Everyone was in a hurry. Everyone was out for themselves. No one gave a shit about anyone else. Long ago, kindness, courtesy, and civility had taken a hike.

So, yeah.

People annoyed me.

These were my thoughts as I felt the bed move again, and the bed moving freaked me way the fuck out.

So I opened my eyes and got freaked out a whole lot more.

Merry was not sneaking out of my room.

He was instead clothed and sitting on the edge of the bed, chin dipped, dark hair the good kind of hot mess, some of it falling on his forehead, sleepy, gorgeous blue eyes aimed at me.

He also had a hand coming my way, and I tensed when he used it to brush the hair off my neck, then curl it warm there.

God, no man had ever touched me like that.

Not one.

Not in thirty-four years.

“Hey,” he whispered.

What was happening?

“Hey,” I whispered back, uncertain how to proceed in this unprecedented situation.

“Didn’t wanna wake you.” He was still talking quietly. “But also didn’t wanna disappear on you.”

At his words, I felt something weird happening to me. Like the beginning of a release. A release that was both pain and relief, the kind that comes as a splinter is being pulled out.

Or a thorn is working its way out.

“I’m on this weekend,” he continued. “Gotta get home, shower, change clothes, get to the station.”

That was when something weirder happened to me.

I felt like I was going to cry.

The last two times I shed tears, I remembered.

One was sitting in Mimi’s Coffee Shop, listening to Alec Colton be cool to me after what I’d thought was a death blow had been delivered. Not a literal one, but definitely a figuratively emotional one.

The other was when I’d heard that Dennis Lowe was dead.

The first were tears of bitterness, sadness, defeat, and shame.

The last were tears of happiness.

Considering Merry was talking, I realized I had to pull my head together and respond.

So I said, “Okay.”

“I’m on all weekend, but we’ll talk later,” he declared.

I stared into his face, my eyes tipped up his way, not moving my head from the pillow.

I tried to read something, anything that would tell me what was going on in his mind.

He just looked sleepy and kind of cute.

This was shocking.

Garrett Merrick was all man, not all-cute man.

He was a cop. He was built, muscular but lean. His tough, sinewy frame, which I knew from my time as a waitress, then a stripper, and finally a bartender, concealed the power packed in his build. He wasn’t a hulk, and therefore, you might think you could mess with him when you absolutely could not. I knew this from looking at him. But he’d broken up three bar brawls in my tenure at J&J’s Saloon, so I’d also seen it firsthand.

Further, he was handsome in a smooth way that didn’t quite succeed in hiding the fact that, under the surface, he was not smooth at all. He was rough.