“What makes you think I want to talk?”

Though I couldn’t see it, I could almost feel his shrug. “You called me at an ungodly hour of the morning. Since you don’t seem to be the type to want to sleep with someone you just met, I have to go with the only other option: you need someone to talk to.”

I chuckled. “I can’t say I have much to talk about.”

“No?” came the amused reply. “What made you want to be a cop?”

“My dad was one. I wanted him to be proud of me, and I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to be.”

“What, no pink tutus or dreams of being a doctor?” Matthew asked, sounding genuinely interested.

I laughed softly. “Never even crossed my mind. Why do you keep doing it?” I kept getting flashes of history as I lay against him. Something made me say, “And why do I keep seeing you in Sherwood Forest?”

He chuckled. “Maybe you’re just thinking I would fit the part of Robin Hood, come to rescue the fair maiden.”

I knew the moment he said it, he was lying. For a brief moment, I thought about raising my arm, revealing the ‘blade, but something told me I was better off letting the lie stand. Besides, if I revealed my secrets, he might still not reveal his, and if he really had something to do with Robin Hood…he’d had a long time to practice not saying anything. Any other night, anyone else, I might have been more inclined to push. Matthew, however, made me want to keep up the pretense we were nothing more than two soldiers of the same side.

“Maybe,” I answered him. “You certainly came when I called.” I paused. “Why did you come?”

“You asked,” he said simply.

I turned to look at him, surprised. “Do you always show up when someone asks you to?”

A gleam of mischief lit his eyes. “Not always,” he answered honestly. “Sometimes I find reasons to be elsewhere.”

“So why’d you give me your card if you didn’t know if you were going to show up if I called?” I pulled out of his embrace warily and sat back on the other side of the couch.

He shrugged. “Do you always know which way you’re going to go when someone asks you for a favor?”

He had a point. Grudgingly, I admitted, “No.”

He leaned forward. “You’re an attractive, smart, intuitive woman. I liked you during the investigation; I wanted to get to know you better. I figured if nothing else, we might be friends. I don’t worry about the rest.”

I took a long, hard look at him, the way I’d do if I was cataloging a suspect. Dark brown hair capped a long, narrow face with an angular jaw, straight nose, and deep-set brown eyes. He had a medium build and looked like the kind of guy who worked out, but not in some yuppie chain-name gym unless he had no other choice. He’d worn a dark green button-down shirt, jeans, and leather shoes that had probably cost more than I’d ever dream of spending on shoes. He was a few inches taller than me, but not by much. I was suddenly struck by how much honesty he radiated, even as his eyes hinted at secrets he wasn’t willing to share. There’d be no way I’d mistake him for a criminal; he had that cop bearing that came out of being a cop for too many years to count. And yet, deep in my gut, I knew he was a killer. I didn’t need the ‘blade to know. Still, I trusted him, and I couldn’t fathom why.

As if sensing my confusion, he reached out to touch the wrist upon which the bracelet rested. “Sara, don’t ask. Not unless you want me to ask how this cursed thing found you.”

I chuckled humorlessly. “Hell of a friendship if we both have secrets,” I told him.

He didn’t smile, but slowly shook his head. “Alliances have been made on less,” he reminded me.

“Is this what we’re doing? Building up favors to trade later?”

“No.” The word was bluntly spoken. “This is just me, letting someone know she’s not alone. Not unless she wants to be.”

I closed my eyes at that, hearing the unspoken question in his words. I blinked back the sudden rush of tears as I realized just how long it had been since someone had offered comfort without strings…two years was too damned long. Swallowing hard, I opened my eyes and tried to smile. “If it’s not too much to ask, would you hold me and talk to me tonight? I don’t know if I can sleep, but maybe…maybe if you’re here, I won’t…” I took a deep breath, hating to admit any sort of weakness. “Maybe I won’t dream.”

“My pleasure,” he said easily, as if he’d been expecting the request, and rose to his feet. As gallantly as any knight, he extended his hand and helped me stand, then led me to the bed. As I stretched out on one side, he stripped off his shoes and took up position on the other side, pausing only to pull up the comforter and sheets I’d kicked off in my previous aborted attempt at sleep.  Pulling the covers up, he settled them around us before he slipped his right arm underneath my head, and positioned his left loosely around the area just below my ribcage. I slipped down the bed somewhat so we weren’t knocking noses.

“So what made you decide to be a cop?” I asked curiously, figuring any question he asked me was not off limits.

“Family tradition,” he told me. “I couldn’t imagine being anything else.”

“You too?”

He chuckled. “Guilty. Even after all I’ve seen, all the hoops I have to go through, I can’t imagine doing anything else. My father would have been so proud.”

“My dad didn’t want me to become a cop at first. Then he saw how determined I was, and…” I paused as old grief hit like a ton of bricks. “Some days, I think he’d be ashamed of me, cowering in fear like this at shadows.”

“Tough guy, huh?”

“Yeah. It got him killed. One of the local bigwigs in the crime scene took him behind an alley one night and shot him. Nobody could prove it, nobody knew anything, so it took years before I was able to close the case on who murdered my father.” I blew out a breath. “Then someone decided to ‘assist’ the killer in committing suicide.”

“You know who that ‘someone’ is.”

I glanced up at Matthew. “Knowing it doesn’t change anything. I can’t prove it, and I can’t say I’m not glad it happened that way.” I could almost see the wheels turning in Matthew’s head. “And before you ask, that someone who assisted the killer is currently in jail for another crime.”

He was silent a moment before he asked gently, “So why do you blame yourself for doing nothing?”

“I don’t,” I said angrily. “I just wonder if maybe if I’d been more open with my friends, maybe then they’d still be alive. They wouldn’t have just thought I was going crazy.”

“And if you could go back and change how things happened, would you?”

I glanced at my wrist. “No,” I answered quietly. “No, I wouldn’t, because they were meant to die when they did. Too many other things would be wrong if they lived.”

“And if they were here, would they be kicking your ass because you’re dwelling in grief?”

Nothing in my life was random anymore, this much I knew. Right now, I wasn’t entirely too happy with that fact, or that a stranger knew me this well. “Danny would be,” I admitted. “So would Jake and Gabriel, now that I think about it.” I chuckled, remembering. “Gabriel was convinced that the longer you grieved, the harder it was for the soul to move on. He was barely twenty, and yet, he was the biggest believer in the mystical I’d ever met. He dealt in rare antiquities: the odder, the more unusual, the more something was the stuff of legends, the better, and sold them to the highest bidder.”

“Did he always believe in what people claimed the items to be?”

“He said it didn’t matter, but I could tell when he got in something pretty exotic; he’d be bouncing off the ceiling trying to tell me about it.”

“So who were Danny and Jake?”

It seemed easier, somehow, to lie in the dark in a stranger’s arms and remember my friends as they were, than to shed useless tears alone. “Jake was my partner. He was assigned to me after Danny was killed. I found out later he was undercover for the FBI, trying to bust a bunch of crooked cops who’d been crooked since my father’s time on the force.”

“You sound like you’re still mad at him for that.”

I half-laughed. “Yeah. It explained why the hell a champion surfer went all the way to New York from California, and why he didn’t seem to be fazed at the whole ‘we’re partners’ thing every time he tried to flirt with me.”

“And did he ever succeed in taking you to dinner?”

I let myself remember. “Once. Then we got paged in the middle of this fabulous feast, and we never spoke of it again.”

“That leaves Danny,” Matthew reminded me.

I didn’t need to look over Matthew’s shoulder to know Danny stood in the shadows, listening, watching. It made me raise my head slightly to meet Matthew’s gaze.

“Danny was my partner. We went through the Academy together, got partnered with other people for a while, then requested to be put together. We were partners for years, ‘til one November day when I insisted we check out a lead, and he was shot before my eyes. Now his wife won’t talk to me, and there’s nothing I can do to get rid of his ghost.”

Matthew didn’t say anything for a few minutes. “I was chasing a suspect across country once,” he finally said. “I was so sure I would catch him. My partner got hurt, and still I went chasing after the suspect. I caught him, but by the time I went back to check on my partner, he was near death. We were in a place where medicine wasn’t as accessible as it could be in other places, and he begged me to shoot him, to put him out of his misery.” There’s a hitch in that smooth Southern-flavored voice as Matthew finishes with, “Some nights I can still hear that shot ringing across the valley.”

In a gentle voice, he added, “There is so much death and sorrow in this life, Sara. We see more of the darkness than some of the folks we swear to protect, but it doesn’t mean we have to sink down into that pit. Friends help keep me sane because they help remind me that there are people I want to protect.”

I breathed deeply. “I lost so many people in one year. I don’t want to go through that again with someone else.”

Matthew pulled me closer. “The alternative, Sara, is that you become a shell of who you are. And then one day you’re staring at your gun and wondering if you shouldn’t point it at yourself, since there’s no one to care if you live or die. Please don’t go down that road.”

“I…thought about it,” I admitted. “Decided I was better off calling you instead.”

“I’m glad you did.”

A long silence ensues, and I start to relax. Suddenly, I remember Matthew’s not only a fellow cop, he’s also an FBI agent, and someone in a position to make my life interesting, if he so chose. “Promise you’ll tell no one about what I said?” I ask in sudden panic.

He stiffened, insulted. “Of course I won’t say anything. I’m not interested in ruining your career. Not when I like you enough to show up at three in the morning.”

I chuckled at his phrasing. “I suppose not. I had to ask.”

He shrugged and relaxed his body. “It’s okay, Sara. I’ll even still respect you in the morning, when your hair is all mussed up and my arm is numb.”

He made me laugh again. “Thanks, Matthew.”

He kissed my forehead. “You’re welcome. Go to sleep, Sara. I’m here.”

And somehow, I did exactly that. I woke to find myself alone. A note was tucked to a grande Starbuck’s coffee cup next to my cell phone. As I sipped the coffee, only mildly surprised it was precisely my preferred concoction since the nearest Starbuck’s was in the building across the street, I read the note.