You Only Love Once

“Just so long as it’s over and no one got hurt.” He acknowledged a hearty slap on the back from one of their colleagues with a nod. He flashed a loaded grin at her. “I didn’t know you were so concerned about my backside.”

“I’m your partner,” she said, her breath catching at the teasing expression on his face. “I’m supposed to be concerned about your backside. But that’s not what I was talking about. I didn’t much care for your little diversionary tactic, David. Do you even know the definition of the word partn—”

“McCoy! Get your ass over here now, boy,” Sutherland’s voice boomed up the stairwell.

“Speaking of backsides…” David groaned. “I’d better go see what he wants.”

Kelli opened her mouth, then snapped it closed again. She got the impression that whatever she had to say wouldn’t make one iota of difference anyway.

She stopped and let him pass in front of her. “Go ahead. I just might enjoy watching the scene commander take a piece out of you.”

David’s grimace was altogether too cute. “Be careful what you wish for, Hatfield. At this rate, I won’t have any behind left to risk.” He waggled his brows.

Sutherland was at the bottom of the steps and was apparently ready to do just as David forecasted. Even so, Kelli couldn’t help eyeing the backside in question. The clinging, unattractive material and bulky weapons belt was unable to hide the fact that David McCoy’s behind was the stuff of which fantasies were made. She started to push wisps of hair from her forehead only to find her hand shaking. She greeted an officer, then outside on the street away from the crowd she took a deep, calming breath.

Why did she get the feeling that everything in her life had just been turned upside down? And why was it that she suspected that a certain precinct Casanova named David McCoy was solely to blame?

3

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Kelli caught herself daydreaming as she stood in front of the toaster. She’d been thinking about David in a way that had nothing to do with the way he’d treated her yesterday, nothing to do with her plans to nab a detective’s shield, and everything to do with hot flesh and cool sheets.

Sighing in a mixture of wistfulness and frustration, she pushed her run-dampened hair from her cheek, then stuck half an onion bagel smothered with grape jelly between her teeth. Ignoring the dirty dishes stacked in the sink, and the empty carton of orange juice on the counter, she clutched her full coffee cup, then elbowed open the kitchen door. She had forty-five minutes before roll call. Plenty of time to peel off her sweats, catch a shower and get down to the district three station to have that little talk she and David had never really gotten around to yesterday.

The tension she had just spent a half an hour and three miles running off settled solidly back between her shoulder blades.

After the hostage case and Sutherland, there had been the press to deal with. She remembered how David’s easy grin and easygoing personality had transferred well over all forms of media and felt her stomach tighten along with her shoulders. Reporters, especially female—although she’d noticed a couple of males responding to David’s charming, daredevil ways—were all over him. When they’d finally gotten back to their squad car, it seemed a quarter of D.C.’s population had a crisis of some sort that needed attention. She and David had spent the day on back-to-back runs ranging from the simple—helping find an elderly woman’s “stolen” social security check in a neighbor’s mailbox—to the complicated—an obvious gang member who would probably lose an eye but would never give up the names of his homies or the opposing gang.

Still, no matter how many calls came in, how much paperwork they had to fill out, a thread of awareness had bound her and David together. It was a connection not even her sharpest retort could hope to cut.

Yeah, well, today she planned to take a machete to work. She’d get a handle on her runaway hormones if it was the last thing she ever did.

Kelli wove her way through the maze that was currently her apartment into the dining area of her living room. She dodged precariously stacked, half-unpacked boxes, a hundred pound bag of diet dog food and her treadmill. Finally she nudged a manila folder aside with her mug, then put her coffee on the cluttered dining room table. Her attention catching on a pink message slip, she freed the bagel from between her teeth and took an absent bite. The message must have slipped from one of the files, the blue ink nearly faded. She leaned closer to see the date. March 25, 1982. The day her mother was murdered. The day she’d decided she wanted to be a homicide detective.

A sharp bark made her jump.

“Yikes, Kojak, you just about gave me a coronary.” Frowning down at the drooling blond boxer she’d rescued from a New York animal shelter, she considered the disgusting concoction that served as her breakfast then held it out to him. He sniffed, licked, then whined and walked away.

Kelli stared at the now inedible bagel half. “Thanks a lot.” She tossed it into a nearby bag she hoped was empty, then switched on the television across the room with the remote. The local news broadcaster’s voice filled the apartment reminding her again how David had charmed the reporters. His too handsome mug had been plastered all over the news last night, every hour on the hour, if not on the news itself, then in the news previews. “You don’t want to miss our story of the day as local man in blue David McCoy saves the day….”

It was enough to make a person ill.

Kelli plucked up the remote again, moving to switch off the television before the news could launch into another “local hero” bit featuring her partner the sexist cad, when a completely different scene stopped her. “We’re on the outskirts of Georgetown where a woman was found dead in her apartment, earlier this morning. Eyewitnesses tell us the murder of this quiet, private school teacher bears all the markings of the work of the man dubbed the D.C. Degenerate.” The female spot reporter looked over her shoulder.

Kelli wryly nodded. “Zoom in on the standard body shot,” she said under her breath.

The reporter looked back at the camera. “If so, then I, for one, think we need to upgrade his name to D.C. Executioner. Because it appears he’s just lost interest in playing out sick sexual fantasies and has just graduated to full-fledged killer.”

Kelli pressed the mute button, the case too similar to another for her comfort. She picked up the message slip lying on the table in front of her, wondering how much detectives knew about this latest guy. And if they would do any better catching him than they had her mother’s killer.

It had been awhile since she’d reviewed the contents of the folders strewn out before her. Three years, in fact. Ever since transferring to New York where doing any footwork on the case would have been impossible. She sat down and curled her right leg under her. Now that she was back home, though…

The telephone chirped. Propping a file open with one hand, she reached for the cordless with her other.

“Yeah?”

“Jaysus, Kelli, is that the way you answer the phone?” her father asked with obvious exasperation.

Kelli closed the file and reached for another. “I don’t know, Dad, you’d be the better one to answer that question since you are the one who’s calling me every five minutes since I got back in town.”

She winced the moment the words were out of her mouth. Not because she shouldn’t have said such a thing to her own father, but because of what it would ultimately lead to.

She closed her eyes and waited for the inevitable speech.

“Yes, well, I wouldn’t have to call you if you were staying here, now would I?”

“No, Dad, you wouldn’t,” she said almost by rote.

“You know I have more than enough room for you. There’s no sense in your going off and getting an apartment.”

“Yes, Dad, I know.”

The sound of crumpling paper caught her attention. She turned to find Kojak nosing around in the bag for the uneaten bagel.

“Have you watched the news lately? It isn’t safe for a woman to be living on her own in this city.”

Kelli nodded. “Not safe.”

“And that damn mutt of yours is no kind of security either, if that’s what you’re thinking. He’s nothing but an overgrown cat.”

“Cat…”

“Kelli Marie, are you even paying attention to what I’m saying, girl?”

“Sure, Dad. Though I really don’t have to because you’ve said it so often it’s etched in my brain.” She pulled another file in front of her and flipped it open. “Was there a specific reason you called, Dad? Or is this just another of your check-ins?”

Silence, then, “Can’t a dad simply want to talk to his daughter?”

Kelli slowly spread her hand out palm down on the table. She should have seen that one coming as well but stepped right through the open barn door all the same. Her voice was decidedly more subdued when she said, “Of course you can, Dad.” She leaned back in her chair. Sometimes it seemed it had always been just her and her father. “You and me against the world,” he’d said when he’d found her crying in her mother’s closet after the funeral. Words he’d repeated time and again after she’d gotten knocked down over and over while proving to everyone and to herself that she was just as good as the guys. “It’s just you and me against the world, kid.”

She curled the fingers of her free hand into a loose fist. “Dad…I know it makes you uncomfortable to talk about it…and Lord knows I’ve avoided bringing the topic up enough times…but I have to know.” She took a deep breath that did nothing to calm her. “Does it ever bother you that Mom’s killer was never caught?”

She regretted the question the instant it was out. The silence that wafted over the line was as palpable as her own unsteady heartbeat. “You know I don’t like talking about the past, Kelli.”

“I know, but—”

“What’s done is done. Nothing can change it.”

I can change it. “But don’t you think sometimes that it can be changed? That by—”