by Cera Daniels
Ryan's smile dipped. "Ah." He nudged the barely-there corner of his glasses, but he didn't avert his eyes. "So I guess dinner's not an option, either."
"Perceptive of you." Amanda turned away. "It was nice to see you again, Ryan. Drive safe."
The little voice in her head begged her to reconsider as she backtracked along the sidewalk and hopped over a shattered drain pipe. It was just a file. A harmless little collection of paper. It involved his family, anyway. If her mother were to die in a fire, she'd want to know more too. Granted, she could run through proper department channels. Her pace slowed as she considered the dilemma. He'd admitted taking the file had been wrong. Wasn't that first step worth something? He'd protected her during the explosion, gotten her out of the building in one piece. Couldn't she let it drop? Stealing a file didn't make him as bad as the criminals she put behind bars, did it?
Her hand tightened around her work cell phone. Of course not. The white collar crime division never locks people up for stealing files.
Ice-frosted vinyl siding reflected shimmers of exposed sun. Disappointment pinched her chest, but Amanda continued toward home. These benched months had rattled her confidence more than she'd realized if she could consider letting him slide.
Wrong was wrong.
With even her lieutenant caving to the money and power struggles of their city, she couldn't afford to waver on her own morality.
She shook her head as if the movement could eradicate doubt. What would I tell him, anyway? 'Call me when you return the—'
"I'm not giving back the file."
Amanda started. Her heel sideswiped a patch of black ice. She got out half a gasp, and then her cheek was plastered against Ryan's cotton-covered and more-than-acceptably-toned torso. His arms wrapped her in an impromptu embrace. When his breath fanned over the sensitive skin by her ear, heat arrowed between her thighs, her body and her hormones ready and raring to play.
Damn damn damn.
A mortified blush crept up from her neck. There would be no graceful recovery. Not when her thighs were practically wrapped around his leg. Heaven help her if he noticed how hot she burned from his Good Samaritan catch.
"Thanks." It came out muffled against his navy blue silk tie, so Amanda tipped up her chin. "I . . . don't like games, Ryan."
Ryan's grip loosed. "I gathered that."
She glanced up at his hoarse tone. He'd closed his eyes but his stance remained rigid. After seeing him in action in the file room, this stillness made her uneasy. Amanda carefully returned her palm to his chest. "Ryan?"
He flinched. Not on his face—he'd resumed a suspicious, blank look over her head—but his muscles jerked under her fingertips.
His gaze dropped, scorching into hers.
She swallowed. "Oh."
Yeah, he'd noticed the heat.
Her lungs sought a shallow breath. The whole city would melt under her toes at this rate. Ice and metal alike.
He eased a hand to his ear. "Heard you the first time, Zach."
Ryan's heartbeat rapped against her fingers. Strong. Fast.
"You know I'm not there yet." Dark brown eyes roved down to her toes then blazed back to her face. "I stopped to eat."
More potent than bourbon. Her cell phone hit the sidewalk with a crack. She tensed her fingers on his chest, but didn't stoop to retrieve the bit of plastic. Not when his intense gaze captured her with such sensual promise.
What was it about him that drew her like an addict when she'd yet to take a taste?
The mischievous smile returned to his lips. This time, he wasn't playing. He closed in and her breath froze in her throat.
A scant centimeter away, Ryan stopped. Despite the frustration that burrowed her fingers tighter in his shirt, Amanda fought against closing the gap.
With a grunt, he ripped his heated attentions away from her to look down the street. "Keep looking. I'll call you when I arrive."
Whatever he'd heard, he didn't like. Amanda's curiosity fought the volcano of arousal when Ryan dropped his hand from his ear to rest on the arm of her coat. She cocked her head to the side and let her brain prevail. "Is he gone?"
The corners of his eyes crinkled. "He's never 'gone'."
"Perk of the bodyguard?"
"Hazard of the brother."
She chuckled and stepped back from him, unrequited passion at a healthy simmer. Chill gusts of wind curving down the street caught her off-guard. She tugged on her scarf and hugged her arms around her middle. "All the money in the world, and you hire your brother?"
His expression sobered. "You can't buy trust."
"True." The sentiment applied to his treatment of their precinct and the so-called benefit dinner too. "Why are you out here, Ryan?"
He nodded over his shoulder, toward his parking space. "I needed to lay some memories to rest."
"Old Town, then."
A thin smile.
His former home lay several neglected miles of road and a bridge away. Cutting through the North End was a longer trip than the interstate, but the route was a straight shot. Maybe it helped to delay the inevitable.
He ran a hand through his hair and nodded at the ground by her boots. "Working?"
"That'd be nice. I report back in tomorrow." The reminder killed the pleasant buzz in her core. She somehow kept her shoulders from slumping. Ah, reality. "Someone could have died yesterday, Ryan. I want to catch whoever's responsible."
Ryan tugged on his jacket and squatted to retrieve her cell phone. Dwarfed in his hands, the device looked miraculously intact. "Lieutenant Dale didn't catch him yesterday? Shouldn't it be 'all hands on deck' after that phone call, then?"
"Unrelated incident. Prank call from a repeat offender. Dale dumped it on the guy's probation officer." She lifted her hand to claim her phone but paused at Ryan's troubled expression. "What?"
His eyebrows drew low. "Didn't sound like a prank. It sounded like someone claiming the attack."
"You misheard. The caller threatened Dale's wife, Theresa. But I talked to her myself last night. She was fine, if a little shaken to see their house surrounded by a whole squad of uniforms. No one had been in their home." Amanda shrugged. "Sometimes it's just a delinquent who isn't making much of his second chance."
"And sometimes it's just a maniac on the loose."
She waited for a smile, but his face remained as grim as her intuition. Just because her lieutenant had provided an explanation didn't mean she had to like its convenience.
"Maniac or not, my lieutenant was quite clear on what 'off-duty' meant." She tipped a defeated look toward Ryan. "It's been a long morning."
"Then maybe this day off will do you some good." He slipped her cell phone into his suit pants pocket before she could stop him and his fingers jangled a set of keys in its place. "I'm headed into Old Town to think. Come walk with me."
A huff of exasperation escaped. "What, you're holding my phone hostage now?"
"Whatever it takes."
"Ruthless."
An unrepentant grin spread over his face. "That's me, Detective. Ruthless."
After a few backward steps, he pivoted around the corner. He knew she'd follow. How could she walk away when he'd confiscated yet another piece of state property? Not to mention her primary point of contact for the investigation results . . . Amanda shook her head as she followed at a slower pace, keeping a lookout for more ice patches. A morning with the hopeless flirt was a terrible, horrible, ridiculously appealing idea. She should just take him down, retrieve her phone by force, and call it a day. Her lips worked up a belligerent smile.
He'd won after all.
Ryan's head popped around the townhouse, those twinkling brown eyes drawing her like a beacon. "Coming?"
"Fine, but we're not going out to lunch."
And naked wrestling was also off the agenda.
For now.
Tattered banners, once bright and inviting, marked the eaves of former storefronts with tribal glyphs Ryan no longer understood. The mu
lti-story buildings remained hollow, charred remnants of furniture encroaching on the sidewalk, the glass from doors and windows still strewn on the ground where they'd fallen a decade ago. Weeds, though brown with winter chill, peeked through cracks in the sidewalk. He sucked in a lungful of winter air and smelled . . . nothing.
No flowering herbs, no smoke or food cooking in kitchens, no sun-brewed tea—nothing.
Sound eluded him too. His ears picked up a light breeze whistling through the ruins, but no one laughed, played, sang, or told stories here anymore. A pang of anger tinged with grief curled his fingers into fists. His mother, their neighbors—their memory deserved better than a memorial of ashes.
Ten years and there'd been no effort to rebuild. Instead, Old Town had been abandoned. Forgotten. Even the graffiti had aged and weathered.
No one to impress in a ghost town.
Amanda shifted beside him, her arms crossed where she leaned on the door of his Mustang. The piercing blue paint seemed ostentatious in the face of his childhood memories.
"I should have brought something low-key." He rapped his knuckles on the hood scoop.
"Nothing about you is low-key, Ryan." She tipped him a sidelong look and a warm smile. "I doubt the people who lived here would want you to be something you're not."
His chest tightened at the observation and he turned to drop both of his palms flat on the now-cooled hood of his car.
"My father was the businessman. He lived uptown, visited my brothers and me on weekends. We lived right there. With Mom." He pointed across the street to a building that leaned on its neighbor and pushed off the car with his fingers. "The fire that took out this block killed her—our—tribe. My past, my brothers' past, gone with no answers."
He looked over to see Amanda staring at his hands. She stretched out a finger to trace over a raw knuckle. The light touch soothed more than tempted, but Ryan slipped his hands into his pockets anyway. He couldn't risk another near kiss.
"Did you scrape it getting out yesterday?"
"I dinged a lot of things yesterday." He smiled. "No, this . . . My brothers were worried about me."
She looked askance. "So you punched them?"
He shrugged. Jay had been satisfied with words, but Zach had wanted to dish out a more physical reprimand. Ryan had been happy to oblige.
Amanda's expression didn't change, but she stepped onto the sidewalk and rubbed a hand over a dull green lamppost. "Well, we're here. You should probably call them."
He nodded. Zach had waited long enough. "I'll be right back." He crossed the street to page his brother. "Any luck?"
"Some of us are more blessed than others." From the clacking keyboard sounds in the background, Ryan guessed his research continued. "Or were you not talking about women?"
"We're burning daylight," Ryan said. He gripped the edge of a banner and lifted it against the wind. Dull, red symbols had been sewn around the perimeter of the rectangle, some lost where the edges were wind-frayed.
"There's no chatter over the normal channels about a masked man," Zach cut back in. "And surprise, surprise, nobody's dead."
"Good." He wasn't the only one with memories. When the gossip had blamed yesterday's bombing on a masked man, Ryan could practically see the ping on Amanda's Klepto-radar. He let the banner drop and it fluttered. Ruined, limp fabric against a charred wall. "So no one's trying to pin the 16th on Klepto."
"Nope. We're good. You're just paranoid." Zach chuckled. "Afraid your cop friend'll ID you and cuff you to the bed?"
Intriguing as his other brain found that scenario, Ryan frowned. "The idea was to deter her from digging in the first place."
"She's with you?"
"Yes."
Zach hummed on the other end of the line. "You must have been pretty convincing." His typing slowed. "I didn't figure she'd be willing to destroy her career for you and your illegally acquired case file."
Ryan dropped his voice to a low growl. "I didn't ask."
True, he'd tracked Amanda to see if she wanted to occupy her mind on her day off. But the minute he'd spotted her, he'd felt it imperative that this time, she'd see him in a better light. Good thing too, because Zach was right. She could have been arrested for working on the case without authorization.
"We're not working on the case. I can always come back later for answers." He hadn't even retrieved the photos from the glove compartment. "We're just looking around. She can't be cited for that."
The typing stopped. "Her coworkers find out she was out there with you and we've got that file, your detective's toast."
Ryan grimaced at his brother's dangerously low tone. "You're right. This should have been a solo excursion into hell."
Zach sighed. "She's not family, Ryan."
"Everything okay?" Amanda stepped onto the sidewalk in front of him, her whole presence neutral save for her eyes. Blue with a cutting glint of warning.
Aware his brother would curse him for it later, Ryan met her challenging look and clicked off the communicator completely. How much of the exchange had she overheard?
Her teeth did a fascinating jig over her bottom lip. "If we're going to look around, we better get to it."
Amanda tipped a look up at the chiseled line of Ryan's jaw as he fell into step beside her, his expression wary. Good. Let him wonder if she knew he'd intended to pick her up today to look over the Old Town file instead of trudging around the snow-dusted concrete reliving childhood memories. Let him wonder—so she'd have longer to figure out why he'd changed his mind.
They walked for a few minutes in silence, slower and slower steps as they approached his former home.
"I was 16," she finally said. "My dad came home that night shaking. He drank himself to sleep."
"Your father was here?"
"He was a fire fighter."
He slanted a look down at her, eyebrows dipping. "Was?"
"We lost him my senior year of high school." She lowered her gaze to the broken sidewalk. "He was a hero."
Ryan pulled to a stop and stared over her head, unable to look away from the ashes. "Some men are born that way, aren't they?"
Some men, maybe. Not her father. He'd had a rap sheet as long as her forearm for boosting cars. If her mother hadn't believed in second chances, Amanda might never have been born. It took prison to straighten him out, and by then the gasoline spike had rendered his line of work obsolete. The pride in his eyes when she'd chosen a career in law enforcement . . .
Amanda locked those thoughts away when her nose tingled with more emotion than cold. She burrowed her hands into her jacket pockets. "This place is . . . heavy."
He gave a slight nod and glanced up at the sky.
She followed his gaze and wet sprinklings of fresh snow settled on her cheeks. "We should get out of the cold."
Ryan seemed to come back to life, though his smile was slow on the rebound. He reached toward her and gestured with his chin at his car in one smooth motion. "I know a little tea shop that will get us warm again—"
He stopped and one of his hands clenched tight on her jacket sleeve. Ryan's head tipped slightly, his eyes narrowing at the entrance to an alley that ran around the side of one ghoulish building.
Alarm spun down her spine. "What's wrong?"
"I think I heard something. Bad news." He dropped his hands and headed for the structure. "Wait here."
She almost snarled. He was a civilian, and she could handle "bad news". Her adrenaline surged free on a heady rush of frustration.
The last thing I need is someone else to keep me on the sidelines.
Ryan held out a hand to block her forward motion when she rounded the building and she slid around him, taking point. He whooshed out an exasperated breath. Amanda hugged the wall. In the middle of the back alley was a man, arms splayed, feet cocked at awkward angles. A perp with a knife leaned over him.
Amanda instinctively reached for a gun, her hips bare of equipment. She cut off a curse. Four months and she still wasn't used to being wi
thout a weapon. Well, she wasn't defenseless. Her eyes narrowed and she shifted onto her toes, a more mobile position as she sized up the suspect.
Long-sleeved mesh shirt over a skin-tight tee, obscenely fitted leather pants—this scumbag wasn't hiding a gun. Her eyes flashed to all the points where an accomplice could have been tucked away, but he didn't appear to have friends.
Ryan's fingers brushed her arm and her head jerked back, connecting with his shoulder on a light thud. Pine aftershave set her hormones to purring. She bit her lip.
"Gun. Two o'clock," he whispered in her ear. "No shooter."
Her eyes searched the ground around the body again. Sure enough, a discarded gun lay a couple of feet away, its muzzle sticking out from under a trash bin. A drug buy gone wrong?
The knife loomed closer to the fallen man and Amanda stepped into the alley. "Police, put the weapon down."
He straightened with a jolt. Both hands came up. "Lady, he was dead when I got here."
Amanda stepped closer, keeping her voice firm. "Drop the knife."
He didn't. Instead, the suspect broke into a gallop down the side street. Ryan growled somewhere behind her as she sprinted after the man, her boots blasting the cracked pavement with satisfying clicks. Thick flakes of snow wheeled around her, tumbling faster as she ran.
"Stop! Police!" Damn, but her blood was happy he didn't listen.
He jumped for a raised fire escape and she slammed into his side, plowing his shoulder against a once-neon orange scrawl of graffiti. His knife spun to the ground. She kicked it away and he wrenched free.
The skinny bastard didn't make it far. Amanda nudged the back of his knee with her heel and he stumbled. She pinned him hard and yanked her scarf from around her neck, pulling the chenille taut before wrapping it around his wrists.
"I said stop," she growled.
"I know this looks bad, but I swear I didn't ex him!" His breath on the pavement melted a layer of freshly clinging snow.
The scene would be compromised by the elements if they didn't get a CSU out there fast.
She gave a savage yank on the makeshift restraints to get him on his feet. Dark marks peeked around the dull gray fabric. Ornate, flaming dragon skulls tattooed his wrists. This guy was syndicate.