by Beverly Bird
Her eyes were ready for battle when she straightened. Raphael felt a swish of admiration for her.
“Just let me do my job,” he said quietly.
“I am.”
“No. You’re distracting me.”
“How am I distracting you? I’ve done everything you said!”
You’re here.
Raphael almost said the thought aloud. The words crowded his throat, but he couldn’t say them because he couldn’t explain them. In the twenty some hours they’d been forced together, something had segued inside him. She’d stopped irritating him so much as she…provoked him.
She confused him.
He’d already spent more time with her in one day than he’d spent with any woman since Anna Lombardo had gotten her throat sliced, he realized. Enough time that, under normal circumstances, any initial flare of attraction should have worn off. At the very least, it should have been easy for him to turn around and walk away, quickly and cleanly, before things got too involved or complex.
But she was having the reverse effect on him. Somehow, she was drawing him in. She was growing on him.
Raphael turned his back on her and started up Bainbridge. “Come on. Let’s go. Keep up with me.”
Kate didn’t need to be told twice. She ran to catch up, but her legs felt unsteady.
She didn’t know what had been going through his mind when his face had changed like that, and she told herself that she didn’t want to know. But for a minute, he hadn’t looked like her worst nightmare. For a minute, he hadn’t looked like chaos and aggravation at all. For a moment, he’d looked…vulnerable. Almost human.
It had startled her, and it poked at something soft deep inside her. By the time they reached the garage and loaded her van, a gunman was the last thing on Kate’s mind.
By six-thirty, Kate remembered the other thing she really disliked about serving the Morleys. Betty Morley had never learned the gracious art of sitting back and letting someone else serve her.
She hovered in the kitchen as Kate skewered the shrimp brochettes and slid them under the broiler. Kate had to move fast to keep everything on schedule. Without missing a beat, she spilled rock salt into the bottom of the cast-iron skillet in which the main course oysters would nestle through their stint in the oven.
“A frying pan?” Betty Morley asked, leaning over Kate’s shoulder to inspect it.
“It can hold up to high temperatures and it’s got a handle for easy retrieval.”
“How clever!”
Kate nodded and scooted over to the oven. The brochettes were nearly ready. She glanced at the woman helplessly. She had never been one for subtle social arts, and she had to fish for an approach.
“Are you enjoying the wine?” she asked, trying to send her back to the parlor.
The woman only moved beside her again to peer into the broiler at the brochettes. “Your associate says it’s very good. And Denny likes it.”
Her associate?
For the first time in a hectic ten minutes, Kate glanced quickly around the spacious kitchen. Raphael had been doing cop things here, moving around in the background while Kate struggled to prepare the meal and serve it by herself. He’d closed the vertical blinds on the single window—she imagined the gesture was against a sniper on some rooftop who might choose to shoot at her. But after his earlier lecture, she didn’t want to think too closely about that. So she’d closed his presence out of her mind instead.
Now he was missing.
“No,” she murmured. “Oh, no. He wouldn’t.” But of course, he would.
Kate grabbed the brochettes from the broiler and put them on a serving platter along with the dip she’d prepared earlier. She herbed the oysters and popped them into the oven, setting the timer for six minutes. She grabbed the brochette platter and stalked out of the kitchen.
When she reached the door to the parlor, she felt as though a bullet had caught her. Raphael was sitting in a Queen Anne chair directly across from Denny Morley. They each had a glass of wine, and they were talking like long-lost friends.
Kate hurried over with the brochettes and slid them neatly onto the table between them. Raphael had wanted the drapes drawn in here, too, so she’d suggested candlelight. But instead of the Morleys enjoying it and some intimate conversation, Raphael was talking to Denny Morley about football.
“I want a word with you,” she whispered.
Raphael looked up at her and smiled. “Sure. In a minute.”
Her teeth ground together so hard she felt pain in her fillings. “Now.”
He reached for a brochette instead.
Her hand snaked out automatically to slap his away. She caught the reflex just in time and smiled weakly at Denny Morley. He was already cramming shrimp into his mouth.
“Try one, Rafe. Go ahead,” Morley said around a chew. “Help yourself. They’re delicious.”
“Actually, I was thinking of doing just that.”
“Actually,” Kate hissed, “you weren’t.”
“Sure I was.”
“No. You weren’t.”
He picked one up anyway.
She didn’t know she was going to do it. She had never done such a thing to anyone before in her life. But there was something red-hot behind her eyes now. It stained her vision and hurt her head. She stepped around the Queen Anne chair and wrapped her fingers around his ear, the one Denny Morley couldn’t see, and twisted.
“Excuse me,” she said sweetly to Morley. “I just need to talk to my…” She would choke on the word. “Associate. For a moment. In the kitchen, please.”
“Hey, take your time,” Morley said. “Where’s Betty?”
She’s got her nose in my oysters. “I’ll send her right out.”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Raphael grated when he had finally swallowed the shrimp and jalapeños. He held his head at an odd angle.
“Requesting your attention. Should I be more persistent?”
It was the kicker, he realized, the coup de grâce to the entire last twenty-four hours.
He reached up and caught her wrist, bending it back the other way. But she only tightened her fingers, pinching harder. He could hear her breath coming faster. Or maybe it was his own.
“You don’t want to do this,” he murmured.
“Oh, I do.”
“No. You don’t.”
“Get out of the chair.”
“This is probably not the best approach to convince me.”
“I tried everything else.”
Clang. They heard the noise at the same time. Not loud in and of itself, but it was followed by a second one, and then the hollow, metallic sound of cast iron rolling over tile.
Her oysters.
Kate let go of Raphael’s ear and forgot propriety. She ran for the kitchen, feeling tears burn her eyes. What Raphael hadn’t already ruined, Betty Morley just had. Unless Kate badly missed her guess, the woman had just dropped the skillet that was supposed to be in the oven.
She couldn’t believe this.
Raphael was behind her, pushing a little against her back to get her to move faster. But Kate was at full speed as she hit the kitchen door with her palms outstretched. She took three steps into the room and stopped with a jerk. She shot a hand out to catch the counter, but it did no good. The room tilted anyway.
Betty Morley was dead.
“No, no, no!” Kate screamed. “Oh, God,” she prayed, “please, not again!”
“Shut up,” Raphael snapped, stepping around her.
Kate put her other hand out to him to hang on as her knees went weak. Her fingers found air.
He was already kneeling beside Betty Morley. The woman was flat on her back on the kitchen tile. She was wearing the oysters. The cast-iron skillet was on the floor amid a spill of rock salt beside her outstretched, oven-mitted hand.
A keening sound started in Kate’s throat. In the next second, another shot rang out.
Kate shrieked. She saw Raphael in a blu
r, coming to his feet, his weapon drawn. She spun, looking the way he was turning. There was a spasm of movement in the opposite door, the one that led out to the hallway. Something in black, she thought. Someone in black. But then the gunman was gone.
Kate screamed again. Denny Morley burst into the kitchen behind her, bumping into her, sending her stumbling toward the prone woman. She pinwheeled her arms for balance. Raphael caught her.
“What in blazes?” Morley bellowed. “Betty!”
“She’s fine,” Raphael said.
Kate was going flaccid in his arms. He felt everything ease out of her muscles, felt her knees bending as she began sinking. She was making a sound she probably didn’t know she was making—something broken, a pitched whimpering, and it was repetitive.
“She’s alive,” he said, his voice hard, his mouth near her ear. “Come on, honey, come on, don’t wimp out on me now.” He thrust his gun in his belt, found his walkie-talkie beside it and got it in his hand.
No one had died. But somewhere in this building, a potential killer was fleeing.
He brought the walkie-talkie to his mouth as he tried to hold Kate up. “All units, this is Command One. Shots fired. Suspect fleeing. He is in the building. I repeat, suspect is in the building.”
Kate mewled and wrenched away from him. She headed for Betty Morley. Raphael’s free hand snaked out and caught hers at the last moment. Her indigo eyes flashed to his, too wide, too stricken, impossibly dark in her white face.
“Oh, hell,” he muttered. He dropped his walkie-talkie on the kitchen counter.
“She’s dead!”
“No.”
“Command One, where will you be following?” the walkie-talkie squawked.
Center stairs, Raphael needed to say, so they didn’t shoot at him unintentionally. But Kate was twisting her wrist in his hand, trying to get free.
“I killed her!” she keened.
“Damn it, she’s not dead!” Raphael shouted.
“Come again, Command One?” said the walkie-talkie.
Her eyes were starting to go unfocused. She was in shock.
Raphael grabbed the walkie-talkie and brought it to his mouth. “All units, I’m not following. This is Command One. I’m staying on scene.” He dropped the walkie-talkie with a clatter. It kept muttering and spitting at him. He ignored it. It was something he had never done before in his career.
He reeled Kate in by her wrist. She took two unsteady steps toward him.
“I did this,” she whimpered.
“Sure, but you’ve had headaches on your conscience before. Four of mine, at least. Don’t worry about it.”
Kate stared at him. She felt horror punch the air from her lungs.
He had been like this when McGaffney had died, too. Joking with that other cop, the one named Fox. They’d been having a jolly conversation over the body. Then she had tolerated it. But this woman… Betty Morley was someone she knew.
Denny Morley was on his knees, leaning over his wife protectively. The walkie-talkie was sputtering and crackling on the counter. Kate took it all in as she tried to breathe, but her breath shook. “Get an ambulance,” she pleaded.
“I’ll call for one as soon as you calm down.”
“I’m calm!”
Kate left him and lunged for the walkie-talkie. Maybe Betty Morley wasn’t dead yet. Maybe she could save her. She got the walkie-talkie in her hands, but she couldn’t make sense of its buttons. It kept talking to her, demanding the attention of Command One. She pushed and prodded. And achieved nothing. She threw it across the room and spun to Raphael.
He caught her neatly. “She’s not dead,” he said against her temple. “She’s unconscious.”
“How could you—”
“Look at her.”
Kate couldn’t. Not ever again.
“That’s not a gunshot wound to her temple. It’s a bruise.”
Kate began trembling.
“I took her pulse. It’s steady. There’s a decent dent in the bottom of the frying pan. Looks like a thirty-eight, but I could be wrong.”
He’d seen it all in the five seconds he’d spent with the woman, but the evidence wasn’t all that hard to assess. The gunman had shot twice. The first shot—the one that had come while they had been in the parlor—had struck Betty Morley squarely in Kate’s frying pan. And, to Raphael’s best guess, the frying pan had then flown out of her hand and had clocked her right in the forehead. The second bullet had gone into the wall.
Kate’s teeth were beginning to snick together. He wondered if she’d heard a single word he’d said. Probably not. Her skin had a waxy quality that he recognized. It was the second time in twenty-four hours that she’d seen someone shot. Raphael swore.
Denny Morley was calling 911. Raphael looked into Kate’s face. Her tongue flicked out, swiping over dry lips. Her gaze danced to meet his, then was gone. A fist gripped his gut. It was cold, then it was hot.
He caught her chin in his hand, pulled her face around and didn’t try to pretend what he wanted to do. Which only went to show that he was out of his mind.
His mouth covered hers, hard, brutal, fast. Kate reared back, shocked, breaking the contact. Then something about her eyes went opaque.
Well, he thought, at least she was coming back to herself.
He moved in on her one more time. To cement the reaction, he told himself. His hand had never left her chin, but now he gentled his hold. When he found her lips this time, her own were soft.
So—what the hell—he kept on with it. He touched his tongue to hers, a game, a tease. She tasted better than the wine he’d had before all hell had broken loose. And that was when everything started going wrong for him.
He’d only meant to break her loose from the shock that wouldn’t let her hear him, with the one thing sure to galvanize every starched, tsking, orderly thing about her. Sure, her tongue flicking out again had given him the idea. But he’d had purely altruistic motives.
The hell he had.
He hadn’t figured, had never anticipated, that her tongue would hesitate, then dare to draw his deeper, into something dark and warm and sweeter than he’d known for as long as he’d breathed. Or that something that was maybe a groan would come from her sensible throat and have his hand tightening on her face again, the fingers of his other hand curling into that crazy hair. The fist she hit against his chest stalled and seemed to forget what it was doing there. She curled her fingers into the front of his shirt instead and held on and kissed him back.
Kate felt instantaneous reaction race through her body. It made everything inside her go weak and tighten at the same time. This was outrageous. It made her heart thud once, soundly, against her chest, but then her pulse seemed to stop.
And she craved.
She craved with all of her, and it didn’t matter that there was a woman on the floor, or that her brokenhearted husband was kneeling beside her. It didn’t matter that there were sirens in the distance. It didn’t matter that this man had not a shred of human decency in his bones, or that this whole dinner engagement was irretrievably ruined. Something at the core of her raced hot and fervid to her skin, burning it, and her blood picked up to pound in her ears.
His mouth turned urgent against hers, more demanding. And his hand never left her face, though his touch was as soft as the kiss of an angel.
Then someone threw open the kitchen door. It cracked against the wall, and Kate reeled back, breaking their kiss, a trembling hand shooting to her mouth. Paramedics, she saw, but her eyes wouldn’t quite focus.
He had kissed her! Here? Now?
Her gaze whipped to him. “You’re a maniac! You’re insane! You’re…you’re…you’re…” She trailed off, beyond words.
Raphael grinned. Her color was back. In fact, her color was high. “Glad to be of service.”
“You’re…you’re…you’re…”
Raphael turned to the woman on the floor, still draped in oysters. He bent beside the paramedics. Not by a ges
ture, not by a word, did he show that he was reeling.
Chapter 7
A good dose of smelling salts brought Betty Morley around. Kate thought briefly of asking the paramedics for some of her own.
He had kissed her.
She would have to deal with it later, she thought shakily. She would decide what it meant and what she needed to do about it. Right now, there was too much going on.
The stretcher the paramedics had brought for Mrs. Morley wasn’t needed, but they insisted that she visit the medical center for precautionary reasons. Kate watched her and Denny meld themselves to each other as he helped her out the door. She felt a funny twist at the pit of her stomach as she considered what it would be like to be cared for like that, to be able to lean like that on someone strong enough to hold her up, someone who wouldn’t rethink her virtues and bail on her at the crucial eleventh hour.
Then Denny Morley glanced over his shoulder and glared at her on their way out. The look of betrayal made a cry escape Kate before she could swallow it.
“Easy,” said Raphael from beside her.
“They’ll never use Dinner For Two again.”
Raphael waited for her to realize that that was the least of her problems.
He saw it happen. The transformation was like an avalanche suddenly spilling down a mountain. In one moment, her expression was determinedly calm. Her eyes were as still as a winter landscape after the storm had passed. Then she blinked. Her eyes filled and her mouth trembled. When she pressed her fingers to her lips, he saw them shake, too. The color he’d pulled into her face just a few minutes ago began to drain again.
“They…he…the killer…thought she was me.” A tear spilled out. Kate scrubbed at it furiously. “If Betty wasn’t such a…such a pain, sticking her nose in my recipes, if that bullet hadn’t hit the skillet, she’d be dead.”
“Or you would be.” So many ifs, Raphael thought. If he hadn’t found Denny Morley’s company a pleasant diversion from Kate’s controlled chaos in the kitchen, if Kate hadn’t come after him to give him hell for it. If he hadn’t determined that the parlor was the most likely place for anyone to breach the security of the apartment, with three times as many windows as any other room in the apartment. Change any one of those things, and Kate Mulhern might well be gone from this world.