“Not a chance in hell.”
She grabbed his arm when he moved to climb out.
“Please, Joe.”
A great pair of breasts and pleading. A lethal combination. And two things he could never resist. At least not in Ripley.
“Fine,” he said, feeling anything but fine.
He watched her get out of the car and visually followed her form as she walked toward the park. The SUV slowly passed, and Joe watched it, wanting to throw his hands in the air in exasperation.
BY THE TIME Ripley pulled up next to the park located on the banks of the Mississippi, the Arch visible just over the rise, it had stopped raining. Although judging from Joe’s stormy expression, she was surprised it hadn’t started pouring inside the car.
Unfortunately, she didn’t think his countenance was going to change anytime soon.
Not many knew of her friendship with Nelson Polk beyond the boundaries of the park. She didn’t think her mother would be very happy if Ripley brought him home to dinner, although she had thought about inviting him a couple of times. She’d settled, instead, for buying him a bite or two or three at a nearby diner. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of him, exactly. She knew others might not understand her bond with this fifty-something washed-up private investigator for whom a bottle of cheap red wine comprised his entire food in-take.
And it looked like he’d had a little too much to eat today.
“Nelson, I need a favor from you.” A big favor. A humongous favor. Although she was afraid it was going to take an act of God to get anything from the man slumped in his chair, his chess set closed on the table in front of him, his mouth hanging open in mid-snore.
Ripley glanced uneasily toward her car some hundred yards away, a car for which she’d traded in her two-year-old Taurus with three years of payments left in order to lower her overhead. She moved so she blocked Joe’s view of Nelson, then crouched next to her friend.
“Oh, please, don’t do this to me now, Nelson,” she whispered, closing her eyes.
At that moment it was hard to recognize the sloshed, barely conscious man next to her as the guy who shared so many words of wisdom over a competitive game of chess. She’d never seen him this far gone and wondered what had caused him to drink himself into such a state. She reached out and rested her warm hand over his cold one.
“Ripley? Is that you?” he slurred, without opening his eyes.
Her heart did a little drumbeat. “Yes, Nelson, it is.”
He smiled, making his two-day-old gray stubble stick out all the more. “Thought so.”
“Nelson…I need your help.”
The smile vanished. “Help. A lot of people asking for help these days. Unfortunately it seems to be in short supply.”
Ripley squinted at him, wondering who else had asked him for help, and in what form it had come. “Actually, I think this kind of help is right up your alley.” She looked toward the churning waters of the Mississippi, then at the sky, which looked moments away from opening up again. But Nelson was dry. Either he had just made his way to the park bench or the tree overhead had protected him from the worst of the previous downpour. “You remember when I told you about that first case I took on?”
His eyelids cracked open, and brown eyes peered at her. “Uh-huh.”
She smiled overly brightly. “Well, guess who needs some information and you’re the only guy she can get it from?”
He didn’t say anything for a long moment. But his eyes remained semiopen, and he appeared to be considering her long and hard. Either that or he could sleep with his eyes open. “So,” he said finally, making her jump, “that’s why you haven’t been to see me lately. This case.”
“I’ve been in Memphis.”
He struggled to sit up, only whatever he’d drunk wasn’t cooperating.
“Nelson, how about I treat you to some coffee?”
He grinned at her. “I’d love a cup.”
“NELSON, I’m sorry to say this, but I think you’re going to be spending the next two days in the bathroom,” Ripley said, stepping to the diner table with two extra-large cups of coffee. She slid them in front of the tattered old man, then slid into the booth next to Joe.
This was the guy who had inspired Ripley to become a private investigator? Joe stared, astounded, at Nelson’s gnarled hands as he pushed aside the cup he’d just drained then reached for one of the others. He rubbed the back of his neck and glanced out the window, where the SUV was stopped across the street, the agents inside pretending to consult a map.
That’s what Joe could use right about now—a map to find his way out of the mess he was sitting in the middle of.
“How are you feeling?” Ripley asked.
Joe glanced at her, but she hadn’t directed the question to him. Instead, she was gazing at Nelson Polk as if he was Moses, seeming unaffected by the ripe smell coming from him and his unwashed clothes.
Polk nodded. “Better.” He turned unfocused eyes on her. “At least now I know that I’m not seeing double, and the guy next to you must be a friend.”
Ripley smiled. “Nelson, this is Joe Pruitt. He’s a shoe salesman.”
Nelson’s bushy white brows moved upward on his ruddy face. “A shoe salesman. A respectable position.”
“I suppose you could say that.” Joe grimaced, not up to correcting the description. He was a whole hell of a lot more than a shoe salesman. Well, at least he was before he met one sexy, insane Ripley Logan.
Nelson quickly drained the second cup of coffee, obviously familiar with the routine. Color began returning to his face, and he sat a little straighter in the booth.
“So tell me about your case, Rip,” he asked even as he popped the lid off the third cup, this time adding a good portion of sugar and cream to it before bringing it to his lips.
Ripley told him, from first being hired by Clarise Bennett—information Joe suspected Polk already knew—then finding out she was really Christine Bowman, to where they were sitting across from the old man in the diner.
Joe glanced at his watch. All within five minutes. And if he didn’t know better, he’d say that Polk had not only followed every word of the explanation, but understood them. Which put him way ahead of Joe. Joe still wasn’t convinced he understood what was going on.
“Where’s the key?” Polk asked.
Ripley glanced toward the window and the SUV parked on the opposite side of the street. She reached into the pocket of her jeans, palming the key, then holding her hand palm down for Polk to take.
“Be careful that our friends don’t see what you’re doing,” she said.
“I wondered whose friends they were. For a minute I was afraid they were mine,” Polk said, adding pocket change to his hand then cupping it and pretending to be counting out the price of the coffees. “Got yourself in mighty deep first case out of the gate, didn’t you?” The smile he gave her was affectionate, and now that he no longer looked like he was going to fall face first to the tile and start snoring, Joe noticed he appeared shrewd.
Great, that’s all they needed. A homeless Colombo.
Polk held his hand out to Ripley, dumping the contents into it. It didn’t appear he’d glanced at the key long enough to make a determination. Joe fully expected him to say he didn’t have a clue.
“The bus station.”
Joe blinked.
“The bus station? Are you sure?”
“Positive.” Polk sipped leisurely at his coffee. “Which makes sense considering the traffic around there lately.”
“What traffic?” Joe found himself asking.
Ripley and Polk stared at him. He shrugged, acting like he’d been involved in the conversation from the onset.
Polk subtly motioned toward the window. “More of your friends hanging around there. Brooklyn Bob was complaining about the lack of prime bench space there this morning. They’ve had the place under surveillance for at least the past month, but traffic picked up considerably over the past couple of days.”
Ripley leaned across the table and gave Polk a sound kiss on the cheek. Joe cringed. Polk beamed.
“You’re a prince among men, Nelson.”
No comment, Joe thought.
12
TWENTY MINUTES and a meal fit for a prince later, Joe watched Ripley pull up to a curb on a downtown street and maneuver her way into a spot that didn’t appear large enough to hold a golf cart. Amazingly she squeezed into it without incident, while the driver of the SUV drove past them as if she hadn’t a care in the world. And, Joe guessed, she probably didn’t. Additional agents were probably already set up around the area to keep an eye out for Ripley and to throw off anyone else who might be watching her.
“You ready?” she asked, grabbing an old newspaper from the back seat and spreading it, presumably to shield her head from the pounding rain that had picked up again after they left the diner.
Ready? Hell no, he wasn’t ready. But the alternative was sitting in the car alone for an unspecified amount of time. He watched her get out of the car and run around it toward the sidewalk to his right. He opened the door and sprinted after her.
The building was an older brick construction, four stories high, four apartments to each floor. The wet paper plastered to her head, Ripley unlocked the outer door, then quickly ushered him inside. Another key and they had access to the hall and the stairs.
She peeled the paper from the side of her face and offered a sheepish smile. “I used to have a nice place in a newer subdivision in the suburbs, but I thought an apartment downtown could serve double duty as an office. You know, until I can afford to rent commercial space.”
She was apologizing for where she lived, he realized. “I’ve lived in worse places,” he said.
She looked at him skeptically.
“Okay, no, I haven’t. But I don’t see anything wrong with this place.”
“You haven’t seen the apartment yet.”
He didn’t say anything as she led the way up the stairs. And up. And up again. Now he knew how she kept that tidy little figure despite how much she put away at the dinner table. She stepped to the first door to the right and opened it, flipping a switch just inside. She stood aside for him to enter.
SOMEHOW the tiny apartment seemed even smaller with Joe Pruitt’s huge frame standing in the middle of the combination living and dining area. Ripley watched his face for his reaction, then looked around the place herself. The furniture wasn’t bad. She’d bought it all when she’d had a nice condo just outside the city, so she wasn’t concerned about that. It was the water stains on the ceiling that no amount of repainting had been able to get rid of. The chipped sink visible in the small kitchen off to the left. The scarred floor that had been under the green shag carpeting she had pulled up her first day in the apartment, thinking anything had to be better than the rug. She’d been right, but just barely. And her area rugs didn’t nearly cover the surface.
She put her hands on his shoulders. He started then turned to stare at her. She gave a nervous laugh. “Looks like we’re going to be here for a while. I, um, thought maybe you’d like to take your jacket off until then, especially since it’s dripping on my floor.”
“Oh.” He shrugged out of his suit jacket. She shook it on the rug near the door then draped it over the radiator in the dining room. The top of the one in the living area was filled to overflowing with plants meant to cover it.
A punch to her answering machine revealed three messages. The first two were from her mother, inviting her to dinner. The last one was nothing but air. The machine said it was left a half hour ago. She shivered, then stepped to the front window where she’d closed the curtains before she’d left for Memphis. She peeked from the side, staring at the street below.
The plan was that she would come to her apartment with the hope that Christine Bowman would contact her here in search of the key. Of course, Ripley wasn’t supposed to let on that she even knew of its existence. Instead, when Christine made contact, Ripley would give her the entire box.
“Are they out there?” Joe whispered.
His breath disturbed the damp hair near her ear, making her shiver. He was referring to the FBI, who had promised to have someone watching her, just in case Christine decided to do to her what she’d done to her mattress last night. Agent Miller had offered to have one of his agents trade places with Joe as an extra precaution. Ripley had passed, feeling far safer with Joe than she would with a hundred agents.
“I don’t see anyone.”
She remained at the window, though her sight had turned inward, her every nerve ending aware of where Joe stood so close yet not touching her.
Last night after the break-in, she’d crawled into his bed, expecting him to follow her, to take up where they’d left off before she’d nearly tripped over the broken lamp in her room. But he hadn’t joined her. Instead, she’d jerked awake at some point during the night to find him sleeping at an awkward angle on the couch, his position allowing him a view of the room door, the balcony doors and the bed. The big lug had been protecting her. The least she could do was get him a pillow and a blanket. And she had, even though she’d mostly wanted to wake him and drag him into bed with her.
Since then he’d been…distant somehow. Preoccupied. He’d barely said a word to her on the plane ride home. Then again, she’d been so consumed with what she’d learned that morning, creeped out by the knowledge that the pawnshop owner had been killed, that she probably hadn’t been very good company herself. In fact, she knew she hadn’t.
“What if she pulls a gun on me?” she murmured, referring to Christine.
Finally she felt him touch her…of all places, on her feet.
Positioning his shoulder to balance her, he lifted first one leg, then the other, slipping off her shoes and massaging the pads of her feet. She moaned, thinking that this was definitely something she could get used to, this thing Joe had for her feet.
In fact, Joe was something she could find herself getting used to. No matter where they were or what was happening, all he had to do was touch her, and every last thought vanished from her head, leaving her with nothing but longing.
He put her right foot on the floor then stood so he was behind her. His hand curved around her waist then came to rest against her stomach. A small tug left her back flush with his front. “I’ll be there, right alongside you.”
She covered his hand with hers, reveling in the feel of him against her. “Somehow the thought of you buying it along with me isn’t very reassuring, but thanks anyway.”
He skimmed his lips over her right ear. “Well, then, we’ll have to make sure she never gets a chance to squeeze off a shot, won’t we?”
And that was the plan. If Christine called, Ripley was going to give her directions to her apartment…if she didn’t already know the way. Ripley would instruct Christine to slip the recovery fee into her mailbox downstairs, then exit the building to stand on the sidewalk across the street where Ripley could see her. Ripley would retrieve the money and put the box between the two security doors, propping open the outer door before hightailing it up the steps to safety.
The click of her thick swallow sounded awfully loud in the quiet apartment.
“Nervous?” Joe asked.
She nodded.
“Good. That means you are human, after all.”
She turned in his arms, bringing her chest-to-chest with him. The brushing of her erect nipples against his hard chest nearly made her forget what she was going to say. “I don’t know if this is such a good idea. Maybe we should change the meeting place to somewhere public.”
His gaze swept over her face. “You are scared.”
She glued herself more tightly to him, resting her cheek against his shoulder and squeezing her arms around him so hard she was pretty sure he was having difficulty breathing.
His hands hesitated on her back, then slid up and down, cupping her bottom in his palms and pressing her against him. “You know, there are things we could
do to keep ourselves occupied until she calls.”
She smiled against his shoulder. “Yes, that there are.”
Only she wasn’t sure she would be such good company. Her mind was so packed full of information it felt like it might explode. And her nerves were stretched to the breaking point.
One of Joe’s hands slipped between them and fit around her breast. She caught her breath, amazed by how quickly every last bit of that information zapped from her head and how loudly her nerves started clamoring for the release they knew he could give her.
She hugged him tighter, trapping his hand between them. She honestly didn’t know what she would have done if she hadn’t made the mistake of crawling into bed with him on that fateful night. He made her laugh, sometimes want to scream in exasperation, more often cry out in such exquisite passion that she had begun not to recognize herself in the mirror. A transformation begun when she’d switched professions but completed when she invited Joe Pruitt between her thighs. He awakened emotions in her she couldn’t begin to identify. Emotions that demanded merely to be felt, rather than analyzed. Lived and breathed rather than denied.
“Thank you for this,” she whispered, rubbing her cheek against the crisp cotton of his shirt.
“For what?”
She pulled back to look into his overwhelmingly handsome face. “Oh, I don’t know. For not saying anything when I hopped into your bed, maybe. Or for not bolting in the other direction even when you were sure I didn’t have a clue about what I was doing.” Her gaze dropped to his mouth. His hot, generous mouth. “For, um, coming back here with me when it would have been easier for you to leave me at the Memphis airport.”
“You act like I had a choice,” he murmured.
She tried to step away, but he wouldn’t allow her the freedom.
“You don’t understand what I mean by that, do you?”
She stared at him, spellbound, afraid to ask for fear he might say she’d railroaded him into coming along.
Private Investigations Page 15