His Wicked Ways

by Joanne Rock

  She didn’t say anything for a long moment, her expression frozen somehow until she blinked fast. Made a little yelping noise deep with her throat.

  Ah, damn.

  He’d wanted to help her. Connect with her. But he didn’t think he could forgive himself if he’d made this strong, independent woman cry.

  Reaching across the console, he opened his arms to her, knowing their trip to the Raven Club would have to wait. Vanessa had become more important to him than any half-baked vengeance plot he might have in mind for whoever was trying to frame him. Right now, nothing seemed more important to him than holding her.

  VANESSA KNEW IF SHE ACCEPTED the full benefit of Alec’s touch, she’d lose whatever tenuous grip on her emotions she still maintained. Burying her head against his shoulder, feeling his arms wrap around her would somehow force her to connect with long-suppressed emotions about the shooting, the same way their bedroom encounter had ripped away all the old fears and hang-ups she’d come to associate with sex.

  The prospect scared her as much as any trip to the Bronx. Possibly more, since she couldn’t use a gun for protection in the slippery world of emotions.

  She settled for leaning halfway into his embrace, resting her head on the comforting strength of his bicep, instead of hurling herself into his arms. If Alec thought her hesitance was odd, he didn’t say anything about it. He kissed the top of her head and curled his arm around her shoulders to stray down her arm and rub her back.

  He held her that way until she found her voice. Swallowed back tears she resented. Damn it, but she needed to pull herself together. She’d give herself another minute here, a few more moments to accept his comfort and then she’d find the strength to put this behind her again.

  “Gena told me once she doesn’t even remember what happened that day. The shots. The tire squeals. The shouting. None of it.” She’d envied her sister the forgetting, and then felt guilty for envying a woman who’d been through more pain than Vanessa could fathom. “I remember every minute detail, every gulping breath my sister took after the bullet penetrated her skin, every retreating footstep as all the people around us ran for cover and left us there alone with some dumb-ass talk-radio station blaring from a window nearby. But despite all the damn clarity, I could never remember the single most important piece of information the cops wanted to know.”

  “No license plate.” He muttered the words into her hair, the scent of his aftershave attracting her for a deeper sniff.

  “No license plate. I had a vague sense of a big, black SUV roaring away but I couldn’t ID the make and model.” She’d beat herself up about it for weeks. Months. Hypnosis hadn’t helped, either, since the hypnotist swore she simply hadn’t been watching the vehicle. Vanessa’s eyes had been focused on her sister. “I told myself that I would never make that mistake again as a cop, and I signed on for the NYPD a few weeks after the shooting.”

  The first couple of months on the job had been a blur, but she’d pulled herself out of it quickly enough in deference to her sister and the hardships she’d endured in ICU and later during rehabilitation.

  “You never looked back on your abrupt career change?” His hand paused in its gentle massage of her shoulders. “Do you foresee a time when you’ll say that you’ve atoned for those ten seconds when you looked down at your sister instead of at a speeding car?”

  Sitting up straight, she realized she’d indulged in the comfort of Alec’s touch for too long if he was asking her questions like that. Still, she couldn’t deny she would have sat there forever as long as his hands remained on her. Stroking.

  “It’s not a matter of atoning for anything. As a detective, I’m right where I need to be to make a difference and that’s a hell of a lot more important to me these days than how much money I can make.”

  “No regrets about bypassing the business world after putting in all those hours for a degree?”

  “I think it makes more sense to look forward than to stare back at the past, don’t you?” She shifted in her seat, focusing her attention back to the street and all the things they needed to accomplish today.

  Rehashing old wounds wouldn’t solve anything, especially not with Alec looking on, witnessing her weaknesses. She had enough trouble forgiving herself for the past. Why share her failings with a man who already knew way too much about her?

  “I think it’s tough to move forward when the past has you in a choke hold, but that’s just me.”

  She felt his gaze from the other side of the car, his scrutiny not letting her slough off the conversation as quickly as she would have preferred. Damn it.

  “Choke hold or not, we’d better get to the Raven Club before it gets any later. Once the bar starts filling up, no one is going to talk to us.”

  “I’m not dragging you through the most lawless beer joint on the south side just so we can find out who jumped us last night.” He shook his head, making no move to start the car. “I had no business asking you to skirt the rules and help me figure out who’s trying to frame me in the first place.”

  “You can’t back out now just because I’ve made a few mistakes in the past.” She never would have told him a damn thing about herself if she’d known he’d try to pull some macho protector crap. “I can take care of myself, Alec, and I’m going to the Raven whether you want to join me or not.”

  “You know how many drive-bys have happened on that very block, Vanessa?” He leaned into her space, his voice lowered.

  “Not a clue. But I know if I can put away those guys who jumped us last night, maybe I can prevent a few more.” Even if it scared her to set foot in there. Only an idiot wouldn’t feel a few qualms about entering such a notoriously dangerous place.

  “Shit.” Alec reached forward to start the car although he clearly wasn’t happy about it. “We go in there, get our answers and go home. Together.”

  “I’ve got my car and we’re almost positive no one’s following us now that your uncle is in jail.” To spend more time with Alec meant falling into bed. The sexual attraction was so thick, so elemental, she’d be naive to think they could be around each other alone for ten minutes and not wind up touching. “I can go back to my place tonight. We can figure out how to keep you safe from your partners tomorrow.”

  “You haven’t even looked at the disks we risked our necks to retrieve.”

  “Then make me some copies, and I’ll look at them tonight.” When she was alone. When her brain engaged again after a day of relentless sex thoughts.

  “For now, you trust me.” He seemed satisfied at the thought as he put the car in reverse. “That’s a good thing. But about us parting company tonight? Not gonna happen.”

  VANESSA’S ANGER didn’t linger.

  Alec sort of wished it had as they sped over the Third Street Bridge into the South Bronx. Instead, her frustrations morphed into a cold wariness he suspected stemmed from old ghosts about the area where she’d grown up. And although her watchfulness didn’t look much like fear, Alec saw past her careful facade better now. He could almost hear her counting the seconds it would take her to go for her gun if the need arose.

  Yeah, he’d rather have had her pissed off at him any day.

  A few minutes later he pulled into a parking space on the street, situating the vehicle near the small lot that served the bar. Only a few cars filled the spaces now, since the sun hadn’t set yet. But in another hour, the club would be crawling with every stripe of punk imaginable out for a good time on a Friday night.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t go in together.” Vanessa blurted out a thought that—surprisingly—mirrored his own.

  He wanted to find out who’d taken his car last night, but not at the expense of Vanessa’s safety.

  “How about I go in and ask the questions on my own? If I’m not out in ten minutes, you can call for every cop in the city to haul me in. Deal?”

  “I just meant we might look too much like law enforcement if we go in there together.”

  “So I’ll
go in alone.” He didn’t care what her reasons were for not going in together—he’d jump on any opportunity to keep her safe in the car.

  “Unless we went in there like a couple.” Her eyes slid over his chest. Lower. Then back up to his face. “Sort of all over each other. Then we wouldn’t look like cops.”

  “Appealing as it sounds to be all over you—an assignment I could fulfill with ease, by the way—I think we’d still raise a flag just because of our clothes. We look too out of place to hang out here.”

  “Not enough bling?” Her smile didn’t begin to ease the worries gnawing at his gut from picturing her in a hangout like this.

  “Either that, or we need to go the other way and look a little more street smart. People around here are either struggling to make a living or their pockets are overflowing with money skimmed off everyone else.” He scruffed up his hair just enough to blend in, then un-tucked his shirt.

  He watched Vanessa start to do the same when a car driving into the Raven Club parking lot caught his eye out the window.

  A way-too-freaking-familiar car.

  “Wait.” He grabbed Vanessa’s hand to halt her flurry of movement in the seat beside him. “One of my partners just drove into the lot.”

  Sinking deeper into his seat, he dragged Vanessa with him.

  “McPherson?” she whispered as she watched, even though there wasn’t much of a chance anyone would overhear them inside the car.

  “No. Vercelli. You never spoke to them?” He hit the button to lower the power window on her side of the car, opening it just a crack.

  She shook her head, eyes still trained on his business associate who fell firmly into the “bling” category as he stepped out of his Lexus and walked toward a side entrance to the Raven Club. “My assignment to find you came from higher up.”

  Tension threaded through him as they watched his partner—a guy he’d gone to college with, a guy who’d been a frat brother, a guy he’d trusted. Mark didn’t make it to the back entrance before the door swung open, revealing a tall kid in a wrinkled tuxedo shirt and crooked tie.

  Mark’s nephew.

  Recognition pummeled Alec, hitting him from all sides at once as he put the pieces together. The vaguely familiar eyes of the carjacker last night. The presence of his partner in the Bronx when Alec had never known Mark to set foot out of Brooklyn.

  He didn’t realize he’d started swearing under his breath until Vanessa jabbed him in the leg.

  “Shh.” She cocked her head at a strange angle to put her ear closer to the crack in the window.

  Too bad Alec had all the evidence necessary. Then again, he didn’t need to make a case against the guy who was supposed to be his friend.

  He only needed to get even.

  Fury flooded his veins as he remembered the brute force the carjackers had used on Vanessa. The way her soft skin has been torn away from her spine when they’d dragged her across the street.

  They were in as much danger—and more—than even he’d realized.

  Starting the car, he didn’t much care if Mark saw them leave. The important thing was to get Vanessa out of here before Alec lost it and took out his alleged good friend right here on Tremont Street for all the world to see.

  “What are you doing?” Vanessa turned her face to the side, mouthing the words at Alec as he squealed out of the parking space and into a U-turn on the street. “We didn’t even get to question anyone at the bar.”

  “I take it you don’t recognize the punk in the bow tie?”

  Hitting the gas, he swerved around a parked truck and ran a light just as it turned red.

  “The kid who looked like a waiter?”

  “That kid waved a 9 mm in your face last night, Vanessa. I hope your partner is still on duty because you can tell him you just found your carjacker.”

  11

  HER HEART LODGED in her throat, as much from the U-turn as Alec’s positive ID of the rumpled waiter.

  “You’re kidding.” She craned her neck to stare out the back window, knowing Alec wouldn’t joke about something that had scared her to the roots of her hair. Roots that were going to be gray in no time if she kept hanging out with Alec.

  “Definitely not kidding.” He slid onto the entrance ramp for the Bruckner Expressway without too much hassle now that dusk was falling and traffic had thinned out. “Vercelli must have hired the kid to follow you after he made the bogus complaint to the NYPD about me embezzling funds.”

  “And I led him right to you.” For the first time, she regretted doing such a good job on the force. What might this guy have done to Alec if he’d been alone last night on that dark alley in the Bronx?

  She shuddered with the thought.

  “Lucky for me, you’re going to be able to back up my story with the police department.” He seemed content to let her off the hook, his tense muscles relaxing the more distance they put between them and the Raven Club. “You’ve seen enough now to know that at least one of my partners wants me dead, scared or in jail. You can make arrests. Convict the bastards.”

  “With what? My say-so?” After seeing the way her sister’s case had dried up into nothing, Vanessa wouldn’t risk letting Alec’s enemies walk away. “We don’t have physical evidence yet. We need to find your car. Scare up a paper trail.”

  “You’ve got the disks.” He jerked a thumb toward the back seat where he’d stored the package they’d taken from above his ceiling tiles.

  “Which may or may not have survived the temperature fluctuations of being stored near the ductwork. And beyond that, we know how easy it can be to tamper with that kind of data. Convicting your partners of anything is going to require more time. More legwork.”

  “Fine. But let the police do it. I’m ready to go into the cop shop with you now that my uncle’s behind bars and you’ve seen my partners’ got it in for me.” Downshifting for a patch of gridlock around a construction site along the shoulder of the expressway, Alec glanced over at her. “They won’t try to arrest me if we have reason to question the evidence offered up by my partners, right?”

  “Right. In theory.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” He checked his rearview mirror, probably watching to see if they’d been followed. The way she should be doing.

  Her objectivity and professional distance seemed to be slipping away from her by the hour, distorted by the presence of emotions she’d never felt before, twisted even further by her unease at being in this part of town.

  Thankfully, they’d be leaving the Bronx behind soon. The exit for a bridge back to Manhattan was just a couple of miles ahead.

  “I’m a little worried about why my lieutenant sent me out after you in the first place without asking me to look into McPherson Real Estate and the legitimacy of your partners’ complaint. I’d just assumed he’d done the homework and thought we needed to bring you in. But since he didn’t bother and still had me come after you…”

  “You think there’s corruption in your department?”

  “I don’t know, but I don’t want to guarantee they’ll let you go without having more evidence to back up your claim.” She didn’t think the head of their precinct would be involved in anything illegal. No way. No how.

  But she couldn’t deny a small niggle of worry about Lieutenant Durant looking out for some of his own investments if he’d allowed McPherson to press their claim without checking into the details behind it.

  “Well I’m not going back into hiding.” He sped past the exit that would take them to Manhattan and continued south toward Queens. “I’m buying back my freedom one way or another, and if the cops won’t help me reclaim my life then I’ll have to take matters into my own hands.”

  “What do you mean?” She couldn’t help but visualize the gun she knew was secured at his waist. How far would he go to recover his old life?

  “I mean I’m going to call on my personal resources to get the evidence we need and put these guys behind bars.”

  “And
you’re going to find evidence in Queens?” She squinted up at the signs overhead, wondering what on earth he had in mind.

  “LaGuardia. I’ve got a private plane out there and I can have a pilot meet us at the airport within half an hour.” He peered over at her from the driver’s side, his dark eyes intense. “Welcome to the world of high finance, Vanessa. You’re about to get a bird’s-eye view of the world you walked away from when you turned your back on the MBA.”

  HE HAD A JET.

  The information didn’t fully penetrate Vanessa’s brain until she took in the lines of the Cessna in a section of LaGuardia Airport she’d never seen up close and personal. There was no check-in process. No mile-long line at a ticket counter. Alec simply shook hands with the pilot, who apparently appeared on call from some sort of air-management company, and before she knew it, the stairs to the plane were being unfurled from the cabin door.

  “Ready?” Alec nodded toward the aircraft, the bright halogen lamps ringing the boarding area casting the whole bizarre world of a corporate magnate in a surreal light. She’d had dreams that looked sort of like this. Only there hadn’t been a guy with a gun carting her aboard the plane.

  “Ready for what?” The stresses of the last twenty-four hours had taken a toll on her clear thinking, clouding her brain with an assortment of worries mixed up with her past. “I have no idea where you’re going and for all I know, you could be trying to flee the country. I’d be ten kinds of an idiot to get on that plane with you when I’m just supposed to be locating you and bringing you into the station for some questions.”

  “And why would I head to the border now after I’ve been hiding under my uncle’s nose in the Bronx for six months while he was still a free man?” He slipped his hand beneath her hair and massaged the back of her neck with soft, subtle pressure. “I’ve got a place in the Hamptons, close to where Sergio keeps his mistress. We can ask Donata some questions, find out where they’re keeping my uncle and figure out if he’s been scheming with my partners or not.”