Bending the Rules

by Susan Andersen

  But the joint had an elevator the size of a British telephone booth and that had an out-of-order sign on it. His brows drew together as he hiked up to the third floor, unable to visualize Calloway here. They cinched tighter yet when he saw the flimsy lock on her door. Maybe that was the reason he pounded a bit harder on it than he’d intended. But what the hell was the woman doing in a place with nonexistent security?

  When his commanding knocks didn’t garner an immediate response, he rapped his knuckles against the panel with even more force. At least it was made from a nice solid piece of first-growth Seattle fir.

  “Hold your horses, for God’s sake,” he heard her say from the other side of the door. “I’m coming.” A second later the door whipped open.

  And he was face-to-face with her.

  “Oh,” she said flatly. “It’s you.”

  He merely stood there staring at her, feeling the way he did every damn time he’d seen her—which, okay, counting this evening had only been three. It seemed like more, maybe because it was always accompanied by this hot spear of lightning ripping up his spine and electrifying neurons along the farthest reaches of every nerve path winding through his body.

  He scowled down at her. “You don’t even look out your peephole before you open the door?” he demanded. “And why don’t you have a chain on this?” Not that chains weren’t a joke in the face of a determined burglar, but since they only allowed the door to be opened so far they did offer the possibility of slowing things down for that important nanosecond the home owner could take to slam it shut again.

  Her chin angling skyward, she narrowed her eyes at him. But in the next instant she flashed him a smile of such singular sweetness he knew to brace for trouble.

  And he got it in spades when she chided, “Oh, Daddy!” and, moving faster than a cat, looped her slender arms around his neck to give him a brief, fierce hug. “You are so sweet, always worrying about me.” Gazing up at him, she touched her fingertips to his jaw and for a warm, moist second they breathed the same air. “The designer stubble is new. You give up shaving, Papa?”

  “Very funny,” he said, even as he stood still as a statue while another of those lightning arcs flashed through him. He was ruthlessly banishing it even before she took a swift step back. Yeah, yeah, she had big brown eyes and creamy skin and a soft cloud of curly blond hair that he wouldn’t mind wrapping around his fists. Hell, he’d strip her down and do her against the nearest wall in a New York minute if she’d let him.

  But that wasn’t going to happen, and his shoulders hitched in a barely conscious move. Oh, well, he thought mendaciously, life was just full of disappointments. You learned that young growing up in the foster system. Or—as in his case—mostly in the system, since he hadn’t spent all his time in foster care after his mother died. Sometimes whichever male relative had been cut loose from the pen would swing by his current dwelling to spring him for a while—against Child Protective Services’ rules, of course, since the state didn’t consider any of the de Sanges men good parent material.

  CPS rarely had to mount a hunt for him, however, because it was never long before Dad or Pops or his brother Joe broke parole—and Jase would find himself delivered back into foster care about the same time the loco parentis of the hour was loaded shackled into the back of a van for a fast trip back to the slammer.

  So big deal; Blondie wasn’t going to provide him with a handy outlet for all this electricity zinging around inside of him. It wasn’t the reason he’d come here anyhow, so it was time he dragged his attention away from the subtle sheen of lavender smoothed from her lashes to the crease of her eyelids and got down to business.

  He took a step forward and felt a little spurt of satisfaction when she fell back. Eradicating that as well, he watched without expression as he backed her step for step into the short hallway of her apartment and closed the door behind them.

  “You’ve had me pulled off a crucial case to attend to what you decided is important for the last time,” he informed her in a low, even voice. “So, here’s how we’re going to work this. You want me to waste my time on this Arts For Thugs project? Fine. I have my orders from the mayor and I’ll follow them. But I’m doing this my way and I plan to watch those kids’every move. You better hope to hell they don’t screw the pooch, Ms. Calloway, because I’m going to be breathing down their necks every minute. And if they so much as spit on the sidewalk I’ll haul them in, lock them up and throw away the key.” Or not. But damned if he was giving her a single reason to suspect he might not be serious.

  “Oh, yeah, like that won’t all but guarantee that they’ll mess up!”

  He shrugged. “Not my problem.”

  “Well, guess what, Detective? I’m making it your problem.” She took a hot step forward. “I was feeling kind of bad about you being dragged away from your work, so I thank you. Your oh-so-sensitive approach to dealing with kids just knocked that clean out of my repertoire of regrets.”

  She got right in his face and he smelled clean skin, felt warm breath fan his chin. “I’ve got a flash for you, de Sanges, I have strings I haven’t even begun to pull. You think the mayor is as high up the food chain as I can go? Think again. So here’s how I say we’re going to work this. You will stay ten—no, make that fifteen—feet away from my kids. The price for you being any closer than that is your willingness to work alongside them. I expect you to be civil. And you can bring your own damn paintbrush, too!” Cheeks flushed, breathing quick and shallow, she stepped back. “Now I’d like you to leave.”

  He stared down at her and the temptation to give in to the de Sanges genes sang through his veins like a sweet narcotic. He knew ways to make her back down—ways that, without issuing an actual threat, would scare the spiral right out of those long, blond curls. All he had to do was lean down and whisper a few succinct sentences in her ear.

  Snapping shut the lips he had opened to do just that, however, he turned and strode to the door. He hadn’t spent all these years rising above his genes just to cave in now. But he stopped with his hand on the doorknob to look back at her, raking his gaze from her chocolate eyes, to her round breasts that pushed against a surprisingly worn-atthe-seams gray hoodie, to the slice of Nordic pale skin showing between the jacket’s hem and the hip-band of its matching drawstring pants, to her sock-clad feet.

  Then he sent it in a reverse journey back up until he was once again looking directly into those startlingly dark eyes.

  She might have won this round, but he had a little news flash of his own. “I’ll stay the requisite fifteen feet from your minithugs or pack my paintbrush. But I’m putting you on notice, Ms. Calloway. This is it. I don’t give a flying…flick who you know. You ever go over my head again or jeopardize my ability to do my job and there will be consequences. Count on it.”

  And seething in places he’d never allow to show, he let himself out the door.

  HEART RACING like an Indy 500 contender, Poppy watched the door softly snick shut behind de Sanges and abruptly buckled at the knees, lowering herself without grace to sit on the hallway floor. Her kneecaps wavering in front of her face, she braced her elbows against them and lowered her head into her hands. “Holy shitskis. Holy, ho-ly shitskis!”

  She couldn’t believe the bluff that had come out of her mouth. As if she called in personal favors from the mayor—and people of even more influence—all the time!

  A sputter of hysterical laughter escaped her. As if, indeed. No, the only one in the Sisterhood with political clout was Ava. Who, it turned out, had talked to her uncle Robert, who played golf with His Honor the Mayor most Wednesdays—and all without so much as a hint to Poppy that she planned to do so. Poppy had been as surprised as de Sanges to hear from the mayor’s office that her proposed project was on after all. And although she’d been thrilled at the thought of having an opportunity to help those three kids, she hadn’t been lying—she had felt kind of guilty about Ava going over the detective’s head for a second time. But only
until he’d opened his mouth and threatened to intimidate the teenagers. That had shot her empathy straight to hell.

  Yet with or without the sympathy factor, she really, really wished she hadn’t touched him.

  Because. Lord. Have. Mercy.

  She didn’t know what it was about him, but she only had to lay eyes on him and she got such a visceral reaction she didn’t know what to do with herself. She hadn’t felt this strongly about Andrew, and she’d had a three-year relationship in college with him. Such an unprecedented response to a guy she didn’t know and didn’t much like the little she did know shook her up. And that pissed her off. Never a stellar combination, which she had proven by promptly getting off on the wrong foot with him the minute she’d opened the door and seen him on the other side.

  She’d thought she was being so clever to treat his arrogant high-handedness over her door chain as if it were a concerned command from her father.

  But it hadn’t been clever at all; it had been stupid. Because she’d looped her arms around his neck and she had damn near whimpered at the heat that pumped off his long, hard frame, at the starch and soap scents she’d smelled emanating from his collar that made her want to bury her nose in his neck. His angular jaw had been bristly beneath her fingertips, making the full cut of his lips look contrastingly soft—until they’d suddenly gone hard with some unnamed determination. Whereupon she’d all but leaped out of range like a scalded cat.

  She hoped he hadn’t noticed, but he didn’t strike her as the type who missed much.

  Her subsequent embarrassment, combined with his unemotional threat against her teens, was undoubtedly what had given her the stones to look him in the eye and lie like a politician.

  But, oh, she was torn about having her proposal suddenly accepted. Half of her was thrilled at this opportunity to reach the three teenagers.

  The other half thought she was freaking nuts to put herself anywhere in de Sanges’s vicinity.

  Oh, no. The latter thought put a firm halt to the low-grade panic she’d been experiencing ever since she’d opened her mouth and started threatening him, and her spine snapped straight. Oh, no, no, no. She was neither weak-willed nor easily pushed around, and the idea that she should be wary of or intimidated by a little one-on-one time spent with the detective put her back up but good.

  For God’s sake, she wasn’t some impressionable fourteen-year-old ruled by her hormones. Yes, he was dark and steely and, okay, the power of attraction she felt was formidable. But she was a big girl, one who was motivated to preserve—and hopefully enhance—the well-being of those kids. And contrary to what de Sanges might believe based on tonight and the first time they’d met, she actually did know how to act professional.

  So he had better just watch his step. Because she was a woman with a mission.

  But one who was going to be very careful never to get within touching range of that man again.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  And I’m supposed to be an artist, with an eye for detail. Some eye. Because the whole Cory-being-a-girl thing—I sure didn’t see that one coming!

  FOURTEEN-and-three-quarters-year-old Cory Capelli pulled her newsboy cap down low, flipped her father’s battered leather jacket collar up and veered away from the group she’d been hanging with on the Ave in the U district. She liked catching up occasionally with other graffiti artists and taggers to hear the latest gossip about who was doing what and listen to everyone one-up each other’s lies. But she did her best work alone.

  It was a policy she should have remembered before she hooked up with Danny G. and Henry Whatshis-name two weeks ago. Danny alone would have been fine. He did some of the best storytelling graffiti around, and Cory considered herself more of an artist than a tagger. She might not style elaborate wall paintings but her tag, CaP, was a work of art in its own right with its fat, two-dimensional, multicolored letters and her trademark cap hanging from the lowercase a. She considered it a world removed from scrawling quick and dirty chicken scratches on bus-stop signs or buildings or messing up someone else’s work. She’d been working on some graphic novel–type illustrations in her sketch pad at home, but she hadn’t worked up the confidence yet to give them a public try. Which was why she’d wanted to team up with Danny G.

  Henry, on the other hand, was one of the chicken scratchers. So when he’d attached himself to their plan to cover a block of buildings together, in a neighborhood they weren’t familiar with, she hadn’t known how to say that didn’t work for her.

  She definitely needed to learn that, whatchamacallit…assertiveness stuff. Because just look where her silence had gotten her. Could you say busted? The three of them were now scheduled to meet some do-gooder tomorrow morning to paint over what they’d done. Whoop-de-do, Cory thought, spotting a nice wall and melting into the space between the dentist’s office hosting it and the jewelry store next door. Like that was how she wanted to spend her Saturday morning.

  Still, it beat getting a record and being sent to juvie, which would just finish the job of Mom’s already broken heart. And Cory got it—she really did—that relatively speaking, she and Danny G. and Henry had lucked out with those people whose buildings they’d tagged. Well, Henry had tagged. He’d managed to scrawl his crap over every workable surface before she or Danny could so much as pull out a can of paint.

  Okay, that wasn’t quite true. They’d both had their cans out when the guy from the store across the street had busted them. Henry might have beaten the two of them to the neighborhood but it wasn’t as if they hadn’t been there to do the same thing he had done—if you discounted the talent factor, since even with their dominant hands tied behind their backs, either one of them would have done a helluva better job.

  But the point was, they’d still lucked out with those store people. Because while the merchants had called in the cops, they’d refused to press charges until they had a chance to discuss among themselves what to do with her and the boys. So this cleanup gig was better than the alternative.

  But not by much.

  And the thought of it was putting a heavy-duty crimp in her night. She was bummed out, it was late, and foot traffic from U-Dub students had dwindled everywhere but around the area’s taverns and clubs. That last part was actually a good thing, since it skewed her odds toward the not-getting-caught end of the spectrum. But it felt isolated and lonely and rain clouds were starting to blow across the moon-free sky. In the little bit of light that managed to penetrate between the buildings from the corner streetlamp, she found herself gazing listlessly at the expanse of smooth buttercream paint in front of her.

  Giving herself a mental shake, she then shook her aerosol can of Patriot Blue, absorbing the comforting sound of the bead rattling around inside. By rights she oughtta be all pumped up at finding a virgin wall like this one.

  Only…

  She had zero vision in her head as far as putting a fresh spin on her tag went. Usually she had all kinds of ideas. But she was tired of just doing the same letters over and over again, and she couldn’t drum up a lick of enthusiasm for the project, no matter how rare it was to find a clean wall.

  So she might as well go home. In light of the way she’d be spending her Saturday tomorrow, it was pretty dumb to be out here pushing her luck in the first place. Plus Mom would be getting off work in about an hour and she’d freak if she knew Cory was out this late.

  The knee-jerk guilt was immediate, but so was the defiance she pushed it away with. Hey, it wasn’t as if she didn’t stay in like a good little Girl Scout dang near every weeknight. She even studied so that she wouldn’t have to see the sad look she’d put on Mom’s face last spring by bringing home a truly in-the-toilet-type report card.

  But the weekends were a different matter. They just seemed to stretch without end, what with Mom working two jobs and the fact that they’d only moved here from Philly a couple of months ago. Midyear changes at school sucked—she’d like to see anyone, except maybe one of those so-perky-you-wanted-to-smack
-’em cheerleader types, make instant friends. And a girl had to have some fun.

  There’d sure been precious little of that since Daddy was killed.

  Grief, hard and sharp, sliced through her defenses, and she doubled over, her arms wrapped around her middle. But this wasn’t the place to give in to it and she pulled herself upright. Still, she had to get out of here.

  She was slipping out from between the two buildings when she heard glass breaking, so close it made her jump. There was a shout from within the store next door. Then the report of a gunshot. It was a sound that defined her nightmares and she froze in the deep shadow of the dentist’s office doorway, cold sweat trickling down her sides.

  A strident alarm started whooping and she made herself move, shimmying up the rough brick that formed a facade at the front of the building. It seemed like an eon but was probably only a few moments before she hooked her elbows over the edge of the one-story office’s cantilevered roof and swung herself over its lip. She lay there on her back for a moment, panting and struggling to slow her heartbeat. Then she slowly rolled onto her stomach and pulled herself by her elbows to the back edge nearest the north-side jewelry store, knowing she should have simply beat feet while the beating was good, but sucked into a bad decision once again by her damn impulsiveness and never-ending curiosity.

  From her vantage point she watched kids pour out of the shop’s back door and realized the stories she’d thought a couple of taggers had been making up must be true: there was a youth gang robbing city jewelry stores. Given that most of the kids looked young even to her, she couldn’t imagine they’d come up with the idea on their own.

  The thought had no sooner flitted across her mind than a man stepped out behind them, shoving both a gun and what looked like a black hood in the waistband of his slacks. He paused beneath the dim light that shone over the door, but with the brim of his porkpie hat throwing his face in shadow she couldn’t make out his features. And that was just fine with Cory, since the most painful lesson she’d learned in her life was that the wrong kind of knowledge could kill you.