by J. K. Coi
She had asked Doug to outline as much of his shift to the uniformed officers as he could remember, in as much detail as he could, indicating that they would record it all and give her a copy of his statement in the morning. Then she’d supervised as the investigator brushed Steve’s front door and the other flat surfaces of his office for prints before moving on to do the same in the kitchen and bedroom.
Steve hadn’t had much to do but listen to Doug relating his statement. He was on nights this week, so he’d started work at seven that evening and had done a sweep of the perimeter before the two daytime guards went home. Then he was the only guard on duty until three in the morning—as it was, he’d been forced to call in the next guy early when the police had shown up.
He’d taken a break around ten but ate his snack—a peanut butter and jelly on rye that his mom had packed—at the front desk. He’d recalled that there hadn’t been any unaccompanied guests through that evening. It was against policy to interrogate strangers who were accompanied by residents of the building, so he didn’t have a list of those particular names, but it was a Friday night, so there’d been plenty of activity.
It was good to know that his neighbors were all having a good time tonight, Steve thought with a grimace.
He looked around the room, but his gaze always drifted back to her.
It was obvious that Ms. Porter was the one running the show here. The investigator seemed competent, but not invested. After having to explain the threatening letters to the police once already that day, Steve didn’t doubt that if Ms. Porter hadn’t been here now, the cops would have asked him the same stupid questions all over again. But her no-nonsense presence had added a degree of efficiency to the procedure that alleviated a lot of the explosive anger that had consumed him since he’d walked into his apartment.
A lot of it, but not all of it. There was still enough aggravation there to fuel him for a dozen more hours in the boxing ring.
He fixed his sights on Ms. Porter while he seethed. Maybe she sensed it because she finally nodded and everyone started to pack up. She’d apparently decided they had everything they needed for now. He released a sigh of relief.
The doorman glanced toward her for the twentieth time, too. Doug had been impressed to learn that Steve’s guest was actually his bodyguard—he’d decided to confide once the cops showed up—and the guard had been following her movements ever since with something akin to hero worship.
Steve thought he might be feeling the same. Ms. Porter hadn’t acted outraged or quit on the spot after he kissed her in the elevator. Instead, she’d stepped up and taken control of this disaster, making the whole thing as hassle-free for him as possible—considering they’d had to call the cops at midnight on a Friday.
She was professional and competent, and he wanted to appreciate her efforts, but this holding pattern was killing him, allowing bitter, unproductive emotions to penetrate the shell of calm he needed to maintain. Someone was bound to find out about this, and if he appeared to be anything other than unconcerned about the whole thing, it would be all over the gossip sites that he’d pitched a fit after “the police had been called to investigate” a “late-night incident” at his home. He could see the headlines twisting it into a domestic dispute, or even worse, actually connecting the dots and linking this to the threatening letters. It never failed to amaze him how easily the facts got warped and corrupted until they barely resembled the truth.
He wanted a pair of boxing gloves and a punching bag, or some other excessively physical activity…and he wanted April Porter. His gaze still hadn’t strayed from the figure across the room. He wanted her more than he wanted to breathe. It wouldn’t matter if she was wearing Lycra or nothing at all, as long as she was out of that suit.
He gritted his teeth and forced his attention back to Doug. “Hey, why don’t you go on home? I think Ms. Porter has everything under control for now, although I’m sure she’ll have some more questions for you after she reviews the surveillance video.” He clapped the other man on the shoulder. “But you should go home now and get some sleep.”
Doug nodded and twisted his hands together as if he wanted to apologize again. “Go,” Steve repeated. “There’s nothing left to do here tonight.”
Doug followed the police officers who were filing out at the same time. The investigator was the last to leave, flipping his notebook closed and putting an arm on Ms. Porter’s shoulder as he said good-bye. Steve’s gaze narrowed on the point of contact as she reached up and squeezed his hand.
Finally his apartment was empty again, except for Ms. Porter…and the lingering sensation of personal violation as he looked around the room. He supposed that was normal but he refused to give in to it.
“What do you want to do?” she asked, looking around as well. Despite the time, she seemed alert and focused.
He swore. Where was the whiskey? “Catch the bastard who did this?”
It wasn’t on the damn sideboard, that was for sure. Nothing was on the sideboard anymore. Whatever had been on the sideboard was now in pieces—jagged glass pieces—across the floor, which meant his whiskey was probably soaking into the porous wood grain.
Her mouth tightened. “I meant for right now. Your bedroom seems to have been hit the hardest. The mattress has been slashed, the sheets cut to ribbons. Your clothes are strewn all over the room. Do you want to grab a few things and go to a hotel, or do you have a friend you could call for the night? Maybe the woman you had dinner with earlier this evening? She seemed pretty open to the idea of you staying over.” Her tone was distinctly void of emotion once more.
The option was distasteful. He wanted to be at Jennifer’s mercy even less now than he had before. “I’m quite sure I’m not up for the kind of payment she would expect in return for a bed to sleep in.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean that you should…” Wait a minute, was the unflappable Ms. Porter blushing?
He waved it off. “I won’t get any sleep tonight no matter where I go. I’ll just stay and wade through all this junk to make that list of missing items for the police.”
She nodded. “That’s fine. Do you want to tell me where to find the other notes then?”
“Now? Shouldn’t you be going home to sleep?”
“I can’t do my job if I’m at home, and I think it’s become more important than ever that I stick close to you.”
He snorted. “The security guard in the lobby will be extra vigilant, and your company put extra men outside. Besides, I’m pretty sure the damage has already been done, at least for tonight. Trespassing and vandalism is tiring business. The person responsible is no doubt deeply asleep in his secret lair by now, maybe even wearing a pair of my pajama bottoms.”
Her mouth twitched just a little. A tiny smile, and he smiled, too. “It’s been a long day for you. Really. Why don’t you go home and rest?”
She raised those slim eyebrows and said, “I’ll start in the study, then. Didn’t you say the notes were in there?”
He grinned. “Well, I’ve done my gentlemanly duty, but if you really want to spend the night with me, who am I to argue?”
She actually chuckled as she followed him down the hall, but both of them stopped short at the doorway and sighed.
She’d been right that his bedroom had been hit hard, but the office was just as bad. The rest of the apartment had been trashed, too, but it was as if whoever did this had gone into full meltdown mode in these particular rooms.
Steve navigated the books that had been swept off of shelves and the broken glass coating the floor, and carefully stepped behind his desk. It, too, had been swept clean like someone had clotheslined it with his arm. Thankfully, Steve had left his laptop at the office, so it was safe, and there would have been no way to access his confidential digital files from the house even if someone had wanted to try getting around his passwords. But all the desk drawers except for the one he kept locked had been pulled out and upended, and it looked as if all the paperwork had been rifled t
hrough.
The locked drawer was scratched up to bejesus, but at least it was still intact. He swept a finger through the greasy fingerprinting dust on the desk with a grimace. The stuff was everywhere, even on the shards of broken glass and some of his paperwork. The police had definitely not wanted to leave any surface untested.
“It looks like whoever did this desperately wanted to get into my files and my desk. When he realized there was nothing here, he apparently went into a rage and tore apart everything else he could get his hands on instead.”
“He or she,” she pressed. “What’s in the locked drawer?”
“Not much,” he said with a shake of his head. Some reports for surveillance that he’d commissioned on Justin Fielding’s family a few months ago after learning that there was a slim chance the man might have survived that car crash after taking off with his father’s money. “The anonymous notes are in there, along with some personal stuff, but nothing that a thief would be interested in.”
Ms. Porter stepped closer and examined the mess with an objective look of calculation. “This thief, if it was in fact a thief and not just a vandal—”
He snorted. “As if that isn’t bad enough?”
“Well, you haven’t yet determined if anything is actually missing.” That was true. It was also pretty obvious that this was more than a simple robbery. He stifled a shudder. Shit was getting real. He hadn’t given any of those notes much consideration one way or another, but this couldn’t be ignored. He was able to admit when he’d been wrong, and this time he’d been very wrong.
“The perpetrator is smarter than the average criminal, and it’s also likely that this is someone who has a grudge against you personally.”
He shook his head. “No. It’s not personal. It can’t be.”
Surprise sharpened her features. “What? You can’t still believe…that much has become very obvious.”
“Too obvious maybe,” he maintained. “Optimus Inc. is negotiating next week for more capital investment, and it’s important that both Harrison and I prove that we’re solid and dependable, that we have what it takes to bring the company to the next level. It wouldn’t take much for a competitor to figure out that our expansion plans could be compromised if the reputation or stability of either one of us was brought into question. It’s very possible that all this is being made to look personal.”
“And you’re certain that’s the only motivation a person could have to target you?” She paused. “What about your family’s past? Could there be any unresolved—”
“No.” He didn’t want to know what she’d read about his family.
The tabloids had had years to paint the picture of him as a self-indulgent playboy, and most of the time, he was more than happy to go along with it, because it served his purposes to let people underestimate him. But it might be refreshing to one day meet someone who didn’t know all about him within moments, and about his family’s fatal mistakes.
It was bad enough that the news rags were digging that shit up again because the anniversary of his father’s suicide was just a few days away. His mother and sister would be devastated if the media had new fodder for the old scandal.
Grace was almost finished with school and would be moving home to New York in a few months. Mother had finally come out of hiding after letting shame and embarrassment chase her away for years. She’d even started hinting that Steve should marry soon, and from the society women she’d been throwing his way, he didn’t have to guess what she hoped to accomplish by such a union. If she could match both of her children with strong, important families, she would have repaired the family reputation in her own way.
They glared at each other until Ms. Porter gave in and nodded. He bent over to pick through a messy pile of papers and tried to determine if anything was actually missing. He thought it was all still there, which wasn’t actually good news. It meant that the person responsible hadn’t been interested in stealing from him, only messing with him.
He could be wrong about the motivating factor, too. What if it was, in fact, a personal attack? But who the hell could he have outraged so completely?
He looked up and found Ms. Porter gently placing books back on his shelves. She paged through one with a bemused look on her face.
“What?”
She glanced up and showed him the faded brown cover with gold lettering. “A Treatise of Algebra?”
“It’s rare. 1820s or something. My mother and sister gave it to me for my birthday, the year I graduated high school.” The day before the world as they’d all known it had gone up in flames.
The internet made it impossible to leave the past behind. For the most part, he was resigned to the fact that no matter how successful he became, he would never climb out of the shadow of his father’s mistakes, but the idea that Ms. Porter had pored over all that online garbage about his family was surprisingly irritating.
“What kind of guy collects rare math books?” she teased, another of those bewitching smiles playing across her lips.
“A math geek.” He laughed. “But I know what you’re thinking.”
“You do?” Her slim eyebrow lifted in a perfect arch, and her eyes glittered with humor before she seemed to realize that she’d actually started enjoying talking to him. She looked down and cleared her throat, and he edged a step closer. She was loosening up with him despite herself, and he didn’t want her to take it back.
“You’re thinking that a guy with my reputation and success already knows everything there is to know about math, and the book is just for show.”
She laughed. “Perhaps you should start getting some books on humility then.”
He grinned. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
After a few minutes of an oddly comfortable silence, he recalled her earlier words and said, “So what makes you think the guy who did this is smarter than average?”
“There weren’t any prints anywhere, and nobody saw the individual come in or go out.” She cocked her head. “Television has made it seem like all violence is committed by criminal masterminds who can only be caught by the most advanced CSI teams in the country, but the reality is that most perps are caught almost before they’ve even left the scene of the crime.”
This was a subject his intrepid bodyguard was obviously very interested in. A simple thing, but her enthusiasm changed her entire face, immediately making her more approachable.
“How does that happen?”
“Mostly, they leave fingerprints. Everyone always thinks they’ll never be stupid enough to commit a crime without at least putting on a pair of gloves, but crime is often impulsive and unplanned, and nobody keeps a pair of rubber gloves in their back pocket, just in case. It happens sometimes, but then the perpetrator leaves the scene of the crime and forgets that the trail doesn’t end there. They’ll drop their name and address at the pawn shop where they’re trying to hock stolen merchandise, or they brag about their exploits to their friends in the middle of a crowded bar.”
“Next time I think I might break the law, I’m coming to you for planning advice.”
She quirked an eyebrow, another one of those fleeting smiles playing about her lips. “Next time?”
He grinned and zipped his lips. She shook her head. “That would definitely involve an additional fee to my regular bodyguard services.”
She smiled freely and didn’t drop her gaze, and his chest swelled in response. Damn. Just like he’d thought. He could get used to seeing her smile and listening to her sultry voice. Maybe too used to it, though. And she was most definitely not the right person for him. Prickly and professional, and…and…none of the other reasons were coming to him at the moment.
Wanting to extend the moment despite himself, he asked, “How long have you worked as a bodyguard?”
She paused, and he stilled, waiting to see if she was going to get all stiff on him again, but after a moment she only shrugged. “I guess that means you didn’t bother to read my file after your partner hi
red me?”
“I’m just the numbers guy.” He shrugged. “Harrison’s a tech genius, and he knows how to bring the investors in. As much as it sometimes pains me to admit it, I trust his judgment.”
She winced. “You may not think so once I tell you I’ve only been doing this for six months.”
“How many assignments have you completed?”
“A few. But I guess since I’m admitting things, you should probably know that none of those jobs involved the possibility of corporate sabotage or personal threats.”
“Don’t worry,” he said with a chuckle. “I don’t think there’s a bodyguard out there more professional or capable, no matter the experience level.”
She crossed her arms. “I didn’t tell you that because I wanted your approval, but in the interest of fair disclosure. I’ll have you know that I’ve been trained by the best, and as long as I have your cooperation, I can help catch this guy for you.”
“I have no doubt about it,” he assured her, surprising himself because it was true. “But if you haven’t been doing this for long, where did you get your FBI contact, and how do you happen to know Investigator Don back there so well?” He was purposely poking just a little deeper into personal territory with every question, hoping to draw out the real April Porter. Every piece of herself that she showed him was more irresistible than the last.
He shouldn’t care to know his bodyguard on a personal level. But he did. He wanted it in the worst way. He wanted her to talk to him all through the night and trust him enough to smile without reservation. The feel of her mouth against his in that elevator had been impressed on him, and the taste of her wouldn’t be banished until he’d sampled all of her.
“Come on,” he said. “You know all there is to know about me. My shit is out there for the whole world’s entertainment. Isn’t it only fair that I get to know a little something about you?”
She didn’t want to share. It was plain on her face.