by Joanne Rock
Knotting a towel around his waist, he stormed from the guest bathroom into the living area, hating the ominous quiet. Where was she? Scanning the empty modern kitchen and the deserted couches in the living room, his gaze moved to the bank of windows…and the pair of bare feet just barely visible behind the floor-length drapes.
Relief swished from his lungs in a sigh before he could slip back into the bathroom to dress.
“Alec?” Vanessa drew aside the heavy curtains to peer at him across the room. Silhouetted by the late morning sun, she wore her jeans from the day before and a white tank top that showed off more of her lightly tanned skin. “Hope you don’t mind I grabbed something out of the closet off the bathroom. I didn’t want to bother you while you were still sleeping.” Her gaze dropped down to his towel and she smiled. “But you look very much awake now.”
Cursing his decision to race out here in a few square feet of terry cloth, he didn’t need to look to know what captured her attention. “Guess I’m still thinking about a few pleasant dreams I had last night.”
The smile disappeared from her face as quickly as it had arrived. “I didn’t have any dreams, but thanks to you, I didn’t have any nightmares, either.” Moving away from the window, she took a few steps into the living room. “Those guys creeped me out more than I wanted to admit, and I appreciate you…helping me forget about it.”
His ego and his hard-on both crashed a little at that news. He was her private diversion for the night? An entertainment she’d only stoop to using after her life had been threatened? Didn’t exactly sit well after he’d convinced himself he’d blown her mind in bed last night. He thought they’d been drawn to one another because of a mutual, un-freaking-believable attraction, not some desire to hide from what had happened.
“You wouldn’t have a pulse if it didn’t rattle you to be dragged out of a car and held at gunpoint.” If she could downplay it, so could he.
“I tried calling my partner to report what happened privately, but I got his voice mail. I think we need to check out the guys who took your car so we can find out if they acted alone or if someone else hired them.” She looked him in the eye most of the time, but then her gaze slipped south again. “You know, maybe this would be easier to talk about if you weren’t strutting around here in a towel?”
“Am I turning you on?” Amazing how resilient a hard-on could be with a woman staring at your johnson.
“I’m going to ignore that.” Backing up a step, she pushed the power button for a flat-screen television mounted across from the couch. “You let me know when you’re ready to converse like a civilized…”
Her words faded away as a newscaster’s voice intruded on them in stereo surround sound.
“…if convicted on all counts, Sergio Alteri faces fifteen to twenty years in prison.”
Alec lunged for the remote.
“Holy hell.” He pressed buttons with a vengeance in an attempt to find out more on another station.
“Your uncle’s been arrested?” Vanessa sank to the couch, eyes glued to the screen.
Alec couldn’t answer. Didn’t know. His uncle Sergio had been a mainstay in his life from the time he was born. The guy had taken him to his first Mets game. Introduced him to the joys of salted peanuts and screaming yourself hoarse for the home team. He’d loved and hated the guy at different times, their relationship tainted by Sergio’s crimes and a lifetime’s worth of pressure to take up the profession.
Within twenty minutes, they’d gleaned all they could from every New York television station and the Internet, which Alec accessed from his laptop while they watched TV. Sergio had been picked up in Brooklyn by the DEA, along with five other alleged major drug suppliers in the city. Evidence suggested an important deal had been in the works the night before.
“Don’t you think this news negates the theory that those guys last night worked for your uncle?” Vanessa’s blank gaze fixed on a commercial for cat food.
“How so?” He clicked through a few more keys and checked his e-mail, hoping to scrounge up more information on the man who’d overshadowed his whole life. His uncle could have gotten wind of Alec’s partners contacting the police. Could have easily had Vanessa followed last night when she’d found Alec, and then sent the carjackers to scare the hell out of them.
Make him sweat his decision to turn his back on his Alteri blood.
“Why would Sergio have arranged the carjacking last night if he had a drug shipment to oversee at the same time?”
“He’s one of the most successful guys in the business on the East Coast.” Alec lowered the screen of his laptop and set it aside so he could get dressed. Even the news of his uncle’s arrest didn’t make him stop thinking about Vanessa, especially with her bare arm resting on the couch a foot away from his half-naked thigh. “I’m sure he knows how to multitask.”
“If he’s so successful, don’t you think he knows better than to take unnecessary risks when he has a big deal on the line?” She reached for his computer. “Do you mind if I use this to submit a description of the guys who took your car to my partner?”
Hell yes, he minded.
“If you report what happened, the cops are going to know you were with me since the sedan is in my name.” He wasn’t sure what scared him more—the fear of someone coming after her, or the possibility of her betrayal after they’d set the whole damn apartment on fire last night.
“I’m not going to file a formal report.” Her grip tightened on the laptop, determination alive and kicking today, apparently. “Just launch a few discreet inquiries so we can figure out who’s after you if it’s not your uncle Sergio.”
“You want answers?” Frustration fired through him as he remembered she didn’t trust him worth a damn. Last night hadn’t changed a thing between them. “I don’t need any report back from your cop friends to tell me who’s after us. Now that Sergio is behind bars, the possibilities just narrowed considerably.”
“Then enlighten me.” Straightening on the sofa, she stared him down in the mellow morning sunlight streaming through the high-rise apartment. “Because I’m going to have a taste for retribution just as soon as we find out who’s responsible.”
“Retribution?” He knew she carried a badge, but she sounded more like a criminal. “Don’t you mean justice?”
“I mean it, Messina. Who’s behind the carjacking?” Her words practically vibrated with fire and passion. How could he have ever thought this woman would be cold?
“Remember I wanted you to come with me last night so you could review some of my real-estate company’s records?” Tugging the towel securely around his waist, he stood. “Maybe it’s time you took a look.”
7
“WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR?” Vanessa couldn’t have grabbed hold of the idea any faster if she’d been drowning and Alec had offered her an inflatable Shamu.
And since she was drowning in her own reawakened sensuality this morning, her heightened sexual awareness flooding her with a million lust-inspired thoughts, the analogy wasn’t too far off base. She should be scared for her life, holed up in this apartment with a man wanted dead by some of the scariest criminals in the city, and yet the predominant thought in her head today was how this unlikely lover had brought her back from an impossibly dark ledge.
A feat that hadn’t been accomplished with the passage of five long years. A feat that really good therapy hadn’t managed.
Alec stared at her with hooded eyes, the heat swelling between them already and they’d barely been out of bed for an hour. She thought he might kiss her. God help her, she wanted him to kiss her. But he turned abruptly on his heel.
“I’ll be right back.” He disappeared into the other bedroom, the one she hadn’t seen the night before, only to return a minute later wearing an unbuttoned white dress shirt and charcoal-gray trousers. His wet hair grazed the crisp collar of the shirt, his chest still exposed to her gaze. “The business accounting records were stolen last night along with the car, but
I have some other proof that McPherson is running some shady deals.”
With an effort, she yanked her eyes and thoughts away from Alec’s chest to focus on the manila folder he thrust under her nose.
“Do you have copies of those accounting reports anywhere?” Her heart lurched at the thought of lost evidence, recognizing the importance of a paper trail in building a case.
“Yes.” He tugged over an ottoman with his foot until it rolled right up to the back of her calves. “But not here, and for now, it’s too risky to retrieve them until we have a better handle on who might be trying to find me and why.”
Sinking into the dark brocade of the long footrest, Vanessa cracked open the folder to find copies of e-mails dating back nearly a year ago. Conversations between Alec and someone with a computer-screen name of…
“Kittykat?” She didn’t want to contemplate the tight ache of jealousy that stabbed through her at notes that went beyond friendly to outright flirtatious. Especially on Kittykat’s side, since she liked to sign off with the endearment “Your Pussy.”
“She saw something between us that wasn’t there.” Alec lowered himself into a chair beside Vanessa and flipped through the messages to one dated just before last Christmas. “The woman is Sergio’s mistress and the only reason I talked to her at first was because she feared for her life. Later, she implied she had access to information about my business partners.”
Vanessa’s first instinct told her to slam the folder shut and throw all discussion of this woman back in his face, but she refused to allow petty emotions to affect her job. She would find out who wanted Alec dead, even at the expense of newly raw emotions.
“She says here that McPherson and Vercelli have been in contact with Sergio about your business?” Vanessa scanned the note, trying to follow the conversation without dwelling on all the extraneous endearments and suggestions they have dinner. She hated Kittykat without ever laying eyes on the woman.
“My partners in the real-estate development company—William McPherson and Mark Vercelli.” Alec planted his elbows on his knees, his open shirttails dangling between his sprawled legs. “Donata swore to me they’d approached my uncle about tying the business to Sergio’s criminal contacts, something I’d refused to do from the moment we incorporated.”
“Let me get this straight.” Vanessa turned to Alec, surprised by how close he sat. She could kiss him. Touch him. Lure him back to bed instead of untangling the mess of complications in his world. “Your partners want to work with the mob? I thought no one in his right mind willingly got involved with that kind of stuff.”
Then again, maybe Alec’s partners had questionable ties to crime, too. Vanessa hadn’t even done a rudimentary check into their backgrounds, trusting her senior officer to have completed his homework on the guys. Actually, now that she thought about it, maybe her lieutenant hadn’t delved into the legitimacy of these partners since he’d mentioned having investments with the real-estate company himself.
“Depends how greedy you are.” Alec stared blankly at the TV, frustration evident in his clipped words. “There’s a lot of money to be made off illegally obtained contracts and prices inflated by crime. Maybe my partners were swayed by the bottom line.”
“But you’ve worked with them for a long time, right?” Vanessa peered inside the folder again, suspicious of anything written by the uncle’s mistress who obviously had the hots for Alec. Had she ever swayed him into her bed? “Do you believe they could have been persuaded to the other side?”
“I’ve known Vercelli since college and find it hard to believe he’d be able to pull this off. But I caught McPherson signing out some of my archived expense reports. I made copies of all the accounting records I could before I disappeared this winter, figuring that way I couldn’t be framed for any of their dirty deals. The backup copies are at my apartment on the Upper East Side, but I don’t know if it’s safe to go back there yet.”
“So you weren’t sure who to trust.” Finally, Vanessa began to understand Alec’s need to slip into hiding. “You had reason to suspect your partners were making an alliance with your uncle behind your back.”
“And if I find out they’ve been cooking the books, I’m going to blow the whistle on both their asses and get them out of the business for good.” He rubbed a weary hand across his face. “I’m tired of always having to watch my back just to do my job. I can do more good at the rec center and probably be a hell of a lot safer, too.”
Vanessa didn’t blame him for putting some safety measures in place. But even with stepped-up security, she didn’t plan to set foot in the Bronx again any time soon. She could untangle the rest of Alec Messina’s convoluted problems from the safety of Manhattan.
Or so she really, really hoped. Bottom line, she’d do whatever necessary to nail the guys who’d held a gun on her last night and resurrected her nightmares.
“Care to tell me how you struck up such a close relationship with your uncle’s mistress?” She hadn’t meant to ask the question. It just slipped out while her eyes locked on the closing lines of one of the e-mails.
“Are you asking as a cop or as the woman I slept with last night?” Alec didn’t pull any punches. Even when she had a carjacking to investigate, Alec’s abundance of shady friends to wade through and a mob mistress with her claws on the man Vanessa had gone to bed with.
Not exactly a red-letter day.
“I’m asking because I damn well want to know.” She hadn’t planned to quiz Alec about the women in his life, but what choice did she have when he waved this female under her nose? “The writer of this e-mail makes it plain as day that her…sex…is yours for the taking. Did you take her up on the offer?”
Snatching the file folder from Vanessa’s grip, Alec flung it on the sofa nearby.
“Hell no.” He laid an arm across her shoulders, his hand winding its way into her hair as if to hold her in place by the long length. “Hasn’t anyone wholly inappropriate ever come on to you before, whether you were looking for a connection or not?”
She met his dark gaze, experiencing the electricity that sparked back and forth between them, a ripple of energy that increased with every breath she took.
Didn’t matter that she was pissed at the idea of Alec possibly sleeping with another woman. If anything, the edge of frustration only heightened the heat.
“I meet some very inappropriate people in my line of work.” Of course, she only had one man in mind at the moment. Someone she never should have looked at, let alone touched. She seemed to have lost all common sense where he was concerned, although she had to admit she didn’t miss common sense when she had a hefty dose of sexual healing to make up for the loss.
“I’ll bet you do.” He twisted his hand fractionally tighter in the strands, enough to steer her closer. “But just because you get propositioned doesn’t mean you jump into bed with anyone.”
“Right. Normally.” She’d brought razor-sharp focus to her work for the past four and a half years because of it. But now? The edges around this whole case were starting to blur. “Last night being a notable exception.”
“You still think I’m someone inappropriate?” His hold on her hair loosened as he slid back a few inches. “Hell, Vanessa. You wouldn’t have got anywhere near me if you really believed I had a hand in any of the charges my partners are trying to stick on me.”
She was glad he thought so because she didn’t trust herself to know anything anymore. The carjacking had put her through the wringer and spit her out a little more vulnerable. A whole lot more tense.
“Maybe. But I’d feel better about spending the night with you if this case was behind me and I didn’t have the guilt of secret knowledge to carry around. I’m not going to look my lieutenant in the eye and tell him I couldn’t find Alec Messina.”
“Maybe by the time you see him again, you’ll be able to tell the truth.”
She didn’t answer, knowing he wouldn’t want to hear about her plan to contact the precinc
t today. But how could she help Alec without accessing the combined strength of NYPD resources and her partner’s clear cop-vision? Wes Shaw was a detective she respected because he possessed brains and balls in equal doses, but opted to rely on street smarts rather than guts ninety percent of the time, which seemed damn rare in a lot of cops. He’d have good advice for what Vanessa should do next, and more importantly, he could make inquiries about the carjackers.
Judging by Alec’s quiet expletive, however, Vanessa figured he’d already guessed her plan.
“You can’t go into work today, Vanessa. We’ve been over this.”
“We could find out who took your car.” The nerdy researcher inside her couldn’t wait to access the computer at her desk. “For that matter, if I don’t call into work and tell them something, my partner is going to have half the precinct out looking for me since I’ve never skipped a day on the job.”
No question, Wes would be worried. His last partner had died while working undercover, so she wouldn’t give him any reason to be uneasy about her. They had always been content to give one another a lot of room, but even laid-back Wes would protest if he discovered the extent of her plan to hide out with Alec until she could ensure his safety.
“You’re working on a perfect attendance record?” A small, rare smile caught her off guard.
“I made a commitment to this job.” For reasons that still scared the hell out of her. “I didn’t sign on with the police department to tick off personal days and let somebody else solve my cases. I took it because I wanted to…”
Nail the bastards who hurt Gena.
“Protect and serve?”
“Something like that.” She just hoped she hadn’t lost her edge by sleeping with Alec and turning on all the emotions she’d managed to shut off. In the past, she’d dealt with a lot of scary crap by being detached. Remote.
Now she was practically choking on new sensations bombarding her from every angle. Fear? Definitely.