Kara frowned at her beer.

“I don’t care about your criminal past. You obviously overcame it.”

“I just—well, I don’t usually talk about my parents or my personal life. You must be a monster in interrogations.”

“I hold my own. I suspect you do, too.”

She simply smiled.

“And?” Matt prompted. “Did you become emancipated?”

“No need to. She didn’t come back before I turned eighteen. So—all that goes into me not liking to take shit from anyone. I didn’t have a lot of friends—who could I trust with any of that crap? But there was another girl my age who had a rough life. Hell of a lot rougher than me—my parents were assholes, but they never hit me or starved me or pimped me out. Anyway, like me, Jamie was living with her grandparents. We became friends. She went to a party. I told her not to go.” Kara paused for a long minute and Matt wondered what she was thinking. About the past or what to share with him? Then she shrugged and said, “She was drugged and raped. A common story. I didn’t take it well.”

“You—?”

“Not me. I mean, I wasn’t drugged or raped. But Jamie was so twisted up and I wanted to kill someone. Instead, I killed his car. Maddox didn’t so much arrest me, as detain me. I told him everything, and he told me I should be a cop, because if I continued down the path I was on I’d be in prison.” She paused. “I didn’t tell your friends upstairs all that. Just the end result. And described in detail what I did to the Corvette that prick owned.”

“You’ve led an interesting life. And you’re what? Thirty?”

“You’ve been checking on me.”

“Your boss gave the basics. I figured you went to the academy right after high school and since you’ve been a cop for twelve years, that makes you thirty.”

“Turned the big three-oh in January. Now your turn.”

“I’m thirty-seven.”

“I meant, what’s your deep dark secret.”

The waitress came over and asked if they wanted a last call—it was eleven and they were shutting down the bar, even though it was a Friday night. So it was with cheap hotel bars in the middle of nowhere.

Matt shouldn’t, but he ordered another Scotch. Kara smiled at him—damn, she was sexy—and ordered another tequila shot.

“I have no deep dark secrets,” he said. He had some dark stories, and he didn’t want to talk about Beth. “And I doubt that’s your deepest or darkest.”

Why had he said that? What was he asking for?

“I tell you my parents are petty criminals and you led a perfectly normal life?”

“My dad was career military—he came over from Cuba when he was a kid. My mom is first generation. My dad was so proud to be an American. He enlisted when he was eighteen, planned on serving for six years then going to college. But he loved the Navy, stuck with it.”