aside from almost scalding him with coffee, she was ready to take on whatever needed to be dealt with.
The other night at Maya’s, though, she hadn’t been dressed, her hair was a mess, and she had her glasses on. Not counting that morning at her house, it was the first time he’d ever seen her in glasses, and…whew…he’d almost wished he’d let her go upstairs to get dressed. It didn’t seem possible that someone as beautiful as Ell could look even better in a pair of plain black horn-rimmed specs.
No fancy clothes, no makeup, and no matching boots and bag—it was just Ellie, guard down, wrapped in that ugly old gray blanket and making him wish he were anything but a cop right then.
But he was. It didn’t matter what he felt for her or what she thought she felt for him. At the end of the day, the only thing that mattered was keeping her safe, and if he lost his badge because he couldn’t stay focused on the job, how the hell was he supposed to do that?
He couldn’t afford to fuck this up by doing something stupid like falling for her, and the best way to prevent that would be to stop looking at her the way he’d been doing, to stop getting personal, and to stop thinking about her every fuckin’ second of the day.
Chapter 13
“Now that’s how you supposed to drive! From now on, that’s how you drive!”
—Detective Mike Lowrey, Bad Boys
Kurt’s phone calls continued to come in daily, and Ellie continued to hang up on him daily. She didn’t shake quite as much as she had the first few times, but each one still seemed to add another layer of anxiety to the growing pile that she was having more and more trouble tamping down.
And it got worse when the emails started.
She’d thought the first message was from Maya, and it wasn’t until she’d opened the attached photo of herself at their ball game last week that she’d realized what was going on. Kurt hadn’t hacked Maya’s account; he’d simply set up a new one with an almost identical address and was using it to send his emails.
Every day there was a new one, each with another photo attached. There was one of her in her store, one of her riding her bike, another of her talking with Pastor Pete, and so on. Like the phone calls, Ellie logged every email, forwarded each one to Tory, and saved a copy in a separate folder in her mail system.
Tory had immediately put the IT guys on it, but no surprise that this wasn’t leading anywhere. They traced the first email to one of the public-use computers at the library, and none of them were too surprised when the surveillance footage showed nothing more than someone in a dark hoodie walking backward into the library and then hunching down over the keyboard, making sure he never faced the camera.
The next two had come from homes that had reported B&Es the nights the emails had been sent, and the cops were now doing their thing with fingerprints at both places. Ellie didn’t expect them to find anything.
She couldn’t have cared less where the emails came from; she just wished he’d show his stupid face so Tory could put an end to it and Ellie could get her old life back.
The thing was, though, she didn’t want her old life back. She wanted her new life back: the one where she got to see Brett on a regular basis, the one where, with a little work, she could get him to smile, and the one where just having him around made her world so much more beautiful.
Eight days: that’s how long it had been since Brett had all but bolted out of her house. Eight days: that’s how long it had been since they’d spent any time alone, and that’s how long it had been since she’d seen him smile.
Eight days. It was a freakin’ eternity.
When he picked her up for her lesson on Wednesday afternoon, she climbed behind the wheel and completely ignored his instruction to head out to the highway, choosing instead to drive down past the yacht club, where the road led to the gravel lot near the waterfront docks.
“What are you doing?” Brett asked. “The highway’s that way.”
Eyes forward, hands at ten and two, she maneuvered his truck around the potholes while still giving the cyclists a wide berth—much like Brett had been giving