He Kills Me, He Kills Me Not

for something in her expression. “I heard you cry out.”
    “Oh. Well, I do that sometimes, have nightmares. It drove my sister crazy.” After several minutes of silence, she said, “I’m not upset at you for last night. If you brought me here to apologize—”
    “That’s not why I brought you here.”
    “Then why did you?”
    He raked his hand through his hair. “You bared your secrets to me last night, secrets that were difficult for you to talk about. I don’t take that lightly and I want to return the favor.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Ask me anything you want, anything at all. I’ll answer as honestly as I can.”
    She stared at him, surprised again at his generosity, how he put her needs above his at every turn. At first she thought she’d turn down his offer, let him off the hook, but there was one thing she wanted to know more about.
    “What was the rookie mistake you said you made, the one that made you leave Shadow Falls and go to New York?”
    His glance shot to hers. “Ouch. How did you know where to strike?”
    “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. It’s just that you told me at my house, about making mistakes, and regrets . . . so I was curious. Forget it, I shouldn’t have—”
    “Hey.” He gently lifted her chin to look up at him. “A deal’s a deal.” He dropped his hand and sighed, looking out over the creek. He told her about a murder, a traffic stop, a split-second decision gone wrong.
    “I screwed up,” he continued. “I made a bad decision that has haunted me ever since. And I knew the only way for me to move past it was to get better training, better experience than I was getting here. So I moved to New York City, took a job in the most violent precinct, traded my vacations for FBI courses at Quantico, did everything I could to make myself a better cop.”
    “That sounds admirable.”
    He shook his head. “No, it’s what I had to do. It was the least I could do. My mistake, no matter how small it might sound, had tragic consequences. A killer went free.” He clenched his fists against his thighs. “It’s something I have to live with, knowing if I’d taken two more minutes, followed my instincts, followed standard procedure, I could have stopped him. Who knows if he’s killed again, or hurt anyone else?”
    “Thank you for telling me.” Amanda reached out her hand to hold his.
    He looked at their entwined fingers resting on his thigh before turning the full wattage of his gaze on her. The pain was there, etched in lines around his mouth, but there was also a raw hunger in him that made her gasp in recognition as the same hunger burned through her. She looked at his mouth, leaned slightly forward.
    His body tensed and he reached for her, but in spite of the heat in his eyes and the tension in his body, he was ever so gentle as he wrapped his arms around her, pulling her against him. He lowered his lips toward hers, slowly, as if to give her time to change her mind. She waited for the panic to come, but all she felt was the same raw hunger, the same answering need. She reached her arms up and wrapped them around his neck, pulling his lips down to hers.
    He groaned deep in his throat. When she moaned beneath the gentle pressure of his lips and parted hers in invitation, his restraint vanished and he swept his tongue inside to mate with hers.
    Without breaking their kiss, he twisted, pulling her onto his lap. She straddled him between her thighs, her stomach clenching as she felt the hardness of his erection beneath her. She couldn’t stop herself from arching against him.
    He jerked beneath her and thrust his hips in response. His hand slid along her thigh, up beneath the edge of her khaki shorts, squeezing her bottom. His other hand snaked up between them, beneath the hem of her tank top to the lacy edge of her bra. He cupped the fullness of her breast and she cried out when his thumb brushed across her.
    His mouth broke free from hers and he slid his lips along the bottom of her jaw, tracing a heated path down the side of her neck. When he reached the upper curves of her breasts where they swelled above her top, he kissed his way to the valley between them and delved his tongue inside.
    Amanda shivered beneath his fiery caresses and ground her hips against him. She ran her fingers across the planes of his chest, unable to get enough of him, desperate to feel his skin against hers. Frantically working the buttons of his shirt, she gasped when his