Unspeakable

by Elisabeth Naughton

  She slowed and pulled to a stop in the roundabout that faced South Waterfront Park. A hotel stood to their left above a closed steakhouse. At this hour, the street was deserted, and the lights from the Marquam Bridge illuminated the empty, damp sidewalks and the fancy yachts docked at the Riverplace Marina.

  Rusty tugged the tissues away from his head and examined the bloodstain in the streetlights.

  “How is it?” Harper asked.

  “Fine.” He pressed the tissues back against the corner of his forehead and glanced her way. “Guess we have matching injuries now. How’s your head?”

  She brushed the hair to the side of her forehead, pulling the locks away from the small red wound that had already healed quite a bit since the other night and was virtually hidden behind her bangs. “Better. You weren’t kidding when you said you knew what you were doing with a needle and threa—”

  Car lights shone in Harper’s window, then moved behind her car as the vehicle slowed to a stop.

  Reaching for the door handle, Harper said, “There he is. Right on time.”

  Rusty still wasn’t sure what kind of “help” she’d called, and considering her connections with the police, he was more than a little concerned it might be one of those detectives who’d wanted to arrest him earlier in the week.

  He watched through the rearview mirror as a man with dark hair dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt climbed out of the blue sedan. The man stopped at the hood of his car and perched his hands on his hips as Harper met him behind her car and spoke to him in a mumbled voice Rusty couldn’t quite make out. Rusty didn’t recognize the guy, and Harper didn’t seem at all wary, so Rusty popped his side door open and climbed out.

  The man’s gaze flicked Rusty’s way, then his eyes widened and he looked back at Harper. “Shit. You’re working with him? After everything I told you? Are you insane?”

  Rusty’s back tightened as he shoved the bloody tissues into his pocket.

  “Relax,” Harper said. “I’ve got it handled.”

  The man glanced down at her evening gown, muddy and ripped around the bottom hem as she stood on the sidewalk in scuffed tennis shoes. “I’m starting to wonder just what that means. And how you’ve got it handled.”

  Whoa. That got Rusty’s attention. He moved toward the back of the car. “Excuse me? Who are you?”

  The man shot him a perturbed look. “Brett Callahan. Detective Brett Callahan.”

  Rusty recognized that name. He just didn’t know from where. He came to a stop next to Harper, just in case this guy tried anything.

  “I happen to be a friend of O’Donnell’s.” He looked back at Harper. “And you know better than to be anywhere alone with this guy. There’s an open investigation going on.”

  Regardless of what this guy was saying, Rusty didn’t like the tone in which he was saying it to Harper. He stepped forward. “Why don’t you dial it down a no—”

  Harper pressed a hand on his chest, stopping him from getting right in Callahan’s face. “Calm down.” She gazed up at him with a let-me-handle-this face. Then turning toward Callahan, she said, “I found Melony Strauss. She’s alive and well and staying with her father. McClane here didn’t have anything to do with her disappearance.”

  Callahan turned a skeptical look Rusty’s way, then looked back at Harper. “It doesn’t change any of what I told you before.”

  “I know that,” Harper said. “But that’s not why I called you. I called you because I need help with what’s in the back of my car.”

  Callahan’s lips thinned, and then he stepped around Rusty and moved to the passenger side of Harper’s vehicle to peer into the back window. “Shit,” he muttered. “That’s Megan Christianson.”

  “You know her?” Harper asked, looking after him.

  Callahan shook his head and moved back to stand on Rusty’s other side. “She went missing up in Seattle about three weeks ago. Was ruled a runaway. And you found her tonight?”

  Harper nodded.

  “Where?” Callahan asked.

  Harper glanced up at Rusty, then at Callahan. “I’m not sure you really want to know. All things considered.” When he only shot her a blank look, she added, “At a party. A ritzy one downtown.”

  “Let me guess. A party the Plague was using as a cover.”

  “Are you working a case against the Plague?”

  “No, but I don’t need to be working a specific case to know what they’re up to. Everyone in the division knows about the Plague, but it’s not talked about because we don’t have any leads to bring them down.” He flicked a look Rusty’s way. “Up until Robin Hood showed up on the scene, they’ve been operating two steps ahead of us. Which means—”

  “Which means someone on the inside is feeding them information,” Harper finished for him. “Damn. I hadn’t considered that.”

  “Yeah.” Callahan’s lips thinned as he glanced once more at Rusty. “Which is why you having any connection whatsoever to anyone they think might be Robin Hood is not going to end well for you.”

  Rusty’s chest tightened. If what Callahan was saying was true, then the cops already suspected his alias. And if a few of them were dirty, then the Plague suspected as well.

  He looked down at Harper, realizing he was putting her in danger just by being near her.

  “I’m not worried about me,” Harper said. “I’m worried about girls like this. Can you help us out with her?”

  “Yeah.” Callahan glanced toward the back window of Harper’s car, where the girl was still sound asleep. “Let’s get her moved to my car.”

  It took all three of them to get her out, then Rusty and Callahan carried her to Callahan’s back seat and laid her down. The girl didn’t even move a muscle. Grabbing a blanket from her trunk, Harper tossed it over her, then stepped back as Callahan closed the door.

  “Are you going to take her downtown and file a report about this?” she asked.

  “No. I’ve got her parents’ address. I’ll drive her up to Seattle myself tonight. I don’t want anyone realizing she was found.”

  Which meant he didn’t want anyone at the station to know he’d had anything to do with her discovery.

  Harper crossed her arms over her chest and shivered in the cool night air. “I appreciate this, Brett.”

  “Yeah, I know you do.” He moved around his car to the driver-side door and flicked one last look at Rusty. “Just do me a favor. Go home and try to stay out of trouble. I’ll try to cover for you as much as I can. Just remember what I told you before.”

  “I will. Thanks.”

  He climbed into his car, started the ignition, and slowly pulled away from the curb. And as they watched him go, a sinking feeling of guilt Rusty didn’t like slid through him.

  Harper turned and looked up at him. “Dang. You’re bleeding again. Where are those tissues?”

  Swiping his fingers over the oozing wound, Rusty glanced at the blood on his hand, then wiped it on his pant leg. “It’s fine.”

  “It’s not fine.” She stepped off the curb and moved for her car. “Get in. You need that taken care of.”

  “You should go home like your friend said. I can find my way back on my own.”

  “What?” She stopped with one hand on her open door and looked over the car at him. “I’m not leaving you down here like that. Get in.”

  “Blake—”

  “Harper,” she corrected, staring at him with a get-over-it expression that was so damn alluring it was all he could do not to walk around and kiss it from her face.

  And damn but he liked the way her first name sounded. Wanted to say it. When he was kissing her. Or touching her. Or taking her.

  He sighed, pushing that thought out of his head because it was never going to happen. “Look, I appreciate the help tonight, but Callahan’s right. I’m not someone you should be around.”

  “Get in the car, McClane. I’m still armed, and I’m not in the mood to repeat myself.”

  She slid behind the wheel and
pulled her door shut with a snap. As he stood there staring after her, he frowned at her bossiness. Then that frown turned to a curl of his lips he couldn’t stop because he liked that bossiness way more than he knew he should.

  He made his way to the passenger side, opened the front door, and climbed in. She didn’t look at him as she pulled away from the curb, but as soon as she turned he knew they weren’t heading back downtown where he’d left a rental vehicle in a parking garage several blocks from the party.

  He sat in silence as she drove, then finally said, “So are you going to tell me what that was all about back there?”

  “It was about the girl.”

  He frowned. “Not that. Whatever Callahan told you about me before. That thing he kept reminding you of.”

  “Oh. That.” Her jaw tensed. “When your name turned up in connection with the Strauss disappearance, the department received some . . . pressure from the city to connect you to the case.”

  “Pressure from whom?”

  “The mayor.”

  Rusty’s mind spun. “I don’t know the mayor.” In fact, he couldn’t remember who the mayor of Portland even was.

  “Not a surprise.” She made a turn. “But the mayor knows you. Or your family, I should say. Miriam Kasdan was a huge donor to his political campaign.”

  “Holy shit.” His eyes widened when he realized where she was leading him.

  “Yep. Your brother was responsible for her incarceration and the end of those donations. Which means the mayor isn’t particularly thrilled with anyone with the McClane last name.”

  Rusty rested his elbow on the windowsill and rubbed a hand over his dusty hair. This was definitely not good news. It didn’t matter that Melony Strauss was alive and well. If what Harper said was true, the police were still going to be looking for any connection they could make between him and any of the other missing girls. Even if they thought the Plague might actually be responsible.

  “They’re not going to tie you to anything.” She glanced his way, the dashboard lights illuminating her features in the dark. “So don’t worry.”

  “If they think I’m Robin Hood, then the Plague likely does as well.” He met her gaze head-on. “You’re putting yourself at risk not just with them but also with the police now. I don’t want them to connect you to anything I’ve done.”

  “They won’t.” She pulled into the drive of a cute little English Tudor set back from the road in the Hillside neighborhood of Northeast Portland and killed the engine. “Besides. I like to live dangerously.”

  “Harper—”

  She climbed out of the car before he could try to talk some sense into her and slammed the door.

  Sighing, he got out as well and looked at her over the hood of the car. “I didn’t ask you to get involved in this.”

  “Nope. But I am. Stop complaining and come on.”

  She grabbed her duffel bag from the trunk and headed up the front walk to the arched, covered entryway. Flipping the keys around, she found the right one, slid it into the lock, and pushed the old red door open.

  He stepped into the house after her and looked around. Three archways led to different rooms on each side of him. One opened to a living room with a big white wood-burning fireplace and plush white furnishings. One to a narrow hallway that led to the back of the house and a set of stairs that went up. And the last to a formal dining room with an antique wooden table and six upholstered chairs.

  She turned on the overhead light, closed the door at his back, and flipped the lock. Kicking off her sneakers in the entryway, she motioned with her hand for him to follow. “This way. I have bandages in the kitchen.”

  The hallway ended in a long galley kitchen in the back that had red tile counters and a breakfast nook with a round white table and four wooden chairs. French doors looked out onto a wooded darkness, and to the left, he spotted a kitchen desk and a laundry room.

  She pulled out a chair at the table, turned it to face the kitchen, and said, “Sit.”

  He did as she said, eyeing her bare feet on the old wood floor, her pink-painted toenails catching the light as she moved, and the muddy edge of her dress dragging behind her. “I should have taken my shoes off out fro—”

  “You’re fine.” She tugged a cabinet open and pushed to her toes for a box of bandages and a bottle of alcohol.

  Feeling out of place and unsure why she’d brought him to her house when she could have just cut him free after they met with Callahan, he searched for something to fill the silence. “This is a nice place.”

  “Thanks. It was my parents’.”

  “Did they downsize?” As he watched the muscles in her shoulders flex while she found the supplies she needed, it occurred to him he knew virtually nothing about her. Nothing except the taste of her wicked lips and how curvy she was beneath that sinful dress.

  “No. They left it to me in the will.”

  Shit.

  She turned toward him. “Take that ripped jacket off.”

  Feeling like a heel, he shrugged out of the jacket and folded it over the back of the chair. She stepped up next to him and brushed the hair back from his forehead. “This might sting.”

  She ran a cold cotton ball over his cut, and he sucked in a breath.

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s fine.” She smelled like tangerines. That was the scent he hadn’t been able to identify before, he realized as she blew gently over the spot, then rubbed the cotton ball against his wound again. Tangerines and honey and vanilla. A dangerous combination.

  “Sorry about your parents.”

  “You don’t need to be. You weren’t responsible.”

  He chanced a look up and saw that she was intently focused on cleaning his wound. And though he knew it was probably a sore subject he should steer clear of, he wanted to know more about her. Wanted to know what made her the tough-as-nails investigator who’d stared him down during their first meeting. “How did they die?”

  Her eyes narrowed on his forehead. “My mom passed away when I was a kid. Cancer. My dad”—she blew against his wound again, her warm breath sending a shiver of awareness down his spine—“was killed almost two years ago in the line of duty.”

  “Your father was a cop?”

  “Deputy chief of police.”

  Even worse. “What happened?”

  She dropped the bloody cotton ball on the counter at her side and looked at the wound from different angles. “He was on patrol with a rookie. Observing. They got a call about a domestic abuse situation. Went to check it out. The guy inside the house pulled a gun and shot him through the window as he was approaching the front door.”

  “Jesus.”

  She shrugged and reached back to the counter. “It happens.”

  “Shouldn’t happen, though,” he said softly, watching her carefully.

  “No, but it does. He knew the risks of the job. We all did. I don’t think this needs stitches. It’s not that deep. A couple Steri-Strips should do the trick.”

  He nodded, and she went to work applying the tape to hold the skin together, then covered it with a bandage. “There. You’ll be good as new in a couple days.”

  She turned, grabbed the wrappers from the bandages, and moved to toss them in the garbage under the sink. And watching her carefully, he realized she was acting standoffish all of a sudden. Nervous. Not at all how she’d been acting when they’d met with Callahan or on the drive over here.

  “Are you okay, Harper?”

  “Me? I’m fine. I told you. It was a long time ago.”

  Two years wasn’t that long, but that wasn’t what he was talking about. “I meant right now. After everything that happened tonight.”

  She froze with one hand on the edge of the sink, and even though she was facing away from him, toward the window, he didn’t miss the blush that rose in her cheeks. A blush that told him she was remembering everything that had happened between them at the club.

  “Tonight? Sure. I’m fine.” Not looking at hi
m, she stepped close once more, grabbed the extra bandages from the counter, and stuffed them back in the box. “It was all just an act.”

  Bullshit. Her hands were shaking as she hastily tried to close that box.

  She replaced the box in the cupboard, then dropped to her heels. “If you’re hungry, I could—”

  He grasped her by the hand before she could get another step away and gently tugged. She landed on his lap with a grunt.

  Her hand pressed against his chest, but he didn’t let her lean back. He wrapped his arm around her, pulling her closer against him.

  “What are you doing, McClane?”

  “Rusty,” he corrected, liking that she was so damn nervous. He was nervous too, but not for the same reason. “And as for what I’m doing? Something I probably shouldn’t.”

  He pressed his mouth to hers and kissed her. And the second her mouth opened in a cute little O of surprise, he ignored every instinct telling him this was a bad idea and dove in to taste her all over again.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Harper sucked in a breath the second Rusty kissed her, unsure of what she should do. Had she brought him here because she’d wanted this to happen? Yes. But it still wasn’t smart. It still wouldn’t help her in the long run. But damn, the man tasted good—like heat and life and heaven all rolled into one. And he knew just how to kiss to make a woman’s knees turn to complete jelly.

  She groaned and opened to his kiss, unable to hold back. And then she was glad she was sitting on his lap and that he was holding her up because he kissed her deeper and all but rocked the world right out from under her.

  When she was breathless, when she could hardly see straight, he drew back, nipped at her bottom lip, and grinned down at her. “I think I really need to know what’s under this dress and why it keeps pressing into me.”

  She couldn’t stop herself. She laughed, wrapped her arm around his back, and dropped her forehead against his shoulder. “It’s my weapon. There are no surprises under this dress. At least not that kind.”

  “Thank God. I really wasn’t in the mood for The Crying Game.”

  She leaned back slightly, glad he was still holding her up, pushed the skirt of her dress over, and unhooked the holster from her thigh. Pulling it out from under her, she set her weapon on the counter at her side. “Better?”