The Departed

free?”
    “You might want to be careful there.” He looked away—had to, before he decided to say the hell with cooking. She needed some food in her belly. He could strip her clothes away and have his way with her after she ate, damn it. And he insisted he could wait, even though his hands were shaking somewhat.
    * * *
     
    DEZ smiled at his back as he focused on the food. Either it required a great deal of his attention to grill those sandwiches or he was ignoring her.
    She figured he was ignoring her.
    That was fine. She’d been flirting with him more to keep her mind off everything else, anyway. Everything else—so much of everything else. Damn it all to hell.
    Stop it. You can think about it more in the morning. You need to sleep, she told herself.
    Needed to sleep. Needed him. Needed to set all of this aside. Tomorrow she’d go back to the hospital, face what she’d done. Again. But for now, she needed to set it aside.
    It didn’t take long for him to slip a plate and a bowl of soup in front of her and she stared at it for a good thirty seconds, trying to convince herself she could eat, that she should eat. Making a face, she looked up at him and said, “You know, I’m not hungry.”
    “Eat.” He settled across from her with his own food.
    “You’re so damn bossy.” She sighed and dipped a spoon into the bowl, stirring it around. “I’m not hungry.”
    “If I waited for you to be hungry, you might eat at the dawn of the next ice age. Eat…please.”
    “Damn. Jones, you just said please . I’m so impressed.” She put the spoon down and picked up her sandwich, then dipped it into her soup, a faint smile curling her lips. Vaguely, she could remember eating like this with her grandmother. Those memories were so faint, they couldn’t really even be called memories. But they made her smile. She reached up to touch her necklace, only to remember she didn’t have it—the chain still needed to be fixed.
    After she took a bite of her sandwich, she looked at Taylor. “Where was my necklace?” she asked him.
    A shutter fell across his face, his eyes carefully blank. With controlled, precise movements, he laid his spoon down. His gaze shifted to some point past her shoulder, although she suspected he wasn’t seeing any part of the house, or even her. “It was on the floor after the medics transferred you to the stretcher. I saw it and grabbed it.” He slanted a look in her direction and then shifted his gaze off to the side again. “I’m sorry I didn’t return it sooner.”
    “’S okay,” she murmured, shrugging. “I was just wondering. I’d pretty much given it up for lost.”
    “I’ll get the chain fixed for you.” He picked up his spoon again.
    She opened her mouth to tell him it wasn’t necessary, but then she frowned, noticed how tightly he gripped that spoon. Hell, she couldn’t have pried it out of his grip.
    “I never should have let you go in there.”
    Dez tore off a piece of her sandwich and popped it in her mouth. Oddly, her appetite wasn’t quite as dead as it had been. “You would have had a hard time stopping me, you know.”
    “I could have cuffed you and thrown you in my car,” he growled. “Shit.”
    He shoved back from the island, hurling the spoon down.
    “And I would have decked you. A girl would have died. We need to get past this, sugar. God knows the two of us are going to have enough to come to grips with, just dealing with everything going on here and now. I’m fine , so why worry about it?”
    “Because I’m not fine!”
    She jumped, caught off guard by the fury, the heat in his usually cool voice. He came off the stool, prowling the kitchen like a caged lion, his eyes half wild, his uninjured hand opening and closing into a fist. “I’ve got enough nightmares haunting me already, but none of them haunt me like that. I can’t…I can’t…”
    His voice broke and he turned away.
    Dez stared as he braced his uninjured hand on the counter, his broken one hanging at his side. Then he just stood there, head slumped. “You’re all torn up inside over what happened to Brendan Moore and I won’t deny feeling some guilt. But it’s not going to shatter me, not going to keep me awake at night. None of it would have happened if he hadn’t taken the road he’d taken. If he was four, five years younger? I might feel different. But you saw the same person I saw—that wasn’t a child making those decisions. He knew what he was doing— and he