CHAPTER SEVEN

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Lassiter noted a distinct absence of Spencers in the station over the next few days. Henry had unexpectedly asked for the week off, Vick told him, and she had no particular reason to say no or even ask him why; she assumed it was for one of his fishing trips.

But Lassiter had a feeling it was no coincidence. Whatever Shawn had done to Juliet, his father knew about it now, and if he was—well, it was ridiculous to use the phrase about Henry Spencer—running scared, then it was ten times more interesting to Lassiter as a result.

And because he was going nuts (pining, even) for Juliet, he was a little more restless than usual, and decided to poke the bear with a stick: he asked for Psych's help on a case.

He didn't need it, of course; his money was on the maid precisely because she was so sweet, and oh yeah, because the prelim background check showed she'd worked for other wealthy men in Peru and Ecuador who'd died suddenly under mysterious circumstances.

But a second opinion never hurt, right?

Stop smirking, he could hear Juliet warning him, and made the phone call to Psych.

"Detective Lassiter," Gus said neutrally. "How may I be of assistance?"

"Need your help on a case. Vick made me call," he lied. "Because you know I normally wouldn't otherwise." That was the truth… but he still smirked, despite the internal warning from his partner.

There were muffled noises in the background, a combination of a half-hissed argument and the teacher-voice from the Charlie Brown cartoons. "Oh. Oh, well, that's really a shame, Lassiter, because we, um, we have the flu."

Lassiter grinned. "You have the flu?"

"Yes. Yes we do. Both of us." Gus coughed overly loudly into the phone.

"But you're at the office," he pointed out politely.

"Oh, I just stopped by for some cold medicine. Some soup. Some… thermometers. And, um, a blanket."

"Well-stocked office," he muttered. "So Spencer's down for the count? Because really, you sound all right, and this won't take long; you can probably swing by the station on your way home."

Was strangled silence a concept? Because that's what he heard.

"I don't think so. I'm really not very well at all, and Shawn is practically unconscious."

"That's a shame. Can I talk to him a minute?"

A background thud and a sharp "No," from Gus. "I'm afraid he's just passed out."

"Geez, Guster, maybe I should call an ambulance."

"No, that's not—oh, see, he's coming around already. Look, I should really go take care of him. Please extend our regrets to the Chief." Click.

Later, Lassiter realized he hadn't laughed that hard in a long time.

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. . .

Their texts and conversations had been careful dances and parries and explorations, he thought as he drove up into the mountains on Friday morning. Neither one had said anything more specific than what passed between them on Monday night, and that was probably wise. This visit, despite his overwhelming need to simply see her, was not about them. It was about the story she had to tell, and despite how much he'd enjoyed tormenting Spencer and Guster, he knew for his Juliet to be so distraught, there would be no other humor involved.

She was staying in a resort they'd visited once on a case, and driving onto the vast property he remembered her appreciative comments at the time. It was pricey, she admitted, but she'd been putting back money toward a nice vacation and this seemed the right time to use it.

His pulse was racing, and when he saw her sitting on a stone bench outside the hotel, her golden hair lit by the sun, he was nearly done for.

She was more than beautiful to him. Beautiful wasn't even the right word. Pretty wasn't enough. Lovely was more like it. Radiant, lovely, perfect.

He parked the car with less than his usual precision and got out, hoping he could make it over to her without passing out.

Juliet stood up and smiled at him.

Damn.

"Hi," she said softly.

I love you, he answered silently.

She stepped into his arms and wrapped hers around his waist, sighing. Lassiter held her close and drank her in, and if nothing else happened the rest of the day, he would be just fine.

. . . .

. . .

Juliet didn't often allow herself to simply admire her partner's physical presence, because whenever she did, rather interesting daydreams tended to follow. But with her arms wrapped around his lean body, and feeling his strong arms holding her tight, she understood anew how complete her attraction to him was.

He put his hands in her hair; she loved how his warm fingers felt at the base of her neck, and she looked into those unbelievably blue eyes and knew he wanted to kiss her as well as she knew he wouldn't. Not yet.

She just hoped he could read the same thoughts in her eyes.

"Come on," she said, and stepped back, but not too far. She reached for his hand and led him down the winding path to her cabin.

"Are you all right?" he asked when they were at the door. "I mean, really?"

On the job, he seldom asked her that, but when he did, he really wanted to know, and this made her smile. "I am a funky mix of terrified and calm and upset and rational and insane and okay. You?"

He gave her a crooked grin. "Different reasons, same sensation. But I meant about why you came up here in the first place."

"I know. But the mishmash of feelings are the same." Inside the spacious cabin, she let him take a moment to check his surroundings, and offered him some iced tea, which she carried out to the back deck.

"We had a lot of conversations here this week," Carlton murmured, sitting on one end of the glider.

"Is the view how I described it?"

"Better, because I'm here with you." Then he blushed, and she was enchanted. He gulped down half his tea, and with only a smile, she got up and brought the whole pitcher out.

Before sitting, she bent to kiss his cheek. "It's better because I'm here with you, too."

The look he gave her made her shiver a little.

First things first.

She sat close enough to take his hand firmly in hers. "What I want most today is for you to listen. I'm going to be selfish and say it's all about me and my feelings, because that really is the whole reason I came here. To deal with all that. And I need you, Carlton, like I never needed you before, to simply listen to my self-indulgent ramblings. Okay?"

"Even if I'm going to want to kill him?" he inquired dryly, one dark eyebrow up.

"Even if. And I suspect you will." She squeezed his hand and felt the satisfying return squeeze. "I know I've already been incredibly selfish just by asking you to come up here, to wait all week for this information. I know you must be frustrated with me."

"No. Not with you. With whatever upset you enough to drive you out of town." He turned slightly to face her, his direct blue gaze so very intent, and she knew there was no more time to waste.

It had started, she led off, when Shawn made his surprised remark about six Yerden paintings, and then backed away from the assertion. She'd been thinking a lot in the weeks prior about how often his 'divinations' were so incredibly, almost impossibly specific. Almost as if he'd seen the things he described with his own eyes, not those of some vague spirit.

So she went after him that day to press him on it, and had come up behind him and Gus talking.

She held on to Carlton's hand tightly while she recounted the conversation.

His grip was like steel and so were his eyes. She could read his tension; hell, she could feel it, and she wanted to stop talking and just soothe him but she couldn't stop now.

"I don't know how I made it through the rest of the day, but once I was home, I already knew I had to get away." She sighed, looking down at his strong hand, so firmly in her grasp. "I know you're trying not to break free and run back to Santa Barbara to arrest him but stay with me now, please."

Carlton let out a slow breath. "I am."

"I felt like this hit me everywhere. It hit my heart, and it hit my pride, and to top it all off, it went to work on my self-esteem as a detective too."

"Your text," he murmured. "Asking if you were a good cop."

"Yeah. I was upset I'd been so blind all this time. So willing to believe the lie. So quick to jump on a lead and stare admiringly as he pulled all this crap out of thin air. All those times you insisted we could handle a case ourselves and I thought it was because you didn't like him, but you were right, Carlton. You knew it was a con. But I fell for it so completely."

He sighed, and she sensed he was relaxing just a little bit. "He did solve cases."

"Yes, but he could have solved just as many without the lie. Without the drama. He could have saved a lot of time and none of us would have had to look like fools or apologize for his behavior." She shook her head, feeling the impatience rising again. "I know the lie started before he met me. I know it wasn't personal. But it was personal, wasn't it? I can think of a few times when maybe he was about to tell me, but he never did. Was it because he was a coward or because he didn't want to ruin a good paying gig?"

Carlton shifted to face her directly and took her other hand. "There'll never be a clear answer to that."

"No, there won't. And then I got mad at myself for all the times I unwittingly helped him make your life miserable. All the times I let you down because I thought you were just giving into your annoyance—and maybe you were, sometimes, but now I know the annoyance was fully warranted—all the times I let my partner down." She blinked back tears. "You never let me down. You stood with me when I screwed up with Tancana, you helped me with Scott, you saved me on the clock tower, you—"

"Stop," he said, reaching up to caress her cheek, and she turned to kiss his wrist, her anger abating at merely his touch. "Partner. You were being a good cop. You were played just like the rest of us and you're not allowed to take more responsibility for that than anyone else." He brushed her chin with his gentle fingers. "And come on, I wasn't exactly an inspiration. I slowed down a lot of investigations because I was so determined not to let him in."

Juliet lowered her head, sighing, and he rubbed her shoulder warmly. "Okay, so you get the idea about my professional rage."

"Yeah. And yeah, I could still kill him. Easily." He smiled faintly. "Repeatedly."

She felt her own smile coming on, but there was more to tell. "It's funny, though, how all of that became what I was most upset about. It's like the personal relationship just sort of faded into the background. I was upset my boyfriend lied to me, yes. I was upset to think his best friend was lying to me, too. And there's no way Henry wasn't part of it. Every time I started to think about how to end the relationship, I got distracted by issues that weren't even part of the relationship."

Carlton asked, his voice low, "How to end it? Not whether?"

"How. I knew that before I even left town." She watched his eyes clear, and he relaxed yet a little bit more.

"For what it's worth," he said with a touch more of the Carlton she knew, "I'd lay money down on Henry being fully aware of what was going on." There was a grim set to his jaw and she knew she'd be asking him what he meant later.

"Yeah, well, that's a different problem. What occurred to me was that Shawn was delighted about Desperaux faking his own death. He was delighted that he stole the sixth Yerden painting. He obviously didn't help him do either of those things, but he for damn sure covered it up, and what's left of the cop in me says there's no way he hasn't done this kind of thing before."

"There's plenty left of the cop in you, O'Hara." His tone brooked no argument. "I'll be calling on that cop to help me track down Desperaux. Again."

"I don't think so." She sighed, squeezing his hand. "It's selfish of me, and yeah, it's illegal, since I'm an officer of the law and I know he's alive, but let's put him aside for awhile, please." She looked at him, silent, until the last of his natural resistance faded, and he simply nodded. "Thank you," she whispered.

"So far you've gotten me to agree to not kill Spencer and not hunt down a known criminal." There was that crooked smile she liked so much. "I'm losing my grip."

"You most certainly are not, and I'm going to have the bruised hands to prove it."

"Oh, God, I'm sorry," he said at once, releasing her hands, horrified.

She immediately reclaimed his, because not touching him now was out of the question. "I wasn't complaining."

He was gentler all the same, his long fingers curving around hers warmly.

"The rest of the Me story is simple. Finding out my boyfriend had been lying, covering up crimes to suit his own sense of entertainment, making a mockery of the police, fooling me into being a substandard partner—hush, I'm just telling you how I felt—and oh yeah, probably breaking hundreds of other laws to find out what he supposedly 'divined,' not to mention stealing his best friend's credit card at every opportunity and breaking into our financial records out of sheer nosiness—well," she said more slowly, "it's been a process of discovery, as you can tell. And then there was Frank."

"Frank… your father?"

"Yeah. I… never really got over being hurt by Shawn pushing him at me." She looked out toward the green trees, feeling an ache. "I told myself he was prompted by a noble impulse, but I don't know. It didn't feel very noble when he was continually ignoring all my requests for him to leave it alone. It felt like he was just trying to make himself feel good for having brought us back 'together.'"

"He was cruel," Carlton said quietly. "I could see how much he was hurting you."

"He was selfish," she corrected. "The cruelty was a byproduct." Letting go of him and leaning back, stretching her legs out, she breathed deeply and tried to let go of the mass of emotions by drinking in the sunshine.

Carlton got up and went to the railing, turning to lean against it, watching her. His blue eyes ever searching. She wondered what he really saw in her.

"So that's the bulk of it. I've been going over it in painful detail for nearly two weeks and what I knew instantly that day is still true. Every day I wake up, it's still true. I can't be with a man who's lied so long, to so many, no matter how many cases he closes. I can't be with a man who's very consistently undermined us and put our jobs on the line so many times. He's a decent guy; he has a good heart; he has Gus and Henry to protect him, and I know he never set out to do any of it, let alone hurt me, but I can't imagine ever being able to get past this, Carlton. I can't imagine why I should have to."

"You don't," he said simply. "He has to face the consequences of his actions just like the rest of us do."

"Yes." She stood up too, because the really hard part was coming. "You've been so wonderful to me this week. So supportive and so understanding. But I think what I'm about to say is going to be the most difficult for you to hear."

He was still, and the ten feet between them felt like a mile. "Say it." Everything about his demeanor screamed out this is going to hurt, and her heart twisted because it wasn't like that at all.

"I don't want him arrested. I don't want him in jail. I don't even want him fired."

His abrupt change of tack was evident in his expression, but it didn't take more than a second for that unnameable fear to turn to active disbelief and not a little anger. "The hell? O'Hara, you—"

"It's not worth it," she overrode him. "You know it's not."

"Then what the hell's the point? He gets to screw around like this for years and walk? And keep doing it? That's not right, O'Hara. That's not—"

"I didn't say he should walk. I want to give him a choice. He can tell Chief Vick the truth, or he can close up Psych and move on. If I won't be lied to, I can't let her be lied to either." She held his steely gaze for long tense seconds and then added, "She can arrest him if she wants. That's her choice. But I won't let him work for the SBPD without coming clean to her. If she wants to let him operate as a merely very observant consultant, that's her choice too."

"I won't work with him again," Carlton said with finality.

"Neither will I. Not any time soon. But he's solved enough cases that I'm not prepared to be the one to shut the door on his abilities."

"What about Henry?"

"I know you want to punish someone," she said gently. "I don't blame you and I've struggled with it myself. But Henry's a good cop and he's done good work for us and he and Shawn, well, they… they punish each other enough. We don't need to get involved."

His hand was on the railing, and Juliet didn't miss how tightly he clenched it. He looked away from her, jaw set again, eyes obviously immune now to the beauty of the mountain before them. She knew how this sounded to him. Not just because it seemed wrong to let the years of deception go unpunished, but because it was Shawn. Shawn, who had enjoyed so many ways to poke at him, mock him, second-guess him.

Someone needed to pay, he was thinking; she could read him well enough.

"Carlton," she pleaded. "Just think about it. You don't have to decide today. Just don't take any action until I come back."

That got his attention; he studied her again, the anger at bay. "How much longer are you staying?"

"I don't know. A week. Maybe two."

Why, was his unspoken question. Why?

"I'm not… done yet," she explained. "Understanding where I've been and knowing exactly where I'll end up aren't the same. I want to be prepared for anything when I come back."

"Okay." A little gruff.

"Plus there's one other thing."

He was clearly about to say now what? but stopped when she moved closer to him. His "What is it?" came out a bit gentler as a result, or so she hoped.

"You," she said simply, and covered his hand with hers. "Us."

"Oh," he breathed. "That."

Juliet smiled, and felt a lightening in her heart, in her spirits.

He said slowly, "You have a lot to think about."

"I do," she agreed, "but if you think I'm not going to kiss you now, you're very much mistaken."

Carlton's eyes were every shade of blue at once, it seemed, almost hypnotizing her with their intensity. He slid his arms around her waist. "I would never dream of stopping you."

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