by Pamela Clare
Wrong thing to say. Or wrong way to say it. Whichever, he could see he drawing breath to scorch him. Before she could blast him, he grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the living room. “Come on. Faster we get this done, faster I’ll be out of your hair.”
“Finally. Something we can agree on.”
She tugged her arm free, but followed him as he made a thorough check of the house. In the last room, a spare bedroom, Quigg spied a door to the attic, a retractable ladder folded up into the ceiling.
“What’s up there?” He nodded toward the attic.
“Up there?” She blew out an inpatient breath, lifting a strand of hair that had escaped the smooth twist. “You mean, besides my crystal meth lab?”
He fixed her with a hard look.
“John it’s an attic. What do you suppose is up there? Christmas decorations, old textbooks from law school, your usual run-of-the-mill junk.”
He pulled a mag light from his pocket. “I’ll just take a quick look.”
“Fine, but I’m going to change.”
Since this was the last room to be checked, he didn’t object. He’d satisfied himself there were no intruders lurking in the attic and was closing the door when he heard the crash from the master bedroom down the hall.
*
Suzannah was picking up shoeboxes, some of which had lost their contents, when John burst into the room, crouched and ready, his gaze sweeping the room. Her heart, already racing, took another jolting leap when she saw his stance. Then she recognized the object he gripped in his hand. Just the bronzed bookend from the desk in her spare bedroom.
“God, I thought you had a gun!”
“No gun.” He straightened, his posture relaxing. “I couldn’t see packing a piece for the Lieutenant Governor’s levy, somehow.” His gaze fell on her. “You okay?”
She resisted the urge to press a hand to her heart, which still pounded a painful tattoo against her ribs. “You gave me a fright.”
“Guess we’re even, then, ’cuz I thought all hell was breaking loose in here.” He looked down at the mess on the floor. “Well, well, Imelda. Overcome by the urge to visit with your shoes, were you?”
She reached for a Prada suede number and stuck it in the box with its mate. “Very funny.” Ignoring his chuckle, she went searching for the black Stuart Weitzman pump with the funky heel. “I just knocked a stack or two down.”
“Stacks? More like towers, I’d say.” He tossed the brass bookend onto her bed, then bent to gather up a couple of boxes that still had their contents intact under snug fitting lids and started stacking them.
“Not like that.” She pulled a box from his grasp. “You’ve just stacked a pair of black flats with beige pumps and brown loafers.”
The look he shot was incredulous in the extreme. “You have a filing system for your shoes?”
She lifted her chin, daring him to make something of it. “I can see the concept of organization is a foreign one, Detective, but there’s nothing wrong with knowing what goes where. In fact, there can be some bonuses to being a little anal about this stuff.”
“Like being able to discriminate between those three pairs of identical black pumps I see lying there?”
She might have argued that the black pumps were nowhere near identical, but instead she drew a deep breath and released it in a long exhalation. “Like being able to say with complete certainty that someone has been in my closet rearranging them.”
He stood blinking at her. “Are you sure?”
She nodded. “Positive. There’s no way those blue Nickels could have migrated to the top of that stack. I knew right away someone had moved them. That’s how I knocked them down, backing out of the closet.”
She heard him suck in a breath. “You wouldn’t have moved it and maybe forgot about it?”
“No.” She shook her head emphatically.
“The front door lock—you fumbled with it tonight. Is it usually sticky?”
“No.” A shard of fear, sharp and hot, shot through her as she realized her lock must have been picked. Someone—a stranger? a disgruntled former client? a pissed-off cop?—had stood outside her door, extracted lock-picking tools and proceeded to finesse her medium-security locks. He’d let himself into her house, walked on her Persian carpets, touched her things.
“And no maid? No one with a legitimate reason to be shuffling things around in your closet?”
“Maid?” She lifted an eyebrow. “I’m hardly home long enough to disturb anything.”
He shrugged. “Color me skeptical. I couldn’t see the daughter of a former chief justice cleaning her own toilets.”
“Okay, so I have a woman in to do floors and bathrooms,” she allowed. “But she comes just twice a month. As you’ve already observed, I’m a little compulsive about order.”
“Lover?”
“None of your business.”
“Right. No lover.”
Gritting her teeth, Suzannah bent to retrieve a Gucci sandal, only to have him restrain her by gripping her upper arm.
“Don’t touch anything. Ident’ll want to go over the whole thing.”
Ident! Her stomach did a queer little flip. Police? Crawling all over her bedroom, dusting her shoes for prints. She could just hear them now, joking with each other.
“No. No police.” Pulling her arm free, she strode over to the cherry wood dresser, pulling open the top drawer.
“Cripes, Suzannah, if you’re right about this, someone broke into your house, spent time in your bedroom. Fondled your shoes, for chrissakes. If that doesn’t creep you out –”
“Bloody hell.”
“What?”
Just like that, he was there by her side. Clumsily, she shoved the drawer closed on the carefully folded underwear. Underwear that was no longer arranged just the way it was supposed to be.
“Your skivvies, too?”
“Looks like it.”
John swore, long and fluently. “Okay, now we call the station.”
“No, we don’t.” She clutched his forearm to restrain him, but released her grip quickly, unnerved by the coiled tension she felt in the muscles beneath her fingertips.
“Suzannah, a crime has been committed –”
“Not unless I say it has. Not unless I make a complaint.”
“Why the hell wouldn’t you make a complaint?”
She felt tired suddenly. Tired and surprisingly close to tears. “We’ve been through this, John.”
“Like hell we have. You need to –”
She put up a hand to stop him. “Okay, say I call the cops. You guys come in, dust for prints, take my prints, too. But if this guy picked my lock, you know and I know that he’s smart enough to have used latex gloves. And if he didn’t take the precaution of wearing gloves, then there’s zero chance you’re going to match him with someone whose prints are in the database. A criminal wouldn’t be that careless.”
“But if we apprehend someone later, we’d have prints to match –”
“If you apprehend someone later, I trust it will be because he commits a crime. And if you apprehend him in the commission of a crime, then you’ll have ample evidence of said crime without any prints that might be gathered here tonight.”
“But –”
“But nothing. If the cops come in here tonight, I’ll be no closer to knowing who did it, and your friends down at the station house will have a good laugh. That’s just not going to happen, John.”
“Dammit, Suzannah. This is no laughing matter.”
He shoved a hand through his hair, making it stand up crazily. Improbably, it only made him seem all the more attractive.
“Trust me, I know that. And tomorrow, I’ll call a security company to install high-security locks, an alarm system, motion sensors, the whole nine yards.”
He swore again, pungently.
“You know I’m right,” she said. “Prints would be either non-existent or unmatchable.”
“But he got in here.”
&nbs
p; “Yes, he did, but he won’t get in again. I’ll see to it tomorrow.”
“What about tonight?” he demanded.
Fear swelled in her throat, but she swallowed it down. “He’s already been and gone tonight.”
“My point exactly. Until you get a decent security system installed, it seems to me he can come and go at liberty.”
She couldn’t quite suppress a shiver. “He won’t trouble me again tonight.”
“No, he won’t,” John said. “Where are your spare blankets?”
It took Suzannah a few seconds to process his words and extract the meaning. “You are not staying here.”
He drew himself up, seeming to acquire added height and breadth. “Fine. Have it your way. I’ll just call for a squad car to sit on your house tonight.”
“You wouldn’t!”
He turned to leave.
“Wait.” He stopped at the touch of her hand on his arm. Again, she withdrew her hand quickly. “I told you, I don’t want the police involved in any way.”
“Tough. I can’t pull stakeout tonight myself ’cuz I’m back on duty tomorrow, so you’ll have to make do with one of the guys from Patrol.”
She bit back a curse that would have done credit to a sailor. “Okay, have it your way.”
A smile ghosted over those fine, full lips. “You were going to see about those blankets? Since hell will be freezing over tonight, I figure I might need them.”
“Anyone ever tell you you’re a real bastard?”
“At least once a day,” he allowed.
Suzannah strode to the hall, yanked open a linen closet and dragged out a lightweight blanket and a fat pillow, which she shoved into his chest. “Couch is in the living room,” she clipped. “Kill the lights and turn the deadbolt before you crash.”
With that, she turned and headed back to her bedroom. As she closed the door, she thought she heard him mutter, “You’re welcome, Ms. Phelps.”
She fumed about it as she stripped off her Donna Karan and hung it carefully on a padded hanger. Damned stubborn, condescending man. Blackmailing bastard. She cursed him as she stood beneath the shower’s hot, stinging spray and scrubbed the feel of his electricity-charged fingers from her upper arm.
But when she finally settled down, after fidgeting with her thin blankets like a dog scratching and scraping and readying its bed, she found her fit of pique had subsided. When at last she fell into a light slumber, her last conscious thought was an acknowledgment that it was only his presence downstairs that allowed her to do so.
Chapter Three
“Rise and shine, sweetheart.”
Suzannah groaned and tried to burrow deeper into the pillows, grasping at the threads of her lovely dream. Hard masculine hands on her body, gravel-voiced words of praise in her ear, hot mouth blazing over her skin…
“Come on, Suzannah. I got a dog at home whose gonna pee on my brand new speakers if I don’t get home and let him out.”
Her eyes flew open. John Quigley. He’d stayed last night, and now he was in her bedroom. She jackknifed up, the twisted sheets pooling in her lap. “Of course. Go. Yes. By all means.” Oh, Lord, she was stammering.
“It’s early yet, barely dawn. I’d stay longer, but the dog…”
“The speakers. Right.” She pushed her hair back from her face and glanced at the digital alarm. Not yet five a.m. She glanced back at John to find his face had changed, sharpened with an edgy, dark intensity.
Oh, hell! Her nipples thrust sharply against her thin cotton tank, thanks to that dream. A dream in which the man standing by her bed, mere inches away, had played a starring role. For a wild, terrifying second, she visualized herself reaching out to touch him as she might have in the dream, her caress bold, sexual, deliberate. There wasn’t a shred of doubt in her mind that he’d answer her need with gratifying urgency.
The idea was scary, dizzying, thrilling, incredibly powerful. Then sanity returned.
She sank back down onto her pillows, pulling the covers up to her chin and burrowing back into her pillow as though to go back to sleep. “Okay,” she mumbled through the sheets. “Thanks for letting me know.”
“Whoa, whoa. Don’t go back to sleep just yet. I need you to throw the deadbolt behind me. It’s getting lighter by the minute, but I’d feel better if the bolt were thrown.”
Damn. “Okay.” She sat up again, this time with the sheets modestly clamped to her chest. “Give me a sec. I’ll drag on a robe and meet you down there.”
His eyes said eloquently that he wished she wouldn’t bother with the robe, but he merely nodded and withdrew.
The moment she heard his tread on the stairs, she leapt out of bed. Damn it, damn it, damn it! She strode into her walk-in closet and yanked a silk robe off a hanger with less care than the garment deserved. Of all the men in her world for her to fixate on, why this one? He was arrogant, pushy, exasperating in the extreme. Too tough, too forceful, too … yang.
And he was a cop.
So why did her body light up for him as it did for no other?
Chemistry. Random, unreasoning, unfortunate chemistry.
She pulled the robe on, wrapping it around her. Well, she never had been very good at chemistry back in school. And she’d get along very well without it fogging her brain again, thank you. On that thought, she cinched the belt of her robe tightly around her waist and marched downstairs to lock Detective John Quigley out of her house, and with any luck, out of her life.
*
Quigg looked at his watch. Four oh five. Ten minutes later than the last time you checked, stupid. Exasperated, he reached for his mug and downed the last of his coffee. It was room temperature and bitter, but he didn’t even grimace. He was well used to cold coffee. He was in it for the caffeine, a commodity he needed in large doses after a restless night spent on Suzannah Phelps’ couch.
God, she’d looked good in that dress. And those shoes. Lying there on her tasteful couch that smelled vaguely of her warm, exotic scent, he’d burned for her. Then he’d come within a heartbeat of jumping her bones this morning when she’d sat up in bed. Warm and tousled and sleep-dazed, she’d looked like his hottest fantasy.
Down, boy. His internal censor clicked on. There’d be plenty of time to play back those images in Technicolor, but not here on the job. You’ve got work to do.
Would Suzannah have replaced that lock yet? Would she have gotten someone hopping on an alarm system? Maybe he should have hung around.
Nah, Bandy would have chewed hell out of his sofa cushions and watered the philodendron, which was dying quite well on its own without any help from that quarter. But he could have gone back after he’d let the dog out, or at some point later in the day. At the very least, he could have made sure she lit a fire under the security guys –
Damn, he was doing it again. Thinking about her.
Resolutely, he forced his attention back to the report he was supposed to be writing. Shouldn’t be so hard to focus. This was one of those cases made you shake your head. Man stabs wife. A pretty straightforward piece of business, normally. But this one had a wrinkle. Seems it was an accident. Jimmy didn’t intend to stab his pregnant wife at all. He did, however, intend to stab his mother-in-law and his wife just got in the way. And the dumb ass couldn’t grasp that he’d done anything wrong. After all, he hadn’t meant to hurt her, and besides, the plastic surgeon had sewn her up good as new anyway. Even after the serious nature of the charges were explained to him, he’d still insisted he didn’t need legal counsel.
Of course, all of this meant Quigg would eventually end up sitting in that witness box giving testimony against this cracker. And given this guy’s socio-economic situation, he’d be Legal Aid all the way when he finally lawyered up. Which meant he’d end up with Suzannah, if he had half a brain. And she’d likely be mad as hell they didn’t oblige the guy to get legal advice.
“What are you grinning at, old man?”
Quigg glanced up to find fellow detective Ray Morgan standi
ng there holding a tray containing two Styrofoam cups from the gourmet coffee shop.
“Who you calling old man?” Quigg pushed his chair back. “Razor, buddy, you’re the one with the wife in tow and a mortgage on that picket fence.”
Ray grinned. “That just makes me lucky, not old.”
Lucky? Yes, Quigg believed his friend was pretty lucky. Grace took some of Ray’s rough edges off. She centered him in a way probably no one other than Quigg truly appreciated. “Maybe so,” he conceded.
“You, on the other hand, are just old.” Ray proffered the tray.
“Go to hell.” Quigg accepted one of the coffees.
“No, thanks. Been there once already today.”
“Yeah?”
“Remember the Courtenay Equipment break in?”
Quigg pried the lid off his coffee and flipped it into the overflowing garbage can by his desk. “Young offender made off with a four wheeler?”
“That’s the one.” Ray removed his own coffee and jammed the carry tray into the wastebasket. “It went to trial today, and you’ll never guess who the defense counsel was.”
Quigg almost choked on a mouthful of coffee. “Suzannah Phelps?”
“The ice princess herself.”
“How’d you make out?”
“Kid was convicted. Judge asked for a pre-sentence report.”
“So what’s the trouble?”
“The trouble, my friend, is that my nice, heretofore pristine goin’-to-court shirt is now permanently discolored from armpit to elbow, thank you very much.”
Quigg laughed at the expression on his friend’s face. No one would ever accuse Razor Morgan of being a dandy, at least not to his face, but he was a bit of a snob when it came to dressing. Natural fabrics, quality tailoring, the whole nine yards. He’d tried his best to educate Quigg, but that was a non-starter. Anything you couldn’t machine wash, haul out of the dryer and drag on didn’t make the grade for Quigg’s closet.
“Cretin. We’re talking Egyptian cotton, here.”
“Maybe you should send her the cleaning bill.”
Ray snorted. “Yeah, like I’m gonna let her know how bad she made me sweat.”