* * *
“He wasn’t affected by her death at all, just relieved that she hadn’t actually stood him up. What a jerk.” She glanced at Josh as they walked out of the building that housed Hammond’s company. “Did you get it?” she asked.
Josh held up his cell phone. It was set to “camera mode.” “Got his chinless profile right here,” he assured her.
She nodded. “Let’s go back and show it to the bartender.”
“If he can tear his eyes away from you long enough to look at it,” Josh commented.
“You can convince him,” she said, giving his shoulder a pat.
Chapter 8
“You guys again?”
It was obvious that the dark-haired bartender at The Hideaway was less than thrilled to see Josh and Bridget making their way over to the bar, especially since it was now during the club’s core hours of operation.
“I can see why you have so much repeat business here, what with that winning, outgoing personality of yours and all,” Josh commented as they reached the bar. “Excuse us,” he said pointedly to two of the patrons as he elbowed them out of the way so that he and Bridget could get closer to the bartender.
“Don’t recall you bringing any business the first time around,” Raul retorted.
“Now, Raul, play nice,” Bridget advised, offering the man a big, bright smile. “We just want to see if you recognize someone.” She glanced toward her partner. “Show him the picture, Josh.”
Annoyed, Raul reminded her, “I already told you, she wasn’t—” And then he curtailed his protest as he saw that the photo on Josh’s cell phone wasn’t of the dead woman he’d already disavowed. Squinting, Raul took a closer look, then nodded. “Yeah, him I saw.”
Straightening, he pointed over to a table on the far side of the bar. “He sat at one of the side tables, holding on to the same damn glass of beer for like two or three hours. He was staring at the door the entire time, like he was expecting someone really fantastic to come through. Could have heard the nerd sighing all the way over here each time the door opened and whoever walked in wasn’t who he was waiting for.”
“Did anyone come over to him?” Josh asked him.
“Nope.” Raul shook his head to underscore his point. “It was obvious right away that he’d been stood up. He started to creep out some of the regulars, sitting and staring like that. I was going to go over to talk to him, tell him to go home, when he saved me the trouble. He just got up and left all of a sudden.”
“Do you recall what time that was?” Bridget asked, mentally crossing her fingers.
Taking an order from one of the people at the bar, Raul picked up a colorful bottle and poured the drink, then pushed the glass toward the patron.
“I think about eleven,” he finally answered. “Why? Does it make a difference?”
She uncrossed her fingers. “Yeah, it makes a difference. It gives him an alibi,” Bridget answered, trying to hide her disappointment. She’d really thought they’d found Diana’s killer. She should have realized that would have been too easy. With a nod, she stepped away from the bar. “Thanks for your help.”
Raul’s attention was already elsewhere as orders came flying at him from along the crowded bar.
“He could be lying,” Josh told her as they wove their way over to the front door.
“Why would he?” she asked.
Josh laughed shortly and shrugged. Taking out his keys, he pointed them toward the vehicle. “I haven’t worked that part out yet.”
“There might not be anything to work out,” she pointed out.
As the car’s security system was disarmed, she heard the locks popping up. Bridget opened the passenger door and dropped into her seat. It felt as if all the energy had been temporarily drained out of her.
“We’re back to square one, aren’t we?” she murmured, dejected.
“Looks that way—unless one of the other detectives came up with the name of a likely candidate from that stack of academy washouts they were going through when we left.”
And that, they both knew, would be an exceptionally tall order. Despite the fact that it had been her idea, Bridget didn’t hold out much hope that there was anything to be found there.
“It’s got to be someone who looks good for all the murders,” Bridget reminded him.
She sighed again. Right now, she was feeling pretty damn hopeless about being able to find anything worthwhile.
Josh took his cue from the tone of her voice. “It’s getting late. What d’you say we knock off for the night and get an early start in the morning?”
That seemed to snap her out of it, despite the fact that, just for a second, it did sound tempting.
“I say no,” she answered flatly. “I mean, you can do whatever you want to, but I’m going back to the squad room.”
Damn but the woman could be stubborn. “And what?” he asked. “Beat your head against the bulletin board?”
Maybe he didn’t get how determined she was to bring down this psychopath. “If I thought it would help, yeah. But since it probably won’t, I thought maybe I’d go back to the first case. This investigation wasn’t ours back then,” she reminded Josh. Two other detectives had been on the case the first year. One of them had become so frustrated, he’d taken early retirement several months later.
“Maybe we reviewed it too fast,” she went on, “missed something the first time around. We were too focused on the latest murders at the time to do justice to number one. Number one would have been where all the mistakes were made,” she said, thinking out loud. “The one that was the original crime of passion.”
Josh mulled over what she’d said. “If it really was number one.”
Did he know something that she didn’t? Bridget wondered. “What do you mean?”
Josh was working out his theory as he went along. “Maybe the Lady Killer hid his first murder for exactly the reasons you just mentioned. After he got even with the woman for standing him up, or ditching him, or maybe even not noticing him—whatever he thought her sin was—he discovered, quite by accident, that he liked killing. He realized that he got off on the power of it all or maybe it made him feel like some kind of king of the world, or, better yet, a god.”
The more he talked, the more he felt his theory was plausible. His voice took on conviction as he continued.
“Whatever the reason, our killer had to have his fix again. Especially when February rolled around. The month just made him feel too miserable, too hopeless and he needed to find a way to crawl out of that hole. His way turned out to be killing his ‘lost love’ again. And again.” Finished, he studied Bridget’s face to gauge her reaction and if she agreed. “Is any of this making any sense to you?”
“Yes, actually it does,” she admitted. “You realize this means that we’re going to have to start digging through old, unsolved homicides.” She emphasized the word “unsolved” because if the case had been solved, the serial killer wouldn’t still be out there.
The proposition sounded daunting, but she didn’t see any way around it. Otherwise, they had nothing to work with.
New theory or not, Josh still thought it was a good idea if they went home tonight. “How about I buy you dinner, then we call it a night and come back fresh in the morning?” he suggested. “You look dead on your feet, Bridget,” he observed. “Falling asleep at your desk isn’t going to help solve this thing.”
She wanted at least to get started tonight. That wouldn’t happen if Josh didn’t start the car, she thought, impatiently. “I’d work on my flattering skills if I were you or you definitely will have trouble landing a woman once this thing is behind us.”
“Don’t worry about me ‘landing a woman,’” Josh told her. “Never had any trouble yet.” He inserted his key into the ignition, then left it for a moment as he continued talking. “Besides, in a pinch, I can always turn to you for some female companionship.”
He couldn’t have surprised her more if he’d tried. “Me?”
He grinned at the look on her face. In a way, he found the trace of innocent surprise enticing. “Yeah, last I checked, you were a female, right?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Just how closely did you check?” she asked.
“I’ve got eyes, Detective. And you’ve got a figure that would really look bad on a guy,” he informed her, deliberately sounding matter-of-fact. “So, what sounds good to you?”
He did, Bridget found herself thinking. “I don’t know,” she responded, then added in a whisper as she looked at him, “surprise me.”
They had been in and out of the car countless times in the last two days, spending most of them in close proximity, not to mention close quarters whenever they were on the road in the vehicle. As she uttered her last words to him, Josh realized that having her so close stirred him in ways that surprised him. He wasn’t quite prepared to deal with it.
His resistance was, admittedly, drastically low. Plus that damn scent she was wearing had been haunting him all day.
That was what he ultimately blamed for what he did next. He wasn’t being himself. But whoever he was, he discovered in the seconds that followed that he was really enjoying himself in a way he’d never believed possible.
At least, heaven knew, not with Bridget.
Instead of starting up the vehicle and driving to one of the myriad take-out places that catered to those caught up in Aurora’s fast pace, he leaned in toward Bridget, framed her face between his hands and kissed her.
And stopped time.
Half a heartbeat before his lips came down on hers, she was about to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing. But then he was doing it and there was no real reason to ask because she knew what he thought he was doing.
Unless he’d suddenly been possessed by an alien life form, Joshua Youngblood knew exactly what he was doing—and so did she.
He was curling her toes. Not to mention curling other stray body parts as well, including all ten fingers of her hands.
It was a lucky thing she was curling them, Bridget thought, because it kept her from lacing her hands around his neck. That would make it look as if she were compliant with what was happening. She really didn’t want him to think that.
Even if it were true.
She wasn’t sure she was ready to admit that to him. Or even to herself.
She would admit that she now saw what the noise was all about when it came to Josh. And she understood why Josh could get away with being such a player without having been shot yet. A woman could probably forget and forgive a great deal if she thought she might be on the receiving end of this amazing experience again sometime in the near future.
God, but it felt good. Really good.
It was becoming harder and harder for her not to thread her arms around his neck, despite the emergency brake that separated them.
She definitely felt as if she were on fire and about to go up in smoke. What’s more, she didn’t care.
Josh couldn’t have really explained what had come over him just then, or what had prompted him to kiss his partner at this particular junction of their working day.
But now that he was doing it, he was glad. Glad that his resistance was down and his thinking had abruptly taken a holiday. Otherwise, he would have never discovered that the woman he’d been partnered with for the last three years, the woman with whom he had shared thoughts and body armor, and to whom, he had to admit, he felt closer than he did to any other human being on the face of the earth, had the ability to fry his brain.
Fried or not, Josh knew one thing to be true. Bridget Cavelli, aka Cavanaugh, was hot. She was also a woman of substance. Who would have thought it?
The desire to deepen the kiss and take it to the next level urgently, insistently, clawed at him, grew stronger by the moment. Any second now, he was certain, it would get to unmanageable proportions and this was neither the time nor the place to allow that.
This should go at a slower pace. He’d just willingly stepped out onto a minefield and one misstep would rend him into tiny smithereens.
He needed to pull back.
No matter how much he didn’t want to.
Bridget struggled between desire and a sense that Josh was suddenly drawing away. The world, listing badly on its axis, was only gradually righting itself and coming back into focus.
She blinked, staring at Josh, wondering if she’d somehow slipped into another reality via an invisible vortex. She had no other plausible explanation for what had just happened—or for her reaction to it.
“Surprise,” Josh finally said in a soft voice.
He’d drawn away, but not far enough so that she couldn’t feel the warmth of his breath. Goose bumps popped up in response.
He was grinning that lopsided grin of his, the one that simultaneously annoyed and enticed her.
“What?” she bit off breathlessly. She decided that her best recourse here was to act as if she was angry and offended despite the fact that she was neither.
“You said to surprise you,” he reminded her.
The words she’d uttered an eternity ago, before the world had tipped over, came back to her. Doubling her fist, Bridget took the opportunity to punch him in the shoulder, hard.
“Idiot!” she bit off. “I was talking about food.”
His eyes dipped down to look intently at her lips. “Some might say that was food for the soul.”
She raised her chin, looking as if she was ready to go fifteen rounds with him, after which she fully expected to be declared the winner. “And some might say that you’ve just gone off your nut.”
For a second, Josh inclined his head, as if agreeing with her. But then he said, “And others might say that it was the smartest thing I’d ever done.” His eyes held hers for a second. There was only a trace of humor on his lips. “I had no idea you could kiss like that, Bridget.”
The inside of her mouth had gone inexplicably dry. If it had been up to her to spit on a fire to put it out, the fire would have raged out of control. It took effort not to allow her words to stick to the roof of her mouth.
“The subject never came up,” she finally replied. Deftly changing the topic before she fell headlong into it—or grabbed him so that he would kiss her again—she abruptly said, “Chinese.”
“Chinese?”
“Yes, Chinese. I pick Chinese,” she told him impatiently. “Food,” she added when he gave no indication that he understood where she was coming from. “Chinese food. Unless you’ve changed your mind and decided to skip dinner.”
“Well,” he allowed, squelching the urge to run his thumb along her very alluring lower lip, “some might say that I’ve already had dessert so maybe I’d better backtrack and have some dinner now,” he said philosophically.
She glanced at him, then looked away. “If you know what’s good for you.”
Bridget was casting her vote on the side of putting all this behind them and just going on as if nothing had happened. But they both knew that you couldn’t un-open the floodgates once they’d been raised and the waters were rushing at you.
“Trouble is,” Josh said as he finally started up the car, “I think I do.”
It was all he said and for once, he didn’t elaborate, leaving Bridget to try to figure out if that meant that he wanted to kiss her again, or felt it was safer and more prudent not to.
Had Josh kissed her because of some silent challenge he had issued to himself—or because he actually really wanted to?
Bridget was undecided as to which side she was rooting for. Both were problematic for different reasons So, for now, she pushed the whole incident—fleeting by most standards—behind her.
Or tried to.
* * *
“Anything?” Bridget called out to the three detectives they were working with as she and Josh walked into the squad room.
Just about on their way out, the three detectives on loan, Cox, Langford and Kennedy, stopped and looked at what Bridget and Josh had just brought in. Especi
ally Josh, who balanced various white bags in a large cardboard box. Between the two of them there had to be eight white bags, all embossed with the logo of The Sun Dragon, a red dragon exhaling a wall of fire. It was an agreed-upon fact that The Sun Dragon was the best restaurant around Aurora, possibly the county, for Chinese food.
“Is that to bribe us to stay?” Joel Langford, the youngest of the three, asked.
“Well, there’s no overtime pay authorized—yet,” she emphasized with conviction, sure that once the cases were reviewed—and solved—there would be. “So we thought we could at least feed you. You have to eat, right? And you have to be sitting somewhere while you eat, right? So why not here? And if you continue glancing through the files, what’s the harm? A lot of people read while they eat,” she said innocently.
Cox exchanged looks with the other two detectives. No one appeared taken in by her innocent expression, but the food did smell tempting.
“When she says it, it sounds so logical,” Cox told the other two men. He was already shedding his jacket and putting it on the back of his chair again.
“When you’ve been around her as long as I have,” Josh told the others, “you learn not to waste your breath arguing with Cavanaugh. There’s no winning against her so you might as well just say yes, shut up and sit down. Save yourself a lot of grief that way.” He placed the bags in a central location and proceeded to take the large containers out of each one.
Kennedy laughed, following Cox’s example and making himself comfortable again.
“You sound more like a husband than a partner,” he told Josh.
“God forbid.” Josh laughed, pulling up a chair.
And that is something you have to remember, Bridget told herself as Josh’s words echoed in her head. The man might stir the blood, but he simply wasn’t the kind to stick around. Ever. She’d seen him go through enough girlfriends in the last three years to fill up a medium-size theater. No matter what, Josh put his philosophy into play every single time.
The problem was, she could still taste him on her lips. It made her thinking process a little fuzzy.
Determined to erase all physical traces of Josh from her lips, she went for the shrimp in lobster sauce first, relying on the fact that there were always a lot of onions, as well as garlic, in the mix.
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