by Beverly Bird
He finally shrugged. “Sure.”
“I don’t have…anything.”
“Anything,” he repeated.
“To sleep in. To brush my teeth with.”
“Consider that problem fixed.”
He disappeared again and came back with a brand-new toothbrush still in its neat cardboard box. Kate didn’t want to consider why he might have such a supply on hand, but women like Allegra came to mind again. Then he went to the bottom drawer of his dresser and pulled it open. He extracted a T-shirt. “Good enough?”
Kate took it. Then she stepped cautiously closer to him and peered into the drawer. “Could I have those, too?”
Raphael scowled. “What?”
“Those sweatpants.”
“They won’t fit you.”
“I’m not going to be walking around in them.”
Raphael shrugged and pulled out the sweatpants. “Anything else?”
“Socks.”
“In August?”
“My feet get cold.” They didn’t, but she couldn’t have explained the truth to him if her life had depended on it. She simply didn’t want him to have any image of her in here that wasn’t layered in clothing.
Her feelings weren’t just like they had been last night, she realized. Last night she had been worried about him suddenly and for some obscure reason deciding to take a shine to her. Tonight, she was worried about herself. About things she suddenly wanted and couldn’t have. About what she might do if presented with them for all the wrong reasons.
“Socks,” Kate repeated in a croak.
Raphael closed the bottom drawer, pulled out the top one and handed her a pair. “Anything else?”
Kate thought fast. “A bathrobe.”
He gaped at her, then he pulled his mouth shut again and frowned. “You’ve already taken a shower today.”
“I’m not going to take another shower. I told you. I get cold in my sleep.”
Raphael went across the hall to the bath and returned with a hunter green velour robe. It matched the color of his eyes, Kate realized distractedly, and rubbed her forehead. She couldn’t think of one other piece of clothing she could add to the image.
“That’s it?” he asked.
“That’s it.”
“I have a parka downstairs in the foyer closet.”
Kate felt herself flushing. “No, this is fine.”
Raphael threw one backward glance at her before he closed the bedroom door behind him. Kate sank down on the foot of the bed, clutching the clothing to her chest.
Finally, she breathed again. After a moment, she got up and peeked into the hall. Then she scooted into the bath and closed and locked that door. Shakily, she began to brush her teeth and change.
Raphael went downstairs to the living room and moved the coffee table. He yanked out the sofa bed harder than he had to and looked at the stairs one more time. She was the most nitpicking, irritating, tsking, organizing woman he’d ever had the misfortune to meet. Why did he care what she slept in?
What he should care about, he thought, was that tonight he was actually going to get a good night’s sleep. Giving her the bedroom was no hardship. He often slept down here, with the television droning him into unconsciousness. He’d discovered early on in his career that images from his day could dog him all night. He’d learned a long time ago to fake himself out. He tricked sleep into figuring he didn’t care one way or another if it found him.
He’d tried a TV in the bedroom. It hadn’t worked. The minute he laid down in that bed, most nights, images from the day assaulted him.
There were already sheets on the mattress. He started to undress, thought better of it and moved toward the stairs again. He needed a pair of gym shorts, but they were all in his dresser. He took the stairs two at a time to his bedroom door and raised a hand to knock.
He considered how she would look when she opened it, in sweatpants six sizes too large for her, in that T-shirt that would come to her knees. In his wooliest socks and his bathrobe. Preposterously, something stirred inside him anyway. He thought of peeling away all those many layers to find her skin beneath. And to see if she’d give up control. Real dangerous ground.
Then he heard her crying.
Raphael’s hand froze just before it hit the wood. Through it all, through finding a body in her salad and another woman getting conked in the head with a frying pan in her place, through a man shooting wildly before he dodged out the door and a dog arriving at his door that should not possibly have found them, through it all she had never really cried. But these sobs were deep, as though wrenched clear up from her chest by a violent hand.
He tried to open the door without knocking. It was locked solid. Raphael banged on it hard. Kate flung it open suddenly, as though waiting for him.
“Hey,” he said quietly. “Easy does it.”
“Go away.” But she didn’t make a move to close the door. She brought up a fistful of his bathrobe and pressed it to her mouth.
His heart rolled over again. He looked past her shoulder. His sweatpants were thrown over the foot of the bed. He looked down. Her legs were bare.
Well, hell.
“I…I…can’t take any more jobs,” she choked.
Raphael doubted if anyone would be calling her catering service when this hit the papers anyway. “No.”
“I tried so hard! I almost could have done it. Another year or two with the catering, and I would have had my restaurant.”
“So now it will be another year or four.”
“I c-c-can’t put anybody else in jeopardy like I d-d-did tonight.”
“Not for a while. But the quicker this is over, the sooner you can rebuild.”
She didn’t say anything else, but she gave a deep, shuddering, soggy cry.
Oh, double hell.
He thought she would probably push him away, but maybe she was too beaten with the truth now that it had finally hit her. For whatever reason, when he held his arms out to her, Kate flung herself at him and burrowed into his embrace. And she cried.
In that moment, Raphael could have killed the men who were doing this to her. He could save her life, but he couldn’t save her business. So he stroked her hair and he ignored the roll of his heart—up, down, back and forth. And he knew that whatever precipice he had been standing on the edge of all day, he was in the process of going right over it.
Chapter 9
It was too easy, Kate thought. Too easy to hold on to his strength while everything else in her world fell apart, and too easy to breathe in the scent of him. And what exactly was it, anyway? Something subtly musky, she thought, like the hot August night air still clung to his skin from his walk. And when his hand smoothed her hair, it was far, far too easy to forget that the last time he had touched her, it had simply been to bring her back to herself.
This time, she knew, he did it out of pity. Kate pulled back from him when what she wanted desperately was to stay in his arms.
Raphael shoved his hands deep into his pockets. “You forgot your pants.”
Kate looked down at herself quickly. She hadn’t layered herself in all that clothing she’d taken from him. One minute she had been fine, and the next everything had piled in on her and she had fallen apart. But did he have to mention it?
She wiped her tears away with her finger, fast and furiously. When she looked again, Raphael was grabbing something from the dresser. Then he was just gone, leaving her feeling hollow. The dog stood on the threshold where Raphael had been a moment ago, looking aggrieved from her bathroom trip.
“I guess this means you’re sleeping in here?”
The dog barked in response. It was uncanny. Kate scrubbed her hands over her arms against a chill and went to shut and lock the door again.
Kate generally got up before the sun did. She usually accomplished more before leaving for work than most people did in sixteen hours. But she no longer had work to worry about, and some part of her unconscious mind clearly registered that. When
Kate awoke Sunday morning, it was to blinding, yellow-white sunlight streaming through Raphael’s bedroom window. Her heart chugged in confusion until she remembered…everything. McGaffney’s death. Betty Morley’s close call. And the man who was systematically taking everything she thought she knew about herself and turning it upside down.
She was so hot in his bathrobe, she was sweating. Kate groaned and rolled over on her back. The velour twisted around her waist uncomfortably.
For a moment, she lay still and listened. There was no snoring this morning, just the distant drone of a one-way conversation. So he was already up and on the phone.
What was she going to do about him?
She was not going to let him get to her, Kate reminded herself. She got out of bed. All in all, it wasn’t much of a plan. The problem was, she had never been one for passivity, Kate realized as she crept across the hall to the shower. Impasses annoyed the devil out of her. And waiting this out—just trying to survive Raphael and the trauma to her business until this was over—was definitely not her style.
She needed to do something. The answer came to her as she was dressing again in yesterday’s clothes, and that alone had helpless discomfort plucking at her nerve endings. But when she went to find Raphael, she had a real plan.
He was on the sofa, his feet on the coffee table, the telephone to his ear. He wore gym shorts…and nothing else. Kate felt her heart kick, and the sound of her breathing changed. Which was ridiculous. She’d seen him without a shirt before—just twenty-four short hours ago, as a matter of fact. It made absolutely no sense for her reaction to be twice as potent now as it had been then.
Except, of course, now he had touched her.
For whatever misguided reasons, she’d felt that mouth on hers, she’d found a moment’s peace in those arms. Kate fisted her hands at her sides against the thrumming of her blood. She made herself swallow. She was not going to think of any of that.
“Hey,” he said, noticing her as he disconnected the phone.
“Um. Yes. Hey, yourself.”
She focused on his feet. It seemed the safest thing to do. But then she thought of those sneakers on the floor of his bedroom and she had the most absurd flash—that basketball image again, his bronzed skin slick with perspiration, those muscles straining, and somehow, as she envisioned it, the gym shorts weren’t there anymore at all.
Kate cried out and clapped a hand to her mouth.
“What?” Raphael came quickly to his feet, looking around the room. “What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“You yelped like that over nothing?”
“I…uh, my nerves are a little…tight, I suppose. I’m going to make breakfast.”
“Breakfast.” Raphael kept looking around the room.
“Now.”
Kate gathered up all the determination she’d fostered in the shower as she began cooking. She was going to do something about all this, she reminded herself. She was going to help him put an end to this nightmare. She was going to actively participate in this investigation—as much as he’d let her—because the end result would mean getting him out of her life sooner rather than later. At which point, she reasoned, she would no longer suffer these sudden and inexplicable swerves of her mind—memories of his kiss, fantasies of him playing basketball naked.
Kate put her mind to what she was doing. Belle appeared and sat beside her right ankle, that skinny, rat-size tail beating a tempo against the floor as she looked up and licked her chops. “Finally woke up, did you?” Kate muttered.
“I could say the same about you.”
She turned quickly at Raphael’s voice. He’d gotten himself dressed. Thank heaven, he’d gotten dressed. He wore jeans again, and a white Polo shirt.
“I wanted to be at headquarters half an hour ago,” he complained.
“What time is it?” Kate looked around the kitchen vacantly.
“Eight-thirty.”
“It can’t be. I never sleep that late.”
Raphael pointed wordlessly to the clock on the stove. It was, to be precise eight thirty-eight.
Nothing about her was normal anymore, Kate thought helplessly. Nothing.
She held a finished plate out to him—steak and eggs, all she could find in his kitchen. “I’ve decided I’m going to help you with your work.”
Her announcement brought no response. Kate watched him warily as he took his plate and headed for the living room and the coffee table again. She followed him and took up her place at the far end.
“How?” Raphael asked finally, cutting into the steak.
“I…I don’t know. I’ll do whatever you let me do, I guess. Just…please, let’s get this over with.”
Raphael’s heart rolled and he put his fork down without taking a bite. There was a thin thread of desperation in her voice that hadn’t been there before. How much of it came from wanting her life restored and how much of it was a need to get him out of that life? He found that he didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to consider the faint lemony scent of her hair that he’d noticed last night when he’d held her in his arms. He didn’t want to think again of what it had cost him—when it shouldn’t have cost anything—to turn away and walk out of that bedroom, as though the way she’d suddenly jerked free from his embrace didn’t mean anything to him at all.
The easiest way not to do any of that was to simply nod, so he tried it.
Kate sighed. “Good. That’s good. So…who was that on the phone? What’s going on?”
“That was Fox. The shooter got away last night. He said they never found the guy.”
Kate dropped her fork suddenly and with a clatter. “He also said half the police department was in that building last night! How could this happen?”
Raphael felt a nerve tic at his jaw. “Hey, don’t look at me. I wasn’t the one peeking into stairwells, looking for the scumbag. I was cleaning up your pots and pans.”
“Are you blaming this…this…atrocity on me?”
“Atrocity?”
“Yes! He was in the building! You let him get away!” She shoved her plate away. “For that matter, how did he get into the building in the first place? I thought you said you had officers on all the entrances!”
“Sure did.”
“Sure did? That’s it? That’s your explanation?”
“If you’d let me get my two cents in and stop throwing words around like atrocity, I’d give you my explanation.”
Kate noticed that his teeth were grinding his words flat again. She folded her hands neatly and exaggeratedly on the table in front of her. “I’m listening.”
“My take on the whole thing is that the guy was already in the building when we got there. Before the officers arrived, and before you and I did. He was hiding somewhere. We had the building perfectly secured by four-thirty. No one got in after that point.”
Kate felt some of her air leave her. “You’re saying he went in before four-thirty?”
“It’s the only explanation.” Damn it, if her eyes started going wild and helpless again, he’d kill her himself. “After he hit a bull’s-eye on the frying pan, I’d say he probably went back to that same spot and laid low until after all our men left the scene.” It was all he’d intended to tell her. But then she shuddered. “Fox says they checked every empty unit in the high-rise, and all the common areas, as well. They combed through the basement, the trash chutes, the generator rooms, and got nothing. Fox is running down the list of tenants and owners today. One of them is going to have friends in low places.”
“He—the…the shooter—knew a resident?”
“He had to have done his hiding and waiting in one of the apartments. Fox says they knocked on all the doors but they didn’t force entry into any occupied ones.”
Something horrific was beginning to dawn on her, something that started a shaking sensation deep in Kate’s bones. “So he couldn’t have followed us there.”
Damn it, she was going to do it again. She was going to g
o all overwhelmed and helpless on him. He wasn’t sure he could stand it. “No way that I can see.”
“He knew my schedule, knew I’d be there? How?”
“Honey, these guys can find out anything they have a mind to.”
Kate stood up quickly. He watched those shoulders go back again even as she wrapped her arms around her waist. Then she added something new to the repertoire. Those indigo eyes narrowed. Dangerously. She was getting mad, he realized, and his heart rolled over in his chest again.
“Can we do that, too?” she demanded.
“What?”
“Find out anything we have a mind to?”
“More or less. It just takes us a little longer because we’re the good guys and we go through proper channels.”
“We can’t…cheat?”
His jaw dropped. “You want to cheat?”
“At this point, I think I’ll do whatever it takes.”
Raphael stood, as well, and fought the urge to hold his arms out to her again, to bolster her determination with his own. In that moment, he thought he’d do anything, as well, just to stop her from shaking. Because he was pretty sure that was what she was doing somewhere behind those arms that were wrapped so tightly around her waist.
He picked up both their plates instead. Sanity, he thought. He’d stay sane if it killed him. “I’ll clean up,” he said. “It’s your turn to walk the dog.”
Thirty minutes later, Kate figured out why he had been gone so long while he had been doing this particular chore last night. She and Belle made their way around the perimeter of Raphael’s backyard at a crawl. Periodically, the dog would stop and inspect a lawn chair or a lush clump of weed. Then she would stare at Kate.
Kate waited. And waited. Then, disbelievingly, she caught on.
“This is ridiculous,” she muttered, staring at the dog.
Belle showed her teeth.
“You’re an animal.”
Belle sighed and lay down.
“Oh, no,” Kate said. “No, you don’t. You’re going to do this and we’re going to get it over with if it kills me.” Then she heard her own words, and a chill traced down her spine.