by Mary McBride
“As long as it takes,” she said softly. A tiny smile, a sad one, twisted the corners of her mouth. “You remind me of my shrink, Decker. Yesterday, when I told him I wasn’t coming back, he said I was making a mistake.”
“Maybe. Only you know what’s right for you.”
She arched an eyebrow. “So, do you have a degree in psychology, too?”
“Me?” He chuckled. “Hardly. I flunked the hostage negotiator course two times.”
“Why?”
“Too impatient. The last time I negotiated with a bullet instead of a bullhorn. My supervisors thought I missed the point.”
She laughed, and he was glad to see her worried features smooth out. What a waste, he thought. A woman as beautiful as she was, hiding herself away from all the eyes that would eagerly appreciate her the way his were doing now, skimming from her soft red hair along lush curves of black velvet all the way to her pink toenails. A hell of a waste.
The front doorbell echoed down the long hallway. His gaze flicked to her face. “Were you expecting anybody?”
“No. Nobody. It’s nearly ten, isn’t it?”
He glanced at his watch as he got up. “Five after. Stay here. I’D see who it is.”
The bell rang once more before Joe got there. When he called, “Who is it?” the answer was a stone cold silence that had him reaching for his gun before he wrenched open the door on the very last face he had expected to see. His captain. Frank Cobble.
From the sudden flare in the captain’s eyes and the quick compression of his lips, it was obvious that he hadn’t expected to see Joe, either, and from his harsh tone of voice it was obvious that he wasn’t one bit pleased.
“What are you doing here, Decker?”
“Just hanging out, Captain.” Joe eased his revolver, unnecessary, into its holster, then he grinned, all innocence, knowing the display would rub his supervisor’s notorious ulcer like sandpaper.
“I told you there’s nothing in the budget for overtime on this.” Cobble’s words came out like hissing steam in the cold night air.
“I’m on my own clock, Frank. What about you? You’re usually tucked into your bed by this time every night, aren’t you?”
“For your information, Decker, I’ve been known to work past five a time or two. Especially now, with the press all over our asses about this Ripper.”
Especially now that they had a witness, Joe thought, and nine-to-five Cobble could grab a little last-minute glory with very little effort.
“How’s our witness?” the captain asked, confirming Joe’s suspicions. “I thought I’d just check on her, you know, to make sure she’s all right. I drive right by here on my way home every night, anyway, so I thought I’d stop.”
“She’s asleep,” he answered tersely.
“You brought her in to look at the mug shots today?”
“She looked at them, but she couldn’t ID anybody. Maybe her head will be clearer in a day or two.”
The captain was silent for a moment, no doubt disappointed that he wasn’t going to be giving a press conference the next day or seeing his picture in the paper. Then he turned up the collar of his perfectly pressed and neatly belted trench coat and stepped back from the door. “You let me know the minute she comes up with anything, all right? Anything. You call me at home if you have to.”
“Will do, boss.” Joe sketched a little Boy Scout cross over his heart just to irritate him.
“See you later, Decker,” he snarled before turning down the walk.
When Joe called out, “Watch your step, Frank. It’s slippery out there,” the only response he got was a quick brush of the man’s leather-gloved hand.
He closed the door and locked it. Sara Campbell owed him one, he thought. He’d just spared her an interrogation that would have been about as subtle and unpleasant as a beating with a rubber hose.
She was curled up on the couch when he returned to the den, her empty wineglass about to tumble from her lax hand. When he removed it as gently as possible, her eyes blinked open.
“I must have fallen asleep,” she said. “Who was at the door?”
“My boss.”
Her forehead creased and she struggled to sit up. “You’re not in trouble for bringing me those pictures, are you?”
“Nah. He was just checking on his star witness.” When he watched her stifle a yawn, he said, “Why don’t you go on up to bed? I’ll just hang out down here.”
“Maybe I will.”
He reached out his hand to help her up. The wine had made her wobbly, and when she leaned against him, Joe breathed in the musky scent of her perfume and felt the womanly warmth of her beneath the sleek black velvet and wanted her with an intensity he hadn’t felt in years.
“Sorry,” she said, steadying herself with a hand on his arm. Her touch, light as it was, flared through him like a Roman candle. He felt his jaw tighten and his expression flatten in his effort to tamp down on the sudden, serious lust.
“Well, good night,” he said, stepping back and snatching a magazine from the coffee table, opening it and beginning to read even as he sat.
“You’re welcome to sleep in any of those other bedrooms upstairs; Lieutenant.”
He glanced from the page—“This is fine, thanks”—then back to whatever gibberish was printed there, aching for her to leave so he could begin to cool off.
“All right, then,” she said, yawning again on her way out the door. “See you in the morning.”
“Right.” Morning. When he would have to batten down his lust all over again. He was really looking forward to that.
Chapter 5
The next morning Sara’s grocery order arrived at seven-thirty, much earlier than she’d expected considering the amount of snow that had come down, a goodly portion of which was on her kitchen floor after Kelvin brought in the last ice chest from his truck. The husky delivery man looked more like a longshoreman this morning in his knit cap and navy pea coat.
“It’s bad out there,” he said, while he emptied the contents of the ice chest onto the island.
“I appreciate your getting here so early, Kelvin.”
“Oh, that’s okay. When I shopped out your order, it looked like you had a bunch of breakfast stuff, so I put you first on my list. No mangoes today, though. Sorry about that.”
“No big deal,” she said, relieved that he hadn’t decided to substitute some khaki-colored, unrecognizable fruit that she’d only wind up throwing away. Kelvin had been shopping her orders for long enough now that he was beginning to second-guess her, often with disastrous results.
He was a sweetheart, though, and oddly gentle for someone with hands like slabs of baby back ribs and a neck as big around as Sara’s thigh. Since her panic attacks had worsened, sometimes Kelvin was the only human being she would see in the space of a week. Well, Kelvin and Dr. Bourne. Now there was no more Dr. Bourne.
“How’s your mom’s rheumatism, Kelvin?”
“She’s achy,” he said. “This snow’s no help. Or the cold. Hey, you want me to put some of this in the freezer for you?”
“I can get it,” she said. “Thanks, anyway. I’ll just sign for it so you can get on your way.”
“Okeydoke.” He fumbled through some papers until he located her order, then vainly searched behind his ears and in the pockets of his pea coat for a pen.
“Never mind,” Sara said. “There’s a pen over here in the drawer.”
When she turned to get it, though, she slipped in a little puddle of melted snow. Her feet started going out from under her, and her arms began to pinwheel, and all she could think was that she was going to crack her head again and, if she lived, she’d have to be rushed to that horrible hospital. Given a choice, she thought, she’d really rather die.
Then Kelvin caught her, and she was safe, even if momentarily smothered in wet navy wool and the mingled odors of produce and perspiration.
“Hold it right there,” Lieutenant Decker’s voice resounded from the doorway.
“No!” Sara screeched, untangling herself from Kelvin’s arms, then standing protectively in front of him. “This is my delivery man, for heaven’s sake. I lost my balance and he caught me.”
The lieutenant rolled his eyes, lowered his revolver and let out his breath in a curse. Kelvin, meanwhile, stood as frozen as a snowman, his mouth agape and his eyes like huge black coals.
“Kelvin, it’s all right,” Sara said. “It’s okay. This man is just—”
“Her brother,” Decker said, cutting her off as he reholstered his weapon.
Sara blinked. “My...?”
The lieutenant fashioned one of his ravishing grins, aimed it at Kelvin and said, “I’m a little overprotec-· tive. Sorry.”
Kelvin started to breathe again. Well, pant, actually, Sara noticed, while he hurriedly gathered his empty canvas sacks and his ice chest and order forms.
“Let me find a pen and I’ll sign that for you,” Sara offered, but poor Kelvin was already halfway out the door.
“S’okay, Miss Campbell,” he called over his shoulder. “Really. S’okay. We’ll take care of that next week. Bye.”
Sara whirled to the man who was leaning a shoulder against the door frame, still grinning that killer grin.
“My brother!” she exclaimed. “My brother?”
He added a shrug to the grin. “I didn’t think he’d buy it if I said I was your sister.”
The man made it impossible for her to laugh and be irritated at the same time, so Sara laughed. “Why all the mystery?” she asked, picking up an egg carton and a gallon of milk on her way to the refrigerator.
“The fewer people who know about your little runin with the Ripper, the better. I don’t want this to turn into a circus with you as the star attraction.” He was silent a minute. Then, while Sara rearranged the contents of her refrigerator to make room for the new groceries, she heard the lieutenant mumbling.
“Onions. Green pepper. Hmm. Mushrooms.” His mumble clarified into his usual sexy baritone. “You know, I used to make a really mean omelette. Bring those eggs back over here.”
Joe was doing fine with his one-handed egg cracking—a quick shot on the rim of the bowl, a controlled drop followed by a perfect lob of empty shell into the garbage disposer—until the sixth egg, which cracked, seemingly all by itself, and ran down the outside of the bowl to form a yellow, viscous pool on the white-tiled countertop. “God bless it!” he swore.
“The paper towels are just to your right,” Sara said from her post at the stove where she was tending the sausages. “As we say in the antique business, Decker, ‘You break it, you bought it.’”
He sopped up the egg, then broke another one—two hands this time—and began whisking them with a fork. Whatever had possessed him to cook an omelette, Joe had no idea. One minute he was drawing his service revolver on a guy in Sara’s kitchen; the next minute he was wearing an apron, crying from chopping onions and beating the hell out of half a dozen eggs. Well, he was hungry, he reassured himself, and he didn’t want Sara to sneak anything weird into his breakfast, like Swiss chard or capers.
When the omelette was done, however, she managed to sneak something onto his plate, after all. Something that looked like a small circle of green gelatin with little black bugs in it. And after she informed him it was kiwifruit, he was even more determined not to eat something that smacked of shoe polish and extinct birds.
“For somebody so fearless with criminals and delivery people, Lieutenant, you’re a real weenie when it comes to food,” Sara said. “Didn’t your mother make you eat everything on your plate?”
“Yeah, she did. Every last piece of meat and potatoes,” he said. “And for somebody who’s such a weenie in general, Miss Campbell, eating kiwi isn’t going to exactly get your picture on the cover of National Geographic.”
“I am not a weenie.” She put down her fork, glaring across the table at him. Her eyes were greener by far than the disputed fruit. “Well, not here, anyway. Not when I’m home.”
They had brought their plates into the sunny breakfast room off the kitchen. Ivy climbed the wallpaper and curtains. It twined around the legs of the glass-top table through which Joe had been eyeing Sara’s slim legs and slender feet while he ate. She’d traded yesterday’s jeans for black leggings along with a bulky white sweater that tried but failed to hide her generous curves. He caught himself thinking again what a waste it was for her to reside permanently behind locked doors.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” he said. “I’ll eat my kiwifruit if you’ll go out to dinner with me. Maybe catch a movie.”
“You’re asking me out?”
“Well, yeah.” He hadn’t meant to. It had just slipped out, taking him as much by surprise as it had her. “Dinner and a movie. Nothing threatening about that.”
“Not for you,” she said. “For me it’s comparable to going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. We can have dinner and a movie right here.”
“What? Swiss chard and Sleeping Beauty?”
She picked up her plate, then shot from her chair. “That’s not funny, Lieutenant. Don’t you have to go back to work or something?”
“I am at work.”
When she rounded the table on her way to the kitchen, Joe caught her arm, holding it when she tried to pull away. “You can’t stay here all your life, Sara,” he said softly.
“Wanna bet?” She jerked her arm out of his grasp and disappeared through the kitchen door, leaving Joe sitting there, staring at cold eggs and a green circle of fruit that was beginning to look like one big smirking eye.
He hadn’t asked a woman out in three years, then he’d done it almost by accident. With a damned nutcase, no less. And she’d turned him down. It probably was time for him to get back to work, or something.
He was chopping the ice off the windshield of his Mustang when Maggie wheeled the big Crown Victoria into the drive. One look at her face, and he could tell that her date with the security guy at Saint Cat’s had been a bust. His own face, he thought, probably looked the same. Like he’d been sucking lemons.
“How was last night?” he called out.
“Don’t even ask.” She plowed through the foot of snow to stand beside him. “How’d it go here?”
“One suspicious phone call and one late-night inspection by nine-to-five Frank,” he said, delivering a blow with the scraper that freed one wiper.
“You’re kidding? Cobble was here?”
“Yeah, but he’s not going to be giving any press conferences today.” He reached across the windshield to attack the other frozen blade.
“So she didn’t ID any of the pictures, huh?”
“Nothing.”
Maggie sighed, and her breath wreathed around her head a moment in the cold air. “Well, you go ahead and take off. I’ll stay with her today.”
Those were the exact words Joe thought he wanted to hear, but as soon as his partner spoke them, he felt a little thread pull tight in his chest. “That’s okay.” He avoided Maggie’s eyes by concentrating on the icy glass. “I’ll stay.”
He could feel her eyes on him, two blue lasers boring through the back of his head. Maggie knew him better than he liked to admit. When nobody wanted to work with him after the First Federal Savings and Loan episode last year—when he’d ignored the hostage negotiators out front and broken in a back window, then handcuffed the asshole robber while he was screaming into the phone—it was Maggie who’d stood up and volunteered. Her first words to him in the squad car were, “Listen, Sue. I like my life, okay? So I’d appreciate it if you’d leave your death wish at home.”
And he had. Pretty much.
“Do you think this is a good idea, Joe?” Maggie asked him quietly.
“Probably not, Mag,” he said. “But I’m staying, anyway. I’ve already called in sick.”
He gave her the pay phone number he’d scribbled the night before, asking her to check it out and get back to him. Then, as she was backing out of the drive, “Oh, and te
ll Cobble that no news is just that. No news.”
Sara stared at the monitor of her computer. It might just as well have been blank for all its images of plates and teacups and saucers registered on her brain. Lieutenant Decker had asked her out. Her heart had done a happy, surprised little tap dance, and she’d yearned to say yes, but instead she’d said no way. Out was something she just didn’t do anymore.
The thing was, she thought, when she’d told Dr. Bourne she was going home to stay, she hadn’t intended to meet anybody who’d tempt her to leave. She hadn’t foreseen dinner with Joe Decker across a candlelit table or a movie with his arm brushing hers in a dark theater. Dammit. Enticing as those thoughts were, they were closing her throat and tightening her chest.
She wished she’d never met him. Or that he were different. Not a muscled, fearless, gun-toting, card-carrying adventurer, but somebody who’d be content to burrow away with her here. Somebody who fixed a mean omelette then didn’t want to leave. Or worse, try to take her with him when he did.
It wasn’t going to work, she told herself, and the sooner she accepted that fact, the better off she’d be. She wished they’d catch the South Side Ripper this afternoon so her life could get back to normal. Well, her version of it, anyway.
Seeking that normalcy, Sara began to make a few changes on her website, marking sold those items that she’d shipped off to buyers last week. Two Fiesta coffeepots. One medium green dessert bowl. A single turquoise tripod candleholder. It had been a good week. She’d cleared over six hundred dollars. This week would probably be even better since two collectors were frantically trying to outbid each other for the red ten-inch vase that had only cost her four bucks. She’d probably clear six or seven hundred on that alone. Not too shabby for a nutcase, she thought.
A soft knock sounded at her door. Sara called, “Come in,” then swiveled to see the lieutenant’s face, flushed with cold, peek around the edge of the door. “I thought you’d left,” she said, trying to disguise the pleasant surprise in her voice. “I assumed your partner was going to baby-sit me now.”