He nodded.
Her hands fidgeted with her purchase, and then her chin went up. He admired her swift recovery. "If you really want to thank me, you can stop hassling my brother."
Jarek squashed his brief regret. "Your brother has already cooperated fully with the investigation. I don't have any reason to bother him again."
Unless and until the results came back from the state crime lab putting Carolyn Logan in Mark DeLucca's car on the night of the attack. But Jarek didn't see any reason to belabor that point now. He did not theorize ahead of his facts.
Tess raised an eyebrow. "Really? So it's just some odd coincidence that Bud Sweet has been by the marina six times in the past four days."
Jarek frowned. There was bad blood there. He wished he knew why. "I'll talk to him."
"I'd appreciate it." She edged around him.
He caught the scent of clean soap and musky perfume as she passed, and his lower body tightened. He wasn't ready to let her go, Jarek realized. Not yet. He hadn't spoken to her since that one unsatisfying phone interview three days ago when she'd checked the details for her newspaper article. He hadn't kissed her in over a week.
He jammed his hands into his pockets, and then pulled them out again when he remembered the paint samples.
"Nice job with the story," he said.
She looked unexpectedly vulnerable. "Are you kidding me?"
He wondered, with a funny fissure in his chest, if she wasn't used to compliments from anybody or if she just didn't expect them from him.
"No, it was good. Accurate without being inflammatory. And I appreciate you printing that list of cautions for motorists."
She shrugged, as if she didn't want him to see her pleasure. "That's me. A real public servant."
He met her gaze directly. "Maybe we have something in common after all."
Oh, boy.
The bottom dropped out of Tess's stomach as she was scorched by those intense, light eyes. How did he do that, render her speechless and yearning when she wanted to be quick and cool and angry with him?
She flipped back her hair. "Great. So now we're pals. Want some friendly advice?"
She felt his slight, polite, unmistakable withdrawal. Jarek still wouldn't tolerate her interference. Okey dokey. This was better. Anyway, it was safer. But she missed his heat.
"Thanks, but I don't need your help," he said.
With the investigation, he meant.
Her heart beating faster, she nodded at the strips of paper in his hand. And took a chance. "You do if you're planning on painting your house pink. I've got to tell you, folks around here are conservative. Pink flowers, pink flamingos, maybe even pink shutters, you could get away with. But no pink houses. This isn't Miami, you know. It isn't even Gary, Indiana."
He studied her a moment. When he smiled, the warmth reached right across the aisle of Tompkins Hardware and made her face glow.
"The samples are for my daughter's bedroom," he explained.
She grinned foolishly back. "Well, that's a relief. What is she, eight?"
"Ten."
Tess shook her head. "Then, no. She won't put up with pink, either. I mean, not that it's any of my business, but—"
"Actually," Jarek said gravely, "Allie wants to paint her room black."
Tess bit her lip. "I take it this is a problem?"
He gave her a twisted smile. "One of several recently."
She didn't want to know. She didn't want to care. I raised one family already. I'm not interested in taking on another. But when she looked at Jarek, the humor curling the corners of his mouth, the frustration lurking in his eyes, her resolve slid away.
"What about a compromise?" she suggested.
"What did you have in mind?"
"Does she have a favorite color? Besides black," Tess added.
The frustration deepened. "I don't know," Jarek said.
What kind of father didn't know his little girl's favorite color?
Hers hadn't, Tess reminded herself. Of course, most days Paul DeLucca hadn't remembered her name, either.
Jarek frowned at the samples in his hand. "She's staying with my parents now. Her room at her mother's was pink. I thought it would help Allie feel at home here if I painted her new room the same color."
"Okay." Tess decided. "You can have points back for that."
He raised his eyebrows. "Are we keeping score?"
She flushed. "Sorry. That was rude. It's no concern of mine."
"No?" His voice was gentle. "How old were you when your father left you, Tess?"
"I—" —don't talk about it. That was one of the rules in an alcoholic household. Everybody in town knew her story anyway. But Jarek just stood there in the middle of the paint aisle, strong and silent as a rock and about as immovable. She gave up trying to get around him.
"Nine," she said finally. "I was nine."
"That's tough," he said.
She couldn't bear his sympathy. She couldn't trust it. It made her feel things, want things, she was better off without.
She shrugged. "I'm a big girl now. Does your daughter have a favorite shirt? A favorite dress? Could you ask your mother?"
He accepted her change of subject. "Allie's favorite shirt is blue." She must have looked surprised, because he added, "I'm a detective, Tess. We notice things like clothes. We just don't talk much."
"I figured that out," she said dryly, resisting him.
He smiled again, and her breath caught even though she didn't want it to.
"So, what about blue?" she asked hastily. "For her room, I mean."
He hesitated. "Blue would be okay. I guess I wanted something more—"
"Feminine?"
"—special," he finished.
Her heart melted. Her imagination grabbed hold. What would a special bedroom have meant to her, twenty years and a hundred broken dreams ago? "You could stencil something. Or sponge-paint clouds. Or—" She broke off.
Jarek was shaking his head.
"Sorry," Tess said stiffly. "That's probably not what you had in mind."
"It's exactly what I had in mind." His gray eyes were rueful. "I just can't paint worth a damn."
She grinned. "You're not telling me there's something the Great Chief Denko doesn't know how to do."
"I'm telling you there are some things I know better than to try."
"Chicken," she teased.
"Would you do it?"
"Sure, I—" Too late, she saw the trap he had set for her. "I don't think that would be a very good idea."
"Why not?"
"I thought we agreed we had a professional relationship."
The crease deepened alongside his mouth. His eyes gleamed. "You could consider this another professional courtesy."
Right. She remembered the angles of his face in the moonlight and the warmth of his lips on her cheek, and her heart boogied in her chest.
Don't be dumb, DeLucca. Jarek Denko wanted something. And it probably wasn't her.
"What about my brother?"
"What about him?" Jarek asked steadily.
"Come off it. I watched you vacuum out my brother's Jeep. You can't tell me he isn't a suspect in the Logan case."
An edge crept into his voice. "Tess, at this moment half the population of McCormick County is a suspect in the case. Including the officers under my command. If I avoided everyone who had or might have a personal connection with this crime, I'd be commuting from Canada and taking my meals in Wisconsin."
He was alone in this. Just like she was.
And then he added, "Besides, you told me Mark didn't do it."
Hope lurched inside her. "Do you believe me?"
She thought his disciplined body tensed. But his voice was calm and even. "That's not the question. The question is, do you believe it enough to take a chance on painting my daughter's bedroom?"
Good question. Tess looked down at the brown paper bag that held the new valve system for her toilet. Maybe he was right. Maybe she did need to trust
more, in Mark or in herself. She certainly didn't want Jarek to think she had doubts about her brother's innocence.
And maybe that's what he was counting on.
Jarek couldn't really think she was going to blurt out incriminating evidence against her brother while she daubed clouds on his daughter's walls. Could he? She snuck a look at his face. It didn't give her a clue.
"You're holding out on me again," she complained.
"I hold out on everybody," Jarek said.
She narrowed her eyes at him.
He sighed. "What do you want to know?"
She tried not to let her surprise show. "Well… Um, how is the investigation going? Are you close to making an arrest yet?"
"Is this a private conversation or am I going to read about it in the paper?"
She put her chin up. "You aren't going to trust my discretion?"
"No."
"Okay." She couldn't blame him for that, she supposed. At least he was talking to her. "It's private."
He glared up and down the deserted aisle. At the register, George Tompkins discussed crabgrass with a customer. Jarek lowered his voice. "Then—not for the record—this investigation is going nowhere fast," he said.
"That's bad." Bad for Carolyn Logan and her family. Bad for Jarek, dealing with the weight of the town's expectations. And bad for Mark.
"It's not good," Jarek acknowledged. "But we're dealing with a traumatized victim with short-term memory loss, a compromised crime scene and no witnesses. It's going to take some time."
"The people at the bar…?"
"I've got a statement from your brother and a list of customers from Tim Brown. I'm working my way through both of them."
Tess nodded to disguise that the thought of Jarek taking Mark's statement didn't make her very, very nervous. "Well, that should be productive," she said brightly.
"Not really." Jarek started sorting the pink paint samples back into the correct slots in the display rack. Tess blinked at this evidence of his thoroughly orderly mind.
"Most of the kids Carolyn met from the Algonquin were only in for the weekend," he continued. "It's taken my officers three days just to track them all down. And not all of their families have been what you'd call cooperative."
"Rich, nervous daddies with lawyers?" Tess guessed.
Jarek smiled in acknowledgment. If she didn't watch it, she'd start imagining there was some kind of bond between them. "You met them?"
"I know the type." She had even dated a few, smooth boys with fast cars and nice clothes, before she learned better. "One of them might have had trouble hearing 'no.' Who else?"
"Carl Taylor."
"What does he say?"
"He claims he was home at the time of the attack. His wife backs him up. But she was mighty unhappy to hear he was at Tim's that night instead of working the late shift at the Gas-N-Go."
Tess frowned. "You can't think Valerie Taylor—"
"I don't," Jarek assured her. "Though if I were old Carl, I'd be prepared for some hot words and cold meals over the next couple of weeks. What do you think of this blue?"
She glanced at the strip in his hand. "Nice. Are you speaking from experience?"
Those remote gray eyes studied her. "Do you want to know if I spent my married nights out drinking with the boys, Tess?"
Yes.
She flushed. "No. Just making conversation."
"Fine." He turned back to the paint samples. His shoulder, hard and warm, brushed hers.
She should drop it. It didn't matter. She didn't care.
She stared at the ranks of blue on blue until, needled by the memory of her parents, she blurted out, "Did you?"
"Did I what?" Jarek sounded distracted.
"Spend your nights in bars?"
He carefully replaced another strip. "More than I should have," he said quietly. "Making detective— It's not like when you're on patrol. Working cases takes more out of you. More time. More commitment. And if you're good at it, you start thinking like the safety of the city depends on you. You get a promotion. You get a reputation. You start believing you are one hot son of a bitch."
"Ice Man," Tess remembered.
"Yeah. Only—" He broke off.
"You start drinking," Tess said flatly. The sinking disappointment she felt surprised her.
"Just a couple of beers," Jarek said. "To take the edge off, you tell yourself. Once you make Area 3, you get cases you would never in a million years want to take home with you. Real bizarro stuff, race crimes, sex crimes, crimes against kids… So even when you get off the job, you don't go home. You go to the Joint with the guys to talk it out or drink it away, and you leave your wife home alone with the baby."
His behavior was understandable. Excusable, even. Except that Tess had heard enough excuses growing up to last her a lifetime.
"Are you telling me that's the way 'it had to be'?" she asked bitterly.
"No," Jarek said. "I'm telling you that's how it was. I'm not proud of what I put my family through."
"Then why stick with it? I mean, you're willing to make a life change now. Why not then?"
"Because by the time I figured how much damage the job was doing to my marriage, Linda had decided that the only thing she liked less than my absence was my company."
Ouch.
"You still could have made time for your daughter," Tess said stubbornly.
"Maybe I could have. Only Linda convinced the judge that I couldn't provide Allie with the stable home a little girl needed." He shrugged. "Well, she was right. She wanted me out of their lives. It seemed kinder to give her what she wanted."
"Or easier," Tess said.
Jarek turned his head. His face was set. His eyes were bleak. "Not easy," he said.
And even though Tess knew better than to trust in regrets and promises, she believed him.
He selected another blue-striped card. "Anyway, I learned my lesson. I'm not going to make the same mistake with Allie."
"What does your daughter think about you moving up here without her?"
"She knows it's only temporary. Just until the school year is over. I figured she's had enough disruptions in the past twelve months."
He still didn't say how Allie felt about it, Tess noticed. But she admired his apparent determination to do right by his daughter. Jarek Denko was a decent guy who was obviously ready to shoulder his responsibilities, put his past behind him and settle down.
Too bad that was the last thing she was looking for.
"So, how about it?" Jarek met her gaze, his smile warm and his eyes coolly challenging. "Want to join my house painting party? Sunday, four o'clock. I should be done with the walls and ready to start on clouds by then."
It wasn't her house, Tess rationalized. It wasn't her daughter. She could see Jarek again without really committing to anything at all.
But the very temptation she felt to say 'yes' warned her she was already too involved. "I, um, I'll have to let you know."
Jarek nodded. "Fair enough."
If her answer disappointed him, Tess thought crossly, he hid it very well.
"They're not coming," Aleksy said, lowering his paint roller.
Jarek pulled another long strip of masking tape from around the bedroom window. "Who's not coming?"
"Whoever you keep hoping to see out there." His brother stepped back to examine the wall's new coat of sky-blue paint. "Okay. We're done. So, who are you waiting for?"
Jarek frowned at the ball of sticky tape in his hand, vaguely embarrassed both by his brother's perception and his own disappointment. He didn't like thinking his attraction to Tess was that obvious. "I thought Teresa DeLucca might stop by."
Aleksy raised dark eyebrows. "The babe? Way to go, bro. It's about time you got back in the game."
"Don't get too excited," Jarek said dryly. "We bumped into each other when I was picking out the paint, and she happened to mention she had some experience."
Aleksy grinned. "Better and better."
"Pai
nting experience, moron." Jarek wadded the trash into the bag in the center of the room. "Neither one of us is interested in anything else. Besides, like you said, she's not coming."
"Too bad. I wouldn't have minded getting to know her better. Since you're not interested."
"Go to hell," Jarek said amiably.
Aleksy grinned.
They worked a while in companionable silence, collecting brushes and stripping the last masking from the white trim.
"So, any breaks in the Logan case?" Aleksy asked.
Jarek poured paint from his tray back into the can, carefully controlling his frustration. "Nope."
"Did you hear from DCI?"
The Illinois Department of Criminal Investigation. Since Eden lacked its own forensics department, Jarek had turned the lab work in the case over to them.
"Not yet. Seems they've got bigger fish to fry than my nonfatal assault. I did get the serologist's report."
"And?"
"The only blood he identified from the car or kit is Carolyn Logan's. Her attacker was either really careful or my officers contaminated the scene before I got there."
"You still beating yourself up about that?" Aleksy asked.
Jarek smiled wryly. "I don't have to. I've got the entire town council in line waiting to take a swing at me."
"It's not your fault the responding officers screwed up."
Good old Aleksy. But Jarek shook his head anyway. "It's still my responsibility. At this point, I'm hoping that either DCI will identify latent fingerprints in the car or that the trace and fiber evidence will match with one of the suspects."
His brother frowned. "Look, bro, I don't know your people. Are they that incompetent? Or could one of them be tampering deliberately with the scene?"
Jarek had forced himself to face that possibility already. "A cover-up, you mean? Because there's a chance Carolyn Logan's assailant could have been on the job."
"Maybe." Aleksy knocked the lid back on the paint can. "Or maybe some jackass just wants to make you look bad."
Jarek shifted the empty tray and wiped his hands on a rag. "I don't know. That's the worst of it," he said honestly. "Not knowing. I've got a couple of veteran officers who don't trust the way I do things and a bunch of rookies who want to imprint on the first suspect they see like a bunch of baby ducks."
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