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responding so quickly,” Talia said. As he walked away, talking into his radio, she heard something about “panic,” and “raccoons.”
    As she looked at the garbage tossed around her garage, Talia suddenly felt very, very tired. “How could you not check to make sure the door was locked?” she said again as she took a garbage bag from the box on a shelf and gingerly picked up an empty pretzel bag.
    “It was just a raccoon,” Rosario said defensively. “It was nothing.”
    “This time,” Talia snapped as she threw a bunch of rancid carrot tops into the bag. “But you heard him. He left to go investigate a rape. That could have been us. It could have been you—” Her voice choked on the thought.
    “Don’t get all paranoid again—”
    “Your sister’s right,” Jack snapped, and knelt down to scoop up some stray papers. “You can’t just think you lock the doors; you have to be sure—”
    “This is exactly why I live in the dorms,” Rosario snapped, and stomped back into the house.
    Talia snatched a milk carton from Jack’s hand. “You can go now,” she said, wincing at her peevish tone. “I’m sorry,” she added immediately, and sat back on her heels with a sigh. “I shouldn’t talk to you like that. It’s just, I thought I was past it, you know?” She pushed herself to her feet and held up her hand to show him how much it was shaking. “One minute I’m fine, sleeping like a baby,but all it takes is a wayward raccoon to send me into a full-blown freak-out.”
    Jack caught her arm, the warmth of his big palm seeping into her skin, making her suddenly aware of how cold the rest of her body was. She clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering as a shudder tumbled through her.
    “Next time it might not be nothing. Don’t beat yourself up for being prepared.”
    Talia let him pull her into the house. False alarm or not, the adrenaline rush of fear and the subsequent crash were real. And though she was loathe to admit it, it felt good to have him here, his strong presence, ready to spring into action at the slightest threat.
    She closed her eyes. Jack was not her personal knight in shining armor, and she couldn’t keep depending on him. She already owed him so much. She couldn’t keep adding to the list.

    Jack pulled Talia into her postage-stamp-sized kitchen and forced himself not to focus on the silky feel of her wrist under his fingers. Though she was trying hard to keep it together now that her intruder had turned out to be a furry bandit, she was clearly shaken up. She didn’t need him to start fondling her arm like some sexually frustrated perv.
    But it was damn hard to pull his hand away as he settled her into a spindly wooden chair. He gave her wrist one last squeeze, telling himself it was to comfort her, but it was just as much to savor a last quick feel of the smooth, milky, coffee-colored expanse.
    “You should let me redo the system,” he said. “Hook it back into the Gemini network so I get an alert when it goes off—”
    She looked up at him, her eyes shadowed with fatigue, her full mouth pulled into a wry half smile. “Really? So you can come running every time a raccoon gets in my trash? Besides, the Gemini alarm system would mean retro-fitting the house’s phone lines. Even if my landlord let me do it, I can’t afford to pay for it.”
    “I can—”
    “Don’t you dare offer to pay for it!” Talia snapped before he could even get the words out. “I’m sorry, I know I’m acting like a bitch, but you don’t need to do anything else for us.” She shook her head and huffed out a little laugh. “I know that sounds ridiculous given how much you’ve done for me and Rosie. But, Jack, it’s been over two years. Whatever debt you think you owe me for what happened, believe me, you’ve made up for it. You can let go of your guilt and stop worrying about us.”
    Goddamn, if only it was that simple, he thought as he studied her. So different now than the almost