“I see.” Her shoulders drew back slightly, as if in reaction to some kind of realization that she was on her own. It didn’t seem to be an unfamiliar state of affairs. “Well, nothing happened. Fortunately for me. I suppose it doesn’t make any difference to you whether anything happened or not.” There wasn’t an ounce of self-pity in her tone; she was just stating the facts. “Excuse me.”
She whipped to her feet, every hair in her twist staying right where it was. She was a woman, Joe thought, who kept her emotions under tight rein. She was upset that he’d left her on her own. Only she’d never admit it, maybe not even to herself.
“You knew where to find me,” Joe said quietly. “You could have called.”
Her answer was a haughty toss of the head, about as phony as the uppity tone, as she marched toward the door.
He leaned back against the bar, noting what a slim behind she had. Hardly any hips at all. Nice legs. Probably would bug the hell out of her if she knew he was giving her the once-over. She’d tell him he was a worm and probably he’d have to agree.
“Rowena,” he said, keeping his voice calm, no hint of the downright primitive urges he was fighting. “What does Tyhurst want to hire you to do?”
She pretended not to hear him and in two seconds flat was out the door.
Joe swore under his breath.
Mario appeared behind the bar. “Go after her, give yourself something to do and get out of my hair at the same time.”
‘‘She’s trouble, Mario.”
His cousin grinned. “Yeah. Way I look at it, you need some real trouble so you’ll quit dwelling on trouble that’s over and done with.”
“Getting philosophical in your old age?”
“Out.”
Joe took his advice, or followed his orders, or maybe just did what he’d have done anyway. He only knew that he was heading across the bar, through the door, and then standing in the heavy fog and persistent drizzle. He looked up the street and down, toward the waterfront.
If he were a recluse, where would he go?
Simple. Home.
* * *
Rowena got as far as an ancient drugstore on the corner before she had to stop and pull herself together. She was shaking, close to hyperventilating. She couldn’t see straight. Her head was spinning. She knew she’d been putting in too many hours at her computer, poring over financial newsletters and periodicals, reading every line of the Wall Street Journal. Trying to get her life back under control.
Trying to exorcise Joe Scarlatti from her mind.
Trying not to think about her reckless plan to meet with Eliot Tyhurst again tomorrow morning.
She removed her earrings and clutched them so hard they pricked her palm. Even before Aunt Adelaide’s death, she had felt alone in the world. She had learned to rely on herself. Trust herself. Now she wondered if she had just been fooling herself. Maybe she couldn’t handle the real world. Couldn’t survive on her own.
But you always have.
No. She had survived by cutting herself off from the so-called real world. She had isolated herself—maybe not as much as Joe Scarlatti thought, but more than other people did. Other normal people.
Backing out of the way of a customer going into the drugstore, she leaned against the dirty plate-glass window and felt the fog swirling all around her. She could smell the salt in the air. Exhaust fumes. She could hear the distant clanging of streetcars and the roar of a faulty engine of a passing delivery truck. She was out of her element. This was Joe Scarlatti’s world, not hers.
My world is just as real as his. I have friends...
It was true. She did have friends. She did have a life. She went to movies and restaurants and took walks in the park. She was just careful about when and with whom, and about how often. Yet ever since Joe Scarlatti had penetrated her existence, she had felt more isolated and alone—as if she’d been missing out on something deep, worthwhile, necessary to her being, something her friends and clients and work couldn’t provide.
Had she been missing, simply, him?
She shut her eyes and concentrated on her breathing. One breath at a time. In through the mouth, expand the diaphragm, keep the chest still, fill the lower lungs, then the upper lungs. Slowly, methodically. Exhale through the mouth to the count of ten.
One... two... three...four...
“Don’t tell me you do yoga, too.”
Her eyes popped open.
Joe scowled at her. “I could have knocked you on the head and made off with your purse.”
“I’m not carrying a purse.”
“Okay. I could have knocked you on the head and made off with you.”
She managed to tell him, “I’m capable of taking care of myself.”
“Never said you weren’t. It’s just that doing yoga breathing in public in this neighborhood—which I know and you don’t—can lead to trouble.”
“Stumbling around out of control would lead me into deeper trouble, I would think.”
His dark eyes narrowed on her, and she immediately realized her mistake. “Why were you out of control?”
She should have risked stumbling home. She never should have stopped. “I didn’t say I was.”
Scarlatti looked dubious, but said nothing. His presence was making it even more difficult for her to pull herself together. His hard body, his too-knowing eyes, the mist collecting on his dark hair. He was too real.
“It seems to me, Sergeant—”
“Joe,” he corrected, again.
“It seems to me you can say anything you want to me no matter how probing or insulting but I can say nothing to you.”
He tilted back on his heels, studying her through half-closed eyes. What he was thinking, seeing, Rowena couldn’t guess, didn’t want to guess. Finally he said, “Point to the blonde.”
“I’m more than just the color of my hair.” Why, she wondered, was she being so testy?
“Okay, point to the eccentric genius of Telegraph Hill.”
She didn’t like that any better. She was a human being. A woman. “Don’t inflict your stereotypes on me.”
“And you haven’t judged me based on your stereotypes of a burnt-out cop?” he asked calmly.
She sighed. “You try a person’s patience, Joe Scarlatti.”
“Talk to my captain,” he said, grinning. “Look, let’s go back to Mario’s and start over. We’ll both be nice. We can talk upstairs.”
“What’s upstairs?”
“My place.”
He walked fast down the block, but Rowena, with her long legs, had no trouble keeping up. And her breathing exercises had helped. Or was it just Joe Scarlatti’s presence—his coming after her—that had her back in sync?
Scarlatti unlocked a side entrance and led her up a flight of uncarpeted stairs badly in need of a good sweeping. Rowena, who had help with the cleaning, made no comment—not that if their positions were reversed and her stairs needed sweeping would Joe Scarlatti resist. He seemed to have absolutely no verbal-impulse control.
At the top of the stairs he unlocked another door, which he pushed open and motioned for Rowena to enter.
She stood on the threshold in wonder.
Henceforth, she thought, he would have nothing to say about how she lived.
His apartment consisted of a small living room, a galley kitchen, a small bedroom and a minuscule bathroom, all within view of the front entrance. The appliances were decades old, the furnishings spare and unremarkable, a plant dying in a window. Things were fairly tidy, though. The bed was made, the dishes were done, a tattered afghan was smoothed across the back of the couch instead of in a heap. On the other hand, an overturned orange crate, which served as a coffee table, was strewn with dog-eared paperback books, and the morning newspaper was plopped on the floor beside a scarred oak captain’s chair.
“All in all,” Rowena said, “I guess you don’t have to worry about anything falling down on top of you in an earthquake. Everything’s pretty much already down.”
“Only if it were the whole damn building,” Joe said, walking past her into the living room. “Mario says it can take eight on the Richter scale, but I think he was lucky the place didn’t come down in the quake of 1990.”
“Aunt Adelaide was alive then. She was terrified. She remembered the 1906 earthquake, too. The fires, the deaths. She was only a child.”
“As my grandmother would say, life isn’t for the fainthearted. I’d like to hear more about this Aunt Adelaide. You want something to drink?”
Rowena noticed the empty beer bottles lined up on the kitchen counter. There had to be a dozen. “Anything nonalcoholic. And I’m not sure I want to talk about my aunt. She did her best, but she wasn’t cut out to raise a child. She was agoraphobic.”
“Never left the house?”
“Almost never.”
“Must have been a hell of an upbringing.”
“It had its moments.”
He glanced over his shoulder at her, squinted a moment as if trying to decide if she was patronizing him, but said nothing as he went into the kitchen. She remained standing in the middle of the living room, watching him pull open the old refrigerator. The door, she saw with surprise, was covered with a variety of magnets: fish, butterflies, dolphins, birds, Betty Grable in a swimsuit.
“Iced tea okay?” he asked.
“Is it herbal?”
He pulled his head out of the refrigerator and looked at her.
“A glass of water would be fine,” she said. “I don’t drink caffeine.”
Without comment, he got out an old orange juice bottle he kept filled with water and poured a glass while Rowena remained standing, glancing around the very lived-in yet simple apartment.
Her eyes fell on a framed picture on an end table. It featured two grinning young men in San Francisco police uniforms. Both were in their early twenties. One was Asian-American. The other was Joe Scarlatti. They looked ready to take on the world.
He materialized beside her with her glass of water. She tore her gaze from the photograph, but it was too late: Joe had followed her eyes. His mouth was a grim line. Rowena sipped her water and said quietly, “That’s Matt Lee, isn’t it?”
Joe sighed, his dark eyes fixed on the photograph, his emotions hidden, buried, under rigid control. “Matt and I went through the academy together. I was married to his sister for a couple years way back when; it didn’t work out. A husband and a brother who were cops—it was too much. Just as well considering what happened.”
“The internal investigation of his death found you were not at fault,” Rowena said softly.
“Legally, technically—no, I wasn’t at fault. Morally...” He twisted open the beer he had brought with him, took a swallow. She noticed a slight tremble to his hand; otherwise there was no visible indication of the pain he must be feeling. “We were after a couple of drug dealers, real heavies. Matt was so sure they’d left town. The warehouse where they’d set up shop was empty— he was just so sure. My instincts told me he was wrong. I should have acted on them, made him listen.”
“He made the decision to go into the warehouse the way he did. It was his mistake, not yours.”
“We were partners. His mistakes were my mistakes. If Matt was reckless, so was I.”
Rowena drank more of her water, feeling awkward, out of her element. But it wasn’t just being away from home. Even if they’d been in her drawing room, Joe would make her feel self-conscious, intensely aware of herself. The personal agony he was trying so desperately to conceal from her stirred her emotions all the more.
“I didn’t mean to get off on this subject,” he said briskly, motioning toward the couch. She admired his control and resented it at the same time, wishing he could articulate his pain to her. “Have a seat, tell me about Tyhurst.”
She chose the captain’s chair instead.
Joe leaned over her so suddenly it almost took her breath away. “Don’t want to risk getting too close, huh?”
“Sergeant—”
He held up his hand, stopping her. “Don’t start. Just sit where you’re comfortable and talk.”
She watched him plop down on the couch, its tan plaid cover badly in need of replacement. His jeans stretched taut over the well developed muscles in his thighs. No fat fell over his belt buckle. She decided not to push him about his partner’s death. She said, “First I need to know if you’re still on my case.”
His eyes shot up and bored through her with a heat that was primitive and very physical. Rowena felt her mouth go dry, felt the awareness rocket through her.
“Yeah,” he said thickly, “I’m still on your case.”
“You’ve kept an eye on my place?” She wished the heat would dissipate; instead, it just surged into her breasts, and lower, impossible to ignore.
“On and off. I missed Tyhurst’s visit.” He didn’t seem too pleased about that. “If anything had happened—”
“It wouldn’t have been your fault, it would have been Eliot Tyhurst’s. And mine. I made the decision to let him into my house. I based that decision on the absence of any violence in his transgressions. He’s a white-collar criminal, a thief. He never physically assaulted anyone.” At the intense look in his eyes, Rowena felt a rush of panic. She pressed her water glass to her lips, tilted it back, sucked in the last few drops. She was burning up.
“Something wrong?” Joe asked.
“No, nothing.” But he knew, she could tell he knew. “I just was thirstier than I’d thought. I’m fine now. As I was saying, I take responsibility for my own actions and decisions. You can’t control everything in your world, Sergeant Scarlatti. You can’t make everything turn out right.”
“Chaos reigns outside the castle, huh?”
She let his jibe at her house go. “Often inside the castle, too.”
“What about Tyhurst?”
Getting a grip on herself, Rowena crossed her ankles and tucked them to one side the way Aunt Adelaide had taught her “proper ladies” sat. She made herself meet Scarlatti’s gaze. His eyes were as dark as any she’d ever seen. What did they see? She felt raw and exposed, totally open to his penetration.
“I want to hire you,” she said, hearing the hoarseness—the heavy desire—in her voice. “I want to pay you for your work on my behalf. I would feel better about it if I did.”
Joe shook his head without hesitation. “I wouldn’t.”
“But—”
“No deal. I’m not a licensed private investigator. I’m still a member of the San Francisco police department—I can’t take clients. Let’s just keep this arrangement unofficial.”
She frowned. “That leaves me with little control over you.”
Again his gaze probed and seared and thoroughly aroused her. Was it deliberate? Did he know what he was doing to her? Or was it just her, her reaction to him?
“You hold that thought,” he told her finally.
His voice was quiet and determined, as if he knew he had her close to melting. Before his words had fully registered, she was on her feet, striding toward the kitchen. She set her glass in the sink, wishing she could splash her face with cold water. But that would be too obvious.
Joe was behind her.
“I’m sure we’re overstating Tyhurst’s threat,” she said crisply. “He’s not out for revenge. He just wants my brain. That—that’s what everyone wants from me.”
“I don’t.”
He put his hands on her waist, his touch more gentle than she ever would have imagined possible for a man so hotheaded, so shaped by a violent world.
“Rowena.”
She could feel his breath on the back of her neck; she didn’t know what to do.
He said again, “Rowena,” and she turned, sandwiched between his hard, taut body and the cold counter. She raised her eyes with a look of challenge, but she saw that she was too late, he had already seen, felt, sensed the longing that had her head spinning, her body aching. Now there’d be no denying it.
With one
finger she touched the uncompromising line of his jaw. For her it was a bold move.
“Rowena.”
It was a hoarse whisper this time, and he caught her hand up in his, placed it on his abdomen; she could feel the iron wall of muscle. She let her fingertips drift downward, over his hips, down to the hardness of his thigh. Suddenly she wanted to probe farther, to feel every inch of this mesmerizing man, but she kept her hand where it was.
He traced the outline of her lips with his thumb. “Say my name, Rowena.”
Her mouth was too dry, her throat too tight from the impact of that brief touch, his closeness.
“Say it.”
It wasn’t an order but a plea. She started to lick her lips but touched the callused skin of his thumb instead; she almost sank to her knees. She closed her eyes and whispered, “Joe.”
His mouth came down onto hers, hot, hungry, determined, his tongue outlining her lips just the way his thumb had. She heard herself moan, felt herself falling back against the counter. He pressed himself into her. Her hand was still between them and dropped lower, brushing against the hardness between his legs.
His tongue plunged deeper into her mouth, its rhythm as primitive as the heat that surged through her.
She felt bold and sexy, wanted.
He lifted her sweatshirt, his hands cool against her overheated skin, his tongue still probing, thrusting. His palms coursed up her sides and without warning covered her breasts that strained against the flimsy bra, the nipples as hard as stones. Her knees went weak.
“Do you want me to stop?” he asked, his breathing labored, tortured.
“No!”
It was out before common sense could intrude.
He raised her sweatshirt to her shoulders and gazed at her breasts and flat stomach. “You’re so beautiful,” he murmured, fumbling at the front clasp of her bra and freeing her breasts. She could feel the cool air and the searing heat of his gaze, and then the aching wetness of his tongue, the erotic pleasure of his teeth. She groaned wildly and pushed her hand against his hardness, stroking, telling him as words couldn’t that she wanted more of him, all of him, that she was desperate to return the pleasure he was giving her.
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