Page 44 of Shadow Justice

“I’m sorry.”

She shook her head. “Don’t say that like it solves everything. Don’t say it like I’m supposed to be okay now.”

“I’m not.”

“Don’t stand there looking like you’ll let me yell until I run out of air.”

“You can yell as long and as loud as you need to.”

A laugh broke out of her, wet and unwilling, more from frustration than humor. It turned into another tear before she could control it.

Reid lifted his hand, then stopped before touching her face, waiting. Letting her choose. Giving back, in the smallest possible way, the thing he had taken from her once.

That restraint snapped the last thread of her control.

Holly closed the distance herself.

She caught the front of his shirt in one fist and pulled him down, angry and aching and tired of every feeling in her body having nowhere to go. Reid’s breath brushed her cheek, and it made her want him with a force that felt like its own kind of grief.

“This doesn’t fix anything,” she whispered. And then she kissed him.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Reid had been kissed in parking lots, in the shadow of military housing before dawn, in moments stolen between duty and departure. He knew what it was to want someone. He knew heat, urgency, and the foolishness that made otherwise rational people forget consequences existed.

None of that prepared him for Holly catching the front of his shirt in her fist and pulling him down to her mouth.

Want had gone through him so fast and hard that it nearly stripped every careful thought from his head. But she was shaken, grieving, angry, and barefoot in the dim light of her apartment with a murdered man’s name still hanging in the air. She was kissing him because every emotion in her had finally collided with every other one, and Reid would not be the man who took advantage of that collision.

Then her mouth moved against his, uncertain and fierce at the same time, and his restraint cracked.

He’d dreamed of this since the morning he’d left. He kissed her back carefully for one breath, then with more honesty than control. His hands found her waist, holding enough to steady both of them. She made a soft sound in the back of her throat, and the years between them disappeared into the heat of her body and the taste of tears on her lips.

His whole life seemed to narrow to Holly’s hand twisted in his shirt, her breath catching against his, and her choosing him when she had every reason not to.

He didn’t deserve this, but he wanted it anyway.

Blue huffed, clearly unhappy, and Reid might have laughed if Holly’s fingers hadn’t tightened against his chest. She rose onto her toes, and he bent closer, letting her set the pace even as everything male and reckless in him wanted to pull her in and make up for six years of bad decisions with one impossible kiss.

His phone rang from the kitchen counter. Reid ignored it.

Holly didn’t. Her mouth stilled beneath his, and the instant she pulled back, the cold air between them felt like punishment. Her eyes were too bright, her lips parted, her fingers still caught in his shirt.

The phone rang again with Garrett Cross’s ringtone. Of course it was Garrett. The man had the timing of an incoming mortar.

“You should answer it,” Holly said, voice husky and ragged.

“I don’t want to.” That truth escaped before he could discipline it.

Holly released him and stepped back, putting one hand to her mouth as if she could hold the kiss there or hide from it. Maybe both. “It could be about Hoyt,” she said.

She was right, which made him resent the phone more. He turned away, crossed to the counter, and picked it up. “Fleming.”

Garrett’s voice came through clipped. “Claire filled me in. You secure?”

“Yes.”

“Holly?”