The Intelligence Unit Series
The Grifter Chapter 9

Thirty-six hours, two grueling workouts, and a pair of subarctic showers later, Shawn could still feel Frankie's hands on his body. They'd left Bang not long after their transaction with Alfie, heading back to the precinct to inventory the heroin. Frankie had been all business as they'd done the paperwork associated with the buy, then returned their panic buttons and the keys to the truck to their respective resting spots. The op had gone well-better than he'd hoped for, if he were being honest-and Shawn knew he should be happy. They'd established contact with Alfie. Started gaining his trust. But, yep, there were Frankie's hands again, pressing sweetly over his chest in his mind's eye, and Christ, he couldn't deny the truth.

No matter how hard he fought it, no matter how dangerous it was, she made him feel things.

And he didn't hate all of them.

"Hey!" Hale's bright voice broke through his thoughts, dumping him back to the right-now of the locker room at the precinct. "How did things go on Saturday night?"

Shawn slapped his feelings back into their hidey hole, but it was a tough fit. "Fine."

Hale waited a beat. Then another. Then one more for shits and grins before she said, "Okay, that's it. Let's go."

"Uh. Where?"

"You're taking me to breakfast," she said, her smile nothing short of angelic, and oh, hell. Nothing good was going to come from this.

"Why?"

"Because I'm hungry. Also"-wait, how were they already moving toward the door-"we're having a call to Jesus."

Shawn's heart climbed halfway up his windpipe. "I'm not sure that's necessary."

"Oh, believe me. It's necessary. Fork in the Road sound good?" Hale jingled the keys to the Challenger against her palm, and Shawn reviewed his (admittedly limited) options. He could argue, but he knew from experience it would get him jack with a side order of shit. Or, he could go with her, feed his face, and let his defenses do the same job they'd been doing for the past eight years.

We have a winner. "Fine. But I'm driving."

"Suit yourself." She tossed him the keys, and great, he was screwed. She never gave in that easily.

The trip to the Fork in the Road was a quick one despite the morning rush, and they were in a booth with giant cups of coffee-his, black, and hers with so much sugar and cream, the spoon practically stood by itself-in less time than Shawn would've liked. He could avoid the reason she'd dragged him to breakfast for a little while, he knew, but in the end, it would be pointless. Better to just yank the Band-Aid clean off.

"So, why is it, exactly, that we're here? Other than the home fries, anyway," Shawn said, because they were pretty much the stuff of legend, and he had a fifty-fifty shot at distracting Hale by way of her stomach.

A bet he'd have lost if he'd taken it, as it turned out. "Aw. You're so cute when you're being thick."

"I'm not sure what you mean," he said, but she speared him with a look that reminded him why she was such a good cop.

"Maxwell, please. I'm your partner." Placing her elbows on the Formica, she leaned toward him, her voice softening. "You've been brooding all over the precinct ever since we started the Beck case, and you and Frankie have some sort of weird energy zapping all over the place between you. If you really don't want to tell me what the hell is going on, I'll have to live with that. You're private. I get it. But for the love of God, do me a favor and don't bullshit me by telling me you're fine. I know you too well to believe that. Plus, it's insulting that you'd try."

"Seriously. I really am fine," was what he meant to say. The words were locked and loaded, right there in his mouth.

But what came out was, "Frankie was my first partner after our rookie year," and see, this was why he didn't let himself feel shit. Emotions made him f*****g gabby.

Hale's shoulders hit the back of their booth with a thump. "Holy crap, Maxwell. Are you serious?"

He watched her thoughts click together, one by one, until... "Wait. She said she was stabbed on a call when she was a cop here. Were you-oh, my God."

Their waitress chose that moment to deliver the food they'd ordered just after they'd arrived, and it gave him time to figure out how to respond.

"Yeah," he said, more to his breakfast special than to Hale. "I was there."

"Does Sinclair know? Not judging if he doesn't," she added quickly. "Just trying to figure out how far into the vault I need to stow this, is all."

God, she was a great partner, and an even better friend. "Sinclair knows Frankie and I were partners, and he knows she was stabbed. That part is in my record."

Shawn trailed off, and Hale forked up a bite of scrambled eggs. "Okay. Isn't that all there is to know?"

Enough dread formed in Shawn's belly that not even the spicy, delicious home fries on his plate could chase it away. But Hale had already picked up on the tension he felt around Frankie. It wouldn't take her long to figure out the rest, then give him a giant ration of crap for not having disclosed.

"So, uh. Not exactly. Frankie and I sort of used to"-date. Have sheet-ripping s*x. Be so in love with each other, it hurt-"be a thing."

Hale's fork stopped, mid-move. "How much of a thing?"

Shawn blew out a breath. "A lot, okay?"

"Oh, I'm gonna need more than that, my friend."

This right here was why she was such a goddamn shark at interrogations. One look, and he was spilling his guts in seventeen different directions. "I asked her to move in with me. Disclose to the department that we were together. The whole nine." Starting at the beginning, he gave Hale a big-picture history of how he and Frankie had met at the academy, then again when they'd been partnered after their mandatory year with veteran officers on patrol. He left out some of the more sordid details when he got to the part where they took their partnership out of the friend zone, but Hale had a stellar imagination; plus, hello, she was a f*****g detective. She'd piece it together.

Shawn stumbled a little when he got to the part in the story where Frankie had been stabbed, then a bit more at the way he and Frankie had shut each other out during the brutal months that had followed. Thankfully, Frankie had been an open book with everyone in the unit about being an addict-she left early every Wednesday to go to NA meetings-so Shawn wasn't betraying her privacy when he ended the story with Frankie leaving Remington so she could enter rehab.

"Okay, so wait." Hale lifted a hand, blond brows sky-high. "Six months after Frankie was stabbed, she told you she was going to Atlanta to do rehab for a drug problem she hid from you, and that was it? You never talked to her again? Not even in an IM?" "Not until a couple weeks ago, no." The times he stealth-checked her online didn't count, and he'd only done that a handful of times to make sure she was okay.

Hale's ponytail brushed her shoulders as she shook her head. "You didn't call her. At all."

"To be fair, she told me she needed to get away from Remington and start over," Shawn pointed out, trying not to scowl. He'd wanted to call a thousand times. But Frankie had been hurting. Hiding from him. She'd needed so many things he couldn't give her. The one thing he could give her was space to heal, and so he had. Even when it had hurt unimaginably. "She needed medical help. Professional intervention. I didn't really have a choice but to let her go."

"Maybe not in the beginning," Hale agreed. "But how about later?"

“།

I thought about it," he admitted for the first time ever out loud. "But she'd made it really clear she needed to go far away in order to get right side up. I didn't want to remind her of the bad shit she'd been through." There were other reasons, of course. Not ones he'd blab about-not even to Hale, with her freaky deaky interrogation powers.

After all, my emotions distracted me enough to let Frankie get stabbed wouldn't exactly inspire confidence in a partner, and anyway, he'd gone to great f*****g lengths to make sure something like that would never happen again.

He straightened, tightening his grip on his nearly empty coffee cup. "Frankie knew where I was. If she'd wanted to talk to me, she could've easily found me. I left the ball in her court, and she never hit it."

Hale opened her mouth-to counter, if the look on her face was any indication-but then snapped her lips shut and regarded him for a minute before seeming to redirect. "And what about now?"

"Now is..." Shawn trapped the word 'fine' between his teeth, but Hale had never missed a trick. She wasn't about to start now.

"Let me guess. Fine?" Her ached brows told him what she thought about that little refrain, but nope. No way. He couldn't back down. Not on this.

"Yes. It's fine. Frankie's fine, I'm fine. We're working the case together, just fine."

"So, you've talked about all of this," Hale said.

Shawn's heart thudded behind his long-sleeved T-shirt. "There's nothing to talk about, other than the case."

Hale laughed. "I'm saying this from a place of love, sweetheart, but God, you're a dumbass."

"Excuse me?"

She looked him square in the eye and smiled. "You. Are a. Dumbass. Look, I get it. Frankie was your partner, and you cared about her. Then you experienced the trauma of her being stabbed right in front of you."

"I wasn't the one who experienced trauma," he said through his teeth. For f**k's sake, Frankie had been the one to lose thirty percent of her blood volume, most of it through his fingers.

Hale, however, was a Pit bull in plainclothes. "You weren't the one who got stabbed, no. But you were there. You were Frankie's partner, and you cared about her on a pretty personal level. Like it or not, Maxwell, you share that trauma." "She's the one who suffered," he argued.

"I have no doubt that she did," Hale said. Her green eyes filled with soft honesty, and damn it, why couldn't they just be dodging active gunfire instead of talking about this? "Frankie's injury sounds terrible, and I'm not trying to downplay her pain or the challenge of

her addiction and recovery. But she's dealt with those, Shawn. She went to rehab and sorted through all of her demons and she came out on the other side. So, I guess the only question left to ask is, have you?"

Oh, his defenses were the stuff of champions, because they made him say, "I don't have demons."

Hale's smile was far too knowing. "Everyone has demons."

"Even you?"

"Of course, even me." Hale rolled her eyes. "Nice left turn, by the way. A for effort. But I'm not letting you off the hook."

Heart thudding, Shawn sat back against the booth. "Look, even if I did know what to say to her, I'm not sure airing out our past is a great idea. There's a lot there, and we're working a case."

"Don't you think that's an excellent reason to get your feelings out in the open?"

Uh... "What?"

Hale's smile never left her face, even as she shook her head. "Do you remember last year, when Hollister had that toothache?"

Shawn blinked. "And the non sequitur of the year award goes to..."

"Hear me out," she said, twirling a finger in a come on motion. "So, do you?"

"Uh, yeah." He grunted out a laugh. "Hollister bitched so hard, I don't think any of us will ever forget it."

"Exactly. He complained for weeks. And here's the thing. That toothache bugged him and bugged him, to the point of total distraction, because he didn't deal with it. He didn't get any relief until he finally sucked it up and went to the dentist." Shawn lifted a brow, unable to stop himself from pointing out, "Actually, Isabella dragged him. If I remember right, there was literal kicking and screaming."

"Uh-huh," Hale said, and he caught her segue just a beat too late. Shit. "You think it'll be a distraction to talk about the past with Frankie. But, oh, hey, spoiler alert: you're not going to be able to put whatever it is that you're feeling behind you unless you do. That weird tension you've got going on? It's not going to go away, no matter how hard you try to pretend it isn't there."

Shawn's throat tightened. He wanted to tell her how dangerous it was when he let his emotions out-for f**k's sake, Frankie had nearly died. He couldn't afford to do anything other than lock his feelings away in the tidy little compartments he'd made for them eight years ago.

But damn it, she was right. His chest had been churning ever since Frankie had walked through the door of the Intelligence Unit, her chin high and every last one of her emotions unapologetically on display. She was capable and smart and, Christ, so honest, it snatched the breath right out of him. Despite his Herculean efforts not to, she made him feel things.

Now all he had to do was figure out if he could trust himself enough to tell her so he could get past it.