All a Man Can Ask

by Virginia Kantra

  He followed her to the kitchen, with its solid cabinets and outdated appliances, and leaned against the counter as she scooped grounds into a paper filter. She was such a cream puff. Soft and sweet. Even pissed, she couldn’t resist taking care of him. He bet her students loved her.

  He frowned as he thought of that kid, that Jamal, who had loved her and given her such grief. Taken such advantage of her.

  The way Aleksy was doing.

  The thought made him uncomfortable.

  It wasn’t the same, Aleksy told himself as the coffeemaker bubbled and spat. He was just doing his job. Well, not his job, exactly. His lieutenant had ordered him to stay off the case.

  “How much longer do you plan to stay?” Faye asked, handing him a cup.

  The full mug burned his hand. He shifted his grip to the handle. “That depends on how long you need protection.”

  “Please. You’re not going to stand there and tell me that every break-in victim warrants twenty-four hour police protection. How long?”

  I think you’d do anything… Including lie to me.

  The memory chafed like an over-starched uniform collar.

  “That depends,” he hedged.

  “On what?”

  “On whether I can establish a connection between the boat you drew and the guy I’m after. I’m not working alone on this.” Hell, he wasn’t supposed to be working this case at all. “Other detectives—other agencies—are trying to trace the money angle. Checking phone records. Chasing trucks across the border. All I can do is sit and wait for something to happen.”

  Her eyes widened. “What is it these men are supposed to have done?”

  If he told her, she would immediately understand his interest in Dick Freer. And that would put her and his investigation at risk.

  “You don’t need to know,” he said.

  “But you still want me to help.”

  He gave her a crooked smile. Could she be charmed? “Yeah.”

  She studied the steam rising from her mug. “We’d need different sleeping arrangements,” she said abruptly.

  Oh, yeah. Absolutely. He wished she would look at him.

  “What side of the bed do you want?” he asked.

  Her gaze jerked to his. Her face flooded with color. “Never mind. It would never work,” she said.

  “Sure it will,” he countered. She wasn’t pretending offense, he saw. There was real distress in her eyes. “It was a joke. A bad joke. What did you have in mind?”

  “I can’t have you sleeping in my work space. It’s too—” she hesitated “—distracting.”

  Her admission soothed his ego. Provoked his libido. But after her reaction to his earlier crack, he wasn’t going to risk another sexual remark.

  “Okay, so the couch isn’t working,” he said. “There’s always the bathtub.”

  Her lips curved. Reluctantly, he thought. “I don’t think that would work, either. There is a back bedroom. I’ve used it—oh, years ago.”

  “That’s convenient.”

  “Not really. Aunt Eileen’s been using it for storage. But you could have a look at it.”

  “Great.”

  She still looked doubtful. “It’s kind of a mess.”

  He smiled encouragement. “How bad can it be?”

  “It’s bad,” Aleksy acknowledged to his brother twenty-eight hours later.

  “Do you need backup?” Jarek asked instantly.

  Aleksy wedged the phone under his jaw and shut off the water. “No. It’s not the case. It’s living here. With her.”

  There was a breath on the other end of the line that might have been exasperation. Or laughter. “What, the art teacher has you shackled to the bed now?”

  “No. We’ve got separate rooms.”

  But he could still smell her scent, that light mix of flowers and soap, every time she walked by.

  He could still hear her humming tunelessly in the shower.

  He still had to watch her padding around barefoot in her skimpy summer tops and scanty underwear.

  A glass slipped from Aleksy’s hand into the soapy water. Actually, he’d only caught her once in her underwear, pale smooth cotton that rode high on her slender legs and low on her gently curved belly.

  “So, what’s the problem?” Jarek asked.

  “The problem is—” The memory of Faye in her underwear had momentarily wiped the problem from his mind. He shook his head to clear it. “I’m just not used to the whole living together scene, you know? I mean, the last time I had to look at yogurt in the fridge, I was home with Mom and Nora.”

  “Yogurt seems a small price to pay for a comfortable crib with an unrestricted view of your suspect.”

  Not to mention the other views he was getting, Aleksy thought.

  He rinsed the glass. “I guess you’re right.”

  “You don’t really have a problem until you start eating the yogurt,” Jarek teased.

  Aleksy stared, stricken, at the refrigerator.

  “Alex?”

  “I only tasted it,” he said defensively. “She put stuff in it, berries and stuff. I didn’t want to be rude.”

  “You ate her yogurt.” His brother’s voice was nearly expressionless.

  That was it. When Aleksy saw Jarek again, he would have to kill him.

  “I could have handled it if she made a big production out of mealtimes. You know, the wine and candlelight routine. Honey, I made waffles and let’s take the syrup back to bed? Only she doesn’t. But every time I get hungry, she’s already got something going in the kitchen. Good food. Nothing fancy. And she tells me what she’s working on, or stories about her students, and—” He realized how much he was betraying and shut up. “Jare, I’m dying here.”

  “Regular meals in agreeable company. Yeah, I can see how that would hurt.”

  “You don’t get it. Since you got yourself engaged to the reporter babe, you’ve completely lost perspective.”

  “Looks like it,” Jarek agreed. He didn’t even sound upset. “See you at seven?”

  “What’s at seven?”

  “Friday. Dinner? Tess is cooking.”

  Aleksy swished the big sandwich knife in the water and set it on the drain board. “Thanks for the warning.”

  “You better show, or you’ll get more than a warning.”

  “That woman’s got you whipped, bro.”

  “Yeah? What are you doing right now, hotshot?”

  Aleksy jerked his hands out of the soapy water. When they were kids, and later, when he’d followed Jarek on to the force, he used to suspect his older brother of possessing some kind of super power deductive skill. Now he was sure of it.

  “I’m just marking time,” he said. “Until something breaks on the case.”

  “Sure,” said Jarek.

  Aleksy scowled. “Did you check out the registration on that boat?”

  “Yeah, I passed it on to some guys I know.” After twenty years on the Chicago force, the guys Jarek knew made up a Who’s Who of law enforcement in the Midwest. “They’ll get back to me. I might even have an answer for you tonight.”

  Something inside him relaxed. “Great. Okay. I’ll see you at seven.”

  “Bring the teacher if you want,” his brother said.

  Aleksy couldn’t do that. A date for family dinner? It would make them seem too much like a couple.

  He wasn’t even getting any.

  “I’ll ask her,” he said.

  Anyway, she’d say no. Faye didn’t want an involvement any more than he did.

  After he hung up, he went looking for her but she wasn’t at her worktable or in her bedroom or on the deck. Which had to mean she’d gone to collect the mail without telling him.

  His scowl deepened. It was a good thing he had exaggerated her possible danger. If the bad guys were really after Faye she’d be dead by now.

  He stalked to the screen and glared toward the road. Nothing.

  She was fine.

  Of course she was fine.


  A minute ticked by, marked by the shadow of a cloud creeping down the drive and the distant roar of a powerboat. Two minutes. Five.

  Aleksy swore and jammed the mop handle into the sliding door. He pocketed a key to the cottage and started down the pine-strewn driveway. She was fine. At least until he caught up with her and told her what he thought of her for worrying him like this.

  Faye was sitting on a flat rock by the side of the gravel drive, her skirt collapsed around her, envelopes and circulars scattered beside her. Her arms clasped her knees; her pale face lifted to the sun. She’d picked a hell of a time to get a tan.

  Relief burst in Aleksy’s gut and made him angry, like that time his six-year-old niece had slipped away from him in the grocery store and he’d found her in front of the ice cream. His jaw clenched. Of all the stupid, inconsiderate—

  He stopped in his tracks.

  She was crying. Silently, with her eyes closed, but definitely crying all the same. Now that he was closer, he could see the shine of tears on her cheeks. Her lips were parted. Her nose was red.

  Panic time. He didn’t “do” crying any better than he did commitment.

  Her wet lashes lifted. Her desolate gaze socked him like a fist in the chest. Aleksy forgot about what he did and didn’t do and went to sit beside her on the rock.

  Faye just opened her eyes and he was there, conjured out of her sorrow and her need, a big, dark, annoyed-looking antidote to grief and guilt.

  She was so glad to see him she felt the tears well again. She squeezed her lids shut.

  But she heard him move, the crunch of boots on gravel. She felt him settle beside her, the brush of his thigh, the solid warmth of his shoulder. She smelled him, clean and male and reassuring.

  “So, who died?” he asked.

  Her eyes popped open. Her jaw dropped. “That is about the most insensitive thing I’ve ever heard anyone say.”

  “You want sensitive, call a girlfriend. You want concerned, I’m here.” He swiveled his head to look at her directly and her heart gave a funny bump. “I worried when you didn’t come back to the house.”

  The tension left her shoulders. “I’m sorry.”

  “Next time you’re going to disappear, say something.”

  “I will. I didn’t plan to be gone so long.”

  “Yeah, I figured.” His long legs stretched out in front of them, muscle wrapped in denim. He nodded toward the mail slipping away across the rock. “What happened? You get bad news?”

  Her throat constricted. She swallowed. “In a manner of speaking.”

  His attention sharpened. “Threats?”

  “No! No, nothing like that.”

  He waited.

  She sighed. “I heard from a former student, that’s all.”

  “Jamal?”

  “How—” He was a detective, she reminded herself. He had an eye for detail and a good memory. “Yes. Jamal King.”

  “What he do this time? Send you a postcard of the Grand Canyon?”

  She smiled reluctantly. “He sent me a sketch.”

  Aleksy held out his hand.

  Wordlessly she passed him the envelope Jamal had constructed from two pieces of cardboard taped together. Someone at school must have given him her address—although it was a good bet Principal Carter would not have approved.

  Aleksy found the slit in the tape and eased out the single sheet of art paper.

  She didn’t bother to look at it. The picture was already clear in her brain. The memory was fresh in her heart.

  Jamal had made the colored ink drawing last fall when the two of them were working after school in the studio, before everything had gone so disastrously wrong. In the sketch, she was painting—what? Faye didn’t remember now and Jamal’s sketch didn’t show. But the picture clearly revealed both Faye’s own absorption in her work and the young artist’s affection for his teacher/subject.

  Jamal’s quick pen and sensitive use of color had captured that golden afternoon more evocatively than any photograph—the sun-drenched room, the play of light on the cluttered tables, Faye’s energy and hope.

  “Damn,” said Aleksy.

  It was a tribute and Faye accepted it as such. “Jamal is very talented.”

  “I don’t know talented, but he sure caught you. Why wouldn’t he keep this? Or sell it?”

  “He did keep it for a while. He made this sketch last October.”

  “Then why send it to you now?”

  “I don’t know.” She pleated her skirt between her fingers. “I’m afraid it’s a cry for help.”

  “You think he’s in trouble,” Aleksy stated.

  “Yes.”

  “He was a good kid, you said. ‘Not a problem.’”

  “No. But—” She stopped. No matter how sympathetic Aleksy seemed, he was a law enforcement officer. She couldn’t bear it if she said anything that got Jamal in deeper trouble.

  “His parents’ expectations put him under a lot of stress,” she said carefully. “He might have made some…unwise choices.”

  “You think he’d hurt somebody?”

  Oh, dear. “Oh, no. But he could hurt himself.”

  “Suicide? Or drugs?”

  She winced. So much for being careful. “I wondered at the end of fall quarter,” she said. “I knew he wasn’t getting enough sleep, and I thought he’d lost some weight. But when I asked him about using drugs, he told me it was just the pressure of finals. He really wanted to do well. And he seemed to get better, in January. But after that everything fell apart.”

  “He turned down that art scholarship, you mean.”

  “He turned down the scholarship, and—” oh, it still hurt “—his parents withdrew him from my class.”

  “Getting yanked from art class doesn’t turn most kids into speed freaks.”

  “Jamal is not most kids,” Faye said fiercely. “He was better than any other student I had. Better than me. He had a true gift.”

  “And he decided not to use it. It was his decision, right? I mean, the kid must be, what, sixteen? Seventeen?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Old enough to stand up to his parents, then. If that was what he really wanted.”

  “Is that what you did at seventeen?” she challenged.

  He shrugged. “Sure. Maybe not so dramatically. Art schools weren’t exactly lining up to give me money. But at that age, I already knew I wanted to follow Jarek on to the force. And our folks were equally certain they didn’t want both of their sons getting shot at for a living. So there was some conflict there.”

  “Some conflict,” Faye repeated. “Did they call you stupid and ungrateful for not taking advantage of the opportunities they had sacrificed to provide you with? Did they tell you you were letting your little brother and sisters down? Did they threaten to throw you out of the house unless you went along with what they wanted?”

  “No,” he said slowly. “We disagreed, but I knew Mom and Pop were always in my corner.”

  “You were lucky, then. Jamal didn’t have anybody in his corner.”

  Aleksy’s eyes were dark and unreadable. “Except you.”

  “Except me,” Faye agreed bleakly. “And I only made things worse.”

  “So why do you think he’d reach out to you now?”

  She hugged her knees. “I don’t know.”

  “You could be reading too much into this. Maybe the kid was just cleaning out his desk. Maybe he wanted to let you know he’s all right.”

  He was trying to reassure her. She was grateful. But she didn’t believe him for a moment.

  Aleksy hadn’t watched Jamal give up what he loved to fit the school administration’s profile of a good student, to follow his parents’ plans for their good child.

  He hadn’t stood helplessly by as the boy’s creative energy was driven underground and became anger.

  He hadn’t observed Jamal’s increasing irritability, the crashing lows and sometimes manic highs that characterized a kid on the edge—or an amphetamin
e addict.

  Aleksy didn’t know and Faye wasn’t going to tell him. Her last attempt to tell had done enough damage.

  “I hope that’s it,” she said. “Thank you.”

  Aleksy frowned. “Look, I know a couple of cops in the Juvenile Division. I could talk to them, maybe get a word on your kid.”

  “No. I don’t want you to go to any—”

  “It’s no trouble.”

  “It’s not your problem,” she insisted.

  “You’re helping me out. Let me help you.”

  He sounded sincere. He looked hard and capable. Even relaxed against the rock with stubble shadowing his jaw and the sun finding highlights in his hair, he looked like a cop. He didn’t need the star in his pocket or the gun hidden at his back to give him authority.

  If she let herself believe him…

  If she let herself believe…

  Her gaze fell to the sketch in Aleksy’s hand. A cry for help, she had called it. If Jamal were in trouble—serious trouble, police trouble—wouldn’t it be better if Aleksy were involved?

  But Faye’s belief had been badly shaken in the past three months. She no longer trusted the authorities or her own judgment. She had lost her faith that things would always work out.

  What if she told Aleksy her suspicions and made things worse for Jamal?

  “I don’t need your help,” she said.

  She was lying. Or hiding something.

  Aleksy had conducted too many interrogations to miss the defensive set of her shoulders, the betraying flicker of her lashes.

  He wanted to protest. He wanted to help. She could trust him.

  But the assurances went flat and sour in his mouth, like a beer that stood open too long.

  Trust him?

  Could she really?

  He hadn’t lied to her—well, except about his having an official role in this investigation. But he hadn’t told her the whole truth, either.

  He was using her. Not the way he used most women, not for laughs or recreational sex, to take the physical edge off loneliness. But using her all the same.

  His mother, Mary Denko, would have been ashamed of him. Aleksy was disconcerted to discover he was a little ashamed himself.

  “If you won’t let me put out a feeler on the kid, you have to let me do something.”