If You Know Her: A Novel of Romantic Suspense

Nia felt the knot in her throat swell until it threatened to choke her.
    Shit.
    “Ah, hell,” she muttered. “I’m sorry.”
    He shrugged. “You don’t need to be sorry. Not like you haven’t had a lousy deal lately.” With his weight braced on his hands, he leaned back. “So what was she like?”
    Nia stared at him for a long moment and then abruptly, she sighed. “Joely … she … she was my opposite.Everything I’m not. Cool and calm, where I’m hotheaded and always ready for a fight—I can be as logical as I want, but I’ll still be spoiling for a fight at the end of it all. I looked for the bad shit. She saw the good.”
    “You were close.”
    “Like sisters. She was all the family I had,” she whispered. Tears threatened, but she blinked them back. “Shit, I still can’t believe she’s gone.”
    “I could tell you that it will get better eventually—the pain will start to fade. And it does fade, but not because it gets easier. You just learn to live with it,” he said gruffly. “I know that’s probably not what you want to hear.”
    Nia sniffed. “Actually, that helps a hell of a lot more than somebody telling me that this will get
easier
. She was raped and murdered—
nothing
about this should be easy.”
    With shaking hands, she dug into her pocket, desperate for a cigarette only to realize she’d smoked the last one.
Shit
. Feeling the weight of his gaze, she slid off the picnic table, desperate to put a few feet between them. She needed to say something, anything—needed to stop feeling so fragile, and she needed him to stop looking at her like … hell, what was the look on his face anyway? She couldn’t quite figure it out.
    Scowling, she shoved her hands in her pockets and turned away, staring toward the sheriff’s department and her bike.
    Anywhere but him.
    “I need to apologize to you again for what I did last year,” she said, the words coming out of her so fast, they tumbled over each other. “I was wrong and I’m sorry.”
    “Okay.”
    She turned and stared at him. “Okay? I pull a gun on you and your girlfriend and you say … 
okay
?”
    Law cocked a brow. “Hope’s not my girlfriend. And what do you want me to say? Tell you to take your apology and shove it?” He shrugged. “I know where it came from—I know Deb Sparks. She had it in her head I was guilty and Deb … well …” He stopped, ran his tongue along his teeth and shook his head. “Well, once she gets an idea in her head, there’s nothing that can be done to get that idea out, not until she decides she wants it out. And it’s not like you were exactly in the best state of mind that day.”
    “Gee, thanks,” she muttered.
    Staring at her averted face, Law tried to figure out just what in the hell she wanted him to say—what she wanted him to do.
Would
she be happier if he just told her to shove her apology?
    Hell. This wasn’t familiar territory.
    Looking away, he rubbed the back of his neck. “Look, I just …” Her gold eyes cut his way and he blew out a breath, struggling to find something,
anything
to say. “Would you feel better if I told you to just fuck off?”
    To his surprise a faint smile appeared on her face, tugging up the corners of her mouth for the briefest of seconds before dying. “I don’t know if I’d feel better, but it seems a lot more plausible than you telling me ‘
okay
.’ I know
I
sure as hell wouldn’t be saying
okay
to somebody who pulled the crap I had.”
    “Maybe you’d surprise yourself,” he said softly. If she’d seen the way she looked … And damn it, he needed to quit thinking about that. Like now. Although really, it wasn’t that much better to think about how she looked now, either. Even with that irritated look on her face, there was something so damn appealing about her.
    “I don’t think so.” She shook her head. “I rarely surprisemyself.” Then she sighed and flicked her fingers through her hair. “I have to go. I’d say it was a pleasure seeing you but … well.”
    “You’d be lying,” he finished. “How about interesting? I can’t say it’s ever been
not
interesting.”
    “Well, seeing as how you’ve met me all of twice.” The smile on her face now was a real one, at least.
    He tucked the memory of it inside his mind as he watched her walk away. He also lingered long enough to enjoy the view … hell, he was a guy, and it was too nice of a view to
not
watch it.
    Her name was Nia