Woody POV

She's as stubborn as a mule but has the heart of an angel. She'll go to the ends of the earth to get the truth and that includes sacrificing herself. She was a crusader for truth, a model for justice and a strong advocate for morals. She didn't follow the rules but she did what was ethically right, regardless of laws and job restrictions that should have held her in her place.

I suppose much of what she learned had come from her father. The man was a fantastic cop in his day but he had a talent for running and a strong track record of keeping secrets. Breaking laws, going after the truth, it seemed to be not only a great family trait but also genuine desire that stemmed from the trauma she suffered early in her life.

I thought I had a tough childhood, my mother died at four and my father died at the hands of a gunman. But I had never seen my parent's dead body, covered in blood with many police officers swarming round and my father in handcuffs being taken away as a murderer. I had witnessed my fathers' final days, but he had been in hospital and I had understood what was going on. When my mother passed I was too young to understand.

But she had been at just the age that she understood and it had hit her hard. Along with the fact that her only other family member, that she was close to, had been perceived to be the murderer must have made the experience harder.

She had told me what had happened, she'd been in class and some officer had come in. She'd thought it was all about her father, not her mother; that hadn't even crossed her mind. She'd literally run home, burst through the door and seen police officers everywhere. The thought had quickly crossed her mind wondering why they were here, but she had passed it off as a natural part of comforting the spouse of the cop.

Suddenly she had heard her father yell and had followed the voice; now confused. Rushing into the kitchen, the sight of her mother, lying on the floor, covered in blood; with a knife sticking out of her chest had sent the little girl into shock. Her father had yelled at her and she had tried to rush to him. He was restrained by three officers and as she moved two officers had grabbed her and held her back.

Biting one on the hand and kicking the other, she rushed toward her father, who was still being restrained and yelling for her. She tried to hug her father but two other officers restrained her and taken her father, almost yelling and screaming from the scene. The next time she had actually seen him was two days later, when he had been exonerated.

All of that had defined her, made her who she was. She was scared of love, of getting hurt but mostly scared of letting someone in. Someone who could be intimate with her and not just on a physical level, but someone who had wiggled their way into her heart.

For the longest time, I had thought that I could be the one person to get past those emotional walls, get past the armour and figurative boundaries that had caused her so much heart ache in the past. The night that we had made love had been a night filled with love, understanding, trust, passion and pent-up sexual tension.

It was an amazing experience that I had wanted to repeat and repeat and repeat again. But we hadn't and I realized that although we might both had loved each other, life wasn't going to permit us to make a go of it, and there was nothing that I could do about it. I think we both knew that we would always love each other and not move on but we would have to try. Jordan and I; we were a couple that would never really be a couple.

There wasn't really anything that we could do about it. The ball from my perspective was in Jordan's court, and in her perspective; in my court. If we could both make a go of it at the same time, then we might stand a chance, until that miracle came; we would love each other from afar.