Even if he’d nearly bungled it beyond recognition.
He was still frustrated with himself for his behavior on their first day of the task force. Yes, he’d been shocked to see her, but he’d been even more shocked at that pure rush of emotion during their reunion.
And with all those feelings he had no business swimming in came the endless questions that had haunted him since the new year.
Why did she leave? What could he have done differently? And perhaps the scariest of all—why had it mattered so much? It was that persistent confusion—and the sheer power of whatever it was between them—that had him pulling back.
I don’t know what to do with you.
Her words still lingered in his mind, even as he had a few ideas of exactly what they could do together. But if he were honest with himself, Gavin thought, there was also way too much unspoken between them to jump back into bed.
But oh, the temptation...
Even as he thought it, Gavin admitted temptation was too simple a word. These feelings for her? They haunted him. Made him want a future with someone who, by all accounts, hadn’t wanted one with him.
His behavior was ridiculous.
All of it.
His moony attitude. His inability to shake these feelings. Even his mental gyrations that insisted they had a connection that went deeper than a one-night stand. A feeling he’d had long before he’d known they’d created a life.
“Gavin?” Her voice was soft, a bemused expression tilting her still-wet lips.
“I interrupted our dinner. We should probably get back to it.”
Bemusement shifted to subtle confusion, and Gavin recognized, once again, his behavior was so far out of the norm for him it was almost laughable.
He simply wasn’t a person set with wide-sweeping emotions. He wasn’t made for that; his early life as a “Park Avenue Hayes” ensured that he knew decorum and had a certain measure to his emotions at all times.
A range of emotions flitted across her face, some he could decipher and others that remained a mystery, before she finally spoke. “Why are you pulling away?”
“Is it that obvious?”
“No more obvious than my own hesitation. So why don’t you grab a fresh beer, and we have the talk we really need to have?”
“About the baby?”
“No.” She shook her head. “About us, Gavin. We need to talk about us.”
Sera had always considered her willingness to tackle conflict—especially when rooted in the vastness of what remained unspoken—as one of her greatest assets in the practice of law. She’d understood from a very early age that the things people said or didn’t say often hid something far deeper going on inside.
A point that became patently obvious when those words didn’t match behavior.
She used that skill—honed it, really—to a sharp point in her legal work. What were the circumstances that led up to a crime? What was the perpetrator’s motives? And what made them act in that moment?
There were times, of course, when people simply acted poorly. But more often than not, asking the questions that probed deeper gave far more insight into a case than simply assuming the worst of someone. It was the lodestone she hung onto, even on some of her worst cases. Finding that humanity in others. Believing it existed.
It was essential to how she lived. She needed it like she needed air.
To make sense of her past.
To believe she was making a difference.
To move beyond her parents’ choices.
And with that knowledge, Sera recognized something else. She hadn’t been at her best these past few days, and she knew herself to be a decent person. Which only made it fair to question what was driving Gavin.
From their tense moments on the first day of the task force to his sudden reappearance two nights in a row, they needed to get underneath it all. Because however much they didn’t know about each other, she knew he was a good man.
She took her seat and waited until he sat back down before launching in. “I know we haven’t been an ‘us’ for all that long or with any level of permanence, but there’s a lot we haven’t talked about.”
“Is there something specific you’d like to know?”
As questions went, Sera had to admit, it was a good one. Because the reality was, there was a rather large chasm between claiming she wanted to talk about us and then knowing exactly what to say on the matter.
“Are you a native New Yorker? Why police work and the dive work specifically? Why Brooklyn?” She lifted her hands and knew the smile on her face had to be distinctly rueful. “Who are you, Gavin Hayes?”
“An expectant father.”
It was sweet that he started there, and Sera felt a small clutch beneath her heart. Especially because the sheer look of awe that filled his face as he spoke the words touched something she’d never thought possible.
“And as you said, I’m a cop.” When she only nodded, saying nothing, he kept on. “I didn’t grow up wanting to be a cop. It wasn’t in my life plan, as it were. But—” He shrugged, and while the action was casual, Sera sensed a pain there she’d never have expected.
Something tugged on her to probe further, but she’d finally gotten him talking, and although she couldn’t explain it, every instinct she had told her if she pushed too hard on that front, he’d shut down entirely.
So she tamped down on her own curiosity, instead following whatever he was willing to share. “But what?”
“But it’s who I was meant to be.”
