing was a scrawled comment from John.

“I knew I liked you that first day, too,” it read.

He had read the journal. “Oh, please don’t tell me I wrote anything stupid in this one.”

Sitting up straight, Brooke read through the journal page by page. She found another comment about how it creeped him out at first to have this quiet stranger predict his needs—sometimes before he knew them—as well as keep him on schedule. Brooke smiled when she found the note about how crazy he thought she was to buy the old stone church. “Waste of an inheritance,” it said. “Too big a money pit for a sweet thing like you.” Then, a page later, he wrote a lengthy missive about his fascination with the history of the church after she’d given him a tour and described her plans for the conversion. He’d gotten caught up in the building’s history and how it related to the settlement of the city and how he’d love to tackle a similar restoration project when he retired. He was impressed with Brooke’s businesslike approach and her determination to maintain the integrity of the historic design when it came to the remodel. He called her a “damn lucky girl to be able to pursue a dream like that.”

Tears, both told-you-so happy and I-miss-you-so regret, filled her eyes and blurred her vision until she had to reach up beneath her glasses and wipe them away. She turned the page to discover a boxy sketch with letters that didn’t form words, and symbols that made no sense.

“This isn’t mine.” She shook her head at the curious creative expression John had drawn in her journal. “And you said I was crazy.”

The phone rang, startling Brooke from the trip down memory lane. The journal fell to the floor when she jumped. “Good grief.” Pressing a hand to her racing heart, she took a deep breath and picked up the receiver and her pen. “KCPD, Fourth Precinct, this is Major Taylor’s office.”

“Miss Hansford?”

“Yes?”

“This is the front desk downstairs. There’s a Tony Fierro here to see you. He says you’re expecting him?”

“Oh. Um…” The job interview for the handyman. Was there a problem? “Do I need to go down there to see him, or can he come upstairs?”

“It’s up to you, ma’am. I can give him a visitor’s pass.”

Just a security protocol. Nothing to worry about. She needed to end her trip down memory lane and start looking to the future again. “Then, as soon as he clears security, go ahead and send him up, please.”