Undercover Lover by Jamie K. Schmidt Page B

I have a change of clothes, and I can sleep on my table in the office tonight.”
    Drake shook his head. “Stay at a hotel instead. One of the five star ones with a spa. Isn’t that what you girls like? Get a massage or a facial or something.”
    “I’m really not in the pampering mood.”
    “You don’t need to deal with all this on your own. Don’t you have a friend to call?”
    Pam shook her head. “Not locally. I’d rather not get anyone involved in this.”
    “I hate the thought of you being alone tonight.”
    “So drive me to the hospital, and I’ll spend the night walking the wards and visiting patients. I’d be doing that anyway, if it was my swing-shift night. Does that work for you?”
    “What would work for me was to have you under guard until we get some answers out of Oksana. But I don’t have the budget for it.”
    This time, she put her hand on his knee for comfort. He didn’t jump, but a part of him did take notice. “Thanks for thinking of me, but I’ve been in worse spots.”
    “Is there a reason why you’re the neighborhood pariah?”
    “What do you mean?”
    He was a little disappointed when she snatched her hand back. Drake reached over and brought the back of her hand to his lips. “I like you.”
    “Thanks,” she said dryly, but at least he’d gotten her to smile.
    “My father gambled a lot,” she said, letting him hold on to her hand. “He owed money to just about everyone in the neighborhood. Then one day, we were foreclosed upon. He’d sold the house to the bookies to save his own skin. We didn’t see him for a few months after that. He caught up with my brother and me at school because he didn’t know where we lived anymore.”
    “Where did you live?”
    Pam shrugged. “Depended on the day. Outside, if it was warm enough. Churches. Libraries. Pretty much any twenty-four-hour place that was willing to look the other way.”
    “How old were you?”
    “High school. Darren got caught driving the getaway car soon after.”
    “He was tried as an adult. Geez, you think they would have gone easy on him.”
    Pam nodded. “His lawyer was a joke. I couldn’t convince him to appeal the decision, and Darren…well, he was determined that prison was now his new home.”
    Drake felt a chill. It was what the vor z vakone , the thief-in-laws, thought. Darren was too young to be in the Russian gulags, obviously, but the new vor had similar traditions. At some point, someone should have intervened with Darren and stopped him from pursuing this future.
    “He told me he no longer had a family. No mother, no father. I was no longer his sister.”
    Drake swallowed. Another part of the thieves’ code. The only reason Drake knew this was because he’d tried to join. Only, they’d laughed at him because he wasn’t Russian. All Darren had to do was forsake his old man and go to jail, and he would be a candidate—if he survived.
    “I told him I would always be his sister. He told me I was just a woman.”
    “Looks like the vor got their hooks into him.”
    “You seem to know a lot about them.”
    “At one point, I wanted to be them.”
    “Why?” Pam said, her tone unbelieving.
    “Respect, tradition, family, loyalty, and power. All the things I didn’t have and had no idea how to get.”
    “But you became a cop? How do you go from being a wannabe gangster to being a detective?”
    “I joined the police academy to be their man on the inside.” Drake had waited until he had parked the car at the station so he could see her full reaction. He regretted it when she gripped the door handle like she was going to jump out.
    “You’re a dirty cop?” she whispered, her beautiful eyes wide with fear.
    He cursed. He had wanted to make her laugh. He didn’t think she’d take him seriously. “No. I found all of that at the academy. Including some more things, like friendship and honor. By the time I graduated, I was on the right track.”
    “Of course, if you were a dirty cop, you