by Anne Calhoun
“You know,” Eve said conversationally, pointing at an old-school barbershop, “if there’s an uptick in gang violence and Mobile Media pulls out, all these businesses are going to go under. It makes me furious.”
“You said he went to Aquinas, so he’s smart, and unlike most of the people we went to school with, he had opportunities. Why is he so bent on selling drugs?”
“Oh, you know,” she said lightly, and let her arm drop. “Fathers and sons.”
Matt knew a thing about fathers and sons. The drumbeat under every move he took was the one his father taught him from childhood: control yourself, control the situation.
“This feels unnatural,” Eve said. “I wouldn’t ignore him.” She turned, and her eyes widened like she’d just become aware of Lyle’s existence. She lifted her hand and gave him a vaguely cheery wave, then wiggled under Matt’s arm and looked up at him. Her smile was faked; Matt could see anger and nerves in her green eyes, but from a distance, her moves and body language were exactly that of a woman newly enthralled with a man.
Lyle never looked away.
She turned her back on Lyle and stepped in front of Matt, wove one leg between his and shifted a little to his left, keeping his right hand free. “He’s watching us, right?”
“He’s watching you,” Matt said. “Eve, this is way more—”
She went up on tiptoes and kissed him. The first brush of lip on lip was perfunctory. Then she slid her hand up Matt’s neck and kissed the corner of his mouth, his cheek, the edge of his jaw, and the spot below his ear. Each touch of her mouth left a hot spot smoldering on his skin, sent heat streaming down his spine.
She could have simply laid one on him, given Lyle a showy open-mouth kiss, a taunt, but she knew that the slow, seductive press of her mouth would show even more that she was completely preoccupied with Matt, that Lyle didn’t have her under his thumb.
That rip in the universe again, the odd roaring abruptly cut off as reality snapped back into place. Lyle was as still as stone, his mouth tight, the relaxed big-shot posture suddenly tense.
Matt gripped her waist and bent to her ear. “What the fuck are you doing?” he growled, his heart hammering away in his chest.
“I’m being me,” she said. “The woman Lyle used to know wouldn’t let him dictate terms, not in my bar, or in my personal life. I want him angry. He gets impulsive when he’s angry.”
“So do you,” Matt said. He reached up and brushed her hair back from her face, hoping like hell the move came off as attentive new lover, not a tightly leashed impulse to fist his hand in her hair and kiss her into submission. “You’re making yourself a target. Stop. Now.”
“Better me than anyone else on the East Side. I’m already a target, remember? Hit on my life? I was from the moment I walked into the Eastern Precinct.”
“You were a target the moment he asked you to front for him.” Eve’s eyes widened, but now wasn’t the time to tell her exactly how dangerous Lyle was. “Get in the car.” He locked his fingers with hers and led her around the back of the Jeep. When they were both inside, doors locked, he pulled out of the parking lot and drove past Lyle.
The moment they rounded the corner, stomach-churning fear swept through him, because for a second she’d made him forget everything that mattered, who he was, why they were on Thirteenth Street in the first place, his duty to protect her. “In fact, you were a target before he walked into Eye Candy and asked you to front for him,” he said. “He’s been thinking about this a long time, Eve. Thinking about you. This isn’t just two old friends playing wrong-side-of-the-tracks games. Something’s happened to him since he left town.”
“Like what?” she asked, searching through her purse.
“I don’t know, but you don’t get expansion opportunities with the Strykers by playing nice with the other kids,” he said, giving her the fit-for-civilian-ears version of the reports he’d read of beatings, torture, murders. They’d totally underestimated Lyle Murphy’s ruthlessness, missed the madness seething behind his eyes. “It’s in his eyes,” Matt finished.
“I’ll have to take a closer look,” she said, her voice shaky as she fumbled with her wallet, sliding the deposit receipt into one of the expansion slots. “Next time I’ll try a different approach. You weren’t all that into it anyway.”
He laughed, that unfamiliar noise she drew from him. “I couldn’t really give it my full attention,” he said, and looked at her. She was uncharacteristically pale, her eyes wide and unseeing. “You okay?”
“No.”
“Put your head between your knees,” he said.
She let her head drop forward and lifted her hair away from her neck. “What do you think?” she asked through the tumbled mass hiding her face. “Coincidence that he shows up in front of the bank while I’m there?”
“He’s following you,” Matt said, glancing in the rearview mirror as he drove. The Escalade was gone. “He wants to know what you’re doing, who you’re with, and why.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve seen his kind before. Psychopaths pop up pretty regularly in war zones.”
Eve blinked, but they were pulling into Eye Candy’s parking lot. There was no time to do anything but scramble through prep. Eve shook out her hands before picking up a knife; he watched for a few seconds to make sure muscle memory took over so she didn’t slice off a finger.
She looked at the clock. “You’re sure I can’t tell Natalie?”
Matt kept up his rhythmic slicing and chopping. “The fewer people we involve, the better. It’s too dangerous.”
“So,” she said, entirely too casually to be casual, “tell me about Ramadi.”
She had a right to know. “Caleb had the basics,” he said. “Two of our guys were injured and pinned down at the back of an alley. I got them out.”
“Under fire.”
Two words, three syllables to describe two mad dashes through a kill zone, just as likely to get hit by a ricocheting bullet from one of his fire team as from one of the snipers. All he could hear was his father’s mantra: Emotions make you weak. No fear. No failure. “Under fire,” he said, and swept the limes into a tub.
She considered this, then said, “How do you do it? How do you go back and forth between lives?”
Eve had one life—friends, family, people she connected with on a regular basis, people she’d regret lying to. He had compartments. He shrugged. “They’re two distinct worlds. My life. My job.”
“Oh,” she said quietly.
Natalie hauled the door open and sashayed into the bar, wearing black leggings, knee-high boots, and a white sweater that clung to her breasts, hips, and thighs. The Eye Candy logo peeked out of the deep V of her sweater. “Well, well,” she said, tugging iPod headphones from her ears. “Where were you all weekend?”
The first big test. “At Chad’s house,” Eve said. “Someone shot out my windows after close Saturday night. Chad was with me, so I went to his house.”
Natalie exclaimed, made all the right noises, asked all the right questions. He stood to the side, observing Eve and Natalie, as he sliced lemons and stocked glasses. Eve didn’t quite seem like herself, her voice a little shaky, her gaze sliding to him every so often, for reassurance, but it was nothing that wouldn’t reasonably be chalked up to nerves after gunfire.
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“Until I know who did it and why, I didn’t want to get you involved,” Eve said. She looked at Matt. “Chad can take care of himself, and me. He’s going to stay with me for a while.”
“Do your parents know? Caleb?”
“Yes, and I’m worried about Dad,” she said, hoping the effort to change the subject wasn’t too obvious. “He’s not feeling all that great these days. Mom’s pretty spooked. Hey, can you make change in the registers for me? I’m really behind after being gone all weekend.”
Nat hurried up the stairs and returned without her bag, a stack of bills in hand to distribute among the barte
nders’ registers.
Matt backed Eve into the bar, his hand automatically going to her hip while he eyed Natalie as she rounded the corner. “Not bad.”
“Thanks.” Her fingers found his, wove into them. Gripped hard. “I’m glad you’re here. After seeing Lyle today I wouldn’t feel safe doing this with two guys sitting in a car outside the bar.”
He stroked the smooth skin of her cheek with the backs of his fingers. “Stay close. Don’t do anything on impulse. Anyone asks you to step outside, male or female, act like I’m an overbearing asshole and check in with me.”
Fists thudded against the heavy steel door, locked at the beginning of the night for the first time. Over the pounding Matt heard Tom’s voice. “Hey, Hot Stuff! If you want us to work tonight you’d better open this fucking door!”
She gave a shakily relieved laugh. “There’s reality.”
He looked over his shoulder at the shuddering door, tried to ignore that her reality didn’t include him. “Let’s do this, boss.”
* * *
Less than a week later Eve was going out of her mind.
Saturday afternoon she stood behind the bar, finishing prep with Matt. He’d figured out how to connect her computer to the DJ’s sound system so they had tunes while they worked. The Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris” played in the background, a band she loved, but the melancholy, intense lyrics only heightened her mood. She’d accepted three more deposits from Travis or another of Lyle’s flunkies, but without words exchanged or a visit from Lyle, they had nothing more than Eve’s word connecting him to the money, or the drugs.
They worked in silence for a while. The days had fallen into a fairly predictable routine. Matt had cobbled together a fitness regime, jumping rope on the dance floor, a speed bag in the storeroom. He worked out while she handled the daily business tasks, then worked behind the bar. Eve handled the social networking and publicity shots with the parties booked into the club. Neither one of them bothered to hide the heat simmering under their every interaction from anyone, the bartenders, Natalie, the customers, people they saw on the street when they went to the bank. Woven into it all was a feeling she couldn’t identify, something new, maybe unformed, but always there, just outside her mental and emotional range.
After hours Matt set about calming Eve’s increasingly frayed nerves. Between the music, the crowds, and the constant fear of Lyle surprising her, she was brittle and on edge, and when they closed the club she went wild under him, against him, using teeth and nails like she was in a fight for her life. None of it fazed him. He just met her wildly emotional response with a slightly stronger level of force until the fear and need combusted.
“I hate waiting,” she finally said. “I’m not good at it.”
“Rushing a case means we get an arrest but not a conviction. Solid police work takes time and patience.”
And the ability to push away instant gratification, she mused. After four years in the Army and eight as a cop, he was an expert at it. She wasn’t.
She dropped a box of lemons on the counter with a little more force than she intended.
“You okay?” Matt asked.
Stop asking me that! trembled on the tip of her tongue, but she bit it back. She was not okay. She was in over her head personally and professionally, and with every passing day he seemed to grow calmer and calmer, going through the work at Eye Candy, staying connected to Sorenson and Hawthorn’s street-level investigation, protecting her. His gaze slid over her much like his hand would over the silk wraparound dress she wore, pausing at all the right spots to admire, lingering on her eyes to assess her state of mind. She didn’t like the way those two melded together.
“I’m fine. It slipped. Can you finish up for me? I need to finish the schedule, do some paperwork.”
He nodded. She disconnected her laptop from the sound system and headed upstairs to do exactly what she’d said, plus make a purchase she’d been thinking about for days. The bar had been open for over an hour by the time she’d paid bills and gone downstairs to the storeroom to compile the liquor order for the next week. The rapid beat of a club remix thumped away at her nerves. She dropped the clipboard on a stack of boxes and resisted the urge to rub her tired eyes, instead pressing the heels of her hands into her eye sockets to smudge the makeup as little as possible.
Lady Gaga’s lyrics crystallized when the door opened, went indistinct when it closed. Then the lock clicked shut. “Are you okay?”
Hands still pressed to her eyes, she said, “Stop asking me that, Matt. It’s driving me crazy. I am as fine as I can be, given the circumstances.”
When he didn’t respond, she let her hands drop and turned to face him. His hair was a little longer and more tousled than when she hired him, she noticed, and a fine network of lines spread from the corners of his eyes. They were both tired, not sleeping well. Even after the sex. “Why aren’t you out front?”
“It’s slow tonight.”
“Pink’s in town,” she said. “I think most of my customer base is at the concert.”
“I hear the trapeze routine rocks.”
She gave him the small smile he’d want to see after making a joke, maybe even felt it a little. “Me too.”
“What’s on your mind, Eve?”
“The usual,” she said and turned to find her clipboard.
Not a flicker of emotion crossed his face now. Long hair aside, his expressionless demeanor could have been a recruiting poster for the Army. “We’ll get him.”
“Whatever it takes, right?”
A long moment stretched between them. Then he said, “That dress looks like someone poured smoke on you.”
A by-now familiar diversion, but it worked. She wore a simple silvery-gray wrap dress with a deep V plunging between her breasts, lined with red silk that appeared as she moved. She’d bought it at an upscale consignment boutique and wore only silver earrings with it, as the dress was a sophisticated enticement all on its own. She smoothed her palms down her hips and looked at him through her tousled hair. “You like?”
Heat flared in his hazel eyes, moss over flecked stone. “I like how the red flashes when you walk.”
“Hmmmm?” she said, closing the distance between them. She needed this. Whatever worked to keep her focused, strong. She needed him.
“Makes me wonder what you’ve got on underneath.”
He stepped into her, wrapped an arm around her waist to hoist her against him, then carried her to the smooth metal shelf lining the wall by the door. She linked her arms around his neck and tossed her hair back from her face when he set her down and stepped between her legs. But when he reached for the tie holding the dress closed, she put her hand on his.
“This isn’t a good idea,” she cautioned.
He continued to tug at the thin gray cord, and the flap of her dress loosened. “I locked the door.”
She tried to hold the gaping fabric closed. “I’m not exactly quiet,” she said halfheartedly.
“It’s really hot when you have to be quiet. Remember?” he said, and parted the flaps. His gaze flicked over her lace bra and thong. “Red. My favorite.”
“I know,” she said. Talking became impossible when he gripped the back of her head in one hand and her ass in the other, holding her to him for kiss after slick, hot kiss. He was notched between her spread legs, and she felt his cock thicken and grow hard as his tongue slid against hers. She hooked one heel behind his knee and reached for the button fly of his jeans, popping the first three buttons to reach inside and grip his erection.
“Jesus,” he said, and broke free. She knew how he felt. She was beginning to wonder if this would ever go away.
She skimmed her thong down and off while he opened his jeans and sheathed himself in latex, then, in one smooth, gliding stroke, in her. The thick shaft stretched her and she gasped, then whimpered as he pulled her to the edge of the counter. She wound her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck. Mindful of the foot traffic from the bar to the di
sh room, she buried her face in his shoulder to stifle her gasps. He stopped and pulled his Eye Candy T-shirt over his head and dropped it on the counter beside her.
“Makeup on my shoulder’s a dead giveaway,” he muttered.
As if glassy eyes, a flushed throat, swollen lips, and a languid hitch in her walk wouldn’t tell everyone who worked at the bar, and maybe some of the customers, exactly what had happened. She didn’t argue with him because running her palms over his shoulders and down his ridged abdomen ratcheted up the anticipation, and when it came right down to it, she didn’t give a damn. She needed this. So badly.
She expected hard and fast, but he braced one hand against the wall behind her and wrapped the other around her hips, holding her in position as he moved. Slowly. Achingly slowly, letting her feel every single inch glide in, pause, then withdraw. The head of his shaft caressed nerve endings aroused and desperate for heat and pressure. Her eyes closed, she sank into her body, the tantalizing rasp of lace against her nipples as they brushed his chest, the warm metal under her ass. The backs of his thighs flexed and released as he moved, denim between her bare legs and his. One red patent leather heel clattered to the cement floor, then the other, as she tightened inside and out, clinging to him, mouth open against the muscled curve where his neck blended into his shoulder.
“Oh God, Matt. More. Please.”
“Shhhhhh,” he said. She could have smacked him for the male amusement under the husky words, but another slick stroke ended all thought of distracting him. “Like you like this, boss.”
She couldn’t hasten the pleasure building with slow deliberation inside her, like a fist tightening around her core. He was so hard, each stroke slick, unhurried, confident. She began to tremble, muscles quivering as molten pleasure coursed through her body, burning away muscle and bone. He took his time, drove her nearer and nearer the edge until she wasn’t sure if she needed or feared the oncoming freight train of release.
She dug her nails into his shoulder, wound the other hand in the loose denim at his hips, and took it. Took him. Even with her face pressed to his damp skin, the cry that tore from her throat as the tight fist opened and flung her into oblivion echoed in the dark, still room. He gave an indistinct growl into her hair, thrust again, and again, then went rigid and jetted into her.