A Rare Chance

by Carla Neggers

  Gabriella straightened. “You’re assuming I know where she is, and I don’t.”

  “I’m going to find her, with or without your help.”

  “I’m sure she’s fine, Mr. Darrow.” Not calling him by his first name provided at least a sense of distance from him. “I’m not worried about her at this point. Maybe you shouldn’t worry either.”

  His eyes narrowed. “You know something.”

  “Yes, I know Lizzie, and diving into a relationship headfirst and then needing to pull back and figure things out is certainly something she’s done before. Now,” she said breezily, tugging open the heavy door into her front vestibule, “if you two gentlemen will excuse me, I haven’t had my dinner yet.”

  She thought she saw a knowing glimmer in Cam’s eyes but ignored it. He wouldn’t confront her about sicking the transit cops on him in front of Pete Darrow. But when she glanced back just as the door shut, his gaze held hers for an instant, warning her—promising her—that he wouldn’t be put off for long.

  It was enough to propel Gabriella up the stairs two at a time. Oh Lizzie, she thought, what a lovely mess you’ve left me with.

  Not, of course, that Lizzie hadn’t helped her out of her share of messes in the past.

  “I just hope you’re safe, kiddo,” she said as she locked every lock on her door before checking the street through her living-room window.

  Pete Darrow and Cam Yeager had departed from her front stoop and were nowhere in sight. Instead of relief, Gabriella felt a strange mix of trepidation and anticipation. Cam would be back. Maybe Pete Darrow as well.

  She headed for the kitchen. It wouldn’t be smart, she decided, to face either of them on an empty stomach.

  Chapter

  Eleven

  I ought to beat you bloody,” Pete Darrow said as he and Cam walked across Arlington Street into the Public Garden.

  Cam shrugged. He could smell the grass, and even in the darkness could see the trees leafing out. Soon the famous Victorian swan boats would be operating. He briefly imagined floating around the shallow, picturesque pond with Gabriella. But with Pete Darrow at his side and the uneasiness and deception Cam had seen in her dark eyes, it was a difficult image to sustain.

  “If you’re going to beat the crap out of me,” he told his ex-partner, “I’m going to have to fight back, and I’m not in the mood.”

  Darrow regarded him with a mixture of annoyance and grudging respect. “You won’t last as a prosecutor, you know. First deal the D.A. asks you to cut, you’ll tell him to go to hell and that’ll be that. End of your career.”

  “You’re such a cynic, Pete.”

  “A realist. One day, Yeager, you’re going to end up back in the country club. You can’t escape destiny.”

  They walked onto the footbridge over the small pond, their bodies casting long shadows in the uneven light. Cam stopped and stared out at the dark, peaceful water. “What about you, Pete? Can you escape destiny?”

  “I can try,” Darrow said, “same as you.”

  “How much money do you need before you’ll know for sure you’ve escaped?”

  “It’s not the money.”

  “It is the money, Pete. It’s always been the money with you.”

  Darrow gave him a long look. Cam didn’t brace himself for a smack in the gut, but it could have come. He had no illusions about his ex-partner’s impulsive temper. “You don’t get it. You can’t. You can try to walk in my shoes and think you have, but it won’t work. What I want and why I want it will never make sense to you because you’ve always had it.”

  “You always believed in the work, Pete,” Cam said quietly. “Other guys who come from worse places than you believe in the work, and they do it. They don’t cross the line.”

  “They think about it.”

  “That’s just a rationalization. Not all of them think about it. Whatever you’ve got going with Joshua Reading,” Cam said, looking at his friend, “will it be worth sacrificing everything you believe in?”

  Darrow smirked. “And what do I believe in, Yeager? You tell me.”

  “Pete, if my joining the D.A.’s office, if my having family money—Jesus, if I’ve done anything to drive you over the edge—”

  “Don’t flatter yourself.” Darrow’s voice was calm and bitter, without a trace of ambivalence over what he was doing. “I’m doing what I’m doing because of me, not you. And maybe,” he went on, his dark eyes turning to Cam, “you should have a little more faith in me. I was a good cop.”

  “Yeah, you were.”

  “Don’t forget it.”

  “I won’t forget.” Cam sighed, feeling his ex-partner’s pain, his own. There was too much between them that could never be said, and none of it would get them anywhere now. “So what’s going on with Lizzie Fairfax?”

  “She’s taken off and I think your Gabriella Starr knows where she’s gone. Joshua wants her back.”

  “Wants her back? Pete—”

  He held up a hand, stopping Cam from going on about a woman’s right to leave a relationship. “He’s not having me hog-tie her and drag her back. He just wants to make sure she’s okay. He’s a little paranoid after the attempted kidnapping.”

  “He thinks something could have happened to Lizzie? Why doesn’t he call the police?”

  “Why call the police,” Darrow said, half cocky, half cynical, “when you’ve got me?”

  “Pete, if you’re doing something against your better judgment, against your basic principles…”

  “Forget me, will you? Jesus. I can handle myself. It’s Gabriella Starr you’d better worry about. If she’s got something cooked up with Lizzie, she’s crazy. They’re both crazy. You tell her.”

  “Pete,” Cam said, “for God’s sake, talk to me.”

  He straightened, suddenly composed, back in control. “Just do as I say, Cam. Gabriella Starr’s hiding something. Mark my words.”

  Without waiting for Cam to respond, Darrow started down the sloping footbridge. His movements were smooth, controlled. Cam debated going after him. Making him talk. But he knew it wouldn’t do any good. Darrow had shut down, and no amount of arm-twisting, pleading, or appealing to honor and friendship would get him to open up.

  So instead Cam turned back toward Back Bay and headed for Marlborough Street.

  Gabriella didn’t answer her intercom right away. He figured she knew who it was and was debating whether she was home or not. When she did answer, she said, “Yes?” in that cool, phony, formal way that told him he was right.

  “It’s me,” he said.

  She buzzed him up and was waiting in the doorway when he got up to the third floor, her hair tied back with a black bandanna, a flannel shirt pulled over her boxing T-shirt. If she’d made a deliberate effort not to look sexy because she’d known he was on his way, it wasn’t succeeding.

  But when her warm brown eyes fell on him, in that steady, level-headed, even supercilious way of hers, he wondered if he’d misconstrued and she hadn’t made any kind of effort at all—didn’t, in fact, give a rat’s fanny whether he thought she was sexy or not. If, perhaps, the attraction he felt toward her was hardly mutual and the word sexy wasn’t crossing her mind when she looked at him.

  Then she cleared her throat and licked her lips, and he grinned.

  Nah. All kinds of things were crossing her mind when she looked at him, and none of them made her feel too terribly secure.

  “I hope you’re here to apologize for following me,” she said.

  “After you sicked the transit cops on me? Hell no.”

  She backed into her apartment, leaving the door ajar. It was about as much of an invitation as he’d figured he’d get tonight. He took it, following her into her living room. She had only one lamp on, leaving much of the cozy room in shadows. She flopped down onto her overstuffed, soft-cushioned couch. “Why did you follow me?”

  Cam shrugged, taking the wooden rocker across from her. “Seemed like a good idea at the time. You were in a hurry
and had a furtive look about you.”

  “A furtive look?” she scoffed, crossing her arms under her breasts. “That’s projection.”

  “When your defense is weak, go to the offense. You don’t have a leg to stand on, Gabby. You were up to something and you know it.” She opened her mouth to argue with him—probably a reflex reaction—but he charged ahead. “What were you doing out at Logan?”

  “Meeting a friend.”

  She’d had plenty of time to cook up her story. Cam didn’t expect to get far, not if her loyalty to Lizzie Fairfax was coming into play, but he persisted. “Give me this friend’s name and number.”

  “As it happens, he was on his way through Boston. He’s in flight right now. He’s from San Antonio.”

  Cam gave a short, incredulous laugh. “Not bad, Gabby. I guess being Tony Scagliotti’s daughter you’d know how to think on your feet. But I’ve seen better liars. I could blow holes in your story without even working up a sweat.”

  “Bully for you.”

  “But,” he went on, more amused than irritated by her refusal to talk to him, “since you know you’re lying and I know you’re lying, there’s nothing to prove. So I won’t bother.”

  “Oh, so now you can read my mind.”

  He leaned toward her, took in the fullness of her mouth and remembered what it felt like, tasted like. “I’m getting there.”

  She jumped to her feet as if he’d stuck her with a needle. “I need something to drink. Is there anything I can get you?”

  He smiled. “Water would be fine.”

  She tucked a thick lock of hair behind her ear, her dark eyes pinned on him. “I can’t tell you what you want to hear. If I could—well, I don’t know that I would. But I might.”

  And with that enigmatic statement, she whirled around and headed into the kitchen. Cam supposed it was her way of calling a cease-fire. She’d trust him if she could—maybe. She’d tell him the truth if she could—maybe.

  You don’t have to figure her out, he told himself. You just have to find out what she was doing at Logan.

  He followed her into the kitchen, where she was rummaging in the refrigerator. He sat at the table, a sturdy square of oak with a single yellow orchid in a glass vase. He thought he’d seen one like it when Scag had put him to work up on the roof. There were, he’d learned since meeting Scagliotti father and daughter, tens of thousands of different kinds of orchids, virtually none of which he could name. It was a symbol, he thought, of the gulf between him and Gabriella Scagliotti Starr.

  “Is sparkling mineral water all right with you?”

  “I don’t like water that fizzes. Just turn on the tap and I’m happy.”

  She smiled as she let the refrigerator door shut. “That’s one area where you’re easy to please.”

  He leaned back in his wooden chair, watching her as she set a small bottle of water on the counter and reached into a cupboard for a glass. “Tap water and the truth and I’m usually a happy man.”

  “I’m not lying to you,” she said, shutting the cupboard door.

  “You’re just not telling me the truth.”

  “I’m not telling you everything. What I am telling you is true.”

  “Hair-splitting.”

  “This,” she said goodnaturedly, “from a cop turned lawyer and the son of a governor.”

  He grinned. “You got it.”

  She turned on the faucet in her immaculate stainless-steel sink and filled the glass—not bothering with ice, he noted. She brought the glass and her bottle of sparkling mineral water to the table. She didn’t sit down. “Instead of following me this afternoon, why didn’t you just come up to me and ask me where I was going?”

  “Would you have told me?”

  “That’s not my question.”

  He knew it wasn’t. He swallowed some of his water, his eyes on her. “Okay. I didn’t come up to you because I didn’t trust you to give me a straight answer, and my instincts said you were up to something.”

  “And you made it your business to find out what.”

  “I did.”

  She twisted the cap off her water. He noticed the muscles in her forearms. She hadn’t been kidding about working out with weights. “But you failed,” she said. “So now you appeal to my sense of honor and trust and all that. It’s a little late, don’t you think?”

  He stretched out his legs, her little lecture not making him feel nearly as guilty as she wanted him to. “I don’t suppose ‘better late than never’ would cut any ice with you?”

  “I’m just pointing out that trust is a two-way street.”

  “Gabby, if I’d gone up and tapped you on the shoulder on the Blue Line, you’d have told me as much as you’re telling me now. Which is nothing.”

  She grinned, knowing damned well he was right. “But I’d have trusted you more.”

  “Not enough to have taken me to Logan with you.”

  “No, not enough for that.”

  Cam gave her a dry look. “Your friend wouldn’t have appreciated my tagging along.”

  He found himself watching her throat as she swallowed some of her water. “Probably wouldn’t have.”

  “You are such a liar, Gabby Starr.”

  “It’s Gabriella, and I have no reason to lie.”

  “There was no friend, Gabriella.” He let himself dwell on her name, drawl it, roll it around on his tongue, and watched her squirm. “Was there?”

  “Well…”

  “And making one up,” he continued, “is telling a lie, not just omitting certain details.”

  She made a face at him. “I’ll bet suspects just loved being interrogated by you.”

  “We all have our gifts.”

  “As a resident of Boston, I’m glad you’re one of the good guys. As someone you suspect of mistruths—”

  “Lies,” he amended.

  “Whatever. Let’s just say I can sympathize to a degree with anyone who’s sat under a hot light with you.”

  He smiled. “Sweetheart, I haven’t even come close to pulling out the thumbscrews. You’re not sweating because I’m asking you questions you don’t want to answer. You’re used to playing your cards close to your chest. You’re sweating,” he said, taking the bottle of water from her hand and setting it on the table beside him, “because you’re attracted to me and it scares the hell out of you.”

  She turned on the cool, reserved professional side of her, the side that didn’t do things like chase up mountainsides for wild orchids or lie to ex-cops. “If I were attracted to you, why would it scare me?”

  “Because you can’t control me and you know it. And you know you don’t want to. You don’t want a man you can control any more than I want a woman I can control.”

  He caught her by the wrist and pulled her onto him, hooking one arm around the small of her back as she balanced on his thighs. She could have jumped up and grabbed her mineral water and thrown him out. But she didn’t.

  He hadn’t thought she would.

  She slipped her arms over his shoulders, not clasping her hands together but letting them dangle. Her eyes were very close to his, dark, unreadable. He thought of the things they’d seen, so different from his world.

  “Okay, I’m scared,” she said, and her mouth found his.

  She drew herself closer, and he could feel her soft breasts against his chest as his mouth opened to the heat of her tongue, to the heat it spread through him. His arousal was instant, forceful. Sitting on his thighs as she was, there was no way she could miss it. He dropped his hands to her waist. She eased her legs around so that she was straddling him, increasing, if possible, the extent of his arousal. He slipped his hands under her boxing shirt, easing his palms along her smooth, bare skin until he found her sports bra. Using his thumbs, he teased her hard nipples through the thin, stretchy fabric.

  “How scared?” he asked.

  She smiled into his mouth. “Real scared.”

  Slowly, with his gaze on hers, he slipped his fingers
beneath the sports bra and pushed it up, freeing her breasts. He cupped them with his palms. Watched her eyes darken with a desire matched by his own.

  He lowered his head and took one nipple between his lips, tasting, licking, until she moaned aloud. She dug her fingers into his shoulders. He paused only for an instant before taking the other nipple. Everything about her—the taste of her, the feel of her, the reality of her—heightened his arousal. He was throbbing, aching. Not for anyone else, he realized. Just her.

  “Let me love you,” he murmured, peeling off her flannel shirt, then easing her shirt and bra the rest of the way off.

  Her upper body entirely naked, he gazed at her without touching her. Her nipples were tight, pink buds, her breathing hard as she met his eyes. “I’d like that,” she said.

  He trailed his fingertips up her abdomen, his motion deliberate, tantalizingly slow. “You’re beautiful,” he said at last.

  She brought one hand down his arm and swept her fingertips across the bulge in his jeans. She found the zipper.

  Then she stopped.

  She looked at him. Her mouth was swollen with her own arousal, with the effects of their kiss. She licked her lower lip. Watching her, he thought he’d explode.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  He bit off a curse. Then sighed. And nodded. And finally said, “I know.”

  “It’s not because I don’t want to or because I’m scared—at least of you. I’m not.”

  With one hand he scooped her shirt off the floor. “You don’t owe me an explanation, Gabriella.”

  She nodded, but added in a low voice, “I guess I’m scared of myself. I’m not good at one-night stands, and that’s what this could be. We both know that. Not because we want it to be, at least right now, but…” She sighed, visibly annoyed with herself. “Oh, hell, I’m not making any sense. The point is, I know and you know that I haven’t told you the truth about my jaunt out to Logan this afternoon. That’s not a very good circumstance under which to jump into bed with you.”

  He gave her a curious look. “I thought the circumstance had more to do with certain physical and emotional needs.”