The Strong Silent Type Read Online Free PDF Page B

surprised him by taking hold of his hand in hers. “Thanks.”
    The simple gratitude he both saw in her eyes and heard in her voice stirred something within him and made him uneasy. He shrugged her words away.
    Emotions of any kind, other than cold, steely anger, made him uncomfortable. They always had. He’d never had any outlet for them. The parents he’d once wanted so desperately to notice him, to get themselves clean and turn him and them into a real family, had rejected him. They had ignored him for as far back as he could remember. Instead, they had more interest in the drugs that could remove them from their world and take them to somewhere he had no desire to go.
    Even as a kid, he’d known that drugs were bad. He’d watched firsthand as first his father, then his mother became firmly entrenched—because of drugs—in the land of the living dead.
    He’d attempted, in his own way, to make his parents come around. He’d cooked, cleaned and tried to take care of them. There were tiny glimmers, moments when he thought things were finally on the right path, but in the end, all his efforts came to nothing.
    When he was just twelve, a drug dealer, enraged because his parents were into him for several hundred dollars, had killed them both. Snuffed out their lives without so much as a peep from either for them. They were that far gone into their make-believe worlds.
    And he had seen it all through the crack created by the doorjamb and a closet door.
    He’d tried to wake them, knowing even as he desperately shook his mother, then his father, that they were both dead. And he’d been the one who had called 911 to report their murders.
    Any shred of childhood he might have still possessed died with his parents that day. He’d become a man with all the burdens, all the sorrows that entailed. A man within a boy’s body, but still a man.
    Which was why he had such a hard time in the system, a hard time trying to adjust to strangers, some of whom did their best to make him feel at home. Strangers who thought their rules applied to him. They didn’t realize that it was too late for him. He didn’t fit into a family structure anymore.
    That door had closed for him when he was twelve.
    He’d grown up isolated, insulated, not needing anyone or anything and not allowing anyone to need him.
    So what was he doing here, letting this woman hang on to his hand as if it were her tether back to life as she waited for a resident doctor to examine her? Why wasn’t he back at the apartment complex, taking down statements, doing his job? That was what he was good at—detective work, not comforting.
    Hell, he wouldn’t be able to comfort someone if his life depended on it. He just didn’t know how. So there was absolutely no point in trying.
    Yet Cavanaugh seemed glad to see him, glad to hang on to his hand as if it were some kind of talisman that could keep her safe. Her hand felt small within his. It made him want to protect her.
    “You looked scared.” He finally answered her earlier question.
    He knew it wasn’t the right thing to say, but it was why he was here. He saw no point in sugarcoating, or lying. He’d used lies to survive on the street when he’d run away from his last foster home. When he’d wound up living in an abandoned warehouse with another kid named Tierney. Used lies until the lines between reality and fantasy became completely blurred for him. He wasn’t about to go there anymore. The path back always became hard to find.
    Teri’s first instinct was to say, no, she wasn’t scared. The only thing that scared her was having harm come to the members of her family. Beyond that, she was pretty much fearless—like the rest of them.
    But her reaction to hospitals, to what they represented to her, wasn’t logical. It wasn’t anything she wanted to explain to Hawk. “I don’t expect you to understand.”
    The nurse had returned to take her pulse, then asked her a couple of quick questions, all of which