by Aleah Barley
These days he didn’t even have that.
Hell, when he’d been laid up in the hospital for two days after the shooting, the only person who’d bothered to visit him had been the captain. He’d brought him a deck of cards and tried to teach him poker. Finn understood the basics, but he was never going to be a professional gambler.
“I’m not exactly the friendliest guy in the world,” he finally said.
“Yeah.” Gina snorted. “I got that. You’re a judgmental bastard who has no idea about what things are like in the real world.”
Finn groaned. “You sound like my sisters.”
“You have sisters?”
“Mary Catherine, Bridget, Colleen, and Sorcha—she’s nineteen and still lives with my mother,” Finn explained. “I’ve also got a brother.”
“I’m an only child.” Gina’s gaze never left the road, but at least they were really talking now. “How old are you?”
“Older than I look. Younger than I feel.”
“Thanks for the riddle. I was actually looking for a number.”
“I’m thirty-seven. Chalk it up to clean living. What about you?” he asked, even though he already knew the answer. He’d read it in her file. Gina Malloy had turned twenty-eight years old two months ago. She lived in southern Las Vegas and was originally from some town in California too small to have its own post office.
Gina shrugged. “Too old to be a showgirl. Too young for Social Security. You were right about one thing. I do need a better job.”
Finn did some math and tried to figure out how many times he’d insulted Gina in the last twenty minutes. It was probably some kind of record. No wonder she didn’t want to talk to him. He’d apologize, but it wasn’t really in his nature.
He stretched his legs out in the passenger side wheel well, and his foot crashed into Gina’s purse. Hell’s bells. If he couldn’t be a decent human being, at least he could be a kick-ass cop.
He reached down and yanked open the purse, rummaging through it until he found the bag the thugs had been looking for. It wasn’t much to look at, a nondescript black canvas tote, but there was some definite weight to it.
Inside, the LVMPD evidence bags were arranged neatly, as if they’d just been taken out of lockup.
He bit back a groan and yanked open the glove box, grabbing for a pair of disposable gloves from the box he kept on hand, in case he was called in to a crime scene. The latex stretched awkwardly over his big hands, but it was better than nothing.
Once he was suited up, he began to rummage through the packet, looking for case numbers and notations on the outside of the evidence bags that would help him make sense of what he was looking at. The documentation wasn’t all from the same case. The neat arrangement was the result of being handled by a police officer who’d been warned more than once not to mishandle evidence. It just went to prove that he should never make assumptions without all the facts.
“Tell me about the shooter again,” he prompted Gina. “He said he’d pay fifty thousand dollars for this?”
“Yup.” She repeated her story exactly as she had before. As far as witnesses went, he’d seen better, but he’d also seen worse. It had been dark, and she’d been scared, but she still managed to give a decent description of both men, where they’d been standing, and what they’d been saying.
“There’s nothing else?” he asked as he stared down at a child’s toy taken from a shooting in a mall and a fingerprint ten card from an old motel off the Strip.
“Sorry.” Gina shrugged.
“Go over what they said again.” Finn squeezed his eyes shut, listening to the words coming out of her mouth, trying to imagine the scene as she laid it out before him.
“The shooter—he asked the cop if he’d brought everything. If he’d made any copies.”
Okay, that helped Finn narrow down what he was looking for. Not everything in the bag would survive a one-on-one encounter with a copy machine. Hell, some things—like the stuffed rabbit—would get squished flat in a red-hot second.
He divided the evidence bags into two groups and took another look.
No pattern emerged.
“What are you doing?” Gina asked.
“There’s evidence from a bunch of different cases here. The guy probably wasn’t interested in all of it, so I’m trying to figure out what, exactly, he wanted.”
Gina thought for a long moment. “What’s the most important case?”
Finn dug through the box. “Mendoza,” he finally said, grabbing for the watch that had been taken off the mob boss’s bedside table. It hadn’t been recovered in the original search, but someone must have thought it was important enough to seize the second time around. “Alfred Mendoza ran a penny-ante bookkeeping racket off the Strip for years. No one paid it much attention until the Feds started investigating bad accounting practices over at the Hendrix.”
“I heard about that. One of the dancers at the Rollio has a sister who was involved. She said they were laundering money for some mob boss out on the East Coast.”
“Right.” Finn hadn’t been involved in the initial investigation—that had been the FBI—but he’d worked on the Mendoza task force after the fact. “It turned out Mendoza was one of the guys helping to cook the books, and he was turning around and investing that money in his brothel.”
“Prostitution’s legal in Nevada.”
Finn made a face. Selling a person’s body for monetary gain was immoral, but he hadn’t written the state laws. He just enforced them. “Sure, but it’s not legal in Clark County. He was sending prostitutes into the casinos and—when people objected—leaving dead bodies out in the desert for the buzzards. He’d be on death row right now if it wasn’t for his lawyers—Wilson, Dasher, and Smythe. The man’s vicious.”
“I can imagine. So, that watch is from the Mendoza case?”
“According to the tag.” Finn hadn’t been part of the team taking evidence out of Mendoza’s house. “I still don’t get it, though. You can’t copy a watch.”
Gina shrugged. “Maybe it’s something else, then.”
“Maybe.”
“You’ll figure it out,” Gina said, a quiet strength in her voice. It was as if she absolutely believed every word she was saying.
Like there was no way he could possibly let her down.
He snorted at the thought. These days, all he did was let people down. He’d betrayed his calling and broken his mother’s heart. It seemed like the only one who still believed in him was Gina.
At least he could keep her safe. He’d take her home—back to Chicago, a city he’d sworn he’d never return to again—drop her off with his brother and descend on Las Vegas like an avenging angel.
Once he started, he wouldn’t stop until the shooter had been found and Gina was safe.
Vengeance wasn’t a particularly noble trait—it didn’t make him the knight in shining armor of Gina’s dreams—but it was the only thing Finn had to offer.
Well, that and a sudden urge to feel Gina’s soft curves under his hands, to hear her call out his name as he threaded his fingers through her long curls and pulled her body tight against his.
Finn reached out to fiddle with the dial on the radio, turning the music up even louder. This time, it was a woman singing, threatening to burn the entire country to the ground over her no-good, dirty, rotten ex-husband.
All the hours he’d spent worrying about losing control and hurting someone—again—he’d still never understood what some people would do for love. Oh, he loved his family—his mothers, his brother, and his sisters…even Sorcha—but he’d never been in love.
Utterly and completely.
He didn’t even know if it was possible.
But for the first time since high school, he actually wanted to feel something deep, something real.
“You going to tell me where we’re going?” Gina asked.
“Nope.” Chicago was still a long way away, and—God willing—he still might figure out a better sol
ution before they made it to the Illinois border.
Before he had to explain things to his brother. Or worse, his mother…
Chapter Nine
For lunch, they stopped at a truck stop in the middle of nowhere. Finn traded some of their rapidly disappearing dollars for quarters and paid for each of them to take a four-minute shower. It wasn’t exactly a luxury resort, but the water was hot and the shampoo was free.
Gina brushed her hair back with her fingers and worked some of her leave-in conditioner into the ends. The scent was so subtle, she didn’t notice it most of the time, but she could still hear the reverence in Finn’s tone when he’d said, “Lilacs.”
She didn’t know what a lilac was exactly, but she figured they didn’t grow in Southern California…at least not in hick towns where no one could afford to water the grass.
Still, the scent was nice, and Finn seemed to like it. She straightened her clothes, wishing she’d been able to do more than wash out her underwear in the bathroom sink, then slung her purse over her shoulder and walked back out into the store.
Finn was waiting for her by the door.
Damn, he was gorgeous, all square jaw and solid muscle. Standing there in the sunlight, with one high-topped foot propped up against the wall, he looked as if he’d been carved out of their dusty surroundings, all-American, rock solid. His eyes narrowed when he spotted her, and his gaze turned appraising. “Enjoy yourself?”
“Damn straight.” She wiggled her ass just to let him know what he was missing. “I feel fresh as a fucking daisy.”
“You shouldn’t swear.”
Gina rolled her eyes. “Isn’t Finn an Irish name? I thought all Irishmen swore.”
“And we drink like fishes, too.” He rolled his eyes and jammed his hands into his pockets, the action only serving to accentuate the bulge outlined by his faded denim jeans.
Her throat went dry. She swallowed hard, trying to focus on anything except the effect he had on her libido. He wasn’t interested, and her little heart didn’t stand a chance. She might not be in love—hell, no—but she found that she liked having a man in her life she could depend on. If she didn’t watch out, she’d get used to it. “Hope you weren’t waiting long.”
Broad shoulders shrugged. “I filled up the gas tank while you were in the shower. It’s not full, but I bought as much gas as I could. It’s going to be a problem.”
“Right.” The truck wasn’t exactly a hybrid. In another few hours, they’d be toast, even with the extra money Finn had just thrown into the tank. Gina’s lips pursed as she tried to figure out exactly how they could buy enough gas to keep them on the road.
“When we find the hotel that takes payment in jerky, maybe they’ll have a gas station where you can pay in bottled water.”
“Cheeky.” Finn grinned. “I like it.”
He turned away from the truck stop. “Come on. We don’t have all day.”
“Right.” Gina swallowed hard as she watched him walk in front of her. Her body was nothing to scoff at. She was a professional dancer, and between performances, rehearsals, and gym time, she was almost constantly in motion. But she also liked her milkshakes.
In contrast, Detective Finn was fit.
His shoulders were broad, his waist was narrow, and his ass was a thing of sculpted beauty. She could probably bounce a quarter off the damn thing, if either of them had a quarter to spare.
She was so busy concentrating on the man’s ass—and fantasizing about what it would feel like to have those muscular thighs thrusting against her—that it took her a moment to realize they were walking away from the truck.
“We’re not getting back on the road?”
“Not yet.” Barely concealed laughter tinged Finn’s voice. He led them out onto a flat patch of grass behind the truck stop, stretching out his arms as he walked. “I was thinking… Since we’ve run into bad guys twice since yesterday, I don’t think it would hurt if you knew a little bit more about how to defend yourself.”
“You going to teach me Krav Maga?” Gina kicked off the heels she’d put on to get through the glass double doors with their no shirts, no shoes, no service sign. She bounced up excitedly onto her tiptoes.
Martial arts might be a little out of her league, but it felt good to be moving around for once, instead of sitting in the truck.
At least Finn had let her drive for the last few hours, even if he hadn’t been the most pleasant passenger.
He was a control freak. Every time they turned a corner, he reached for the oh-shit bar over the window.
And whenever she made it up to cruising speed, his foot started reaching for a brake pedal that wasn’t there.
He needed to learn how to relax.
“Krav Maga’s a good choice,” Finn said, his voice rough. “You can look up a class when we get back to the city, but it’s not exactly my style.”
“You a karate champion?”
“Not karate, either.” He turned slowly to face her and grinned.
Gina stilled, struck dumb by the beauty in front of her. He should definitely smile more often.
“I’m a boxer.” He shimmied forward slightly in his tennis shoes. “Take a swing at me.”
“A boxer.” She frowned as she looked at him straight on—really looked at him. It wasn’t just his dark hair and blue eyes that made him look like a knight of old. It was the nose that had never been broken and the lack of scar tissue around his eyes. “I don’t see it.”
“You don’t?”
“I know what a beating does to a man.” Hell, she’d been on the receiving end more than once herself, when she’d turned down a particularly obnoxious client back at the strip club. “You don’t have the scars.”
“Maybe I’m just that good.”
Gina rolled her eyes. “Please…I bet my nose has been broken more times than yours.”
Finn’s entire body stilled. For a moment, it looked like he’d stopped breathing. “Someone broke your nose?”
“I did it to myself once, my first year at the Rollio. I tried to do a routine I wasn’t ready for, and I tripped over another dancer’s feet. I think you could hear the audience laughing all the way over on the casino floor.”
“And that’s the only time?”
“Nope.” She reached up to touch the barely visible quirk in her nose. “My daddy was a mean drunk. He got me once. Then there was the manager at the Beavertail.” Rick. She frowned at the memory. He’d made her daddy look like a goddamn saint. “He snuck up on me in the VIP room.”
She struggled to force down the memories. She wasn’t back in that hole of a town outside Barstow. She hadn’t been there in years…not since she’d fled town in the middle of the night, heading out to Las Vegas with all of her meager belongings stuffed into her car, leaving a trail of destruction in her wake. “It hurt.”
Finn’s jaw tightened. “Hell.”
“Life’s not all sunshine and roses.” She shrugged. It was water under the bridge. She wasn’t going back there—ever. Not unless she wanted to answer some uncomfortable questions from the police and face off against an angry strip club manager with reason to hold a grudge. “You were really a boxer?”
“I won a couple of regional championships when I was in high school. It never went any farther than that—I had other things on my plate—but I never stopped practicing. Hell, I taught boxing for a while back in Chicago. It was an after-school program and most of my students were just clumsy kids, but some of them had real talent.”
Chicago. It was another tiny glimpse of his life back before the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. A past where he’d beaten a man half to death, as part of a job he didn’t want to tell her about. A job that involved teaching kids? Maybe the odd glimpse of softness underneath his tarnished armor wasn’t just a fantasy conjured by her sex-starved mind.
Maybe he really was just a teddy bear.
Gina nodded slowly. “Okay, what do I do?”
“Hit me,” Finn said.
“Showing is better than telling.” He danced back and forth from foot to foot, the elegant motion making his bulky body seem as nimble as any bumblebee’s. “You took a self-defense class, right? Show me what you learned. Hit me.”
“Not going to happen.”
“Because you’re afraid?” He lifted his left eyebrow. “Because you’re a girl?”
Gina took a swing, balling her right hand into a fist and slamming it toward his head. Nothing happened. In the time it had taken her to throw her weight behind the punch, Finn had moved. He was now standing a foot to the left of where he’d been, looking complacent.
“Hit me.”
No holding back. Gina threw one fist after another. Wherever she tried to punch him, Finn was already gone. When she stopped, he was always waiting to tap her gently on the arm, reaching through her defenses like they were nothing.
It was damn aggravating.
“Aren’t you supposed to be teaching me something?”
“I’m trying to figure out what level you’re at.”
“And? Where am I?” Her knees hurt from where she’d landed on the pavement the day before. Her lungs were screaming for air. Forget moving around, she’d be happy to get back to the truck.
“You hit like a girl. You’re not committing…there’s no follow-through.” Finn chuckled warmly, but he stopped dancing around like an asshole and reached out to settle his broad hands against her hips. “Hit me again. Harder.”
“No.”
“Come on.” A single dimple bloomed in his cheek as he grinned. “You know you want to…”
She slammed a fist into his chest, swearing angrily when her knuckles connected with pure muscle. It was like hitting a damn car. No give.
His grip tightened on her hips. “You’re standing on your tiptoes—like a dancer. You need to be on the balls of your feet. Drop your hips down and try again.”