Free It Had to Be You by Jill Shalvis

that she’d gotten as a gag gift for her birthday from her sister. “No,” she said quickly. “Wait— That’s not mine—”
    Cop number two pulled a Catwoman costume from the bag and then a massive, eye-popping neon-pink vibrator.
    Teddy gawked at the sheer size of the thing. “You have a vibrator?”
    “It was a gag gift,” Ali said, sure she was as pink as the vibrator.
    Still standing stoic and steady as ever, Luke eyed the items without a word.
    “You have a vibrator,” Teddy repeated in disbelief. “Is that why we hadn’t had sex in two months?”
    Once again Luke’s hand settled on Ali. Just as well since there were two—no three —cops watching. So she didn’t go for Teddy’s throat, a fact she considered a real feat of restraint.
    But it wasn’t restraint at all. It was burning humiliation, anger, and something else.
    Terror.
    And that terror was tripled when the cops finished searching both the house and her truck. Though they didn’t find the money, they took her downtown anyway.

Chapter 6
    L uke stood in the center of his living room, which looked like it’d been tossed by a couple of thieves.
    Hurricane Ali.
    He didn’t know what to make of the fact that she’d been caught with the bill wrapper. Nor did he know what to make of her being taken to the station for questioning.
    But he did know one thing. Marshall—he refused to think of him as Teddy —had rubbed him the wrong way.
    Still, this wasn’t his problem. He didn’t know Ali from Adam. What he did know was that he didn’t want to get involved. He was on break from getting involved. In spite of what his commander wanted, he had nineteen days left on his leave, and he planned on using every single one of them to do jack shit. He was looking forward to it.
    But for reasons he couldn’t explain, he couldn’t dispel the image of Ali at the station, sitting in an interrogation room, in trouble.
    He’d always believed in the system. He’d had to. It was what had made his job so important to him. Take down the bad guys and let the courts keep them down—that had been his life, his entire reason for being.
    But then that very system had failed him. And he’d failed too. He’d failed the people who believed in the system. And now he was taking a break from people so he couldn’t fail again.
    Which in no way explained why, instead of putting the house back together, or hell, going back to paddleboarding, he ended up in front of his laptop.
    He’d already done that basic search on Ali, but he hadn’t gone far. He picked up where he’d left off. Her mother had a record: two arrests for assault and battery, one, apparently, for the baseball bat incident Ali had told him about. Both times the charges had been reduced, and Mimi Winters had been let out on time served. Ali’s sister, Harper, had a record as well, for indecent exposure.
    Nothing for Ali. Though going back further, he caught a few additional times where she’d been questioned, one for an incident involving her science teacher, who’d allegedly been sexually inappropriate with his students. Christ, he hoped she hadn’t been one of them. Leaning back in his chair, Luke stared at his screen. He already knew that she was protective, loyal, and tough as hell. Now he also knew that she’d grown up knee-high in shit, and yet somehow she appeared to come out of it with a sweet kindness that was to-the-bone genuine.
    And she was innocent in regard to the money. He felt it deep in his gut.
    He researched Ted Marshall next. There’d been the basic search done when Marshall had applied for the lease, but Luke went deeper without remorse, because something wasn’t right.
    The golden boy had certainly sailed through life so far. He’d been raised here in town, was captain of the football team, and had gone on to the University of Washington, graduating with a degree in political science. He’d not gotten into law school, so he’d come back to Lucky Harbor. He paid his bills