He’d liked kissing her way too much, and his excuse that it was a rehearsal was transparent.
She stood up, pushing the skirt down with both hands. One of her feet was bare. She looked around a little helplessly, then gave up and kicked off the remaining sandal.
When he took his boxes out to the truck, he didn’t let himself look back. He didn’t want to see Investigator Linn Nichols looking vulnerable. He didn’t want to know what her mom painted or what kinds of flowers were in her garden. Because if he wasn’t careful, he’d find himself back inside, taking her in his arms for reasons that had nothing to do with Caroline or sex or the job.
And that was something he wasn’t prepared for.
That call had reminded him it was all too easy to let it happen—those moments he hated when the line between Kellan and Dean blurred and he lost his grip on who he was supposed to be.
One way to prevent that was to remember who Caroline was. She was sex and danger and allure. She was the one he was allowed to want.
Not Linn.
ALL LINN WANTED was to crawl under the covers and hide, but there was one more thing she had to do tonight. She punched the pillow up against her back, picked up the phone and hit the number two on auto dial.
“Hey, Linn,” her sister said instead of what most people would say, which was “hello.”
“I know you have caller ID.”
“I don’t, honest. I just knew it was you.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Are you okay, sweetie? You sound all…depressed or wrung out or something.”
“Let’s go with option B. Wrung out. It’s just been a really long day.”
“Is it the job? I can imagine it’s a lot tougher environment than Santa Rita.”
Close enough. “Yes. Look, I need a favor.”
“Sure. What?”
“I need a pair of red high heels. You have any?”
There was a moment of silence in which Linn could imagine her sister sitting straight up in surprise, and she braced herself.
“You want to borrow a pair of my shoes? You’re kidding. Red high heels are serious stuff. Who is he?”
“Why does it have to involve a guy? I’m working an operation and I have to wear this hooker outfit and need a pair of shoes. Okay? Simple as that.”
“Linn Alexandra Nichols, it’s never as simple as that. I know there’s a man in this somewhere. I threw the cards for you yesterday, and the Emperor came up.”
“Tess, give me a break. I can’t deal with this stuff right now. Do you have a pair of shoes or not?”
“Linn, just listen to me for a minute. This is important.”
It was the skirt all over again. Tessa wouldn’t give up until she’d had her say, and like Harry Potter’s red Howler envelopes, it only got worse the longer you put it off.
“All right.” With a sigh, Linn pushed her hair out of her face. She wore it loose when she played Caroline and she’d been so disoriented when Kellan had left that she hadn’t thought about tying it up again. “What does the Emperor have to tell me?”
“It means that an influential person has entered your life, but there’s stuff going on that affects whether you can have a relationship or not. You should back off, because what you want personally has to take second place to business.”
Linn had closed her eyes in sheer exhaustion. Now they flew open. “What?”
“I’m not done yet. You promised you’d listen.”
“What do you mean, what I want has to take second place to business? Who says I want the guy, anyway?”
“I’m just telling you what the cards say. You have to figure out what they mean. Are you going to let me finish?”
Linn lay back. “Go ahead. I can hardly wait.”
“Okay, the Emperor was in the Situation position. The Star was in the Love position.”
“So what does that mean? I have stars in my eyes?”
“Linn.”
“All right, all right. Star in the Love position.”
“It’s how you perceive yourself in love and relationships. But in this position it means your personal identity within the relationship right now.”
Linn’s scalp prickled. What personal identity? She had two at the moment. And only one of them had a tendency to wear black lace and kiss men who could get her into trouble. Maybe the cards could be more specific about just whose personality they were referring to.
“It points to your self-image, not how somebody else sees you,” Tessa explained.
“My self-image?” She knew how Kellan saw her. But that wasn’t how she saw herself. Or was it? This was really weird and mixed up and annoying. “Tess, I’m tired. Can we wrap this up?”
“Okay, okay. Bottom line is that you need to think about some aspect of yourself that needs development.”
Her love life needed development, that was for sure. Since the departure of Jordan the Jerk a couple of months ago, about whom she’d made the mistake of being moderately serious, there hadn’t been anyone. Most men outside law enforcement couldn’t tolerate a woman with a badge…well, except for Mark, who’d been fonder of her handcuffs than he had been of her. She’d narrowed her pool of possibilities and started dating cops from other departments, who at least could understand double shifts and night work, but even there she’d run up against alpha types who couldn’t tolerate strength in a woman.
Maybe with Caroline in the picture, she’d have better luck.
“One more,” Tessa said.
“Thank God. I need to brush my teeth.”
“I turned up Four of Swords in the Challenges position. That means you’re on the cutting edge where you can turn challenges into a win/win situation with a bit of creativity and a positive attitude. Unlike what you’re showing me here.”
“Sorry. But this is just too weird for me.”
“Even if it’s accurate?”
“Lucky guesses. Vague pronouncements you can take to mean anything you want.”
“Of course it’s only relevant to you. One last thing.”
“Shoot.”
“The Four of Swords means you need to think about how you behave in recurring patterns. And it also means you need to get back to the cave. Take a bit of time off to evaluate and find your strength again.”
“The swords have obviously never held down a job with CLEU. I’m in the middle of an operation. Taking a couple of days off isn’t possible right now.”
“I’m just telling you,” Tessa said stubbornly. “Do with it what you will.”
“Well, thanks for all the time you spent, anyhow. So about the shoes?”
“Of course you can borrow them. I have a pair of red stilettos that’d go perfectly with a hooker dress.”
“Deal. I’ll run over and pick them up tomorrow. ’Night.”
“Good night, Linn. Give my regards to the Emperor.”
Very funny, Linn thought as she turned off the phone and lay back on her bunched-up pillow. Tessa’s idea of a joke.
She pulled her down comforter up over her head, but it was a long time before the images in her mind would let her sleep.
6
SHE WAS A HARD-NOSED investigator, Linn reminded herself as she walked into the office at the beginning of swing shift the next day. One of the best, according to the letter that had come six weeks ago and offered her a job with CLEU. She knew better than to get hot and bothered with the men she worked with, never mind her own team lead.
The recurring thought made her want to spend the day in solitude. Maybe she could volunteer for a couple of hours of surveillance to get her out of the office. Or even better, maybe the Santa Rita PD hadn’t replaced her yet. Female officers were getting easier to come by, but not in narcotics. And she’d been good. They’d take her back in a minute—her lieutenant had said so during her exit interview.
No. She sat at her workstation and regarded the pile of reports stubbornly. She’d never go back, because that would mean admitting defeat. Admitting she hadn�
��t been good enough, that she was too small for the big time.
Not gonna happen. Uh-uh. If there was one recurring pattern in her life, it was that she didn’t accept failure.
It was only a kiss, really. She wasn’t going to scuttle her career because of a kiss. She liked sex as much as the next woman—just ask Jordan the Jerk—but she had a brain to go with it. If that kiss was any indication, sex with Kellan Black would be everything his wicked smile promised. But she couldn’t count on promises. He might send her body into ecstasy and the very next morning send her file up to Internal Affairs.
She’d made a mistake in letting her Caroline side start something her Linn side couldn’t finish. The thing to do now was damage control, and in her case, that meant not only fooling Rick O’Reilly, it meant wowing him. Getting everything she could out of him while giving nothing away, and handing it all to her team on a silver platter.
She could do that. She was a pro. And this time she wasn’t going to forget it.
Satisfied with her internal pep talk, Linn fired up her computer and got down to prepping for the evening’s operation at the hotel.
A knock on the metal trim of her cube about twenty minutes later made her look up.
“Hey.” Danny Kowalski motioned toward her guest chair. “Mind if I come in?”
“Help yourself. Mi casa es the State’s casa and all that.”
Kowalski looked like Hugh Jackman in his long-hair-with-beard phase, and according to one of the admins she’d talked to in the break room, he had the highest arrest record on the team. From the admin’s tone, she wouldn’t have minded one bit if Danny had arrested her.
“In the old building we used to have real offices with doors.” He looked around the cube, as if she might have done something to change it.
“Yeah, they probably got too suspicious about what you were doing with the exhibits in there.”
“No, fact was, the lieutenant got a little tired of the booby traps on his door. He figured with cubes at least he could see what everyone was up to.”
She smiled, not at the actual words, but at his willingness to be companionable. He was the first of the team besides Kellan to actually approach her with more than a request for a surveillance or a report.
“So, are you settling in okay?” Danny leaned back in the chair.
“Yes. I was hoping for another fight poster. I could start a collection.” Her grin told him she wasn’t serious and wasn’t bugged about their joke. Well, not now, anyway.
“I have connections. I could get you one.”
“I bet. I suppose Kellan had nothing to do with it.”
“Nah. We take our duty very seriously. Somebody has to keep him humble.”
“You guys have been working together a long time, haven’t you?”
“Three years. Max tour of duty is four, so we’re looking at busting up our happy family soon.”
Four years in narcotics. Many investigators she’d known hadn’t lasted that long before they’d rotated out—burnout sometimes set in as early as two.
“He’s a good lead.” She tried to make it sound like an observation, not a question, and then wondered why she was pursuing it. Maybe Danny would think she was fishing for information because she was interested.
“Yeah, he is. Never asks us to do something he wouldn’t go out there and do himself, no matter how much it stinks. He volunteered for this operation, you know.” Danny crossed an ankle over his knee as if he were staying for a while. “Six months undercover. Some guys wait around to be assigned to stuff like that, but not him.”
“He wants the Colombian pretty badly.”
Danny nodded. “As do we all. Whoever he is, he’s responsible for most of the cocaine supply in northern California. Shutting him down would be worth losing six months of your life. At least, Kellan thinks so.”
“Does he have a family?” She couldn’t seem to stop the words coming out of her mouth.
“His mom’s a widow. His sisters are married, in Sacramento. I lost track of how many nieces and nephews he has. But if you’re asking if he’s married or anything, he’s not.”
Linn didn’t like that speculative gleam in his eye. She kept her expression noncommittal. “It would be hard to maintain a relationship if you were in deep cover for months at a time. I was involved in an operation for a month with SRPD and that was hard enough.”
“Boyfriend didn’t like it?”
“You could say so. Jordan was a pilot. Let’s just say the skies weren’t quite so friendly after that.”
Danny laughed. “Kell doesn’t have to worry. He knows how to pick ’em. The female operators from the CLEU suboffices all over the State line up every time he finishes an op. It’s like some kind of smoke signal goes up saying he’s back in civvies, and the switchboard lights up like the Fourth of July.”
“No kidding.” Had the temperature dropped in her cube, or was it just the blood draining out of her head?
“I keep hoping he’ll settle down and leave the field open for the rest of us, but so far it hasn’t happened.” He glanced at his watch. “Oops. I’ve got to go meet with a fink before we do the preop meeting. Nice talking to you.”
“See you at six,” she said faintly.
She turned back to her computer and stared blindly at the report on the screen.
Okay. Kellan was a short-term guy. She could deal with that. If anybody was short-term, it was Caroline. So Caroline was all he was going to get.
But she herself was a long-term girl. She’d had her share of men who didn’t stick around, or who only called when they were in town. She was ready for more than that.
That one kiss they’d shared? That was it.
Their term was over.
ON A SCALE OF ONE TO TEN, the Dominion Hotel was about a five. Your husband could take you to dinner there. You’d book your cousins into a room there for a family wedding. You probably wouldn’t take a client to the bar for a drink, though. It was noisy and crowded and, while it wasn’t ideal for a business discussion, it was the perfect place for a meet. Linn had been there a couple of times on surveillance, but never as a private citizen. Given the choice of a night out in San Francisco, she’d pick a seafood dinner at the wharf and a stroll on the pier.
The team had met at the office for the six-o’clock briefing. She’d found them in a conference room—Kellan; Cooper Maxwell, who had a doctorate in psychology, which in her opinion was of no use whatsoever on the street unless the lowlifes wanted to talk about their feelings during buys; Danny Kowalski; and “Slim” Jim Macormick, who apparently had never met a lock he couldn’t pick or, if the admins could be believed, a woman he couldn’t seduce.
Her cover team, she thought, sinking into a chair at the end of the table. The men she depended on to save her life. The men who were trying not to look at her, probably because Kellan had already told them in graphic detail about his briefing with Caroline.
And they all had those damn caps on. Everyone had one but her. She slouched in the uncomfortable chair and resisted the urge to cross her arms and sulk.
“Here’s the plan,” their team lead said, and everyone stopped talking and swiveled in their chairs to give him their attention. “We’re not going to wire Linn tonight.”
“Why not?” Cooper wanted to know. “Why give up the evidence?”
Kellan shook his head. “I’ve seen what Linn will be wearing. You couldn’t get a credit card under it, much less a recorder.”
“No kidding.” Maxwell looked as if he’d just been told it was Christmas. “Can you get underwear under it?”
Kellan grinned and shook his head, and Cooper sat back. “I love this job.”
Linn shot him a look that scissored the grin from his face, and he had the grace to look chastened. These guys obviously had a steep climb up the learning curve when it came to working with a female investigator.
“Right. Linn, we’ll drop you a block from the hotel and get settled in the bar. If he’s already there, one
of us will call your cell phone and give you a description of clothing and so on. He knows what you’ll be wearing, but no need to give him an advantage.”
“And where will you be?” she made herself ask. She’d rather not speak to him at all. Credit card, indeed. He’d made her buy the damn dress.
“I’ll be in the back at the pay phone. There’s a pretty good view back there, and it’s dark.”
She’d concentrated on making careful notes and had merely nodded.
After the briefing she’d gone home to change into the red dress, and now here she was, walking along this street near Union Square, with every breeze in town trying to get under it.
She’d be lucky if it were just the breezes.
Her cell phone rang when she was about twenty yards from the portico of the hotel, and she dug it out of her purse.
“Yes?” said Kensington W8.
“It’s me,” Kellan replied. “He’s got a table in the rear right corner. Khaki-colored silk suit, collarless shirt. Diamond stud, left ear. Fending off cruising boy toys as we speak.”
“Lovely. And what about my boys?”
“All set up. Coop and Jim are at the table next to him pretending to be a couple.”
“I’ll buy a ticket to see that.”
“There are no empty tables because the band’s getting ready to start, so just go to the bar. I’m betting he’ll come and get you.”
“Will do.” She flipped the phone shut without saying goodbye, took a deep breath and allowed an exiting patron to hold the door for her.
She felt the thump of the music under her ribs long before she entered the bar to a blast of sound and color and movement. She was going to have to sit in Tricky Ricky’s lap and scream in his ear to make herself heard.
Tessa’s red stiletto heels changed the way she walked, and her hips swayed gently as she made her way over to the bar.
“Buy you a drink, beautiful?” someone wanted to know as she passed a table.
“Looking for company?” asked another man as she laid her evening bag on the bar.
“Thank you, no,” she told him, and turned to the bartender. “Chardonnay, please.”
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