by Beverly Bird
His physical reaction to that was dangerous. The rolling sensation that she could kick into his chest seemingly at will was mild compared to the way his heart twisted itself into something like a fist now. But he couldn’t regret not giving more weight to the fact that the door in the kitchen led directly to a more isolated section of outside hallway, because if he had to do it all over again, Raphael knew he would have done everything exactly the same. Because he had never anticipated that Charlie Eagan wanted Kate dead badly enough to send someone right inside after her to do it at close range.
“Come on,” he decided. “We’ll go to my place.” The security at her apartment was more porous than that here in the Morley home.
Sensation started to come back to Kate’s limbs slowly. She stared at him.
He couldn’t be thinking what she thought he was thinking, she decided. A woman had almost just died in her place. She had at least half of the Irish mafia trying to gun her down. And he wanted to take her back to his place? What for?
Because he had just kissed her.
Kate focused on that hard and fast because it suddenly seemed like the least overwhelming thing of all that had happened in the last thirty minutes. She had been kissed before—not nearly so…completely, but it had happened. She had never been shot at before.
“I don’t think so,” she said stiffly. Raphael’s brows lowered in that way he had, making his eyes so thin she couldn’t see what was going on there.
“You don’t think so,” he repeated.
“I don’t want to go to your home.”
“Care to tell me why not?”
She sniffed. “This is hardly the time or the place for that discussion.”
Raphael glanced around the kitchen as though expecting to find that they weren’t alone anymore. “It looks pretty good to me.”
“A woman was just shot at! I just can’t deal with that…with the other right now.”
“What other?”
“I need time to think about it!”
“About what?”
“About why you kissed me!”
For a minute, Raphael felt as though someone had cracked him upside the head with a frying pan. A laugh started in his throat. Then panic suddenly tried to climb into his chest from his gut, and it crowded out the reflex. She was taking him—and everything he did—entirely too seriously. He didn’t mean anything by it. Not by any of it.
But the fact that she was still dwelling on it, that she was still analyzing it fifteen minutes later had a strange sensation of possessiveness wrapping around his heart, and he felt the damnedest urge to smile.
“Honey, you were going hysterical on me. I kissed you to snap you out of it,” he said before the sensation could spread.
Kate stared at him expressionlessly for a moment. Then her face flamed with color. She brought her shoulders back so hard and fast he thought he could hear her bones crack. “I knew that.”
Finally, he did laugh. Hoarsely. “Yeah. That’s why you kissed me back.”
“I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.” She’d been willing to die for more of it.
Her blood went ice cold. Oh, she was such a fool! What other reason could there have been? What had she been thinking? That he had suddenly been overwhelmed with passion in the middle of a crime scene?
Then again, a man with a little more sensitivity might not have pointed it out.
Raphael ducked when a salad tong came flying his way. It landed in the wagon. He caught the bag of rock salt that followed it. So, he thought, they were back to normal.
“Kiss my…my—” She broke off. No word that came to her was vile enough.
Raphael waited to see what she would say this time, how she would finish that little retort when it was inching so close to dangerous ground. Then the door opened behind him and the crime scene techs spilled in along with an officer and his partner.
“Well, this little problem is certainly heating up,” Fox drawled.
For a moment, Raphael didn’t know which problem he was talking about. Kate, he thought first. The frustrating, fascinating, innocent and utterly practical Kate Mulhern, who was turning a simple baby-sitting situation upside down.
“So where is the scumbag?” Raphael demanded, dragging his mind back to business.
“Don’t have him yet,” Fox responded unperturbedly.
“What do you mean we don’t have him?”
“We’re still looking for him. It’s a big building.”
“He’s still here?” Kate cried.
Raphael’s partner turned to her. “It’s all right, ma’am. We’ve got half the department on the premises. Wherever he’s hiding, he’d be crazy to come out now.”
It was true as far as it went, Raphael thought, but he and Kate were still leaving. “Put that stuff down,” he snapped as Kate began to spoon food back into her containers. “We’re going.”
“As soon as I finish here.”
“You are finished. The techs can pack up your stuff. I’ll have a uniform drop it all off at the RH Unit and we can pick it up tomorrow.”
“That’s not possible. Some of it is perishable.”
“There’s a refrigerator there.”
“It’s all work product. It’s my job. I have to pack it up.”
“Except you’re leaving.”
She would deal with where he was taking her after she had her utensils and supplies stored neatly in the wagon again, Kate decided. In twenty-four hours, she had already learned to take one issue at a time with him. He was entirely too volatile otherwise.
He was going to be volatile anyway, she realized a moment later.
Raphael stalked over to one of the counters. He began grabbing things—soiled things—and dropping them into the wagon. “Honey, we’re going to get this show on the road if I have to carry you out of here.”
“You’ll do no such thing!”
“Watch me.”
Kate had started to grab a dirty spatula from his hand. She backed off quickly instead, putting more than an arm’s reach between them. His eyes were hot. Just with temper, she told herself. She knew better than to think anything else at this point. But Kate licked her lips unconsciously.
Half an hour ago, Raphael had felt sure that he’d give anything for a glimpse of the unrelenting practicality that had been driving him to the edge for a solid twenty-four hours. Fragility didn’t sit well with this woman, and watching it happen to her had wrenched something deep inside him. But now that she seemed to be back to her normal, annoying, tsking, stubborn self, he saw a great deal of merit in that previous stunned, shaky quiet.
He thought about choking her. Then she licked her lips, and he felt his blood pressure spike from an entirely different emotion. She had him completely off balance…again.
Kate scooted behind Fox. “He’s a maniac,” she told the other detective shakily.
“Nah, just a little unpredictable,” Raphael’s partner said. “He’s right, though. The guy’s still here somewhere. You really ought to go.”
“But my things!”
“Looks to me like Rafe is taking care of that for you.”
Raphael was. Kate gave a cry of alarm and hurried to the counter. She began grabbing items, as well, though she kept a good distance between them.
“She’s a nutcase,” Raphael said to his partner.
“Nah, just a little set in her ways,” Fox responded. “She’s right, though. We’ve got enough on our hands here without having to worry about taking catering supplies back to headquarters. Look at that, between the two of you, you’re done already.”
Kate glanced around quickly. He was right. Everything was in the wagon. It was piled haphazardly, but it was there. Although, she thought, she should really wipe up before she left. She reached into the sink for a dishcloth.
“Don’t even think about it,” Raphael growled.
Kate jumped and pulled her hand back. She doubted very seriously if the Morleys were ever going to use her services again a
nyway. She bent for the handle of the wagon.
“I’m still not going to your house,” she muttered, looking at him over her shoulder.
“Sure you are.”
“I am not. I fail to see the necessity.”
“That’s what you said about needing a baby-sitter. Tell it to Betty Morley.”
That quelled her. This time, when she reached the door, Kate waited and let Raphael go into the hallway first. She did not stick her tongue out at his back.
When the door shut again with a crack, Fox looked at the officer who had come in with him and gave a gusty, grinning sigh. “Love. Ain’t it grand?”
They drove in silence with Raphael behind the wheel of her van. Then he turned west on Spring Garden Street, and Kate sat up straighter. “I live south of here.”
“I know.”
“You’re not taking me home.”
“I told you that.”
“You can’t just…just hijack me.”
“It’s called kidnapping. And yeah, I can. If you don’t like it, call the cops.”
Damn him! She hated letting him win, and knew he had her. “Just tell me why I can’t go home.”
“Because there are as many ways up to your apartment as there were into the Morleys’ kitchen.” He thought about it. “And because you’re too cheap to buy a new sofa.”
“I told you why I don’t want a new sofa!”
“Yeah, well, I guess you never had to sleep on the one you’ve got.”
Actually, she had, back when she and Shawna had still lived together. The apartment only had the single bedroom so they had taken turns with it, rotating months. In the interim, each of them had slept in the living room. Still, Kate had never thought the sofa was that bad.
“So now I get to sleep on your sofa,” she muttered. “Is that the deal?”
He took his eyes off the street long enough to slant a glance at her. “I have a few manners.”
Kate lifted her brows. “Sorry. I hadn’t noticed.”
He locked his jaw and looked ahead again. “You can sleep anywhere you damned well please. You can sleep in the shower for all I care. But you’re going to do it at my address where I can secure every single way in or out. And you’re going to stop picking at me about it.”
“I don’t pick.”
“You pick.”
“I do not.”
“Honey, you’re a world-class nitpicker. In twenty-four hours now, you haven’t once let anything just be.”
“Twenty-five.”
His gaze rounded to her again. “What?” he asked disbelievingly.
“It’s been twenty-five hours now. It’s nine-thirty. You arrived at the scene last night at eight-thirty.”
“There. There. You just did it. Twenty-four hours, twenty-five, what the hell difference does it make?”
“Well, they have been some of the longest hours of my life.”
“You’re damned lucky you’ve got any hours left.”
That sobered her again instantly. Kate settled back against the seat, falling quiet for a while. “So where exactly do you live?” she asked eventually. “Where are we going?”
“North of the university.” His tone was clipped. “Outside the worst of the city.”
“Because?”
He looked at her again. Was she going to pick at this, too? Probably, he decided.
“Is there a specific reason why you live on the other side of the river?” she asked when he didn’t answer. “I mean, I would think that with your job and all, you’d do better to live right in the thick of things. You must get called out a lot. Wouldn’t it be better to just live close by?”
“I see enough of the thick of things during working hours.”
“Ah.”
“Ah, what?”
“Just ah. As in, I understand.”
He took one hand off the wheel to scrub the back of his neck, wondering why he was going to explain. This, he thought, was definitely picking. “I need to draw a line between me and the job. Too many cops let the street bleed into their personal lives. And it destroys them—their marriages, their lives, whatever.”
“You couldn’t keep the line there with Anna Lombardo.”
“I didn’t try hard enough.” Raphael felt his heart rate pick up in anger and with something like helplessness—a feeling he disliked a lot. Kate had been doing this to him since the first words he’d spoken with her, digging too deep. “Here we are,” he said shortly.
Kate watched him, amazed at the changes of expression that danced over his face in the glancing headlights of the passing cars. It looked like a series of photographs clicking by, one right after the other, freeze-frames of too many emotions—pain, temper, maybe, she thought, even guilt. She realized she wanted to know more.
Kate began to ask another question, then she registered what he had just said. He was pulling into a driveway. She turned to look out the window, curious as to what she might find. Given the disaster of restraint that he was, she expected a place falling in on itself. But his home wasn’t that at all.
It was a town house, one in the middle. Thin light from a street lamp spilled over it and its narrow lawn, just enough that she could make out a lot of dark brick and a brass sconce beside the door. The mailbox next to it had a brass clasp—their headlights caught it and made it wink. The sidewalk curved toward the drive rather than run ruler-straight to the street. Spiky green plants bordered it, and the lawn seemed healthy enough.
So, she thought, he respected something. “It’s nice,” she said, surprised.
Raphael turned off the ignition and her old van belched and rumbled for a moment before the engine finally quit. “Well, there goes the neighborhood.”
Kate thought she could actually feel her veins tighten. “Do you have any idea how much a new vehicle costs?”
“No, but I’ll bet you’re just dying to tell me.”
She didn’t know, not precisely. “A lot.”
“Might sweeten your image,” he said. “A shiny new van, your name emblazoned on the side.”
A whole fleet of vans wouldn’t help her now, Kate thought.
The truth made a large, painful rock cram itself into her throat. Her mind had been nudging at it all night, like a tongue at a sore tooth. Now reality rolled through her blood like ice water.
Two dinners, she thought helplessly, and two disasters. Death, gunmen, shooting. The mob! It would make the papers. Her name would be in there. No one would call her. The word would spread. Use that caterer, and you’re as good as dead.
She got out of the van quickly. Everything that had happened was too huge, too painful to contemplate just yet. So she hurried around to the back of the van instead, throwing open the doors, pulling the loaded wagon toward her.
She’d have to take the perishables inside and store them in his refrigerator. She was working the wagon out of the van, thinking that she didn’t even have her toothbrush or anything to sleep in, when she heard the bark.
Like it had been doing all night, her mind danced from the truth. Raphael has a dog, she thought. But the distinctive sound of that yip—pitched, squeaky, maybe reproachful—pierced her denial like a needle through skin.
Kate dropped the wagon. It hit concrete with a metallic crash, and food containers rolled merrily down Raphael’s driveway. It wasn’t possible.
She turned quickly to Raphael. He was moving up the sidewalk, jiggling his keys in his hand, then he stopped, too, with a jerk. “What the hell?” she heard him mutter.
“Belle,” Kate said. Belle? “You didn’t lock the crate!”
“You locked the crate!”
“No, I did not! She bit me again when I tried. You locked it.”
“Yeah? So how’d she get through two closed doors in that apartment, even if we left the crate open?”
“Two? What two?”
“The bedroom. The front door. And how did she know to come here?”
Kate swayed and put a hand to the side of the van for suppor
t. Belle was back. Apparently, Belle went wherever she chose to go.
Hysteria crowded into her throat. It came out as a thin sound. Raphael heard it and started to turn to her, but he was loathe to take his eyes off the dog.
The critter was on his porch. Sitting on his doormat. As his gaze lingered on the beast, she tipped her skinny muzzle up and barked again. Raphael felt something mildly spooked crawl over his skin, and it did it with small, cold feet.
“There’s an explanation for this,” he murmured.
“She’s an angel,” Kate croaked.
Raphael finally took his gaze from the dog to look at her sharply. “Knock it off.”
“Shawna says she’s an angel.”
“Yeah. And I’m the King of Siam.”
“Actually, I don’t think Siam has a king.” His eyes went wild. Kate backpedaled quickly. “Okay, okay. I’m picking again. So how did she get here? Just tell me that!”
“How should I know? You’re the one with the practical answers all the time!”
Kate stared at the dog who couldn’t possibly be there and felt the night closing in on her. Everything that had happened, ludicrous and terrible and beyond belief, flashed through her mind’s eye.
Betty Morley on the floor, draped in oysters.
Denny Morley looking at her with such anger in his eyes.
Honey, I kissed you to snap you out of it. And like an idiot, she’d let the truth spear right through to her soul, the soul she’d poured into that kiss only minutes before. Even though she knew she wasn’t the kind of woman who inspired passion. Because for a moment, while he had been kissing her, she’d let herself believe in magic.
Now, to top it all off, Belle had somehow found them when she was supposed to have been in a crate half a city away.
All of it crowded in on her, overwhelming her. The stars swirled. Kate looked at them helplessly and gave a puzzled cry, because she never fainted. Then, before Raphael’s astounded eyes, she swooned dead away.
Belle woofed softly and waited for Raphael to carry Kate inside, then she darted quietly inside on his heels.