by Beverly Bird
“Damn you, Phillip McGaffney,” she muttered just as the alarm went off.
Kate rolled over and slapped her palm down on top of it. Then she was instantly contrite. Phillip McGaffney was dead. What kind of problems did she have compared to that?
Then a particularly resonant rumbling came from under the blanket beneath her door. At least McGaffney had not been forced to spend the night with Raphael Montiel chainsawing away on his living room sofa, Kate thought sourly. It was just possible the man had gotten the better end of the deal.
At least Montiel had left her alone. He hadn’t—
Hadn’t what? A thin laugh escaped Kate’s throat. He hadn’t been suddenly overwhelmed with lust for the single woman just beyond the locked and blanket-bulkheaded door? Not likely, Kate thought. He’d spent most of their interview the night before watching her with those green eyes squinting ever so slightly. Like she was a bug or a microbe on a slide, something he couldn’t quite identify. He had not once glanced at her with anything resembling a gleam in those eyes.
“It doesn’t matter,” she muttered, getting to her feet, swaying slightly from fatigue.
Kate knew her assets, and she also knew that a man like Montiel would never appreciate any of them. She’d tangled with his type before—a man with that same lazy, confident sense of power—and she had been left almost literally at the altar by him in favor of a flighty, vapid, though admittedly physically perfect exotic dancer. She swiped a hand over her head to smooth her wild curls. Then she went grimly to the closed bedroom door.
The problem was that she knew relatively little about men, she realized. She’d been engaged for those six short months and had come out of that experience even more perplexed by the species than she had been before. She did know, however, that men didn’t have to be particularly swept away by attraction to…well, to…want it. And mornings—well, men often felt particularly amorous in the morning, and it was not so much desire that got them that way but testosterone.
Kate eased back from the bedroom door. Better to be safe than sorry, she decided.
She retreated to her closet, then she went to her dresser, gathering clothing. She was not going to bounce back and forth between the bedroom and the bath with a towel wrapped around her. It was best to set a precedent, she thought, right here, right now. Who knew how much longer this situation would be necessary?
After she showered and had gotten dressed she tiptoed into the living room, past the sofa, then she stopped and stared. He was laying on his back. His right arm was flung over his eyes.
He had taken his shirt off.
“Oh, my,” Kate murmured. The arm heaved over his face was corded and looked strong. She hadn’t realized last night just how…well, muscled he was.
He hadn’t used the sheet she’d given him. He still had his jeans on, and she was very grateful for that. But the snap was open, and the dark golden hair on his chest tapered down, narrowing into a V until it disappeared beneath the denim. Kate took in a deep breath and ran a finger under her collar. She took a step backward from the sofa, then two. Coffee. She needed coffee. Now.
She squared her shoulders and turned for the kitchen. Then she stared at her counter, and a sound of pure distress caught in her throat.
There was a carton of milk sitting out. A whole half gallon. And it was the good stuff, too, not two percent, not skim, but the carton she used in recipes. Her gaze flew around the kitchen. She knew every move he had made by the time she breathed again.
There were rye crumbs on the counter. His cell phone sat beside them. She hurried around the breakfast bar and yanked open the refrigerator door. Within another thirty seconds, she knew that both her roast beef and the horseradish sauce had been decimated.
That didn’t particularly bother her. She cooked for others to enjoy, after all. But the waste infuriated her—a perfectly good half gallon of milk!
“What have you done?”
Her cry went through Raphael’s unconscious like a jet breaking the sound barrier. It boomed his heart into sudden overdrive. He rolled and groped beneath the sofa for the gun he had tucked there after removing it from his waistband last night. When he landed on his feet, he was armed. “What?”
Astonishment—and maybe just a little fear—punched the air right out of Kate’s chest. “Put that away!”
Raphael looked around. There was no one in the apartment but them. “What?” he asked again.
“That…that weapon!”
Raphael looked down at himself. Sleep tried to cling to his mind like a sticky spiderweb, making his thoughts track too slowly. “It’s been called a lot of things but—”
“The gun! Are you crazy? What kind of person are you?”
Raphael finally came fully awake. “Me? What the hell did you scream for?”
“I want a new baby-sitter.” She turned her back on him smartly—he doubted if a trained cadet could pivot quite that cleanly—and went to the kitchen. She grabbed the telephone on the wall.
“Your hair’s sticking straight up from your head.”
Kate gave a cry and dropped the phone. She plastered both hands to her skull. Of course it was. She’d stuck her fingers into it in dismay when she’d seen the mess he’d made of her kitchen.
She smoothed her hair frantically, then was appalled to realize that she even cared what he thought. She dropped her hands.
One wild curl had escaped her effort, he realized. It made him itch to touch it, to see if it would wrap around his finger with a life of its own. He was losing his mind.
“I don’t want you here,” she said.
“Yeah. We’ve been all through that.” He snapped his jeans and tucked the gun into them at his back.
Kate struggled for reason. “I understand that the authorities think I’m in danger, but I want them to send someone else to protect me. Clearly, this isn’t going to work.”
Something vaguely uncomfortable gripped Raphael’s stomach. He told himself it was just the way she talked. It was really starting to get to him. Clearly… Then again, he’d rarely been vetoed by any woman, for any reason on any job.
“Why not?” he heard himself ask.
“You’re…you’re…” Kate crossed her arms over her chest and wished he would put a shirt on. “Chaos,” she finished.
“I’m chaos? You screamed.”
“You wasted a whole half gallon of milk while I slept! And you woke up and pointed a gun at me!”
“I thought you were in danger!”
“Why on earth would you think that?”
“Because you were caterwauling!”
This time he could almost predict what she would do before it happened. That sniff. The immediate hoisting of her shoulders. “I was not caterwauling.”
“You sounded like a cat with its tail trapped in a door.”
Color flooded her cheeks. Raphael watched the phenomenon.
Then, finally, for the first time, he noticed the way she was dressed. She wore khaki slacks, socks and neatly laced sneakers. This was topped by a white turtleneck, albeit a sleeveless one. Except for her arms, every inch of skin from her chin on down was covered, laced, pressed, creased. She looked as though she had been up for hours already.
Raphael glanced at his watch. It was only twenty after six.
He scrubbed his face with his hands. He needed a shower and a shave. Of course, he had nothing with him to shave with, and she definitely didn’t seem the type to keep an extra razor on hand for unexpected male guests. Let her call Plattsmier, he thought. The department was full of by-the-book rookies who would put her milk carton away after they drank from it, and they’d both be a hell of a lot happier if one of them was assigned to her. But Raphael doubted if any of them had ticked off the commissioner just lately, or if they knew a blessed thing about Philadelphia’s organized crime netherworld.
Nope, he thought, he was stuck with her.
“Call in to your diner,” he said. “Tell them you won’t be in. I’m going to tak
e a shower.”
“No.”
He’d already turned away from her. Now he looked back. She was holding the milk carton in front of her in both hands, as though it were a smoking gun.
“We talked about this last night,” she said, drawing herself up again. “I have responsibilities. I intend to meet them.”
Raphael felt his blood pressure creeping upward again and it wasn’t even yet six-thirty in the morning. Then he realized that there was always more than one way to skin a cat.
He thought of her labeled food containers. Of her scheduling diary with the times of calls noted down. “Yeah? Counting the one to your commonwealth?”
Kate frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“You’re one of two prime witnesses in a murder investigation. Seems to me you have a certain responsibility to the good people of Pennsylvania, too.” Unless he badly missed his guess, this was one woman who had never missed a chance to vote. Hell, she probably wrote her comments in the margins of the ballot.
“I fail to see—”
“You’re bait.”
“I’m what?”
“Bait. You’re alive. You might have seen something. In all likelihood, someone is going to come after you in an effort to remedy that problem. When it happens, I’m going to nail his—”
“Spare me the profanity,” she said quickly.
“Backside to the wall.”
“I take it self-confidence is not a problem for you.”
“No. Not when it comes to my work.”
That quelled her. A new flatness had come to his tone. It was unapologetic and brooked no argument. Kate felt like she was somehow losing this discussion. “What does that have to do with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania?”
“The long and short of it is that by cooperating with me, you’ll be helping to take a criminal off the streets.”
She cocked her brows. It irritated the hell out of him. But Raphael was winning here, and he knew it.
“Let me get this straight,” she said. “A killer comes after me, and you’re there beside me so you can nail his—”
“—backside.”
“—to the wall.”
“Right.”
“And no other officer could do this quite so well.”
“I’m not an officer. I’m a detective. Big difference.”
“I beg your pardon.”
Raphael smiled graciously. “Bottom line, honey, you’re stuck with me if you want to see justice served.”
Kate nodded thoughtfully.
She should have been fighting it a bit more, he thought. This victory was feeling a little too easy.
“Okay,” she said finally. “Go take your shower. I’ll make us some breakfast. Then I’ll let you come to the diner with me so you can play watchdog.”
“Damn it—”
“Stop swearing.”
“Get used to it.”
“I will not.”
“You’re not getting it here! I need to look for this guy! I can’t do that from a diner!”
“You just said he was going to come to me.”
“He will. He’ll try. I want to nail him first! I can’t do that if I’m baby-sitting you!”
“That’s your job!”
“It’s my assignment. I can do it my own damned way. And my way is to keep an eye on you while I try to unravel this mess.”
“Not without my consent.”
He was going to kill her, Raphael thought. End of problem.
He’s going to kill me, Kate thought. She saw his hands clench at his sides, and he did have that gun tucked behind him somewhere. She took a judicious step backward until her spine came in contact with the refrigerator.
She did not want to die. She most definitely did want someone good watching her back until this was over. But that only made it doubly important that they set some ground rules here.
“Look,” they said simultaneously.
Kate waved a hand. “Go ahead. You first. You will anyway.”
“We need a plan here,” Raphael replied.
This time her brows positively arched. “A plan? You want to make a plan?”
“Right.”
“Such as?”
“If I had one, we wouldn’t need one.”
“Unless, of course, it was diametrically opposed to my own.” His eyes went to slits. Kate held a hand up, palm out. “Okay, okay. Go ahead. You were saying?”
“Call in to the diner for one morning until we can figure out how we’re going to do this.”
She hated, positively hated to admit it, but it made sense.
“They’ll understand!” he argued at her silence. “A man dropped dead into your dinner plate last night!”
“Actually, it was a salad plate.”
“What the hell difference does it make?” he shouted.
Kate flinched. “One morning?”
“And then we’ll take it from there.”
Kate knew, somehow, that it was the best she was going to get. Besides, she saw an advantage to letting him win this one. It was a matter of give and take, she reasoned. Dinner For Two had an engagement this evening. Talking him into letting her do both seemed like something of a long shot. She’d give in on the less important of the two issues. The dinner engagement was something they could get into later.
“Okay.” She put the milk down and reached for the phone. But she didn’t punch in the number right away. She watched him turn away and head for the hall, still shirtless. She took in those broad, bare shoulders. They moved nicely with his stride, with that grace that was all male. She contemplated the movement of muscle beneath skin that looked like pale bronze. Kate put the phone down again quickly and rubbed her palms on her khakis to dry them.
He paused at the door to the hall. “You wouldn’t want to have kept that milk anyway.”
“Why not?” she asked, startled.
“Because I drank right out of the carton.”
He heard her make that strangling sound again. Raphael went on toward the bathroom, imagining her expression, grinning to himself. Regardless of the fact that he didn’t want the prize, winning felt damned good, he decided.
Chapter 5
Regardless of her many irritating traits, the woman could flat-out cook, Raphael realized half an hour later. He’d come back from his shower to find huevos rancheros waiting for him. He didn’t know how she had managed to do it so quickly, then he thought of her labeled refrigerator containers. Under the circumstances, they didn’t annoy him quite as much.
Raphael dug into breakfast. Spices rolled over his taste buds, caressing them like a lover. There was the bite of the chilies, perfect enough to make him want to groan with pleasure. He almost felt guilty for using, and probably ruining, the razor he’d found in her shower.
He pushed his plate away and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Listen, about that shower I just took—” But he was interrupted by a knock at her door.
The sound galvanized Raphael. It wasn’t a conscious decision to shove his stool back and have his gun in his hand, the safety off, before his next heartbeat. It was fourteen year’s worth of ingrained reaction to trouble. It was the image of Anna Lombardo’s crime scene photos that flashed across his mind’s eye before he took his first step toward the door.
“What are you doing?” Kate cried, horrified.
“Go to the bedroom. Now.”
“I will not!” It was the second time in as many hours that he’d pulled that gun out! At first she’d been merely astonished at his lightning reflexes. But now he was waving the weapon around again like he was some kind of Wild West vigilante, and her heart threatened to stop entirely.
When he turned to her, there was something dangerous about the way he moved. Each motion was contained, violence restrained—not at all like he’d been in Mr. McGaffney’s kitchen last night.
“Go to the bedroom,” he said again, every syllable a warning.
Panic seized Kate by the throat, but she held he
r ground. “I’ll do no such thing.”
Then, suddenly, she was furious. Kate marched up to him and stuck her face close to his. “Stop this! Stop it right now! You’re running around here like Billy the Kid! It was a knock on the damned door, not a gunshot!”
“Did you just swear?”
Kate reared back. “What?”
“I could have sworn I just heard you swear.”
“So what?”
“What was all that earlier about watching my language? What, underneath all that proper and practical surface you’re really a wild woman? That could make these next few days a lot more interesting.”
It happened instantly, a feeling Kate had never experienced before in her life. It was complex, tangled and frightening. Too many things happened to her simultaneously. Her breath shortened in the same moment something warm swept upward from the very core of her. She felt her skin burn, her heart pump, her adrenaline race.
Was he flirting with her?
Then he turned away. The moment was gone.
“If you won’t leave the room,” he said, “then at least stand over there behind the breakfast bar where you can duck if you have to.”
Kate found herself moving obediently on legs that wobbled. Then she got a grip on herself. “Please. I have friends,” she said weakly, turning back. “I’ve got associates. I have a job tonight. It could be a delivery. You can’t answer the door with that…that thing, ready to shoot somebody.”
He looked at her sharply. “What job tonight?”
Kate bit her tongue. It wasn’t time for that particular battle.
“Hello?” came a female voice through the door. “Katie, are you in there?”
Relief flooded Kate. It was Shawna, her old roommate.
She swept past him, and Raphael put an arm out to stop her. She ducked under it neatly, or maybe he just hadn’t acted quickly enough. He felt a little off balance.