by Susan Crosby
“Everything looks beautiful, Mom. What’s the big event?”
“A luncheon for my book club.”
Arianna leaned back. “I didn’t know you were in a book club.”
Her mother brushed the hair from Arianna’s face and smiled. “We started it a few months ago. It’s mostly an excuse to eat and gossip. We take turns hosting.”
“And you’re doing your own decorating? I’m impressed.”
“That’s part of the rules. I didn’t iron the tablecloths myself,” Paloma added in a whisper.
“A small cheat, Mom.”
Paloma walked them to a table where she continued winding the leaf garland up the umbrella pole. Taller than her mother, Arianna took over as it reached the top then taped it there.
“You are looking demure today, mija,” Paloma said, eyeing Arianna’s jeans and white blouse.
“Good. That’s the look I was going for.”
“Are you undercover?”
“No.” Well, sort of, she thought. “I’m meeting someone.”
“Someone special?” her mother asked.
“Mike Vicente.” Her heart pounded as she said the name.
“No.” Paloma’s face went ashen. She clasped her daughter’s hands. “You cannot. Arianna, you cannot. I forbid it.”
Arianna squeezed back. “I have to know, Mom.”
“Why? What good can come from this now, after all these years?”
“My good.” See how important this is to me, Mom. “I need to find out what happened to my father.”
“If they didn’t know then, how can they know now?”
“A lot has changed. They’re using DNA to solve old cases now.”
Her mother shook her head.
“I’ve been having nightmares. Dad’s trying to tell me something.”
“Even if I believed in such things, why would he wait until now?”
Arianna willed her mother to understand. “Because something is different now. The truth is waiting. He wants me to find it.”
“Mija, I am begging you to leave it alone.”
“Madre, I can’t.” She forced the words out. “I can’t rest until I know. I had hoped for your support, but I’ll go ahead without it.”
“I cannot endorse this. I cannot.”
Arianna pulled her mother into a powerful hug. “I love you, Mom. I’ll keep in touch.”
After a few moments her mother hugged her back, her embrace fierce, as if she could stop her daughter from leaving. Finally she let go. “Vaya con Dios, mija.”
“You, too, Mom.” Arianna swallowed the lump in her throat and jogged back to her car. Her next conversation wouldn’t be any easier.
From his parents’ bedroom Joe could see the street, and every car that passed by. He didn’t know what Arianna drove, but he imagined it was dark and sleek, like her. Something quiet and powerful. But maybe she would surprise him—again.
Her asking to meet his parents had almost left him speechless. After so many years as a detective he was accustomed to the routinely unpredictable nature of his work—things were often not as they seemed—but his relationships had been fairly predictable…if he didn’t count Jane returning his engagement ring. That had caught him by surprise.
A dark blue BMW pulled up in front of the house. No surprise, after all. The trunk popped open, then she climbed out of the car, looking casual in jeans and a white top. Her shiny almost-black hair was down, the length just past her shoulders, which answered his question of last night. He missed the flamenco costume.
She shaded her eyes and looked at the house. He hurried down the stairs to meet her at her car, where she was unloading an ice chest.
“I hope you’re hungry,” she said, passing him the chest.
“Always.” Joe noticed she wasn’t making eye contact, unusual for her. The first time he met her he’d noticed how much eye contact she made, then noted it again last night. She started to walk past him, a grocery bag in hand. “Arianna.”
“Hmm?”
Distracted wasn’t the right word for her demeanor. She seemed nervous. Or anxious, maybe. “Hi. How are you?” he asked.
“Good, thanks. How are you?” She kept walking up the pathway to the house, a small, neat structure that his parents had owned since before he was born. “What a sweet house.”
Joe tried to see it through her eyes. Freshly painted, the yard well tended, mums in bloom. He’d put in long hours to get it looking good after a few years of neglect.
He followed Arianna into the house, also newly painted and spotless, although the furnishings were dated. “Kitchen’s to your right,” he said.
She walked into the room and set her bag on the counter. “Where are your parents?” she asked, looking around.
He put the ice chest next to the bag. “My mother passed away five months ago. My father just moved to a smaller place.”
She stared speechlessly at him for several seconds then crossed her arms and looked at the floor. After what seemed like an hour she said, “I’m so sorry about your mother.”
“Thank you. She put up a long, hard fight. Lung cancer,” he added. “The house just sold. I’m doing an inventory of the contents so that I can figure out what to do with everything.” What’s going on? he wanted to ask. She was so subdued he didn’t know what kind of conversation to have with her. He figured she would give him hell about implying there would be four for lunch. “Do you want to eat now?”
She roused herself enough to smile. “Sure. Anyone in the neighborhood you’d like to invite? There’s enough here to feed ten, I think. Great bread. Marinated shrimp, barbecued chicken, several deli salads.”
His stomach burned at the thought. Even bland food lit a fire. “I don’t mind having leftovers.” He took some plates from the cupboard and silverware from the drawer while she set out the containers.
“Do you want the bread heated?” she asked, holding up a loaf of something. If it wasn’t sourdough or white sandwich bread he could only hazard a guess. This was brown, flat and oblong.
“Whatever you prefer.” He figured she was a warm bread kind of person. If she heated it, she meant to stay and have a conversation. If she didn’t heat it, she planned a quick escape after the meal.
She moved to the stove and turned it on. He relaxed. Maybe he was reading something into her actions that wasn’t there. She was normally confident and direct, but not today. Could she actually be nervous about being alone with him? Was that why she’d jumped at the chance of meeting him at his parents’ house?
“I guess I should’ve told you my parents wouldn’t be here,” he said.
“That would’ve been nice.” A brittle smile accompanied the razor-sharp tone.
He got it. She was mad. That he could handle.
“I didn’t mean to mislead you, Arianna.”
“You said you were going to be at your parents’ house. You could easily have corrected my assumption that they would be here, but you didn’t.” Her eyes gave off sparks.
“I was too curious. Why would you want to meet my parents?” When she didn’t answer, he moved to stand next to her. “What’s going on?”
After a few seconds she faced him. “My father was murdered twenty-five years ago.”
Like it was yesterday, he decided, seeing the pain in her eyes. “I’m sorry, Arianna. You must have been very young.”
“Eight. Your father was the lead detective in charge of his case.”
Surprise zapped him in the midsection, then he realized she must have known that fact before the party last night. He’d been set up. Used. “Is that why you wanted to meet him?”
“I want to know why he didn’t find my father’s killer.”
Four
Arianna saw him retreat, not only physically by taking a step back, but his expression cooled, too.
“Some cases don’t get solved. It’s a sad fact of life,” he said, crossing his arms. “So are you the reason I got an invitation to the party last night?”
She owed him the truth. “I saw a picture of you and Scott in his den last month when I had dinner there, and I asked about your relationship. Then I started having nightmares about my father.” She brushed some crumbs off the counter with her hand, hoping he wouldn’t see how much the dreams affected her. “For the first time since I was a little girl I got out the scrapbook I’d made after he died. I hadn’t remembered the lead detective’s name, Mike Vicente. It seemed too much of a coincidence, but I did some checking and found out he was your father.”
“Then you asked Scott to invite me to the party so you could set me up.”
She shook her head. “I wanted to talk to you. Away from your office.”
“What made you think I wouldn’t have talked to you? Met with you, away from the office? Did you figure you had to play the sex card to get my attention? I assure you, I’m not that base.”
“The attraction was real and unplanned,” she admitted. “Unfortunately.”
“Unfortunately?”
“It complicated everything.”
“You seemed to deal with that complication just fine. Nice dance, Arianna. Great kiss. I bought it.”
His anger was justified, but it still stung. “I didn’t know it was you by the waterfall. I had no idea.” She couldn’t tell if he believed her. His expression didn’t change. “As for the kiss, I was as swept away as you were. The last thing I needed was—was…” She spread her hands wide, not able to come up with the right word.
“Chemistry?”
“Yes. I don’t know if you’ve heard but I haven’t exactly endeared myself to the LAPD through the years.” Which was putting it mildly, she thought.
“I heard rumors,” he said, then shrugged. “I asked around a little after we met.”
“I have a lot of resentment.”
“I gather that. At least now I know why.”
She’d wondered. She’d thought maybe that was why he hadn’t tried to contact her after they met last year. But that was before she knew he’d been engaged. “I figured you might have. But there’s no denying we made some kind of connection when we met. I also figured if you got to know and like me, you would be more willing to do me a favor.”
He shoved his hands in his back pockets. “What kind of favor?”
“I want to see my father’s file. I had hoped you’d find a way to get it to me.”
“All you have to do is request it.”
“No. It’s unsolved. I’ve been denied access.”
“That makes no sense. If the case is twenty-five years old, what would it matter? Certainly you’re entitled under the Freedom of Information Act.”
“My relationship with the LAPD is bad enough already. Pushing legalities would only hurt me in the future when I need information for a case. All I want is to see the file. And find the killer,” she added, the most important issue.
“Why do you think you could?”
“It’s a hunch. I’m a good investigator, and I’m not bound by a cop’s rules.”
She could see him thinking it through.
“Was your father involved in a crime?” he asked.
“My father was a thirteen-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department. He died in the line of duty.” A situation that still made her both angry and proud. He’d been her knight in shining armor—but he’d been taken from her.
Joe hardly missed a beat. He rested his palms on the counter and leaned toward her, his gaze locked with hers. “Then you know that my father and everyone else at the department did everything they could to find the killer and bring him to justice. Everything.”
She didn’t break eye contact. “And yet they didn’t solve it. Tell me, Joe. If it was your father who had been murdered and justice hadn’t been served, wouldn’t you be doing everything in your power to find the killer?”
He was quiet long enough that she began to hope.
“I can’t help you,” he said at last, pushing away from the counter.
Hope died. “Why not?”
“A hot file like that—a cop whose line-of-duty death was never solved? That would require approval from some brass before I could pull it from Records. Plus, it would look like I was working, which I can’t be, because I’m on vacation.”
“When you get back from vacation, then.”
“I’m off for four weeks starting today. If you can wait that long I’ll give it a try.”
She decided to press. “Would you let me talk to your father?”
“That’s not possible.” He picked up two of the food containers and carried them to the kitchen table.
“Why not?”
“I’ve given you my answer, Arianna. If things were different I would try to help you.”
Her throat burned. He was her only chance of getting a look at the file, short of hiring a lawyer and making an issue out of it, which would totally destroy whatever small amount of credibility she had with the department. Not to mention that she needed the nightmares to end.
She looked blankly at all the food she’d brought. She couldn’t stay there any longer.
Arianna extended her hand. “I’m sorry I bothered you.”
He took her hand then didn’t let go until she met his gaze. Sympathy brought out specks of gold in his green eyes, but he didn’t try to stop her. She was grateful for that.
She kept her emotions in check as she pulled away from the curb. Now what? Where could she go? Not back to her mother’s house. Not to her own apartment, either. Too quiet. To the office, then, where she spent most of her life, anyway.
She had to come up with plan B.
An hour later Joe tossed his inventory log onto the dining room table and headed to the backyard, in need of fresh air. He stalked the grounds, hunting for nonexistent weeds, then sat next to an orange tree and rested his back against the trunk. He plucked a blade of grass, then another. One more.
He didn’t know why he’d expected anything different. Of course Arianna wasn’t interested. He was a cop, LAPD at that—just like her father, a man who had died in the line of duty. And his own father hadn’t found the killer.
That was just the beginning. Her income was probably three times his—or more. She had fit in at Scott’s party, as sophisticated as the rest of his guests. Joe hadn’t, which is why he’d discovered the waterfall in the first place. He had decided he’d made a mistake by going to the party and so had looked for a place to hang out until he could politely leave.
Then Arianna had appeared in the misty, mysterious place like a wish fulfilled, her spicy perfume alerting him to her presence, her sexy body jolting him back to life after a long sleep, her dark eyes entreating him to trust and hope. Was it all a game? She said it wasn’t, that the attraction was real and unplanned and complicated. He would’ve believed her, believed she was honest, if she hadn’t misled him last night. What was the truth?
He’d been lied to before, most recently by his own fiancée. He hadn’t learned to play those games and didn’t know how to spot the players.
Arianna hadn’t shown herself to be any different. She’d walked out as soon as she learned he couldn’t be of any use to her.
So much for trying to get back his life. And a date. It was too bad his interest had been piqued to the degree it had.
“Joe?”
He swung around. Arianna stepped through the side gate and into the yard.
“I didn’t mean to just barge in, but I rang the bell several times. Your car was still out front, so I took a chance you were out here.”
Damn, she was one sexy woman. Curvy, fluid, graceful and…competent.
“No problem,” he said, standing to greet her. Stay this time….
“I apologize for walking out on you,” she said.
He liked her directness and that she looked him in the eye. He even liked that she didn’t offer an excuse. She was in search of the truth. He couldn’t fault her for using whatever method it took to find that truth.
“Forget it,” he sa
id. “Are you hungry? I seem to have some extra food on hand.”
After a moment she smiled. “I’m starving.”
Keep it light, he told himself. “That’s the real reason you came back.”
“Absolutely. The only reason.”
As they moved toward the house, he resisted resting his hand on her lower back as he had the night before, but her perfume whispered to him, urging him closer. He’d already danced with her. Kissed her. Held her against his body. He wanted to sweep her into his arms right now, but she wasn’t a woman who could be rushed. He already knew that about her.
He also knew if he played his cards right, she might stay for dinner.
Arianna appreciated attractive men as much as the next woman—she just didn’t trust them. There were exceptions. Her partners in her firm, Nate Caldwell and Sam Remington, were both attractive and trustworthy. And she sensed that Joe Vicente was a man she could trust. Maybe too much.
She let her gaze wander over him as he stored the leftovers in the otherwise empty refrigerator. He had the body type people called rangy—lean and loose-limbed. He moved slowly and spoke thoughtfully. A deliberate man, she decided. Someone who didn’t make mistakes often, either in words or action. Important qualities in a detective. She wondered if his father was the same way.
She also wondered why Joe was protecting him.
Arianna hadn’t realized her gaze was lingering on Joe’s rear end until he turned around and caught her staring. In truth, although it was a very nice feature of his anatomy, she’d been lost in her own thoughts, not drooling. He couldn’t have known that, however, and the last thing she wanted was to get involved, even just physically, with a man as wounded as he seemed to be.
Surprisingly, he didn’t tease her. Instead he sat across from her at the kitchen table and said nothing, apparently letting her decide what would happen next.
She should probably go. She was keeping him from his task.
“Is this hard for you?” she asked instead. “Emptying your parents’ house?”
“I grew up here. It’s home.”