by Lucy Score
“About time you moved on from that smug shit sandwich,” Mrs. Penny said.
He wondered if smug shit sandwich was the guy who’d put the rings on her finger. He gave Riley’s shoulder an affectionate squeeze. “You okay there, babe?”
She looked like she was one second away from reverting to her junk punching plan.
“Great,” she rasped to his relief. “Just great.”
“Well, Nick. I’m Mrs. Penny, and after a background check you’re welcome here anytime for dinner… or breakfast.” She gave them a slow, disturbing wink.
“Uh. Thanks, Mrs. Penny. It was nice to meet you,” he said, releasing Riley and offering his hand out the window. The woman’s grip was surprisingly strong.
“Mrs. Penny, did you get your driver’s license back?” Riley asked.
The woman turned a shade of pink. “You know, I think I might have left my iron on. I’d better go check! Toodle-oo!”
Nick watched as she trucked toward the back door of the building.
“First of all. How old is Mrs. Penny? She looks like she’s 105, but she moves like she’s in her forties,” he observed.
“She’s eighty. Now, please leave without murdering any of my neighbors.”
Baffled, he grinned. “You seriously think I’m here to murder someone?”
“You knocked on my door under false pretenses looking for Dickie Frick, not collecting candy money. Then I find you lurking in the parking lot two days later. You’re obviously up to no good,” she pointed out.
“So you’d get in a car with someone you thought was a murderer? That’s irresponsible. Didn’t your parents teach you Stranger Danger?”
“First of all, no. My parents didn’t teach me Stranger Danger. Secondly, I can junk punch a whole lot harder than any of my neighbors, so I’d rather you have to go through me to get to them. And third, excuse me, stalker. You don’t get to pass judgment on me.”
“You shouldn’t take unnecessary chances, Riley.”
“Don’t tell me what to do, Nick.”
They sat in a short, tense silence.
“Thanks for not blowing my cover,” he said finally.
“I didn’t do it for you. I did it to get Mrs. Penny away from your car.”
“I’m not here to hurt anyone,” he promised, flashing her a grin.
She appeared to be immune to his dimples. This was uncharted territory for Nick Santiago.
“You said if I played along, you’d give me anything I wanted. I want answers. Why are you stalking me and my neighbors?” she demanded.
“I’m not stalking. I’m surveilling. There’s a very important legal distinction.”
“Semantics,” she said. “Why are you ‘surveilling’?”
“Well, before you stood on my hood and gawked at me like a Bieber fan, I was trying to catch your neighbor Dickie—”
“My uncle,” she corrected. “And I was not gawking.”
“Yeah, right. And Mrs. Penny is your second cousin once removed, and I’m actually selling candy,” he scoffed.
“You were creeping, and I spotted you creeping. You’re a conspicuous creeper.”
“Surveilling. I’m a conspicuous surveiller, and no, I’m not.” Nick sighed. “You’re the first neighbor to spot me.”
“Most of my neighbors are nearsighted and half deaf. What do you want with Dickie?” she demanded.
“All I want to do is hand him a couple of papers.”
“And then what? Shoot him in the head?”
Pretty Riley Thorn had quite the imagination.
“I’m a private investigator, Thorn, not a hitman. I don’t generally shoot people,” Nick said with an exasperated laugh.
She gave him a long searching look that felt like she was prying into his soul. He was most definitely imagining the tingle he felt in his chest.
They sat there locked in a staring contest, and when Riley finally blew out a breath and relaxed against the seat, the tingle in his chest went away.
“Okay. How much trouble is he in?” she asked.
“Some,” he said evasively.
She spied the papers on the dash and grabbed them.
“Hey, Nancy Drew, hands off the paperwork.”
“Trademark infringement?” she read and collapsed against the seat with a relieved laugh. “Wait a minute. Dickie is only fifty-seven? He looks like he’s a hundred.”
Nick snatched the papers back. “Apparently he’s perverting the Nature Girl brand without the organization’s permission.”
“Ew. Dickie owns that gross bar?” Her nose wrinkled, and she got even cuter.
Nature Girls was a bar on the seedier end of Harrisburg that dressed its servers up in pornographic knockoffs of actual Nature Girl uniforms. They wore short pleated kilts, cropped button-downs, and suspenders covered in naughtier versions of Nature Girl pins.
“You don’t know what your uncle who lives across the hall from you does for a living?” he teased.
“We’re not a close family.”
“You live together,” he pointed out.
“People don’t get killed over trademark infringement, right?” she asked, ignoring his question and looking very, very serious.
“Not usually. But they do get sued for a lot of money. Like your fake uncle here if he doesn’t respond to these papers,” Nick explained.
That seemed to appease her, and Riley visibly relaxed. “So you chase people around with papers for a living?” she asked, stretching her legs out.
He couldn’t help but send her thighs an admiring glance. “Sometimes.”
“Your job might be more boring than mine,” she said, looking around the interior of his vehicle. It was littered with protein bar wrappers and empty bottles of water.
“You don’t find all this glitz and glamor impressive?” he asked. “By the way, don’t drink out of that Mountain Dew bottle.”
“How long have you been sitting here?” she asked, eyeing the bottle with a mix of fascination and horror.
“Two hours so far today. Client said they’d pay for it.”
“Hate to break it to you, but he doesn’t usually come home until ten on Thursday nights.”
“Christ,” he said, glancing down at his watch. “I’m not sitting here for another three hours. Are you sure about ten?”
She nodded. “Thursday nights, he comes home, showers, and watches NCIS reruns.”
“How thin are your walls?” he asked.
“You can practically see through them.”
It was time to turn up the charm.
“Okay, let’s go,” Nick said, hitting the unlock button and opening his door.
“Where?” she asked, scrambling out.
He crossed to her Jeep, stuffed the serve papers into one of the grocery bags, then looped the handles over his wrists. “Your place,” he said.
She wrinkled her nose. It was a cute nose. “Have you lost your mind?” she asked.
“What kind of boyfriend would I be if I watched my girl carry all this stuff up all those stairs?”
“A fake one?” she shot back.
But he was already heading in the direction of the back door.
9
7:15 p.m., Thursday, June 18
Nick’s ass going up stairs turned out to be the distraction Riley had been looking for. Staring at worn denim moving over taut muscle had an anesthetizing effect on the panic she’d spent all day squashing.
Griffin’s ass had always been a little too flat for her liking. He didn’t have any tattoos either. Or dimples. He’d also never voluntarily carried anything anywhere. Not groceries, not laundry, not even Riley across the threshold on their wedding night.
He claimed it was because his hands were an important part of his job. He’d taken his class in on-camera gesticulations very seriously.
Nick, however, carried groceries like a champ, and his ass was much, much nicer. She also caught a glimpse of ink on his upper arm when it peeked out from the sleeve of his t-shirt.
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Her brain coughed up another glimpse of that hideous bedspread and glorious, naked flesh, causing her to stumble on the stairs. She wondered if there was any way to will one vision to actually happen—Naked Hot Nick—while preventing another—Dead Dickie.
“You okay back there?” he asked with the sexy arch of an eyebrow.
“Yep,” she lied. “Falling down the stairs is a hobby of mine.”
He gave her an “I know you were checking out my ass” grin before continuing up.
They made it all the way to the third floor without spotting any other neighbors.
Riley stepped past him and unlocked the door. “Come on in,” she said, glancing nervously at Dickie’s closed door.
Her underwear-dropping neighbor would be royally pissed if he knew she’d helped a PI track him down. But if her vision actually came true, Dickie had bigger problems than trademark infringement.
Nick wasn’t here to hurt Dickie. She was reasonably certain. Maybe she didn’t exactly know how to wield her whackadoo “gifts,” but she wasn’t getting any homicidal maniac vibes from him.
Besides, it would have taken her two trips to haul all of the groceries herself.
“Nice view,” Nick said, nodding toward the river through the dormer windows. He put the bags down on her sliver of countertop and started unpacking them.
Riley blinked and then stepped in to start putting the food away. “Thanks.”
“Might be the ugliest couch I’ve ever seen,” he said, eyeing the offending brown and green checkered loveseat.
He wasn’t wrong. The previous tenant must have had a cat because stuffing was actively trying to escape one of the arms. “It came with the room,” she said.
He held up a bag of cheese curls in one hand and seaweed crunch treats in the other, the look on his face questioning.
She took both bags from him and opened the cabinet above the sink. The cheese curls went in first, followed by the seaweed bag propped in front as camouflage.
“What?” she asked, noting his appraising look.
“You’re a good girl, aren’t you?” he said.
She was immediately offended because he sure as hell didn’t mean it as a compliment. “Excuse me?”
“You live alone, but you make your bed every morning,” he pointed out.
“A lot of people make their beds every day,” she said haughtily.
“You didn’t blow my cover in the parking lot when you had the chance just because I asked you nicely.”
“I didn’t want to cause a scene and endanger my eighty-year-old neighbor,” she insisted.
“You didn’t do it because I asked you not to. It’s as simple as that. And you like my dimples and my ass, but you haven’t flirted with me at all.” He said it with a suggestive eyebrow wiggle.
“Oh, please. Maybe I’m just not attracted to you,” she shot back.
“Yeah. I don’t think so.” He said it with the confidence of a man who was every woman’s type. Which only served to annoy her further. “Face it, Thorn. You’re a good girl. A nice girl. A rule follower.”
“Spoken like the high school bad boy who never grew up,” she huffed.
“You wound me, Thorn.”
“I doubt that.”
His grin was lethal. “You know what I like about a good girl?”
“Please. Enlighten me,” she said with an eye-roll.
He reached into the cabinet above the sink, plucked out the seaweed snacks, and tossed them to her. “Behind every good girl facade is the urge to do something bad.” He pulled out the bag of cheese curls, opened it, and helped himself to one.
He was standing in her kitchen, flirtatiously offending her and eating her snacks. She was both outraged and outrageously turned on. “Okay, buddy. My turn,” she said.
“Have at me,” he said, opening his arms in invitation.
“Fine. You’re one of those rebels with no cause. The rule-breaking, ‘I can’t be tied down to a job or a woman’ type. I bet you’ve tossed your fair share of leather jackets over your shoulder in your bad-boy career. You claim you don’t want normal because normal is boring. But that’s all a facade.”
“What is it I really want, Thorn?” he asked. Those blue-green eyes were warm, entertained.
She wasn’t sure which one of them was enjoying the naughty, naked vision that started playing in her head. “Maybe you get off on the whole black sheep routine not because you hate normal but because you don’t think you can hack it. Maybe you want to be the guy who shows up on time with no-reason roses or doing daycare drop-offs, but you don’t think you can. Because you don’t think you’re reliable or responsible enough.”
Nick studied her for a long beat, and then the smug, gorgeous son of a bitch popped another cheese curl into his mouth. “I like you, Thorn.”
“Gee, I’m so happy to hear that,” she said dryly. She snatched the bag out of his hand and pretended not to watch him lick the cheese dust off his fingers.
“You know, I was thinking…” he began.
She knew exactly what he was thinking. “Nope.”
“Since we’re dating and all,” he continued.
“Not dating,” she corrected.
“And since I need to wait for your fake uncle…”
“N-O.”
“How about I order us a pizza, and we hang out here in your conveniently located apartment? Have ourselves a date night?”
Nick Santiago was dangerous. Maybe not in the here to murder her neighbor way, but he definitely was not safe. “Thanks, but I’ll pass,” she said.
“See. There’s that good girl again,” he teased, taking a step toward her. “Saying ‘I’ll pass’ instead of ‘get the hell out of my apartment, Nick.’”
The testosterone exploding forth from his pores was acting like a drug on her own body. Her heart was tapping out Hot Guy Alert in Morse code, and her nipples had at some point turned to stone.
“Thanks for the help. Now, get the hell out of my apartment, Nick,” she said.
He flashed her that killer smile again, and she knew she’d only managed to entertain him.
Zing! Hormones instantly flooded into her system. But Riley Thorn was smarter than hormones.
She took him by the arm and escorted him to the door.
Nick paused in the doorway, his eyes locking on hers. She could smell his dryer sheets and deodorant, feel the delicious heat his body pumped off. She wondered if he was about to kiss her. Or maybe she was about to kiss him.
“See you around, Thorn,” he said, chucking her on the chin.
“Bye, Nick.”
She watched him leave. Worn denim over muscled ass. White t-shirt flexing over broad shoulders.
“Yoo-hoo, young stranger!” Riley heard Lily call. “Can you help me move some furniture in my bedroom?”
Riley crossed to the top of the stairs. “Nick’s leaving, Lily. He doesn’t have time to come to your bedroom,” she yelled.
Nick glanced up and sent her another sexy grin, accompanied by a casual salute.
“Look at the patootie on that one.”
Riley couldn’t argue with Lily’s inner observation as Nick Santiago walked out of both their lives.
10
9:05 p.m., Thursday, June 18
Nick juggled his haul and jabbed the doorbell with a finger. The gong-like sound of it echoed inside the monstrous house.
“Come in!” bellowed someone from inside.
Nick shook his head. Security obviously wasn’t a priority here. He should have a chat with Riley about that. He let himself in and found the foyer empty.
“Gimmie a hand, will you, sonny?” a voice wheezed from the room to his left. Nick spotted an elderly gentleman perched on a cushion in the middle of the floor of what looked like a fancy living room stuffed with furniture. The man’s feet and legs were at weird angles, as was the toupee slipping down over his forehead.
Nick dumped everything he was carrying on the hall table and crossed to the man.
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“Are you stuck?” he asked, offering a hand.
“The ol’ hip joints lock up sometimes in lotus pose,” he said, gripping Nick’s hand and rocking from side-to-side.
It took both hands, most of his upper body strength, and a good two minutes to untie the elderly yogi. There was a sickening chorus of joint pops and a crack that sounded like bone snapping in half before the man finally unwound his limbs and made his way back to his feet.
“Whew! Thanks for the hand, whippersnapper,” he said, wiping the sweat from his brow. “I’m Fred, by the way.”
Nick gave him the once-over to make sure no bones were poking through the skin.
“I’m Nick,” he said, letting go of Fred and feeling relief when the guy didn’t crumple back to the floor.
“Nice to meet ya,” Fred said, shuffling out of the room without asking Nick who he was or why he was there.
Nick gathered his stuff, locked the front door, and headed up the stairs. On the second floor, he heard Mrs. Penny cursing through her closed door. “Think you can use dragon fire on me, you goddamn amateur? Eat my icy acid, you son of a bitch!” He hoped she was gaming.
The third floor was much quieter. At least until the bathroom door flew open. A Carrie Underwood song about cheating exploded into the hall. And so did Riley Thorn wearing nothing but a blue bath towel. She smelled like something bright and citrusy.
She shrieked when she spotted him. The wireless speaker she carried hit the floor with a thump. So did the bucket of shower supplies when she hunched over to assume a panicked defensive stance.
The towel slipped very nicely from breasts to belly button.
Reluctant gentleman that he was, Nick turned around to face the stairs.
“What are you doing here?” Riley gasped.
He held up the pizza box in one hand. “Date night?” he offered.
“No!” He heard her scrambling behind him to fix the towel. “You just want to use me for my apartment.”
“Definitely not just,” he said. He’d only gotten a glimpse, but it had been one hell of a glimpse.