Read Sacred Sins for Free Online Page A

doesn't have enough class.”
    She leaned forward and dropped her chin on her folded hands. “You might be a good detective after all. It's Tess.”
    “Tess.” He tried it out slowly, then nodded. “Very nice. Tell me, Tess, why psychiatry?”
    She watched him a moment, admiring the easy way he sprawled in his seat. Not indolent, she thought, notsloppy, just relaxed. She envied that. “Curiosity,” she said again. “The human mind is full of unanswered questions. I wanted to find the answers. If you can find the answers, you can help, sometimes. Heal the mind, ease the heart.”
    It touched him. The simplicity. “Ease the heart,” he repeated, and thought of his brother. No one had been able to ease his. “You think if you heal one, you can ease the other?”
    “It's the same thing.” Tess looked beyond him to a couple who huddled laughing over a pitcher of beer.
    “I thought all you got paid to do was look in heads.”
    Her lips curved a little, but her eyes still focused beyond him. “The mind, the heart, and the soul. ‘Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased. Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow. Raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with some sweet oblivious antidote cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart.’”
    He'd lifted his gaze from his drink as she'd spoken. Her voice remained quiet, but he'd stopped hearing the juke, the clatter, the laughter.
    “Macbeth.”
When she smiled at him, he shrugged. “Cops read too.”
    Tess lifted her glass in what might have been a toast. “Maybe we should both reevaluate.”

    I T was still drizzling when they turned back into the parking lot at headquarters. The gloom had brought the dark quickly, so that puddles shone beneath streetlights and the sidewalks were wet and deserted. Washington kept early hours. She'd waited until now to ask him what she'd wondered all evening.
    “Ben, why did you become a cop?”
    “I told you, I like catching bad guys.”
    The seed of truth was there, she thought, but not the whole. “So you grew up playing cops and robbers, and decided to keep right on playing?”
    “I always played doctor.” He pulled up beside her car and set the brake. “It was educational.”
    “I'm sure. Then why the switch to public service?”
    He could've been glib, he could've evaded. Part of his charm for women was his ability to do both with an easy smile. Somehow, for once, he wanted to tell the simple truth. “All right, now I've a quote for you. ‘The law is but words and paper without the hands and swords of men.’” With a half smile he turned to see her studying him calmly. “Words and paper aren't my way of handling things.”
    “And the sword is?”
    “That's right.” He leaned over to open her door. Their bodies brushed but neither acknowledged the physical tug. “I believe in justice, Tess. It's a hell of a lot more than words on paper.”
    She sat a moment, digesting. There was violence in him, ordered and controlled. Perhaps the word was
trained
, but it was violence nonetheless. He'd certainly killed, something her education and personality completely rejected. He'd taken lives, risked his own. And he believed in law and order and justice. Just as he believed in the sword.
    He wasn't the simple man she'd first pegged him to be. It was a lot to learn in one evening. More than enough, she thought, and slid aside.
    “Well, thanks for the drink, Detective.”
    As she pushed out of the car, Ben was out on the other side. “Don't you have an umbrella?”
    She sent him an easy smile as she dug for her keys. “I never carry it when it rains.”
    Hands in his back pockets, he sauntered over to her. For reasons he couln't pinpoint, he was reluctant to lether go. “Wonder what a head doctor would make of that?”
    “You don't have one either. Good night, Ben.”
    He knew she wasn't the shallow, overeducated sophisticate he'd labeled her. He found himself holding her door open