obvious.
“You...you were going to kiss me!” Shannon swiped her forearm across her mouth, almost as if he’d managed to accomplish what he’d set out to do.
Leaning back, he continued to stare up at her. “Yeah. What’s wrong with that?”
“What’s wrong with it?” she heard herself sputter. “You’re my friend. You’re like a brother.”
He rose and dusted off his jeans. “Is that so? Is that how you think of me?”
“Well, yeah. How else?”
She and Kenny—Ken—couldn’t reach any kind of agreement, but at least she had her answer to the question she’d been grappling with.
Something had changed between them.
Kenny no longer thought of her as a friend or a sister. He confessed that he wanted her as his girlfriend.
Shannon couldn’t think of him that way. Her mother’s warning, and how readily she’d dismissed it, came to mind.
Kenny suggested she take some time to decide. She knew she didn’t need time, since her feelings for Kenny weren’t going to change.
Kenny drove her home. He didn’t bother to get out of the car. They said a terse goodbye and, with a heavy heart, she walked into her house.
When Shannon entered the kitchen, her mother glanced over her shoulder from where she was standing in front of the stove, stirring a pot. “Oh, thank goodness you’re back,” Victoria said. “Your father has a charter booked to go fishing and wants to take Charlie with him.”
“Charlie?” Maybe it was because Shannon was still in a daze from what had happened with Kenny, but she didn’t understand what her mother was talking about.
“Yes, Charlie.” Victoria turned, a wooden spoon in her hand. “Where is he?”
Shannon felt cold tentacles of dread slithering through her. “Why are you asking me? I was with Kenny. Charlie wasn’t with us.”
The spoon slipped out of Victoria’s hand and clattered to the tile floor. “Then where is he? When we couldn’t find him, we...we assumed he must’ve gone with you.”
The tentacles were constricting, and she imagined her ribs would snap at any moment. It was nearly impossible for her to breathe. “No...” Shannon’s voice was a disembodied whisper. “He wasn’t with us.”
Victoria rushed to the hallway. “Paul! Paul... Charlie wasn’t with Shannon!”
The rest of the day was a nightmare for Shannon.
The police were in and out of their home as if it had a revolving door. They visited Kenny and found Charlie’s stuffed dog on the floor of his car. They’d speculated that Charlie had followed Shannon out of the house and that while she and Kenny had gone into the garage to get her hiking boots, he’d hidden on the floor in the backseat of the car and sneaked after them when they went on their hike.
A police officer and his search-and-rescue dog were brought in to find Charlie.
They discovered his body the next day.
He must’ve gotten lost in the forest and had drowned in a creek. The K-9 officer had tears in his eyes when he told them. Shannon hadn’t blamed the police. She could tell they’d done everything possible to find Charlie. The K-9 officer had just been brought in too late, as he’d been deployed on another assignment. She’d concluded that if there were more police officers with dogs, they could’ve found Charlie in time. She knew her parents felt the same way, because they made a donation in Charlie’s memory to the San Diego Police Department Foundation to acquire and train a police service dog in search and rescue. Shannon had asked that the dog be named after Charlie. The foundation had agreed.
It was back then that Shannon had resolved to become a police officer working in the K-9 Unit. If she could save one little boy like Charlie, dedicating her life to policing would all be worth it...
Now, here she was, and she’d had that chance. And she’d failed.
* * *
IT WAS WELL past eight when Logan finished the last of his paperwork and turned off his computer. He said silent thanks that Ariana was so understanding about the odd hours he had to work. He smiled, thinking that she’d soon be his wife. Logan wouldn’t have imagined it six months ago, when he’d first met the cool and competent head of security and loss prevention for San Diego International Airport.
Logan retrieved his duffel, whistled for Boomer, his explosives-detection dog, and left his office.
He’d thought that he’d been alone in the squad room, but he was wrong. Shannon was leaning back in her chair, her feet propped up on another one, her legs crossed at the ankles. She had her laptop on her lap, but she was completely still. He couldn’t tell if she’d dozed off or not, but the computer screen was dark. He knew she’d been working long hours since Cal had left on vacation, and this should’ve been her day off.
“Hey, Shannon,” he said quietly as he approached her.
She dropped her feet to the floor and nearly knocked the laptop off her thighs as she bolted up. The jostling had the screen coming out of hibernation. “Logan. Sorry, I didn’t hear you.”
He smiled. “Obviously.”
She hurriedly shut down her laptop, but not before he saw the smiling, freckle-faced kid’s picture.
He pulled the chair she’d had her feet on forward and sat. What would another fifteen or twenty minutes matter when he suspected he knew what was going on. He signaled for Boomer to lie down. The beautiful near-black Dutch Malinois/shepherd mix did, right next to Darwin.
“Shannon, the boy in that picture is your brother?” He searched his memory for the child’s name. “It’s Charlie?”
Shannon nodded.
“You want to talk about it?”
She took a deep breath, then blew it out. “I just relived it in my mind. I’d prefer not to go through it again. At least not now.” She placed a finger on her touch pad, fiddled with it a bit and clicked. She turned the screen toward Logan. “And that’s Dylan.”
Logan noted the similarities in age, coloring and the wide, gap-toothed grins.
“I don’t want what happened to Charlie to happen to Dylan.” She raised her hand. “Oh, I know the situations are entirely different, but I don’t want a cop—me or someone else—to have to tell Sawyer Evans that his little boy is...is gone. I don’t want Sawyer to have to go through what my parents did. To live with having lost a child.” She reached down and stroked the top of Darwin’s head, then shook her own. “No parent should have to endure that. I know what it felt like to lose my brother and to carry the blame—”
Logan’s eyes narrowed. “Blame?”
With a resigned sigh, she gave him the highlights.
“You’re not to blame,” Logan said vehemently when she’d finished, but he understood her better now.
“Maybe not. However, it doesn’t mean I don’t still carry the guilt. Reason is one thing. Emotion, something else altogether.” She paused for a long moment. “Is it worse knowing someone took him? That it wasn’t an accident?”
Logan understood that the question was rhetorical, but irrespective, he didn’t have the answer. He and Ariana had discussed having children, and the idea of anything like that happening to one of them petrified him. “At least we have a chance of getting Dylan back safe and sound,” he said gently.
Logan still had to address with Shannon the fact that she’d withheld material information about herself, information that could’ve impacted the specialization he’d assigned her. Especially considering the particulars she’d just shared. But looking at her and how fragile she seemed he knew that now was not