NIGHT WATCH

by Carla Neggers

  “You did? You knew I was here?”

  “Of course! I heard you prowling through the downstairs working your way in here.”

  Somehow Joe was neither intimidated nor insulted. “That’s just because you’re used to this tomb. You hear every creak and groan—unless you’re working at your computer. Tyhurst was too preoccupied gazing into your pretty blue eyes to pay any attention to a few odd noises.”

  “He didn’t once look at my eyes.”

  “So,” Joe said casually, “what did he look at?”

  Her cheeks reddened. She whirled past him and the stuffed owl. “It’s a wonder you’ve ever caught any criminals. Your incompetence and audacity must constantly get in your way.”

  That phony I’m-smarter-than-you tone again. Joe tilted back on his heels. “Tough to be incompetent and audacious at the same time, don’t you think?”

  She was at the hall door. “No, I don’t, not since I’ve met you.”

  And then she was through the door.

  “Hey, Rowena.” His voice was calm, unperturbed, mostly because he sensed her anger had more to do with the sheer fact of his presence than his professional abilities. Having him this close got to her. He didn’t think he was jumping to conclusions: he just knew.

  He waited until she turned back toward him, reluctantly, angrily. Her eyes were a smoky blue. Watching him. Wanting him. Pretend you don’t notice, he warned himself. Stick to your job.

  “Is the bastard up to something?” Joe asked.

  The breath went out of her, the anger, the frustration. “Give me an hour and I’ll give you my best guess.”

  * * *

  After two hours Joe ventured up to the third floor. This time he made sure he didn’t make a sound. He didn’t want to give her a heart attack. He edged into the doorway.

  The place was humming.

  Her back to him, she tapped madly at her computer. Lights were flashing, numbers blinking, papers flying out of the laser printer. Magazines and financial newsletters and spreadsheets were scattered on the floor all around her. Not one hair was out of place.

  Joe could feel her concentration. She was completely unaware of his presence. He was reminded of what, before Matt’s death, he’d been like when he was deep into a case. Nothing could distract him. He’d given his work everything he had.

  Maybe he and Rowena Willow weren’t so different after all.

  The thought disturbed him, told him that his attraction to her went beyond the physical, and he withdrew silently, heading back down to the kitchen with the cats. He scrounged up a muffin that looked like something a horse would just love and zapped it in the microwave, pouring a cup of coffee from Mario’s thermos while he settled in and waited.

  * * *

  After a total of four hours, Rowena stumbled down to the kitchen where Joe Scarlatti was warning Mega and Byte that he wasn’t a scratching post. Bleary-eyed and stiff, she glanced at her watch and winced. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize the time. Why didn’t you just leave?”

  He shrugged. “Rough night. I needed a lazy day. You find out anything?”

  “Nothing concrete.”

  His eyes clouded. “Or just nothing you think I’d understand?”

  “There you go inflicting your stereotypes on me again. I don’t know what you’d understand. I don’t worry about that sort of thing. I just don’t have enough information yet to be sure what he’s up to, if anything.” She rolled her shoulders a few times to loosen up the muscles. “I’m not sure exactly what he’s after.”

  “You for starters.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah. Ol’ Eliot’s got the hots for you.”

  She blinked at him. He was seated at her kitchen table, right at the point where her eyes couldn’t seem to focus properly. Probably it was just as well she couldn’t see him clearly, given what had transpired in his kitchen yesterday afternoon. She made a look of distaste. “Even if that’s true—and I doubt it is—it’s irrelevant. Eliot Tyhurst wants my approval, I think. If he can convince me he’s reformed, he can convince others. I’m not sure why that’s so important to him except—” She stopped abruptly. “Why are you shaking your head?”

  “Because you’re wrong,” Joe said.

  She bristled. “Just because you’re...physically attracted to me doesn’t mean Eliot Tyhurst is.”

  Joe was watching her very closely. “When’s the first time you realized I was ‘physically attracted’ to you?”

  “When you—when we—”

  He grinned. “See? You don’t know. Rowena, I knew I wanted to go to bed with you the minute I laid eyes on you.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Want to make a bet?”

  She refused to show her discomfort. “You’re just saying that so you can win this argument. You want to prove I’m naive about men and can’t be trusted to know when one’s attracted to me or not.” She cleared her throat. “Just because I haven’t had sex with a man doesn’t mean I’m naive or repressed or—or mentally ill. I consider my decision to wait until I was ready an act of independence and self-knowledge, not desperation or insecurity.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said.

  “I—I’ve never allowed myself to get carried away before.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s irresponsible.”

  “And what made you so responsible, Rowena Willow?” he asked quietly.

  She licked her lips. “My parents. They—they were very much in love, but they brought out the worst in each other. They had me when they were far too young—”

  “Says who?”

  “They were barely into their twenties. They did everything on impulse. Mother would make an offhand comment about wanting to take an Alaskan cruise and the next thing she knew, Father would have the tickets. Father would make an off hand comment about starting his own business and the next thing he knew, Mother was encouraging him to quit his job. They did everything on impulse, they lived totally for the moment. They spent everything they had and died virtually penniless.” She kept her gaze on Joe. “They were killed when their car ran off the road up in the Marin hills. It was pitch-dark. They didn’t have a good reason for being up there. They’d just wanted to see the stars.”

  “And they left you alone to be raised by a weird aunt.”

  Rowena smiled suddenly, remembering Aunt Adelaide. “But she knew she was weird, and she tried very hard to give me a normal life. It’s true, though, she only left this house a half-dozen or so times that I can remember in all the years I knew her. Anyway, she did teach me to be comfortable with myself, to know what I want and don’t want.”

  “To be responsible,” Joe said. He stretched out his muscular legs, looking very relaxed. “Then how come you were ready to jump into the sack with me the first chance you got?”

  “Because I had been thinking about it for several days and had decided if the opportunity arose, I would seize it.”

  “Seize it you did,” he said wryly.

  She tossed her head back in an attempt not at haughtiness but at maintaining dignity. “You’re being deliberately crude just to get me flustered. It won’t work. You’re operating on the assumption that I was somehow out of my head yesterday and that you’re the first man who ever provided me the opportunity of a physical relationship.”

  “You always talk like that? Sounds like a report on a corporate takeover, not two people who got caught up in the moment and almost overdid things.”

  “I didn’t get caught up in the moment—”

  “Oh, no?” he said, amused.

  She swallowed. “Well, I did, but as I said, I’d contemplated that moment before.”

  If she felt awkward and exposed, Joe Scarlatti seemed perfectly at ease with their conversation. Entertained, even. He folded his hands on his flat abdomen, watching her. “Okay, Rowena. Confess.”

  “What do you mean, ‘confess’? I have nothing to confess. I’ve told you everything.”

  “You haven’t told
me when you started speculating on what we might be like in bed together.”

  She pursed her lips. How had she gotten herself into this mess? She said quickly, “Before I met you.”

  One of Scarlatti’s thick eyebrows went up. “Before, huh? That’s about impossible to top.”

  “It was just imagining on my part. I was anticipating what you might be like.”

  “Were you close?”

  She nodded, her mouth dry. “Very close. But I didn’t know for sure until I’d actually met you that I definitely—that you were...” She cleared her throat once more, a dead giveaway of the difficulty she was having with this level of intimacy. “You were as tough, arrogant and sexy as I’d imagined. It was a.. .purely a physical reaction on my part.”

  “I see.”

  She could see he had no idea if she was telling him the truth or putting him on so she could win the argument—provided she could remember what they were arguing about. Something to do with Eliot Tyhurst’s supposed attraction to her. She made herself tell Joe, “I would have no regrets if we had finished what we started yesterday. I hope you ended it for your own sake, not mine.”

  He was on his feet, moving toward her with an efficient, masculine grace that she’d come to recognize as distinctly, uniquely Scarlatti. Yesterday’s near love-making hadn’t cooled her desire for him, she realized. It had only made her want him more. He brushed a knuckle across her jaw, then let it skim her breasts. She had removed her suit coat and could feel the immediate response of her nipples beneath the silk fabric of her blouse.

  “Would you have any regrets,” he said languidly, “if we finished what we started now?”

  And he caught her by the wrists, holding her arms at her sides, keeping her tantalizing inches from him. He kissed her without allowing their bodies to touch. Desire ran up her spine like a hot wire. His tongue plunged between her parted lips, explored, tasted, probed with a primitive rhythm that made her moan into him with a longing deeper and more demanding than she’d thought possible. “I don’t know if I’d have regrets,” she answered as the kiss ended.

  He pulled back. His eyes were darker than she’d ever seen them, aching with a passion she recognized in herself, but he gave a small smile of satisfaction. “I didn’t think so.”

  But could he guess the reason? That yesterday she had wanted to make love to a sexy, thrilling man and to hell with where it led, it just didn’t matter—that she had consciously decided to seize the moment. Joe Scarlatti could be her once-in-a-lifetime chance to experience a physical relationship with an exciting man who also, if only for a time, was attracted to her. It had been of no consequence if he’d had any regrets. She had only wanted to know the feel of a man’s body—his body—throbbing inside her. Wanting her. Satisfying her as she’d never been satisfied.

  Today she still wanted to make love to him, to have him make love to her. That hadn’t changed. It couldn’t. But today she also wanted to know him, to hear him laugh, to meet his friends, to talk to him about everything, not just the dangers Eliot Tyhurst might present to her and society. Maybe this emotional attraction to him had always been there, too, and she simply hadn’t wanted to admit to it.

  She still didn’t. She still knew that she and Joe Scarlatti were the same kind of disastrous combination her parents had been. Driven to act on the moment. On impulse. On desire rather than thought, logic, facts.

  But her emotions were increasingly difficult to ignore.

  Was she falling in love with a burnt-out cop?

  This wasn’t the life she’d imagined for herself. She’d imagined she’d end up more like Aunt Adelaide than her parents.

  “I need a cup of tea.”

  He raked a hand through his hair. “Yeah, I’ll bet you do.”

  She stumbled toward the stove, feeling his eyes on her. “Would you care to join me?”

  “You’ve been trapped in this mausoleum all day. Don’t you want to get out of here?”

  “Out?” She looked over her shoulder at him, perplexed,

  “Yeah, out. Outside in the great big wide world.”

  “And do what?”

  “Nothing. Unwind.”

  “That’s why I was going to have a cup of tea.”

  He sighed. “Okay, we’ll find a tea shop.”

  “Do you know any?”

  “No.”

  “Then how can you propose—”

  “Come on, Rowena.” His voice was teasing, but without mockery. “For once in your life let your hair down.”

  Eight

  They walked.

  Rowena had changed into an oversize multicolored chenille sweater—it was chilly—and black leggings. The fog had receded from the hills but continued to swirl in low pockets and still completely obliterated the Golden Gate Bridge from view. She didn’t mind. She liked foggy San Francisco days almost as much as the sunny ones. They were eerie, isolating, romantic. The fog seemed to make the pastel-colored buildings and the flower boxes and small gardens stand out even more, give even more pleasure than they did in the sunlight.

  Or maybe she was so agreeable toward the fog because Joe Scarlatti was at her side.

  He walked fast, as she did, but his powerful legs ate up pavement where she tended to glide along. In the sunlight his face seemed even more ravaged. The man needed a shave, a bath, sleep.

  Or not, she thought uncomfortably. There was a roguish masculinity about him that suggested all he physically needed was to finish making love to her.

  She shrugged off her discomfort. Was it so bad having Joe Scarlatti want her?

  They didn’t touch as they descended a steep hill into the fog. Rowena tried to picture them as hand-holding tourists. They could take a cable car and kiss under lampposts. Wander into shops—expensive and tacky alike—that catered to tourists.

  But the picture didn’t quite form. In both appearance and attitude, Joe Scarlatti was too much the tough, cynical cop; she too much the eccentric genius. They made too bizarre a pair. Sexual attraction was one thing. Becoming a couple was very much another.

  For one thing, it took a man who would talk. Since they’d left her house, Joe hadn’t said a word, just squinted his eyes against the glare of the sun and now the fog and kept walking. Rowena wondered what he was thinking. Cop thoughts? Romantic thoughts?

  Or was he just plotting to get her into bed?

  She almost asked him, but they’d turned a corner and he suddenly nodded to a shop topped with a pink awning. “There,” he said. “Tea.”

  They went inside a small, attractive shop with glass counters filled with pastries, shelves lined with glass jars of coffee beans and loose-leaf teas and about a dozen small round marble-topped tables. There were stained-glass lamps, rose wallpaper, pink napkins, flowered teapots.

  Rowena suddenly smiled to herself.

  Joe narrowed his eyes at her. “What’s so funny?”

  “I was just thinking about bulls in china shops.”

  His eyes smiled back at her. “You saying I don’t fit in here?”

  “I’m saying I’m grateful that you agreed to come here with me. I know Mario’s is more your style.”

  “Hey, I’m not a slug,” he said with a grin.

  They sat at a table by the window overlooking the street, and Rowena ordered Earl Grey tea and currant scones with clotted cream from a young waitress.

  “Clotted cream?” Joe asked.

  “It’s a lot like butter—it’s very soft, perfect with scones.”

  “I’m sure. Okay, I give in.” He looked at the waitress. “Bring me coffee—black—and a scone with clotted cream. Can I get my scone without currants?”

  “Sorry, no.”

  He gave the waitress a devastating smile. “Leave the currants in, then.”

  When the waitress had retreated, Rowena said, “You’re quite the charmer, Sergeant. I suppose you have no trouble with women.” She smiled suddenly. “Or should I say too much trouble?”

  He laughed. “Got me figured out
, do you?”

  “No, I would just think you aren’t...inexperienced.”

  “Depends what you mean by inexperienced.” He stared out at the street. “Yeah, I’ve been around. Was married a couple years. There’ve been women to share a night on the town when I wanted—but not many real relationships. And my ‘experience’ doesn’t mean I don’t want what other people want.” His eyes, dark and unreadable, drifted to her. “Maybe I’m just more pessimistic about getting it.”

  “Because of what you’ve seen on your job?”

  “Because of who I am, Rowena, What I’ve seen, what I’ve done, what I know. I don’t like reflecting on all this stuff. It’s easier for me just to shut down. What I don’t think about, I don’t think about. Six months off the job is an eternity, though, I can tell you that.”

  “I can’t imagine what I would do without my work,” Rowena said pensively.

  “You’re more outgoing than I ever thought you were.”

  “Am I? I spend a lot of time alone—my work requires it. I certainly get out more than my reputation would suggest.”

  The waitress brought their pots of tea and coffee— his was white, hers pink-flowered—and their scones and two tiny pink-flowered dishes of clotted cream. Joe examined his with some skepticism. He dipped his spoon in, smelled, then sampled the creamy white delicacy. “Tastes like something between whipped cream and butter.”

  “Good, isn’t it?”

  Rowena split her scone and slathered it with the clotted cream, wanting to resume their conversation about his leave of absence and its consequences. But she could see he’d drawn the curtain on that subject and said all he’d planned to say—probably more than he’d planned. She sensed him pulling back, retreating from introspection. Despite being a man of action, Joe Scarlatti felt his own and others’ pain deeply. It wouldn’t be a simple matter for him to confront the consequences of his mistakes. But confront them he would.

  “I have a feeling,” she said, “that no one’s harder on you than you are on yourself.”

  He looked at her. “And on what do you base this judgment?”

  “It’s not a judgment at all. I’m just speculating.”