Nothing could stop them.
Absolutely nothing.
He lifted the sweatshirt over her head. She shook her arms and let her bra drop to the floor. Her clingy leggings seemed like no cover at all. She realized that her breathing was ragged, strands of hair had loosened from their pins and combs.
He tore off his shirt, unsnapped his jeans.
“I’ve never...” He couldn’t finish, but swept her into his arms, her breasts responding at once to the feel of his warm skin against them, the prickly feel of his chest hairs, the thrill of their near nakedness. She could feel herself tremble with desire. She had never felt such abandon.
He kissed her, languidly, erotically, his fingers slipping her leggings and underpants down over her hips, lower, cupping the smooth skin of her bottom. Her senses were overpowered. For a wild, panicked moment she thought she would short-circuit, go catatonic, die before she had experienced the wild, thrilling passion of this man.
But he said her name, whispered it gently, and she came back, her eyes meeting his as his fingertips reached the throbbing center between her legs. “I want you, Rowena.”
“We need... I need ...” She almost laughed. “I can hardly talk.”
“It’s okay. We don’t need to talk.”
“But I... it’s been ... I’ve never...”
“What?”
“I never thought... I never thought I’d lose my virginity in a cop’s kitchen.”
His hand went rigid and stopped. His eyes darkened.
She released him and bit her lip. “It’s not a disease, you know. I assumed you—you didn’t guess?”
“No. I didn’t guess.”
Up went her underpants, up went her leggings. He scooped up her bra and sweatshirt and thrust them against her exposed breasts. He zipped up his jeans, snapped them and grabbed his shirt.
“Joe, it’s all right. I’m more than ready—”
“It’s not all right. I’m sorry. I—” He raked a hand through his hair. “Get dressed.”
He took his shirt into the bedroom and shut the door.
Rowena got dressed.
Using a scratch pad and stubby pencil by the wall phone in the kitchen, she scrawled him a note in a shaky hand: Tyhurst is meeting me at my house at eleven o’clock tomorrow morning. What you do is your choice. You can always hide in Aunt Adelaide’s suit of armor. R
She wondered if he would get the underlying meaning of her note. Because he hadn’t rejected her. She knew that. He had exercised supreme control in an act of nobility she found frustrating but endearing—one didn’t make love to a virgin on the kitchen floor.
Her knight in shining armor.
She didn’t say goodbye when she left, and his bedroom door remained shut.
Seven
Joe rolled out of bed, literally, the next morning with the worst hangover he’d had in months. He lay on his back on the prickly wool rug. Hank’s wife had given it to him because she thought his life was so damn pitiful.
She was right.
He placed his palms on his ears and waited for the world to stop spinning. Blood pounded behind his eyes. Maybe I’ll just lie here, he thought, until someone takes me out on a stretcher.
He could hear footsteps pounding up his stairs. “Joe? Joe, you up?” his cousin Mario yelled.
Then there was a pounding on his door. And a worse pounding in his head.
Joe groaned. “Arghh.”
“That you, Joe?”
“Leave me alone, you sadist.”
His head threatened to burst. He squeezed it tighter between his palms.
Mario banged on his door once more. “You dead or what?”
Just wishing he were. He rolled onto his stomach and tried to get up on all fours, felt a wave of nausea and flopped back down like a dying salmon.
“Ah, hell,” Mario grumbled, and Joe could hear the rattle of keys, the turning of the lock, the creaking of the door, Mario’s heavy footsteps across his living room. He appeared in the bedroom doorway. “Nah, you aren’t dead—you’re still twitching.”
“Funny, Mario.”
“What you need is a little hair of the dog.”
Joe had learned the hard way that Mario used “hair of the dog” to mean anything from an experimental drink to drain cleaner. In this case, it probably meant one of his hangover milkshakes. He put tofu, yogurt, fruit and honey together in a blender with a lot of ice, poured the contents into a tall glass and made his victim drink up in his presence.
They were a huge incentive to stay sober.
“Go away.”
“Nope. Last night while you were tying one on, you told me to come drag your miserable carcass out of bed if you didn’t come down by ten in the a.m. I gave you until 10:02.”
Ten o’clock in the morning. What the hell did Joe have to do at ten? He was on leave of absence. He didn’t have to go into the station.
“You want a swift kick or ice water?”
Joe made his entire body relax and lay still. His head pulsed. His stomach churned. A kick or ice water—would he feel either one?
Mario sighed, impatient. “Why don’t I just drag you to the window and toss you out on the street by your heels?”
“Fine with me.”
“Well, it’s 10:10 and whatever you’ve got going you’re going to miss if you don’t drag your miserable butt up off the floor and get moving.” Mario made a sound of unadulterated disgust. “What Rowena Willow sees in you I don’t know. Saw her flying out of here yesterday afternoon. That why you’re such a pitiful hunk of flesh this morning?”
Rowena...
Yesterday afternoon. In the kitchen. Soft, pink-tipped breasts. Milky skin. Wide, passion-filled blue eyes. Moans of wanting, hands of unbelievable temptation and sweet torture.
Joe bolted up onto his knees. The blood drained out of his head too fast and for a second he thought he’d pass out, which would no doubt prompt Mario Scarlatti to opt for a swift kick. Possibly two or three.
“Rowena...”
Mario responded with another sigh, this one of resignation. He walked into the bedroom and put out a beefy hand. Joe accepted it and let his cousin help him to his feet.
“I’ll be downstairs in five minutes,” Joe said.
“You okay?”
Joe didn’t dare nod. He couldn’t have his head exploding when he had work to do. He just looked at his cousin and said, “Yeah. Thanks. I was waking up, but there’s no telling if I’d have come to in time.”
“I’ll have a shake waiting.”
Moving as fast as he could, Joe put on a clean shirt and pair of jeans and slipped on his running shoes, opting to tie them later. He just couldn’t bend down that long. He stumbled into the bathroom, filled the wash-basin with cold water and stuck his face in it. He held his breath for as long as he could, blew some bubbles and held it a few seconds longer.
“Be a hell of a thing if you drowned yourself,” he muttered, examining his reflection in the cracked medicine cabinet mirror.
Bad. Real bad. Bloodshot eyes. Bags. Dark circles. Enough beard growth to look scruffy but not sexy. Breath that would wipe out entire populations.
He brushed his teeth and gargled with his least favorite, most powerful mouthwash.
“Gotta stay away from eccentric geniuses, Joe m’boy.”
So what was he doing half killing himself to race to her rescue? Probably wouldn’t need him. Could manage on her own, thank you very much.
Virgin that she was.
Damn knight in shining armor that he was. He could have avoided this hangover if he’d made love to her right there on the kitchen floor, just the way she’d wanted. The way he’d wanted.
They’d come so close.
Another two seconds and he would have been inside her. Making love to her. Trying to let her body consume his pent-up desire for her. He would have made love to her all afternoon, all night if he’d had to.
He had a hell of a lot of pent-up desire for her. Still did.
<
br /> “Arghh!”
He grabbed a towel and rubbed his face hard, then made himself tie his shoes. Better to think about his aching head than aching other parts of his body. He hadn’t felt so rotten in months.
He hadn’t, he thought, felt so alive.
Mario had a mud-colored shake and a thermos of coffee waiting on the bar for him. Joe knew better than to go for the coffee first. His cousin, his white butcher’s apron stretched tight across his ample abdomen, watched from behind the bar until Joe had drunk every last drop.
A little hair of the dog.
“If I don’t throw up now,” Joe said, “I won’t. Do I want to know what kind of fruit you used?”
“Didn’t have any. Used a few drops of vanilla instead.”
“Vanilla, huh?”
“It’s ten-thirty.”
“You’re lucky I don’t have time to kill you. You ever drink this swill yourself?”
His cousin grinned. “Ever seen me with a hangover?”
Joe took the thermos to his truck and headed for Rowena’s house of horror on Telegraph Hill.
* * *
Rowena let him in. If she was embarrassed about yesterday, she gave no sign of it. If she even remembered yesterday, she gave no sign. Joe knew he himself still looked like hell. He could see her noticing, wondered if she could guess why he hadn’t shaved, why his eyes were bloodshot, why he had a thermos of hot coffee hanging from his thumb. Wondered if she could tell that he could carry her upstairs and make love to her right now. Could even take her into the drawing room and make love to her with her beady-eyed stuffed animals looking on.
It wasn’t going to go away of its own accord, this hunger he had for her. He realized that now. Like hunger for food, like a vitamin deficiency, a thirst, it wouldn’t go away until it had been satisfied. He had to have her in his arms again. And even then the desire would still be there.
He gritted his teeth. Such professional thinking.
Rowena did not look like hell. She had on a sleek tropical-weight wool pantsuit in a warm, rich brown that made her skin seem even creamier, even more touchable. Her hair was pinned up, as tight and formal as she was pretending to be. The schoolmarm, the ice princess.
The untouchable virgin.
“Good morning, Sergeant,” she said, her voice cool, calm, professional. But her eyes didn’t linger on his, and he could see the faint color high in her cheeks, as close to a betrayal of her awareness of him as he would get. She glanced at the thick-banded watch on her slender wrist. “It’s almost eleven. Mr. Tyhurst will be here at any moment. Might I suggest the drawing room?”
Joe felt himself beginning to relax. What an act. He decided to go along with it. “For him or me?”
She pursed her lips; she had a luscious, sexy mouth. “You. Mr. Tyhurst and I will conduct our meeting in the parlor across the hall.” With a slight nod she indicated the room through the archway to her left; it looked friendlier than the one she had in mind for him.
He shrugged. “I won’t be able to listen in.”
“Do you need to?”
“Afraid I won’t understand what you two are talking about?”
The lips pursed again; he saw they were highlighted with a blackberry-colored lipstick. Very appealing. He could almost taste it. She said, “That’s a highly defensive remark, Sergeant.”
“It wasn’t a remark—it was a question.”
“My point is, if I need you, I’ll call.” A half smile. “If I’m in any danger, you’ll have no trouble hearing me.”
“If I so much as sense you’re in any danger, sweetheart,” he said, sexy, deliberately cocky, “you won’t have a chance to yell. I’ll be there first.”
She tilted back on her heels, her arms folded on her breasts. “So sure of yourself, aren’t you?”
“Of many things, no. Of that, yes.”
And he turned on his heels and headed into the morgue.
“Hey, guys,” he said cheerfully as Rowena Willow snapped the sliding pocket doors shut behind him in a huff.
Teach her to pretend he hadn’t had her naked in his arms less than twenty-four hours ago.
Or was she teaching him?
He frowned and looked for somewhere to sit and have a cup of coffee. The only furnishings built to accommodate living, human rear ends were a couple of stiff-backed antique chairs. Their red-cushioned seats might have been out of a bordello from San Francisco’s early, less chichi days.
A weird family, the Willows.
The doorbell rang, and Joe tensed as he listened to Rowena greet Eliot Tyhurst and usher him into the parlor. The lying bastard sounded ready to do anything she asked.
Joe hated being reduced to peeking through keyholes, but there he was on his hands and knees doing his best to see into the entry.
Nothing. They’d already gone.
He got up and paced for a full two minutes, careful not to make any noise. His audience of dead animals seemed to be mocking him. So, Joe, does she know more about police work and the likes of Eliot Tyhurst than you do? Going to stand on your head and spit nickels if she asks you, Joe?
“The hell with it,” he growled under his breath.
He went through a single door at the back of the drawing room into a smaller sitting room of some kind—an unbelievably dreary place—and out it into the hall near the kitchen, through the kitchen, through a butler’s pantry, through the dining room and into yet another short hall.
How the hell many rooms did one woman need?
And all, he noted, were as dark and forbidding and spooky as every other room he’d ventured into in the peculiar house, except for Rowena’s office on the third floor. He had a sudden urge to see the tower room she’d visited every afternoon at five while he’d watched her from the street, thinking he was unseen. A mistake where eccentric geniuses were concerned, he now realized. He had been as arrogant as charged.
He came to the library and slowed, hearing voices. Hers, Tyhurst’s.
His instincts and training taking over, he walked softly across the thick Persian carpet, making no sound in the darkened, eerie library. A stuffed owl watched him from a tall stand. He half expected it to spread its wings and swoop down after him, wondered what would come to Rowena’s mind if Mario started talking to her about a little hair of the dog. Probably not milkshakes or experimental drinks.
The connecting door to the parlor was shut tight. Joe pressed his ear to it. You re a pro, he assured himself, not a sneak.
Tyhurst and Rowena were talking numbers and stuff. The ex-convict understood her jargon. They spoke each other’s language.
If Tyhurst was running a new scam, Joe would need Rowena to decipher for him what the hell the two of them had talked about. But if Tyhurst was out for revenge against the woman who’d put him in prison, Joe wouldn’t need anyone’s help. He’d know what was going on. And he’d know what to do about it.
Skewer the SOB.
“I’d like your analysis,” Tyhurst was saying. Just the sound of his voice irritated Joe. “I know you have no reason to trust me. I appreciate your even agreeing to see me again. I had no right even to hope that you would go out for dinner with me, never mind entertain the prospect of taking me on as a client.”
Joe made a face. Laying it on a little thick, Tyhurst.
Rowena didn’t seem to think so. “I have no grudge against you, Eliot.”
Eliot?
“Then you’ll help me?”
“I can’t work for you.” She was using her cool, high-I.Q. tone. “It would be unethical on my part after having ... given our past.”
There was a short, pained silence. Eliot said, “I understand, but I’d like you to think over my proposition. I’m only trying to do the right thing. I will never, never repeat the mistakes I made. I know that even if no one else does.”
“I’m sure people will realize that, given time.”
Like hell; Joe wouldn’t.
“I just want to be absolutely certain,” Tyhurst went o
n, “that I don’t tread even close to the line the authorities drew for me. You know I’m banned from certain financial activities. I don’t want to touch anything that might raise suspicions, however incorrect they may be. I know in my own heart I’m reformed.”
A conman, Joe thought. But he had to give the bastard credit; he certainly was slick. Even a small part of Joe wanted to believe him.
Tyhurst went on in that vein for a few more minutes. Apparently Rowena was supposed to do some financial analysis for him on a new venture he was undertaking and make sure he didn’t cross any lines, get into anything, not just from which he was barred by law, but that would raise eyebrows. One would think the bastard would know, Joe thought.
Which was more or less what Rowena told him, except she was more polite and long-winded about it.
She’d dismissed him and as far as Joe could tell was showing him the door when Tyhurst—Eliot—abruptly said, “Rowena, I want to see you again.”
And Joe heard it in his voice. Knew in his gut that the man had precious little interest in Rowena Willow’s impressive capabilities with matters financial. Tyhurst wanted to get her into bed. Whether as part of a revenge scheme or just because he’d been in prison for a long time and she was a beautiful woman, Joe couldn’t say. But he knew.
He went rigid, ready to tear through the door—on what grounds? And to do what? Hell if he knew. Ring the bastard’s neck. And how are you any better? As if you haven t thought about getting her into bed yourself.
As if he hadn’t almost done it.
He shoved his hands into his pockets and forced himself to stay put.
“I’ll call you after I’ve given your proposal some thought,” Rowena said. “I don’t have your number—”
“Let me call you instead.”
A beat. Then, coolly, “Fine.”
And he was gone.
Joe heard her mutter something under her breath that he didn’t quite catch. Then she yanked apart the library’s elegant pocket doors and caught him red-handed spying on her.
She glared at him, hands planted firmly on her slim hips as he rose up straight. “It’s a wonder Eliot didn’t hear you.”
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