When I'm With You: Part VII by Beth Kery

not hear. In Laura’s case they’d been things Shane would have paid any price to permanently erase from his memory banks.
    She abruptly broke free and sprinted ahead of the pursuing reporters and photographers. He pulled up a few feet in front of her as she ran down Erie Street and slammed on the brakes.
    “Get in,” he barked through the lowered window.
    She pulled up short, her eyes widening when she saw him. She hesitated.
    “Get in the damn car, Laura. They’ll be all over you in a second.”
    Once she’d made her decision she moved fleetly. He stomped on the accelerator the second she’d slammed the door. One of the members of the rushing media slapped the back of his car in frustration as it took off down the street.
    For almost a minute neither of them spoke as he merged onto Lake Shore Drive south. It struck him as surreal to be driving a car with Laura Vasquez in the passenger seat. This morning he’d never have guessed in a million years that this was how his day would end.
    “You shouldn’t have done that, Shane. One of them might have seen your license plate and figured out that I was just picked up by the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Chicago offices—the same man who was responsible for Huey’s arrest.”
    “
Huey
was responsible for his arrest, Laura.”
    His stern tone might have been an attempt to neutralize the effect her low, husky voice had on his body. She was one of three people on the face of the earth who actually called him by his given name—his mother and father being the other two. He hadn’t heard it coming off her tongue for more than a dozen years now.
    He glanced over at her, taking in the clean, harmonious curves and angles of her profile against the lights of the city, a flawless diamond set among glittering rhinestones. She appeared calm and untouched by his provocative statement.
    How did she really feel about her husband’s death? He forced his stare back to the road.
    As usual it was impossible to plumb her depths. She was the one person he’d ever encountered who represented incontrovertible truth that his ability to judge another human being’s character was grievously flawed. His peers would say that was Shane’s expertise—the ability to comprehend people’s motivations, to predict how they’d act given a certain set of circumstances.
    The fact that his feelings toward Laura were such a stark discrepancy of what they
should
be given reality bugged the shit out of him. It’d been like a burr under his skin for thirteen and a half years, a wound that just wouldn’t heal no matter how he tried to forget her and move on with his life.
    “So what if they do realize it was me?” he muttered. “I’ll say that I picked you up for questioning.”
    “Is that really what you’re doing?”
    For a brief second their eyes met in the shadows. “Questioning you has never gotten me anywhere in the past, has it, Laura?”
    She looked like she was about to say something but then she stopped herself. Her face looked set and pale—the most beautiful mask he’d ever seen in his life. He resisted an urge to pull the car over and shake her until she showed him something. Her rage. Her sadness. Her passion.
    Anything
but this cold indifference.
    “Where are you taking me?”
    He blinked at the mundane question in the midst of such a charged moment. Charged for
him
, anyway.
    “I don’t know. Where do you want to go?”
    “So you’re really not taking me in for questioning?”
    He cast a hard look in her direction. “Didn’t the police question you?”
    “Yes. At the hospital. They said they’d be contacting me in the morning to clarify a few other things. I received the news that Huey had passed away as they were questioning me . . .”
    He didn’t say anything for a few seconds when she trailed off. Huey Mays’s unexpected death by suicide pissed him off so much that he’d practically been blind with rage for a few seconds as he stood there in front