by Norah Wilson
~*~
Suzannah was picking up shoeboxes, some of which had lost their contents, when John burst into the room, crouched and ready, his gaze sweeping the room. Her heart, already racing, took another jolting leap when she saw his stance. Then she recognized the object he gripped in his hand. Just the bronzed bookend from the desk in her spare bedroom.
“God, I thought you had a gun!”
“No gun.” He straightened, his posture relaxing. “I couldn’t see packing a piece for the Lieutenant Governor’s levy, somehow.” His gaze fell on her. “You okay?”
She resisted the urge to press a hand to her heart, which still pounded a painful tattoo against her ribs. “You gave me a fright.”
“Guess we’re even, then, ’cuz I thought all hell was breaking loose in here.” He looked down at the mess on the floor. “Well, well, Imelda. Overcome by the urge to visit with your shoes, were you?”
She reached for a Prada suede number and stuck it in the box with its mate. “Very funny.” Ignoring his chuckle, she went searching for the black Stuart Weitzman pump with the funky heel. “I just knocked a stack or two down.”
“Stacks? More like towers, I’d say.” He tossed the brass bookend onto her bed, then bent to gather up a couple of boxes that still had their contents intact under snug fitting lids and started stacking them.
“Not like that.” She pulled a box from his grasp. “You’ve just stacked a pair of black flats with beige pumps and brown loafers.”
The look he shot was incredulous in the extreme. “You have a filing system for your shoes?”
She lifted her chin, daring him to make something of it. “I can see the concept of organization is a foreign one, Detective, but there’s nothing wrong with knowing what goes where. In fact, there can be some bonuses to being a little anal about this stuff.”
“Like being able to discriminate between those three pairs of identical black pumps I see lying there?”
She might have argued that the black pumps were nowhere near identical, but instead she drew a deep breath and released it in a long exhalation. “Like being able to say with complete certainty that someone has been in my closet rearranging them.”
He stood blinking at her. “Are you sure?”
She nodded. “Positive. There’s no way those blue Nickels could have migrated to the top of that stack. I knew right away someone had moved them. That’s how I knocked them down, backing out of the closet.”
She heard him suck in a breath. “You wouldn’t have moved it and maybe forgot about it?”
“No.” She shook her head emphatically.
“The front door lock—you fumbled with it tonight. Is it usually sticky?”
“No.” A shard of fear, sharp and hot, shot through her as she realized her lock must have been picked. Someone—a stranger? a disgruntled former client? a pissed-off cop?—had stood outside her door, extracted lock-picking tools and proceeded to finesse her medium-security locks. He’d let himself into her house, walked on her Persian carpets, touched her things.
“And no maid? No one with a legitimate reason to be shuffling things around in your closet?”
“Maid?” She lifted an eyebrow. “I’m hardly home long enough to disturb anything.”
He shrugged. “Color me skeptical. I couldn’t see the daughter of a former chief justice cleaning her own toilets.”
“Okay, so I have a woman in to do floors and bathrooms,” she allowed. “But she comes just twice a month. As you’ve already observed, I’m a little compulsive about order.”
“Lover?”
“None of your business.”
“Right. No lover.”
Gritting her teeth, Suzannah bent to retrieve a Gucci sandal, only to have him restrain her by gripping her upper arm.
“Don’t touch anything. Ident’ll want to go over the whole thing.”
Ident! Her stomach did a queer little flip. Police? Crawling all over her bedroom, dusting her shoes for prints. She could just hear them now, joking with each other.
“No. No police.” Pulling her arm free, she strode over to the cherry wood dresser, pulling open the top drawer.
“Cripes, Suzannah, if you’re right about this, someone broke into your house, spent time in your bedroom. Fondled your shoes, for chrissakes. If that doesn’t creep you out –”
“Bloody hell.”
“What?”
Just like that, he was there by her side. Clumsily, she shoved the drawer closed on the carefully folded underwear. Underwear that was no longer arranged just the way it was supposed to be.
“Your skivvies, too?”
“Looks like it.”
John swore, long and fluently. “Okay, now we call the station.”
“No, we don’t.” She clutched his forearm to restrain him, but released her grip quickly, unnerved by the coiled tension she felt in the muscles beneath her fingertips.
“Suzannah, a crime has been committed –”
“Not unless I say it has. Not unless I make a complaint.”
“Why the hell wouldn’t you make a complaint?”
She felt tired suddenly. Tired and surprisingly close to tears. “We’ve been through this, John.”
“Like hell we have. You need to –”
She put up a hand to stop him. “Okay, say I call the cops. You guys come in, dust for prints, take my prints, too. But if this guy picked my lock, you know and I know that he’s smart enough to have used latex gloves. And if he didn’t take the precaution of wearing gloves, then there’s zero chance you’re going to match him with someone whose prints are in the database. A criminal wouldn’t be that careless.”
“But if we apprehend someone later, we’d have prints to match –”
“If you apprehend someone later, I trust it will be because he commits a crime. And if you apprehend him in the commission of a crime, then you’ll have ample evidence of said crime without any prints that might be gathered here tonight.”
“But –”
“But nothing. If the cops come in here tonight, I’ll be no closer to knowing who did it, and your friends down at the station house will have a good laugh. That’s just not going to happen, John.”
“Dammit, Suzannah. This is no laughing matter.”
He shoved a hand through his hair, making it stand up crazily. Improbably, it only made him seem all the more attractive.
“Trust me, I know that. And tomorrow, I’ll call a security company to install high-security locks, an alarm system, motion sensors, the whole nine yards.”
He swore again, pungently.
“You know I’m right,” she said. “Prints would be either non-existent or unmatchable.”
“But he got in here.”
“Yes, he did, but he won’t get in again. I’ll see to it tomorrow.”
“What about tonight?” he demanded.
Fear swelled in her throat, but she swallowed it down. “He’s already been and gone tonight.”
“My point exactly. Until you get a decent security system installed, it seems to me he can come and go at liberty.”
She couldn’t quite suppress a shiver. “He won’t trouble me again tonight.”
“No, he won’t,” John said. “Where are your spare blankets?”
It took Suzannah a few seconds to process his words and extract the meaning. “You are not staying here.”
He drew himself up, seeming to acquire added height and breadth. “Fine. Have it your way. I’ll just call for a squad car to sit on your house tonight.”
“You wouldn’t!”
He turned to leave.
“Wait.” He stopped at the touch of her hand on his arm. Again, she withdrew her hand quickly. “I told you, I don’t want the police involved in any way.”
“Tough. I can’t pull stakeout tonight myself ’cuz I’m back on duty tomorrow, so you’ll have to make do with one of the guys from Patrol.”
She bit back a curse that would have done credit to a sailor. “Okay, have i
t your way.”
A smile ghosted over those fine, full lips. “You were going to see about those blankets? Since hell will be freezing over tonight, I figure I might need them.”
“Anyone ever tell you you’re a real bastard?”
“At least once a day,” he allowed.
Suzannah strode to the hall, yanked open a linen closet and dragged out a lightweight blanket and a fat pillow, which she shoved into his chest. “Couch is in the living room,” she clipped. “Kill the lights and turn the deadbolt before you crash.”
With that, she turned and headed back to her bedroom. As she closed the door, she thought she heard him mutter, “You’re welcome, Ms. Phelps.”
She fumed about it as she stripped off her Donna Karan and hung it carefully on a padded hanger. Damned stubborn, condescending man. Blackmailing bastard. She cursed him as she stood beneath the shower’s hot, stinging spray and scrubbed the feel of his electricity-charged fingers from her upper arm.
But when she finally settled down, after fidgeting with her thin blankets like a dog scratching and scraping and readying its bed, she found her fit of pique had subsided. When at last she fell into a light slumber, her last conscious thought was an acknowledgment that it was only his presence downstairs that allowed her to do so.