by Beverly Bird
“I’m going to stop the first cab I see.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am.”
He grabbed her arm, spinning her back to face him. It only made her madder that his eyes were amused.
“Are we having a fight?” she demanded suddenly.
“Sure sounds like it.”
“Okay, then.”
He watched, curious and confused, as she took a deep breath. What was she doing? He tried his damnedest not to notice the way her breasts rose and fell even beneath her bulky wool jacket. He tried his best not to remember what she looked like without that jacket. He was still trying when she hauled off with her fist and punched him squarely in the gut.
“I win,” she said calmly, and then she began running.
It took him a moment to recover from his surprise. But he was big, he was fast, and he was strong. In the next heartbeat he caught up with her again, and Tessa found herself airborne.
She cried out as he scooped her off her feet, looping an arm around his neck out of a pure instinct to hold on. “Put me down!”
“I’m driving you home.”
“No! You’re acting like a—a Neanderthal, Gunner! This is ridiculous!”
“I haven’t grabbed you by the hair yet, so don’t give me ideas.”
“Gunner, I mean it!” She tried to kick. He tightened his hold.
“Listen, Princess, we harassed the hell out of Benami today, and you’re not walking down Filbert by yourself in the dark and a bunch of fog, hoping for a cab to come along.”
“Okay. All right!” she gasped. “Just put me down. At least...just put me down.”
Her voice was less forceful than panicked now. He noticed it and looked down at her sharply.
Her palms had gone damp and her heart was hurtling. Not once, not in nearly a year now, had a man touched her, Tessa realized, at least not a man to whom she wasn’t related. And she didn’t like her reaction.
It didn’t matter that Gunner did it in temper, in amusement, out of some frustration. It didn’t matter at all that there was nothing sexual about it. It didn’t matter because his shoulders were so hard under her arm, swaying a little with each of his steps, and that was so male. His right arm was beneath her back and the side of that hand unintentionally skimmed her breast as his arm came up around her ribs. His left arm was tucked beneath her knees and that hand rested on her thigh, nearly on her bottom. He held her against his chest and his torso, and she was aware of the hardness of him again—no flab—and this wasn’t impersonal, not at all.
Suddenly she felt aware and alive. It was a sensation that speared through her without warning. And she hadn’t felt it for anyone, with anyone, in so very long. Suddenly the solitude she dragged around herself all year seemed miserable, suffocating, too heavy to bear.
“Please!” she almost wailed. “Gunner, put me down now!”
He looked down at her. Her face had paled. She was wild-eyed. Gunner swore. He set her carefully on her feet again. He wouldn’t apologize this time. Damn it, he couldn’t even be sure what he was supposed to apologize for!
A cab whipped around the corner of Tenth. He stepped angrily into the street and waved it down.
“Go on then,” he said tightly when it had stopped. “Go home.”
“Yes, I...thank you.” Still, she stood on the curb, thinking there was something else she really ought to say. She was trembling. Her thoughts were jangled, sharp, chaotic, and her pulse was still scrambling. Her face felt flushed.
“Go home, Tess,” Gunner said again, opening the door for her.
She nodded and scrambled into the taxi.
Gunner watched as the taillights got smaller and finally blended in with the other traffic. He wished mightily for a cigarette.
He was marginally calmer by the time he’d finally collected their car and turned it toward the south part of the city. Calm and troubled. Anger had given way to a nagging feeling of concern.
He hit the brakes as he passed a 7-Eleven store on Twelfth Street. The bet had been that he wouldn’t smoke in her presence, he thought. He parked and went inside, bought a pack of cigarettes, then stood out front on the sidewalk, scowling down at them in his hand.
He’d have to smoke it right here, he thought. If he did it in the car, she’d probably smell it tomorrow.
So what?
Damn it, she wasn’t his jailer. And tomorrow was Sunday anyway. Maybe they would both give it a day off.
Then again, maybe they wouldn’t.
He didn’t know how long it was going to take for this nicotine craving to go away. He’d never tried to quit before. But something told him that the hours he already had under his belt were going to make a difference. That if he smoked tonight, or tomorrow, then Monday was going to be as much of a pure hell as today had been.
He swore and tossed the cigarettes into a trash can. It had nothing—absolutely nothing—to do with her opinion of him. It was just common sense.
He went back for another hot dog and a pack of gum, then he finally returned to the car and sat for a while, watching winos and good upstanding citizens move in and out of the store. So she didn’t think they ought to break into Benami’s house, he thought. No big deal. He’d had enough of those kinds of disagreements with partners before. So why was his gut in knots?
Because he wasn’t sure this partnership was going to work out after all.
He felt as if it were an instinctive, worrisome thing moving under his skin, pulling his nerves tight. Tessa Hadley-Bryant was his fourth partner—in Homicide, at any rate. And not one of those relationships had felt this way.
This wasn’t impersonal. Somehow, it hadn’t been from the start.
He’d argued with his other partners plenty. But not like this. Was it a male-female thing? All his other partners had been men. Did that have something to do with it?
And what in the hell was it?
She was damn good-looking, he thought, just the kind of woman he liked. Soft, not overdone. He knew better than to fool around with anyone who worked for the city, and he wouldn’t. No, he never would. But he’d have to be dead not to notice her eyes, the way they flashed and smiled. Maybe that was just skewing his thinking somehow, altering his brain processes.
Hell, she blushed. And it turned him inside out.
She made him feel protective. Too protective. Maybe that was it. She wasn’t frail, fragile, not at all—God, she could jump back at him faster than he could expect it. And he liked that. But something about her made everything male inside him rise to shield her, to smooth the way for her. Something male, and okay, macho, he thought.
He’d been out of line with Benami, grabbing him that way. And he knew himself well enough to guess that he probably wouldn’t have laid a hand on the man under any other circumstances. He was pretty inured to scum by now.
Rapport notwithstanding, there was no way this partnership was going to work, he thought again, not by her rules. Not by his own.
He couldn’t function this way. Whether she liked it or not, there was something vaguely and unrelentingly personal about their interchanges. He felt it, and she did, too. Maybe he could work around it, but not if she got that panicked look in her eyes every time he inadvertently moved too close. He couldn’t measure every word he said, every gesture he made. He would go out of his mind.
She’d told him that he shouldn’t tiptoe around her, then she’d lost it when he didn’t. So if he didn’t tiptoe, didn’t keep back from those invisible boundaries of hers, they wouldn’t be able to work together at all.
God, that look in her eyes when he had picked her up! He closed his own against the memory of it. She had been...aware. Of him. As a man. And that had gone through him as if it were lightning.
Well, Angela had warned him. And Angie was one smart cookie.
Gunner finally started the car. Then, impulsively, he made an illegal U-turn and headed east instead of south.
By the time the taxi dropped her off i
n Elfreth’s Alley, Tessa was much calmer. She’d been out of line. She’d overreacted, she realized, still embarrassed.
She paid the driver and went inside, and Maxwell was especially out of sorts. It had been a very long day. She stepped over him and went to the kitchen to feed him, then she found herself talking to him again.
“I wasn’t wrong about breaking in. I didn’t overreact about that,” she murmured. The cat ignored her, chowing down. “Any sane person would have argued with him about that, Max. He’s nuts. He takes too many chances. I can see that now.”
She rocked back on her heels, her spine against the wall, moving the cat food can from hand to hand until the smell got to her. Then she stood abruptly and hurled it into the recycling basket.
There was still the rest of that bottle of wine from last night. Opened, not finished.
What was she doing? she thought halfway through pouring herself a glass. She really didn’t drink. Hardly. But the cabernet was warm and soothing when she took a sip, loosening a bit of the tension that still gripped her just under her skin.
“I overreacted when he touched me,” she told Maxwell, who was cleaning himself and purring now. She sipped again, closed her eyes. “It was just...” I’m widowed, she thought for the second time that day, but I’m not dead. And it was a thought that had never once occurred to her in virtually twelve months now.
The problem was, there was no way to keep things impersonal with a man like John Gunner.
The biggest problem was that she didn’t even know how to deal with a man like John Gunner. She’d never met anyone like him. He ran through life with no constraints, she thought, sipping again. He was full of feelings, and he acted on them right off the cuff, without thought for the possible repercussions. He barely knew her, yet he’d been ready to punch Benami’s lights out this afternoon because of what he’d said to her. There was no restraint there, she thought.
What in the world was she going to do about this? About him? She couldn’t be attracted to him...and she was, in a purely physical, leaping, instantaneous way that made her no different from any other woman in the department. She’d known it as soon as he’d picked her up. Even before that, she admitted.
He was all simmering, unadulterated sex appeal, and it made young girls gush and old ladies blush. He didn’t mean any of it, of course. Not seriously. Of that, she was fairly certain. He hadn’t stayed married when he’d had the chance, had he? By his own admission, he wasn’t a committed sort of man. He was dangerous, one of life’s quintessential bad boys, obviously free with his loving and his touches. She might have been able to disdain that, except he had a macho heart of gold.
She wished Matt could tell her what to do about him. If Matt were alive, would he suggest that she might want to think about asking for a different partner? Then she had another, horrible thought. If Matt were alive, was it possible she would still be attracted to that cocky, animal magnetism in Gunner?
Yes, she thought, shaken, she would be. Because it had nothing to do with morals, with common sense, with decency and all the rules she had grown up believing in. It was elemental. Gunner’s laid-back charm was something that simply was, but the mature, the sensible, the moral people of the world acknowledged it and walked around it.
At the moment, after today, she wondered if she had a mature, sensible, moral bone in her body.
She made her way upstairs quickly. She left her wine on the dresser and stepped into the bathroom. She started to fill the tub, then she thought better of it. She was tired, so bone-deep tired. It was a good feeling, one she had missed badly these past twelve months. But there was also the very real possibility that it might have her falling asleep in the bathtub.
If she drowned, Gunner would be convinced that Benami had had something to do with it. He’d probably kill the man, no questions asked. She laughed breathlessly, then sobered. He really did need to learn control.
She turned the shower on and washed quickly. She was just towel-drying her hair when the doorbell rang. Her heart skipped, stalled, then started again too fast. Gunner. She was sure against all reason that it was him.
She flew into her bedroom and rummaged through her drawers for underwear, for clothing, more panicked about the situation than it warranted. The resounding chimes started up again, impatiently.
What if it wasn’t Gunner? What if it was Benami?
She slammed the drawer shut and grabbed her robe off the bathroom door instead, hurrying. Then she remembered that she was on twenty-four-hour duty now.
She ran to her night stand for her gun, loading it with fumbling fingers. Calm down. She slammed the magazine into place and crept back down the stairs. When she reached the front door, she moved to the side of it and put her back flush to the wall.
“Who’s there?” she demanded.
“Your apologetic partner. Open up.”
Tessa breathed again. Her knees went weak. Her belly fluttered. She almost dropped her gun.
She moved in front of the door again and flung it open. “Gunner, what are you—”
“Good girl.” He glanced down at the gun in her hand and nodded.
“What are you doing here?” Lines, she thought. She didn’t want him here, at her. home. She had never intended that this should happen. She had promised herself that it wouldn’t. And oh, God, the lines were crazy, all messed up, scattered all over the place, making no sense anymore at all.
How had this happened in two days?
“What do you want?” she gasped. “It’s late and—”
He stepped past her into the entryway. “What are we going to do about this?” he said, interrupting her.
“I...don’t know.” The air went out of her. She didn’t even pretend that she didn’t know what he was talking about.
“This impersonal business of yours is garbage, Tess. It’s not feasible. It’s not possible.”
“Maybe not,” she whispered.
“So,” he muttered.
“So we’ll talk,” she managed to say reasonably, but her heart thrummed. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”
“At this late hour?”
Tessa flushed. It was barely past seven.
Gunner finally grinned.
The tension drained out of his face, and his smile was crooked, endearing. He moved past her down the hallway, looking around as he did.
The inside of her brownstone was more or less what he’d expected. There was a sunken living room off to his right. He noticed hardwood floors and an Oriental rug, dark wood, plants and white walls. There were a few quiet prints. It all looked like money. He hesitated, his gaze taking accurate stock of everything in the spare moments she gave him.
It struck him that he noticed nothing personal whatsoever in the room. He wondered if that was a rich-girl thing, or a result of her tragedy, if she had emotionally cleaned house afterward and thrown out all the boxes.
He glanced into a dining room as he passed it and found another place of understated elegance. There was a breakfast nook in the kitchen. This was predominantly white, too, with touches of sunny yellow that flared when she threw on the overhead light. Lots of plants here, he saw.
“Is instant okay?” She set her gun carefully on the counter.
“What, no cappuccino, no espresso maker?”
She glared at him.
“That’s better, Princess.”
“What’s better?” she asked warily.
“That look like you’re thinking about flaying me alive. I can deal with that better than—” He broke off abruptly.
Better than vulnerability, he thought uncomfortably. Better than the softness that made him jump to protect. Better than the brilliant smiles and that quick little way she tucked her hair behind her ear.
He sat down at the table, and that was when he finally realized that she was only wearing a robe. It was a silky thing that seemed to whisper when she moved. Short, midthigh, belted, some kind of exotic print on a background of royal blue. It slid over her s
kin, and unless he was badly mistaken, she was not wearing a bra.
Her hair was wet, tousled. He realized that she must have just gotten out of the shower. She had very incredible legs. He’d registered that she was reasonably tall. It went without saying that she would also have long, slender legs. Didn’t it? Sure it did. It usually did, with most tall women.
But this wasn’t most women.
He cursed himself up one side and down the other for barging in on her tonight, for putting himself through more of something he was already having a tough time handling.
“Gunner?”
He snapped his eyes back to her face. It was the damnedest thing. His mouth felt dry. Oh, yeah, big mistake. It had definitely been a mistake to come here.
“What?” he asked hoarsely.
“I asked if you wanted cream or sugar.”
“Uh, no. Black. Black’s fine.”
“There you go.” She put a mug on the kitchen table and sat down carefully across from him.
“Thanks.” Then something bit his ankle and he came up again like a shot, shaking his foot, staring down disbelievingly. There was something large and hairy wrapped around his ankle. “What the hell?”
“Maxwell!” Tessa leaped to her feet again. “Oh, God, Gunner, I’m so sorry.”
She pried the animal off. He went unwillingly. He got his claws into Gunner’s jeans and refused to retract them, hissing and spitting as Tessa pulled him away.
“He’s never done this!” She finally got him free. She carried him to the kitchen door and threw him unceremoniously onto the back porch. “Bad kitty,” she snapped.
“Bad kitty? Sweetheart, that thing ought to be classified as a lethal weapon.” Gunner sat again, feeling even more shaken. He did not like cats. He was a dog man. A man’s man. He was—
Tessa faced him and flushed, and it was charming.
“I’m so sorry,” she said again. “I told him he’d never meet you.” She was rattled. “Maybe he was miffed.”
Gunner raised a slow brow. “So what does he do when you have a date?”