She and Daniel both looked at the small ring on her right middle finger. The stone was orange, an odd shape, inexpertly polished, and the silverwork was clumsy, but it was important to her because it was one of her mom’s first pieces when Libby took up jewelry making. The jewelry-making hadn’t lasted any longer than Libby’s other hobbies, but Natasha had had the ring for ten years now.
After clearing his throat, Daniel read on. “‘Are you sleeping with him, Nat? You know what will happen if you do. You will ruin everything I’ve done for you. You’ll be no better than the whores on Olympic and Western. You’ll be an embarrassment to me, and I won’t have any choice but to punish you. I’ll punish both of you.’”
Daniel tapped his index finger against the cell case, meaning he was paying special attention to some part of ScrewYou’s message. She was curious about how crazy-man thought the vows had been made. Sometime when he’d followed her, had he projected promises of love and obedience into her brain from a block away and decided that turning left meant she accepted them, turning right meant no and going straight meant she needed more time to think about it? Had he broken into her apartment and done some ritual, imbuing her ring with magic that would bind her to him the next time she put it on?
Honestly, if the man could take a generic friendly smile and build a whole relationship out of it, who knew what else he was capable of creating in his head?
“‘You’ll be no better than the whores on Olympic and Western,’” Daniel muttered. “Olympic and Western...” He gave her a quizzical look. “Say you’re back in LA. A friend comes from out of town to visit and says, ‘I got a hundred fifty bucks. Where can I pick up a girl?’ Where would you send him?”
“Back where he came from.”
“You don’t know where to find the working girls?”
This was definitely the first time in her life anyone had asked if she knew where to find a prostitute. She replied with a shrug. “Sunset Boulevard, I guess. But that street’s been walked since before we were born. It’s a long-standing tradition. History.”
“But RememberMe knows that Olympic and Western are good places, too.”
“How do you know that?”
He mimicked her shrug. “I’m a cop. Cops always know where to find hookers.”
“Where do you find them in Cedar Creek?” she asked curiously.
“Online or in Tulsa.” He started tapping the cell case again. “Olympic and Western... There are plenty of other places in LA. I wonder why he picked those two.”
“Maybe he lives in the area.”
“Or works there himself. They’re both in Olympic Division.” His tone was thoughtful, and his gaze had gone distant. He might be lying beside her in bed, her naked body pressed against his, but his thoughts were half a country away. That made it a good time to fluff the pillow under her head and go back to indulging herself in studying every little detail about him.
“I should have asked Morwenna’s mum if he would be the type to solicit prostitutes. Probably not, since he’s so obsessed with you. If he does, I bet it’s blue-eyed blondes. But then maybe he lives on the other side of town. You know, you don’t play where you live. People are more likely to recognize you.”
He was so serious, his voice pitched low, thoughtful, talking more to himself than to her. While he was lost in that world, she could do anything—get out of bed, take a shower, maybe even do an erotic little dance around the room in front of him—and he would be totally unaware. It was one of the things about him she found endearing.
Aw, hell, she found everything about him endearing.
Everything.
Chapter 9
Daniel’s muttering had trailed off, and he’d located five different patterns in the wood beams of the ceiling while his subconscious continued to wonder about the significance of those streets to RememberMe. Then he finally realized that Natasha had fallen asleep. She looked like an angel, kind of a sexy and sultry angel. If he had an ounce of artistic talent, she would be his only model, her every mood, clothed and nude, all her happiness, silliness, sexiness.
But his talent lay in police work. All he could do was keep her safe and find her stalker, and his email held hours’ worth of work to help him do just that. Even though Ben was coming over later to help, it couldn’t hurt to go ahead and get started.
Stay in bed or work? Peel himself away from Natasha, who was peaceful and resting and naked, and go downstairs to cuddle with his laptop instead?
Work could wait.
He forwarded RememberMe’s text to the chief and Ben, told them he and Natasha were fine, then turned the cell to vibrate, laid it on the table and settled in close to her again.
The room was more shadowy when he awoke. Not dark, but the sun was definitely lower in the west. He yawned, wondered why he was asleep at four in the afternoon, felt a warm breath on his shoulder and remembered it all. Every incredible second of it.
Including admitting he still loved Natasha.
For half a second, he’d wondered if he should have kept that to himself, but why bother? It was true. And like he’d said, people looked at them and knew. Their connection had just been so...
She shifted behind him then slid her arm over his middle. “I’m starving. Are you starving?”
“Yeah, I am.” His breakfast had been cookies from the vending machine at work, and they had missed lunch.
“Any chance Ben would want an early dinner?”
“I’ll text him.” He didn’t right away, though. He was too comfortable lying there, all warm, her body pressed against his, a slight chance of falling back to sleep if he gave it a try, a better chance of having great sex again if he gave that a try. But Natasha let go of him, the mattress shifted and she rolled away. She sat then stood up. Scooped up clothes on her way around the bed. “Bathroom?”
“First door on the left.” He admired the view as she walked out then finally reached for his phone.
It was about an hour later when Ben arrived with his laptop and three large brown bags. The smell was incredible, though not all of it was for them. As soon as he unpacked the food on the kitchen counter, he took two smaller plastic bags and two drinks and headed back outside. “Aw, he brought food for the other officers,” Natasha said, sounding impressed. “He’s a good guy.”
“He is,” Daniel agreed. He’d worked with a lot of cops who automatically considered themselves superior to small-town cops just because they worked in a city. They assumed they were more sophisticated, more worldly, and that was sometimes true on an individual basis. But Ben and Sam would very easily hold their own if they ever decided to move to the city. Smart and capable had nothing to do with the size of the town where they worked.
He set out plates, utensils and napkins, and when Ben returned, they served themselves buffet-style before carrying their dinner into the dining room. His computer was already set up there. Ben booted up his own, and they sat down, plenty of food to eat and hours of surveillance footage to go through.
Natasha didn’t have anything to do but eat, so she played hostess, refilling their plates or glasses when needed, taking them away to the kitchen when they were done. For a time, she stood behind Daniel’s chair, watching until she said the video made her eyes cross. She found a book in the living room—Mila Douglas’s book, The Unlucky Ones—and brought it back to the dining room. She didn’t seem at all bored. Just...comfortable.
If she hadn’t run away, this was how they would have spent the last five years: sharing dinners and quiet evenings at home. Hopefully, they would have had at least one little Harper by now, maybe two. This being a Sunday, the dinner would have been at his parents’ house, and Jeffrey and Archer would have spent the entire time spoiling her and the kids. They did love her a lot.
They could still have all that. Maybe not the weekly Sunday suppers with his dads, but the rest of it. They hadn’t lo
st their chance. It had just been postponed for a while. As long as there was breath in their bodies...
Which wouldn’t be long if RememberMe had his way.
After a few hours, Natasha made coffee, and they ate slices of Mrs. Little Bear’s excellent chocolate meringue pie. Ben, who’d grown up eating her food, wasn’t overly impressed, but Daniel, whose parents hadn’t been available to cook regularly, and Natasha, whose mother’s creativity in the kitchen far exceeded her skills, did everything but lick the plates when they were done.
“I’d be fat and happy if I got to eat like this all the time,” Natasha said with a sigh.
His gaze back on the computer, Daniel said, “You could. She runs a restaurant, you know. You’d just have to move here.” From the corner of his eye, he watched her response. A slight raising of her brows. A moment’s concentration as if she was trying to imagine herself not in hiding but living here. Seeing the rest of the town. Spending time with the Little Bears, the Douglases and the Armstrongs on a regular basis. Living in this house with Daniel. Feeling safe and loved and anchored, with no need to ever run away again.
Then a smile, just a little one, a curve of her lips that was sweet and delicate and full of satisfaction. “I just might do that.”
Could she leave her home and settle halfway across the country with him? Say goodbye to Stacia and everything familiar? Five years ago, marrying him hadn’t been a complicated decision. She had planned to move in with him, eight miles from the apartment she shared with Stacia. They would have been within an hour’s drive of her parents’ place, and her job and friends were a crowded freeway’s drive away. But here...
She would make—had already made—new friends. She could do video calls with Stacia and the others. As he’d told her earlier, planes flew that way.
He forced his attention back to the computer. When they were alone, he would simply ask her if she could live here. This time around, instead of assuming, they would talk like mature adults.
“Man, that brings back memories,” Ben said, breaking the silence that had settled.
“What’s that?”
Ben turned the computer to show him the paused video, a shot of an unassuming gray midsize sedan. “That was my first unmarked unit. The department got a good deal on them because they were all crap. Mine had no radio, no siren and no heat in the winter. I hated it.”
“LAPD must have got a good deal on them, too, because that was my only unmarked unit out there. At least mine had a radio and a siren.” Daniel had been so happy at his promotion that he hadn’t cared he was driving a crappy vehicle also driven by a large percentage of the county’s residents. He’d worked with officers who had no desire to get out of uniform and into detective ranks, but from day one, he’d wanted to move up. That was what had attracted him to the job. It was what he was good at.
When his cell phone buzzed, Daniel glanced at the time—coming up on 9:00 p.m.—and rubbed his eyes wearily before he picked it up. He was having trouble focusing, both his vision and his mind. He might have seen enough of cars whizzing past silently for one day.
Apprehension washed over Natasha, seated at his right, feet drawn onto the chair. She closed the book, marking her spot with her finger and looked at him with a fear that cut right through him.
“‘Message for Nat,’” he read aloud. “‘What the hell are you still doing there? You need to go back to the hotel. Now. Don’t make me tell you again.’”
Five minutes later, the phone buzzed again. “‘You’re pissing me off, Nat, and trust me, you do not want to do that.’”
Three minutes later: “‘Get out of there, Nat.’”
Two minutes after that came one more. Daniel didn’t read it aloud, but he grimly handed the phone to Ben. He looked grim, too, when he handed it back.
“What does it say?” Natasha demanded.
“It’s for me.”
“From him?”
“Yeah. It’s just the usual threat, Tash. Nothing new.” Okay, maybe the wording was more obscene and more graphic, but in the end, the message was the same: RememberMe wanted Daniel dead.
She wavered between wanting to read it for herself and not wanting to know what had made him and Ben both grimace. After a moment, she shuddered and got to her feet. “Can I take a shower?”
“Sure. The jersey’s in the bottom dresser drawer.” It was a relic from his high school baseball days, pin-striped and well-worn once it had become her favorite of all his clothes.
Smiling wanly, she touched his shoulder on her way out of the room.
When the shower came on upstairs, Ben leaned back and stretched his arms above his head. “I wonder why our crazy guy wants to do anything else once he’s already ripped your effing head off. You’d think it would be more satisfying to desecrate a live person than a dead body.”
“You’d think,” Daniel agreed sardonically. “Too bad RememberMe isn’t thinking clearly. Gee, while we’re at it, why don’t we wish he was sane?”
“Yeah, if he was sane, you’d be going to sleep all alone in a cold bed tonight.” Ben grinned as he began shutting down his computer. “We can start again tomorrow, but right now, I find myself forgetting that I’m watching this stuff for a reason. I need a break. What’s the plan for tomorrow? You staying here or is she coming in with you?”
Daniel stood and stretched, too. “I’ll let you know when I know.”
He walked to the door with Ben, locked up behind him then watched through the peephole to see he made it safely to his vehicle. Feeling an odd combination of fatigue and energy, he shut off the lights, except for one in the kitchen and another in the living room, and slowly climbed the stairs. The running water became louder with each step, and musky floral scents drifted on the air. Natasha had left the bathroom door open, a silent invitation they’d used way back.
He stepped inside the large square room, looked at the pile of clothing on the black-and-white tile floor, felt the sweet warm air damp against his skin and, finally, shifted his gaze to the shower, where Natasha was peering out from behind the curtain. Her blond hair was plastered to her head, giving her a sleek look—like a seal, he’d say, but she might not be amused—and her mouth was curved in a sweet, inviting smile that he found more seductive than any deliberately sexy smile could be.
“Come on in,” she said, her voice husky and vibrating through him. “The water’s steamy.”
“What a coincidence,” he replied as he began undressing. “So am I.”
* * *
The cell phone buzzed a few more times over the next hour, until Daniel had finally left the bed and taken it downstairs. He still had a landline, he’d said, and if Sam or Ben needed anything important, they could radio the officers on surveillance to bang on the door.
Natasha wasn’t sure which surprised her more: that he had a landline or that he would ignore the cell. He felt such an obligation to responsibility and duty. She knew from his face that ScrewYou was saying some ugly stuff to him, but she didn’t see any worry in his reaction. Irritation, annoyance, frustration, but no worry.
It was too early for bed, and she thought maybe they were both too tired to make love again. That last time had been lazy, easy, kind of like an aftershock to a powerful earthquake. That kind of sex was her favorite because you had to be pretty much a part of each other for it to really work.
But she didn’t want to get out of the warm bed, didn’t want to go back to reading the scary-sad-hopeful book she’d started, didn’t want to be out of sight of Daniel for longer than it took to pee. So she combed her fingers through a first-class case of bedhead and wriggled into the baseball jersey. Then she slid under the covers and turned on her right side to look at him. “I take it I’m spending the night here.”
“Unless you’d prefer us both to spend the night with the iron birds.”
“If we do that, instead of Morwenna telling
humiliating stories about her sister-in-law’s encounter with the birds, she’ll be telling about ours. And we’d be sure to have one.”
“Those birds... What were they thinking?”
The question was familiar. She’d heard it plenty of times when she’d dragged him through various art exhibits. He appreciated art, he’d insisted, but paint splattered haphazardly on canvas? Rusty pieces of trash welded together? Blobs of shapeless clay? What were the artists thinking when they did the pieces, and what were the museum people thinking when they called them art? Hearing him say it now gave her a sense of comfort. She scooted as close to him as she could get and whispered, “God, I’ve missed you.”
His gaze locked with hers, and his fingers brushed her jaw. “These last years have been like someone ripped out a part of me, Tash. Everything healed over, but life was never the same. I was never the same.”
“I’m so—”
His fingers touched her mouth. “Don’t apologize. You never have to apologize to me again. I’m just saying that’s what it was like, and I don’t ever want to feel that way again.”
Her chest tightened mid-breath. When he’d said he still loved her, she’d thought... Oh, God, she’d jumped immediately to dreams of second chances and happily-ever-after. Had he simply been stating a fact? I still love you, and I want to keep you safe and protect you from your stalker, but I don’t want to be with you?
It happened. Her mom said it was that way with her father: they loved each other, but they were a lot happier apart than together. Could she love Daniel if they were apart? The last five years were proof. Could she bear it if he didn’t want her in his life?
Apparently unaware of the panic racing around in her brain, he went on in a ragged, emotion-thickened voice. “Of course, everyone feels that way at some point in their lives. The only way you can not get your heart broken is if you never love anyone, and that’s no way to live. I just want to know, Tash, that you’ll do your best to not do it again. That you’ll talk to me. Trust me. Understand that you’re a part of me, and I have a stake in what’s going on with you. When you’re afraid or unsure or unhappy, I need a chance to help make things right. I need to know you won’t run away again. I need to know you’ll stay.”
Killer Smile Page 20