CHAPTER FOUR

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After awhile, Juliet let go of him and sat down wearily, resting her head on her arms.

He felt the same weariness, but one of them had to be functional. He got up and fetched a cloth so he could wipe the table off, refilled the ice tray and put it back in the freezer, and asked if she wanted a fresh cup of tea.

"A drink would be better," she mumbled against her forearm.

Might be a good burn going down, but for sure he needed a clear head. "That's not a good idea for either of us right now. I can offer you a piece of pecan pie."

Juliet raised her head and looked at him. "Did you make it?"

He shrugged. "I may have. Is that a yes?"

She nodded and put her head back down while he started the kettle again.

Leaning against the counter, he studied her, and knew he had to take care of another bit of "housekeeping."

"You're going to have to explain how you found me. How you even knew to look for me." Donovan would certainly want to know where the system failed on this one.

Sitting up, she angled herself to face him. "I didn't. Your cane caught my eye a few weeks ago in Mandolin's diner."

Wait, he thought. "A few weeks ago?"

"Saw you from the back and side mostly. Thought you looked a lot like... you. And that I was crazy." She swallowed. "But then a few days ago you were standing outside Redding's and you practically looked right at me through the window." She gave him a faint smile. "If it weren't those bodacious eyes, partner, it would have been the nose."

He felt goosebumps and confusion simultaneously. "What... what are you doing here?" This wasn't that large a town and it wasn't tourist season. And he had nothing to say about his nose.

"I'm a special agent with the Park Service. I've been on temporary assignment down the road for nearly three months."

For some reason that blew more than one circuit, and not only because she spoke as if this were perfectly normal. "Wait... wait. You mean to tell me we've been in each other's orbit all this time by... pure chance?"

Juliet's smile was slow. "Guess while you weren't keeping tabs on me because they were keeping tabs on you, nobody else was keeping tabs on me either."

Great. Donovan would have a cow. Possibly a cow and a half.

But then he had a truly terrifying thought. "Spencer!"

Juliet frowned. "Who?"

"Holy crap, woman—Spencer! Shawn Spencer!"

"What about him?"

He pulled himself together. "Where is he? Did you marry him?"

Did you marry him and have little Spencer babies? Or did you marry Guster so the two of you could raise Spencer?

She laughed.

She laughed? Like that was funny?

"O'Hara," he snapped, "think about it. If Spencer noses his way in here, is there any chance at all my cover doesn't go up in flames?"

She was still laughing, but stopped at his tone and scowled at him. "First of all, you can stuff that 'O'Hara' crap. Second, yes I realize he wouldn't be able to keep this quiet. Third, no, I did not marry him. I broke it off before I left Santa Barbara."

Relief flooded him—followed by a realization that not marrying Spencer didn't mean she wasn't involved with anyone else, although she wasn't wearing a ring, and neither of those realizations was worth the time he'd already spent having them.

"Honestly," she muttered. "You seriously think I'd have married him?"

He wasn't keen on her tone, and retorted, "Why wouldn't I think that? You started dating him despite all kinds of evidence he was an asshat."

The glare she gave him was masterful, but she didn't bother to defend herself. "Just give me some pie already."

When they were both seated with the pie and tea—and after he slugged back a couple of naproxen for the aches he was already feeling from her visit so far—she seemed to be gathering her thoughts.

But he had more questions for her first. "So what became of them? Spencer and Guster?"

"Oh, they're still in Santa Barbara. Shawn opened a combination smoothie/churro shop and runs Psych on the side. He 'reads' the customers to drum up business. Gus married a woman who helps him set boundaries with Shawn."

Carlton stared at her. "That... works?"

"He says it does. This is really good, by the way," she said. "I love pecan pie. As for the guys, I don't really have much contact with them. Texts now and then. I haven't been back to Santa Barbara."

In all this time, he wondered.

Juliet gave him a sudden sharp look. "I haven't been back, or seen the ocean, or had fried ice cream, in five years."

Might as well have been a knife-twist.

"Your family in Miami..." he trailed off.

"We've met up on inland vacations." She blinked rapidly. "I couldn't... I had to put myself away from everything that had been familiar, because you weren't there."

His heart constricted. If theirs had been a different relationship, he would be thinking she sounded like a wounded lover.

"Did you..." He hesitated. "Did you ever go to Scotland? The land of your ancestors, even though O'Hara's an Irish name?"

This earned him another faint but precious smile. "No. I went to Ireland, the land of your ancestors, to see all the places you had on your list."

Carlton's heart did that constricting thing again, and the smile on her lovely face brightened and lit her dark blue eyes.

He drank tea, because he didn't trust himself to speak.

She took another bite of pie and then said soberly, "I suppose I have to start calling you John now."

Reality check. "You should. I can't answer to the other name. Did you..." He didn't want to, but he had to ask. "Did you tell anyone I reminded you of your old partner?"

"Please," she scoffed. "Of course not. It would have raised more questions. I don't talk about my past anyway." She turned her mug idly. "I relive it all in my mind more than enough. Steffie—the waitress at the diner?—said she thought you hurt your leg in a car accident. Is that what you tell people?"

"Yeah. Like you said, the truth would raise too many questions. What do you say when people ask why you left the force to go into the Park Service?"

She gave a slight shrug. "Sort of the truth, that I needed a change. I just leave out the part where everything changed for me against my will."

We have that in common.

"Do you like the work?"

"I do. It's been interesting and..." Juliet looked away, smiling. "I hear your voice in my head all the time. Every time I'm trying to make a decision about a case or a suspect, I hear you. Usually snarking."

He grinned. "Sorry."

"No, don't be. Hearing your voice in any form is always worth it. I still have a couple of your voicemails, you know."

And there was another knife-twist. Damn.

"Juliet," he breathed. "You can't—"

"I can't what?" She was looking into the mug, not at him, and the smile was gone. "I can't what, John?"

"The people in your life now," he began.

"What people?"

"Your significant others," he tried again. "They should come first."

Juliet stared at him. "If I ever meet anyone more significant than you, I assure you he'll come first."

Carlton swallowed all the things he wanted to say because none of them would sound sane.

"You—"

His jaw ached and his gut ached and his foot hurt too. His leg? Whatever.

His heart was very confused.

Once again she looked directly at him, blue gaze searching. "You're going to have to tell Donovan about me, aren't you?"

An uneasy feeling settled in his gut. "Yeah."

"Well, tell him this while you're at it: I'm not losing you again. He'll just have to make room for me in John Ellery's world."

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Juliet hadn't known she was going to say that, but once the words were out, she knew they were absolutely true.

Unless Carlton—John—personally escorted her out of his life again, and even then it would have to be on a stretcher or in a strait jacket, she was not giving him up.

She might not be done yelling. There was still anger lingering in the dissipating adrenaline. But she was definitely done living without him.

Carlton's eyes were wide and he was motionless, and part of his problem was that as Carlton, he was still on the page from five years ago, where he had no idea how she felt about him.

She'd have to turn that page.

"My assignment here," she offered calmly, "ends in another three months. I'm filling in for a combination of one maternity leave and one leave of absence. But the chief already let me know he wouldn't mind if I wanted to stay on, and I'd been thinking I might. I like this place. I haven't stayed anywhere more than a year because I didn't want to..." She took a breath. "I didn't want to get attached. But on Monday I'm going to tell him I'd like to stay."

She heard him let out a breath. Reaching over, she covered his hand with hers, feeling his warmth.

"John," she said evenly. "John Ellery. You should get used to me being around. Donovan should get used to me being around."

Damn, those eyes of his; the blue was so unnerving sometimes. He turned his hand to clasp hers, and started to speak.

But from outside the cabin, there came the sound of a horn, and a door slam, and Carlton jerked back, as did she.

"Yo, John!" someone called out.

He glanced at the wall clock; it was nearly three. "Tack Sullivan. He's here to drop off some firewood."

"I know who he is." She stood up. "If he needs to come in, you invited me for pie and tea."

"Okay, but..." He stood up too, taking the cane and heading for the door. "You might want to, um, freshen up. The bathroom's through that door and down the hall."

Instantly realizing what he was too smart to spell out, she took his advice, and what she saw in the mirror would have made it very clear to Tack that she obviously found pecan pie extremely upsetting.

"Waterproof mascara my ass," she grumbled, doing her best to clean up; when her eyes looked less like raccoons had settled in for the winter, she borrowed his comb and tidied her hair as well.

At the front window she stood to the side, watching them talk. Tack was sixty-something, weathered and good-natured. She'd been in his tavern a few times and liked that he didn't tolerate any kind of trouble.

They'd obviously already moved the firewood, because the back of Tack's pickup was empty and he was leaning against the tailgate. He looked past Carlton—John, she reminded herself, John—toward the porch.

"That's not the way my daddy taught me to put up tools."

From where she stood she could see what he meant—the aftereffects of her greeting when she arrived. The sawhorse was down and the boards scattered and the saw lay forlorn in the leaves.

John looked sheepish. "I may have reacted a bit abruptly to a wasp sting." He gestured to his arm, which of course was covered by his sleeve. Starting toward the mess, he grinned back at Tack, who helped him right the sawhorse.

Watching him move in the uneven grass yard, it was easy to see how much he needed the cane, and yet naturally he tried to do as much of the work himself as he could.

Tack, to his credit, didn't overtly roll his eyes, as she would have, but then she knew how proud Carlton... dammit, John.

No, you know what? Just call him your man. Because he is.

She knew how proud her man was. He wouldn't want to ask for help; he would want to do it all himself.

But as she was thinking this, damn if he didn't stand back to let Tack bend to pick up the rest of the boards.

Whoa... you've learned to yield?

Or you were trained to yield, she thought. That made a lot more sense, because while Tack was finishing up, she recognized that the pained expression on her man's face had nothing to do with his leg and everything to do with having to admit there were things he needed help with. Or needed to accept help with.

Juliet smiled slowly. Getting to know John Ellery—and she intended to get to know him very well—was going to be fun.

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When Tack had roared off in his pickup again, Carlton went back into the cabin, wishing he could have a few minutes to regroup, to think about what Juliet said before the interruption.

He'd internalized the essence of it well enough: she intended to stay.

And he...

He wanted that very much.

But there were aspects of his life over which he had no control, and one of them was that his life was on loan to him, in a manner of speaking, courtesy of Donovan and his federal friends.

Juliet was perched on the arm of the sofa, arms crossed. She'd washed up and looked fresh and pretty again, and watched him solemnly as he approached.

It was still stunning that she was here.

"I changed my mind," she said.

He stood in front of her. "About?"

"I'm not going to hit you anymore. I can't say I'm sorry for what I did, but I won't do it again."

"Thank you." He rubbed his tender jaw. "That was a pretty good foot-stomp."

A smile curved her lips. "I know."

He had to smile back. She was irresistible.

"How much does your leg hurt?" she asked. "I mean normally."

"Most days, it's just a dull ache. Helps to stay on even terrain. I don't need the cane here in the house most of the time unless I've just been beaten up by a girl."

Juliet laughed and looked a bit embarrassed. "I'm sorry."

"No, you're not, and you just said you weren't going to apologize."

"Changed my mind about that, too."

She was still smiling, and damn, he loved her.

"What you said, before—"

"Was true." She reached out and hooked his belt buckle to draw him nearer, and he tried not to register too deeply how it felt to have her fingers at his abdomen even that briefly. "And I'll ask you this once. Would you really want me to walk out of here today and never come back?"

Carlton hesitated.

She waited.

"No."

"That took a minute."

He couldn't decide what her tone was.

"No, I don't want you to walk out and never come back. But you know it's not going to be that simple."

She smiled first. "Nothing is ever simple."

"There's a lot of layers here."

"Donovan," she supplied.

"Not just Donovan." Carlton moved around her to sit on the sofa, and she hopped down off the arm to sit facing him, cross-legged.

"What else, then?"

"No one from your past or mine could ever see us together. Ever."

"So?"

He shook his head. "That's no response."

"We're in Virginia. I don't know anybody here. You already figured out I don't have any social media accounts. I'm not interested in telling the world anything. I just want us back together."

Did she even know how that sounded?

Back together?

"In what way, exactly?"

She blinked. "In what way—"

He was just going to have to say it, because Donovan's opinion was irrelevant compared to this one little tiny detail.

"You... look. When we were partners, we were together eight or more hours a day. But your personal life was yours—until you hooked up with Spencer. I got through that because I had you the rest of the time when he wasn't barging into our cases and disrupting everything."

She nodded, her gaze fixed on him.

Now or never, and damn it all, never is not an option.

"I was in love with you, Juliet." He looked away rather than see her reaction. "I stayed in love with you after the explosion. And if you're so sure you want to be in John Ellery's life then you should know he's in love with you too. I could handle being only partners and friends before, but not anymore. If you settle in this area because you just want the friendship back, I'm not going to survive watching you take up with anyone else. This life is the last one I have, and I'm not spending it pining for you again."

Turning his head to look at her, he felt oddly calm.

Her expression was curious, but again he couldn't read it: was it relief? Trepidation? Or a simple attempt to hide her reaction while she thought about his words?

"Think about that awhile before you make up your mind. It's one thing to know I'm alive and want a connection but you... you might not be ready for what that could do to me."

Because he couldn't do it again. He survived the first go-round of Spencer winning Juliet. He survived the explosion. He survived the gunshot.

He wouldn't survive once again being this close to her and still losing out.

"John," she said softly. "Let me tell you about my late partner."

Her hand stole out to rest on his arm, and she inched closer to him on the sofa, and suddenly he felt a lot less calm.

"We were so close, like partners should be. I had this out-there boyfriend who was stuck in the eighties and really much more interested in his bromance, and my partner—not that he was perfect, I mean, wow he could really use a smack upside the head sometimes, he was so stubborn—but he was the antidote to all the craziness from my boyfriend."

She could smack him with a mere eye-roll, he reflected. She had often enough.

"Then one day we got caught up in this terrible situation in the forest with some Serbians and I nearly lost him." Her voice caught on the last few words, and her hand briefly tightened on his arm. "I realized, during that experience, that what I felt for him wasn't just friendship and partnership."

Her other hand came to rest on his arm as well, and he felt his pulse racing.

"I realized I loved him. You."

She clasped his hand now and brought it up to her lips for a kiss, and his heart thudded.

She loved me.

"I don't want to cry any more today," she said, even as her beautiful dark blue eyes grew misty. "But this is the truth. I had a plan. I was going to break up with Shawn and after a decent interval, start working on you. But I procrastinated because I knew Shawn wouldn't make it easy and I knew, because of Psych, that it was all going to be so awkward at the station, and I was a coward. But I had time, right?" She still had his hand, and brought it to her warm soft cheek, sighing. "I procrastinated, and then you were gone."

And then I was gone.

"Thank God," he breathed, and her eyes widened in shock.

"What?" She was wounded. "I don't—"

"Thank God you procrastinated," he said again, as true understanding dawned.

She was hurt, and he had to make her see.

"Don't you get it?" He turned the hand she still held to caress her face. "If I had just found out you loved me, and that I could never see you again, Donovan would have had to put a bullet in my head."

She was in his lap two seconds later, her warm and gentle fingers stroking his beard and then slipping into his hair in the moment before she kissed him.

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