by Beverly Bird
“I don’t...I never... I haven’t...”
No, he thought, she probably hadn’t.
He wasn’t surprised and was sorry he had asked. It only reminded him how fragile she really was, though she’d take his head off if he said so. But a woman who still didn’t date wasn’t ready for...well, he thought, much of anything.
“How did he take to Matt?” he asked bluntly, remembering that she’d specifically jumped all over him for touching that subject too cautiously. So he grabbed it, trying to steady the boat.
“He never knew Matt,” she said on a sigh, but her voice was steadier. “I rescued him from the pound right after...after Matt died. The house was empty and quiet. Too empty and quiet. But Maxwell has never livened things up quite like this before.” Then again, she realized, he rarely ever met strangers.
She sat across from Gunner again, sipping her own coffee. “You wanted to talk,” she said carefully, changing the subject.
He looked at her. He’d had every intention of telling her that he thought they should put in for reassignment. Now, right away, with no hard feelings. It just wasn’t working. It was what he had come over here to tell her.
“What the hell are we going to do about this?” he asked instead.
“Do?” Her voice was cautious.
He noticed that she didn’t hem and haw about what “this” was. He liked her even more for it.
“I think it’s best if we just ignore it,” she continued on a burst of breath. “It isn’t feasible.”
Feasible? A hell of a way to describe someone ringing your chimes, he thought. “Honey, this isn’t a business deal.”
“But it is—in a way. It should be.”
“Too late.”
She paled a little, but she was stubborn. “Of course it isn’t. We haven’t...haven’t...”
He couldn’t resist. “Made mad, passionate love in the back of our city car? I guarantee you that if we had, you wouldn’t be sitting here discussing it in terms like ‘feasible.’”
Color flew into her face. And it still fascinated him.
“Nor will we,” she said tightly. “Do it or discuss it.”
“Of course not.”
Was that amusement in his eyes? Damn him, was he laughing at her? “Lines, Gunner,” she said through clenched teeth. “That’s all it takes. Just a little self-discipline and restraint. We just need lines. You stay on your side. I’ll stay on mine. Just kindly refrain from picking me up on busy city streets—” from touching me, please don’t touch me “—and we’ll get along fine.”
This time he laughed aloud. He couldn’t help it. “Sure. We can give it a shot.”
“Good,” she said stiffly.
“Good,” he agreed, grinning. “In the meantime, while we’re saluting these little lines, we have some unfinished business to attend to.”
“What?” she asked warily. But she knew. Of course, she knew.
“I can’t break into Benami’s place without your help.”
Chapter 7
Tessa groaned.
“Or at least I can’t do it as safely as I could with your cooperation,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because you’re the one with all the connections. We need to find out when he’s going to be out of the house, when he’s got some sort of social engagement. We’ve got to find out what kind of alarm system he has on the place.”
“Gunner, I don’t like this ‘we’ business. This is your baby.”
He watched her guilelessly. “Please?”
The simple word shot something warm and weakening down to her toes. “I could flay you, Gunner, I really could.”
“wand?”
“It’s wrong. It’s illegal.”
“It’s necessary. I want this guy.”
“What if we get caught? You’re on probation, Gunner, aren’t you? For that last car you lost? The one that got towed away? You’d probably get thrown out of the department if Kennery caught wind of this.”
“If it means Benami doesn’t have a chance to disappear again, I’ll run the risk.”
She stared at him. He was serious. The ramifications to his own life weren’t important. Right and wrong was important. If Benami had killed Daphne, and if Benami got away with it because of a probably crooked judge and the money to buy a good attorney, then that would be very, very wrong.
She let out her breath carefully. “I won’t go in there with you.”
“We’ll discuss that part later.”
“No, Gunner, no. We won’t discuss it at all. I’ll find out when he’s going to be out of the house. I’ll even find out what kind of security Daphne has on the place. But I will not break in with you.”
“I really need a lookout, Princess.”
She covered her face with her hands. “Oh, my God.” She peered at him through her fingers. “And don’t say ‘please’ again. Don’t you dare.”
“Just think about it.”
“Do you honestly think for a minute that I’m going to be able to do anything else?”
He grinned crookedly. “I hope not.”
“You’re incorrigible.”
“You owe me something for the mortal wound your damn cat just gave me.”
“Maybe Maxwell is just a good judge of character. And you’re breathing, Gunner. Until I see you collapsed on my floor, that won’t hold water.”
He drained his coffee and got to his feet. “What about tomorrow?”
“What about it?”
“We should start trying to track down the help at that party and see what they have to say about Benami’s comings and goings.”
Tessa stood as well, hugging herself, suddenly self-conscious in her robe. “It beats the devil out of breaking into a man’s home, I guess.”
“Well, we’ll work on our plans for that, too.”
He had never taken his coat off. He thrust his hands into his pockets and wandered down the hall again. When he was outside, halfway down the front walk to the cobblestone alley, she shouted after him.
“Gunner!”
He turned around, walking backward to grin at her. “What, Princess?”
“Do you always get your way?”
“I try my damnedest.”
Tessa was sleeping deeply, dreaming disjointed dreams, when the telephone jarred her awake the next morning. They weren’t the same nightmares that had haunted, her in the months after Matt had died. Not quite. This time she was in a funhouse, with too much glass, too many reflections, and bullets were spitting, cracking, flying. Glass sprayed, razor-sharp and lethal, and she ducked and shielded her face and screamed. She was trapped in there.
But Gunner was in one of the passageways.
She caught glimpses of him in the mirrors, his gun drawn. His voice echoed eerily, shouting to her that he would protect her. But she didn’t need his protection. She had her own gun this time. She looked down at it in her hand.
It was a hot dog.
She sat bolt upright and gasped. The phone kept jangling.
“Hello,” she croaked, finally fumbling for the phone.
“’Morning, Princess.”
Gunner. Again. Already.
She slumped back against the headboard, then she cracked one eye to check the bedside clock. She would be reasonable about this.
“Do you know what time it is?”
“Sure. Seven-thirty.”
“Gunner, it’s Sunday.”
There was a short silence. “What, do you go to church or something?”
“I was planning on sleeping in,” she answered tightly.
“Not today. We’ve got work to do. I’m calling to tell you that I’ll be there in half an hour.” With any luck, he thought, by calling ahead this time he would give her enough warning that she wouldn’t be wearing a short blue silk robe with the hint of nothing underneath.
He could handle this. Damn it, he could.
“No! ” Tessa protested.
“No?” Gunner repeated. “How
come?”
Last night had been one thing, she thought frantically. She couldn’t, wouldn’t let it establish a precedent. She had told him they needed lines! But suddenly she felt like a tumbleweed, being bounced along by a strong wind, and there was nothing at all she could do to stop her momentum.
“I’ll meet you at the office,” she said, resigning herself to being awake at seven-thirty on a Sunday.
“Not cool, Princess. Our desk isn’t the place to talk about what we have to talk about.”
She remembered his decision to break into Benami’s town house. She remembered her tacit agreement to help him. It flooded in on her, leaving her cold, then hot and itchy with nerves. She didn’t answer.
“Come on, Princess, you don’t strike me as the type who’d welsh on her word.”
“Maybe if it was given under duress, I would,” she grumbled.
“That wasn’t duress. It was just gentle persuasion.”
She wondered what classified as duress, then.
“Half an hour,” he repeated. This time he hung up before she could argue.
Tessa leaped out of bed. He was coming here. Again.
She dressed fast and ran a brush through her hair, refusing to put makeup on, not even a little, just because he was coming over. Then she raced downstairs into the kitchen. She flung open the refrigerator. She’d been so excited about being reassigned to Homicide that she hadn’t been to the market in days.
The refrigerator yawned back at her, virtually empty. There was a small slab of Gouda cheese and half a tin of water biscuits. There was a leftover Caesar salad—probably limp by now—and three bottles of mineral water. Nothing at all that would interest a man like John Gunner, she realized.
She pushed the door shut again and hurried into the living room to use the phone there. The gourmet market around the corner made sandwiches.
“I need some sort of breakfast sandwiches,” she demanded as soon as someone answered. “Whatever they have at fast-food places.”
“Are you serious?”
She thought of Gunner and his hot dogs. “Very. Anything with cholesterol. Lots and lots of cholesterol. On second thought, maybe you should throw in some sausage instead of the bacon. He’d like that. Bring me two of them. No—three! And hash browns.” It would be a real macho, Neanderthal treat.
“Got you covered.”
She’d barely hung up when the doorbell rang. Half an hour, my foot, she thought, going to the door.
She realized that he’d probably called her from the car. But at least he had called this time. Then she pulled open the door, and her thoughts staggered.
How could he always look so good?
His cologne was fresh and it immediately filled her senses. She stepped back to let him inside, and he gave her that crooked grin as he passed her. No T-shirt today, she noticed as he shrugged out of his jacket and dropped it on the newel post. He wore a blue polo shirt. The neck was unbuttoned. At the V below his throat, she could see a few dark chest hairs. They matched the soft, dark down on his forearms. His jeans hugged his body. And in spite of herself, she thought of how hard and unapologetically masculine he had felt last night when he’d held her, and something in her belly curled.
She needed coffee. She needed it badly.
“What’s for breakfast?” he asked.
Maybe worse than her attraction to him was the way she was already coming to anticipate him, she thought sinkingly, following him into the kitchen. “It’s on its way.”
“On its way?”
“That’s right. I called to have something delivered.”
He helped himself to a coffee mug, filled it with water and stuck it in the microwave. He grinned. “Delivered, huh? Damned if I couldn’t get used to living this way.”
“Don’t,” she said quickly. “We’re not starting a precedent here.”
“Whatever you say, Princess.”
The doorbell rang again. She hurried back to collect the food and pay for it.
The market had done itself proud, and Gunner was pleased. The breakfast sandwiches dripped with cheese and an ungodly amount of grease, she thought. Gunner ate two of them. His stomach must be cast iron, Tessa decided.
It sure had felt that way, she thought, being tucked against him last night when he had carried her up Filbert.
“So,” Gunner said, finally wiping his mouth and leaning back in his chair. “Let’s straighten out the mechanics of getting into that house first. Then we’ll go track down the help from the party.”
Tessa nodded slowly, resignedly.
“The first thing we need to do is find out when Benami is going out, to where, and for how long.”
Tessa chewed her lip. “Well, this is the time of year for charity balls.” She couldn’t believe she was actually doing this. “There’s got to be something coming up. I guess I could call my mother.”
She sighed and got to her feet. Gunner watched her go, enjoying her walk, then he felt a twinge of remorse at the tension in it now.
He had done that to her.
It would probably be better, kinder, if he didn’t take her with him, he realized, and wondered if that was his urge to protect her talking, or just fear of an unhappy God striking him with a thunderbolt for dragging a sweet-faced angel down into sin and crime. He got up to make another cup of coffee, and that was when he noticed the cat outside on the porch railing.
Maxwell glared in at him malevolently. Gunner glared back.
“The mayor’s having a fund-raiser. Tonight.”
Tessa’s voice startled him. He quickly turned back to her. “Perfect.”
“I called Millicent Craig. She’s the mayor’s right-hand man, or woman, as the case might be. Christian is on the guest list.”
“Better yet.” Gunner nodded. “What about the security?”
“I’m waiting for a call back on that.” Even as she spoke, the phone rang again.
She was gone longer this time. Gunner went back to eyeing Maxwell. Impulsively he wrenched open the door and jumped at the animal, shouting, trying to startle him.
Maxwell didn’t move a muscle except to yawn.
“Damn fleabag,” he muttered.
“Gunner, you’ve really got to work on your aggression.”
He looked over his shoulder at her, vaguely embarrassed. “It’s the principle of the thing.”
“You have those?”
“A few. What did you find out?”
“The windows are wired and there are motion sensors on both doors.”
“You’re sure?”
“Reasonably. It’s a town house, I know the woman who lives next door, and she says the builder put the same system in all of them. I called and pretended that I was thinking of changing what I have on this place, asking for a recommendation.” At eight-thirty on a Sunday morning, she thought. Anita had probably thought that she’d lost her mind.
“Okay. Good,” Gunner answered.
“It doesn’t feel good, Gunner!” she cried suddenly. “It feels sneaky and underhanded and wrong.”
He wanted to touch her. He wanted to hug her, to smooth her ruffled feathers, to hold her and tuck her hair behind her ear. With any other woman he would have done just that, impulsively and without a thought.
Lines.
He kept his distance. “Don’t wimp out on me quite yet, Princess. The worst is yet to come.”
She paled a little. “What if Benami actually catches us in the act? What if we get past the security, and Benami comes home unexpectedly?”
“We, huh?” His grin widened.
“Figure of speech.”
“Mmm.”
“Well, what if he does?”
“We’ll talk about it when and if the time comes.”
She stared at him incredulously. “I’m not going in there unless I have some sort of game plan mapped out ahead of time, Gunner. And it had better cover every eventuality.”
He shrugged. “Okay. I’ll have one by the time we get there.”
She watched him warily. “Promise? Are you good for your word?”
“Oh, yeah, Princess. Always.”
Tessa realized she believed him.
Six hours, fifteen waitresses, three bartenders and seven bus boys later, Tessa was almost starting to agree that extreme measures might be required to nail Benami. Almost, but not quite. Unfortunately, not one single person had noticed Christian leaving the Heart Association Ball.
They sat in their car outside the apartment of the last person they had interviewed. Tessa leaned her head back against the seat wearily.
“Are we wrong?” she asked quietly. “Did Benami not kill her? Is it possible?”
Gunner only grunted. “He’s just good,” he said finally. “Very, very good.”
“So how’d he do it?” she wondered aloud.
“Like you said. He just made sure none of the help was watching.” He paused. “We were asking for a lot from those people, Tess. Two hundred and fifty guests, and we asked them about a man they know only from a photograph we showed them.”
She nodded wearily.
“Some of them didn’t recognize him or even remember seeing him at all,” he reminded her, “but we know he was there.”
“Yes,” she agreed quietly.
“We’ll just have to go on to those other hundred and fifty guests who haven’t been questioned yet. Tomorrow. Right now, we’ve got a little breaking and entering to see about.”
Her heart sank. “I’ve been thinking about that. I really don’t want to do it, Gunner. There’s got to be another way.”
“Okay.”
She whipped around in her seat to look at him. “Okay?”
“I’ve been thinking about it, too. I’ll go in alone.”
“I don’t want you to do it, either!”
“That’s not okay.”
She swore. He cocked a brow at her in mild surprise. “And all this time I’ve had you on a pedestal.”
It seemed safest to ignore that. “Christian has to have slipped up somewhere,” she said suddenly, vehemently.
Gunner started the car again. “That’s what I’m counting on.”
“Let’s swing by and check Igor first. I’ll think about...the other.” Breaking in. She could barely even say it, she realized.
Igor had nothing new to tell them.