In the kitchen Eve scraped the remnants of dinner into the garbage as water ran into the sink to wash the crystal, which was too delicate for the dishwasher. Caleb brought the last of the dishes from the dining room and leaned against the counter, his wineglass in one hand. “You’ve got a mark on your neck,” he said, gesturing vaguely in the direction of his collarbone with his empty hand.
“The hell I do,” Eve said matter-of-factly as she slid the leftover lentil casserole into the fridge.
“Evangeline!”
“Sorry, Mom,” she called. The door to the den closed. Eve gave a resigned sigh. That had gone about as well as she’d expected. She wondered what Matt wanted with her father.
“Good to know,” Caleb said with obvious relief.
“He’s too skilled for that.” Ruthlessly controlled, in fact, a master of the very fine line between not hard enough and too hard. She’d felt the edge of his teeth against her shoulder, her thigh, the power of his grip on her hip or her wrist, giving her resistance to arch and writhe against, making her nerves sing in anticipation and need, but not enough to leave a single mark.
She was rewarded for her noncommittal manner with Caleb choking on his wine. “I didn’t need to know that,” he muttered.
“Then mind your own business.”
With a lift of his glass he acknowledged a point scored, but switched tactics in a lowered voice. “Jesus, Eve. You’re sleeping with him?”
“Five seconds later and still none of your business, Caleb,” she shot back.
“It is my business. You’re my sister. And if you’re being pressured in any way, then we call this off and the police department can figure out another way to get to Lyle. Are you okay working with him like this?”
“Trust me, I’m not being pressured.” She thought about it for a moment. “We are so close, Caleb. So close to making the East Side redevelopment efforts a reality. Yes, I want that for Eye Candy, but I want it for the East Side too. If we don’t stop Lyle now, the city council will pull backing again and give Mobile Media space for their location somewhere else. And if having him around for a few weeks will make that happen, then I’ll deal with it.”
“It’s not the having him around I’m worried about. It’s the consequences of living in close quarters in a difficult situation with someone you’re clearly, although inexplicably, attracted to.”
“It’s no big deal, Caleb.” It wasn’t. It was purely physical. No emotions involved, just intense, visceral, feral desire sweeping through her body and shutting down her brain. She kind of liked him. Given the way they’d begun, kind of liking him wasn’t a bad place to be.
“Eve,” Caleb said, in his serious voice. “This is a violation of about fifteen different statutes on police conduct.”
“Caleb,” she replied, in her serious voice. “I know when I’m being used. And it’s still none of your business.”
He swallowed the rest of the red and set the glass on the counter, then picked up a tea towel. “Remember Steve Hollister?”
She handed him a dripping plate and said, “From the Christmas party? Vaguely. Why?”
“He’s a mediator who specializes in troubled families in the court system for one reason or another. Never married. No kids. Volunteers with Habitat for Humanity when he’s not working. I guarantee he won’t treat you like a piece of ass, and anyone who drives a ten-year-old Honda Accord doesn’t give a damn about whether your outfit matches his car.”
No horrified shouts from the dining room. Mom must be out of earshot, she mused as she finished washing the crystal. “As much as you’d like to pretend we didn’t have a cop sitting at the dinner table, he was there and he’s not going anywhere. I can’t possibly date right now.”
“You never know. He might be into ménage.”
“Caleb!” she yelped with a glance at the door.
“Evangeline,” he said, his face completely serious as he dried the last glass, “medals aside, you don’t know jack shit about this guy. Even if you did, this isn’t real life.”
It was hard to remember, given the immediacy, the sheer intensity of “now.” “Now” meant she and Matt would go back to his house, and go back to bed, perhaps even to sleep for a while before returning to Eye Candy tomorrow. “Yes, I remember Steve Hollister,” she conceded. Barely. “I’ll think about it when this is over. I promise.”
She collected Matt from the front room and kissed her parents as they moved through the front door.
Neither one of them said anything until they were back in the Jeep. “So … not your first time at that rodeo?” she asked as she jammed the buckle into her seat-belt clasp.
“It’s what happens when you join the Army after nine eleven,” he said, his voice tight as he shifted into first and accelerated down the street. “You’re assigned to an infantry division in a war zone. People shoot at you and you shoot back. It happens less frequently as a cop, but it does happen.”
Are you freaking kidding me? “Are those your medals hanging at the end of the hall?”
“My dad’s,” he said abruptly.
“Where are yours? The Bronze Star? You have dog tags hanging from your mirror.”
“Framing medals wasn’t high on my list of priorities when I got home.” He consciously relaxed his grip on the wheel. “Your name’s Evangeline? Your records all say Eve Marie Webber.”
The topic switch and the white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel told her to go with the flow. “It’s vaguely creepy that you’ve seen my records, Matt.” His face didn’t change, so she dialed down the sass. “They wanted to name me Evangeline, but I was three weeks early and Dad was away at his annual retreat. Mom was completely out of it when the nurse asked for my name, and Mom gave her the nickname. I’m Eve to everyone except my family, and then I’m Evangeline only when I’m screwing up.”
“Or swearing.”
She looked at him, dread in her heart. “How much of that conversation did you hear?” she asked.
“No ménage,” he clarified.
She sank down in the seat, embarrassment heating her cheeks. “I’m going to kill him,” she said.
“Unless the next time you get pissed at me, you decide that’s how you want to work out your anger.”
Her jaw dropped. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Yes,” he said. “No ménage.”
Thank God.
“Caleb’s hiding an honest-to-God big brother under that swagger,” he said.
“Takes one to know one?” She sighed. “Sometimes he’s such a jerk I forget he really cares.”
Matt downshifted and coasted to a stop at a light. “What drives him? They teach argumentation in law school, but he takes combative to a whole new level.”
She thought about how to answer that question for a long time before saying, “He made a mistake. Lives were ruined forever. He puts on a front because the world sees gold and Caleb knows better.”
He nodded, as if that made perfect sense to him. Maybe it did. “What do you see?”
“My brother,” she said simply. “He used to strap my Barbie dolls to bottle rockets, and light them while I screamed. He taught me to shoot free throws well enough that I won the school competition my senior year.” She laughed. “Classic Caleb story. My sophomore year I wasn’t allowed to date, but Nate Marshall asked me out. He was a senior starting wide receiver on the football team, teen idol movie star gorgeous, and he knew it. I was all angles, no curves, and he asked me out. So I snuck out to meet him. Nate drove me out to the reservoir north of town and said he wouldn’t take me home until I—red light! Red light!”
The Jeep jerked to a halt halfway through the crosswalk, the seatbelt locking with the force of the stop. Matt cursed, shoved the gearshift into reverse, and backed up a few feet.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Fine,” he ground out. “What happened?”
“I told him to go to hell and fuck himself when he got there. Then I got out of the car and started walking, and he took off, spraying me with dust and gravel from his nifty Camaro as he drove away. Caleb got wind of the whole thing, and found me a mile from home, walking along the highway. He got me inside without Mom and Dad finding out, and the next day, after school, he went after Nate. I didn’t see it, you understand, so I’m just repeating what I heard, but apparently the entire offensive line was clustered around Nate’s Camaro when Caleb waded through them, twisted Nate’s arm up behind his back, grabbed his hair, and slammed his pretty face into the trunk of the car.”
“I would have done the same thing.”
“Two broken teeth, a broken nose, split lip, and Caleb hadn’t hit him yet. Caleb took him apart. I was minding my own business, sitting on the front steps of the school with most of the drill squad, wondering where the hell Caleb was because he was my ride home, when Caleb shoved Nate in front of me and told him to impress us both with his eloquent apology.”
Another one of those deep, unwilling laughs. “You have to respect his style.”
“The school tried to suspend Caleb for fighting, but they couldn’t get Nate to identify Caleb as the person who did it because Caleb said he’d make Nate tell the principal, the football coach, his parents, my parents, and most important of all, the football recruiter from Ohio State why Caleb beat him up.”
“Nate believed him,” Matt said, but it wasn’t a question.
“Years and experience have reined in the temper, but Caleb takes personal offense when the strong take advantage of the weak.” She watched the scenery shift from the small homes and small lots of the East Side to Matt’s neighborhood. “He’s just Caleb. That’s all I see.”
Matt said nothing for a few moments. “You were on the drill squad?”
“No. President of the Future Business Leaders of America. Nat was on the drill squad.” Another memory surfaced, one that made her laugh at the irony. “I just remembered how Caleb found out what Nate had in mind for me. Lyle was at Aquinas High by this time, selling steroids to football players. He heard about it, and called Caleb.” She looked out the window. “Maybe in the suburbs things are black and white, good and evil. It’s harder to pin down the East Side. I know Lyle’s bad news now, but to me he’s still the kid who called my brother. Even then Caleb hated him, but Lyle still called him.”
He pulled into his driveway and cut the engine, but didn’t get out of the Jeep. “It’s a gift, you know.”
“What is? Forgiving Caleb for taking on the world and everyone in it?”
“Seeing people as they are and caring about them anyway.”
Might get her in trouble, given how much slack she’d cut Lyle. “Guess I paid attention in church.”
Another laugh, the noise tugged from somewhere deep inside, rusty and unused, but she liked it. She liked seeing his battered face morph into something filled with humor and personality. She liked being the woman who did that for him.
“They ride you pretty hard,” he said quietly. “Why?”
Sitting in the now-warm Jeep, she smoothed the strap of her purse in her lap before answering. “Because at heart I’m selfish. I want what’s best for the East Side, but I want something for me too. A good person, a good girl, wouldn’t do what I do. I’d be teaching or in social work, volunteering at church and the SCC. I should be married by now. Raising babies.”
“You’ll be good with kids, but I can’t see you at an insurance company, boss.”
“You and I are the only ones with that particular deficit in our vision, Matt.” When he didn’t say anything else, she added, “It’s Monday night.”
“It is,” he agreed.
“Football night, right?”
“Preseason game in New York,” he said.
“Do you want to watch the game?” she asked. “We could order a pizza. My treat. Dinner was inedible. Mom’s an amazing cook with unlimited quantities of butter and…”
Her voice trailed off. His eyes were heavy-lidded and intense. Despite the setting sun, the air in the Jeep was heating rapidly, twilight-dark, close.
“What do you want to do, Eve?”
Uncertainty shimmered in her stomach. Dinner with her family only brought back the realities she was ignoring, the troubles the East Side faced, her job, her lack of a steady boyfriend, and suddenly the fear was back, the threat from Lyle intensifying every worry she had about the present, let alone her future. Matt sat next to her, hands relaxed on his thighs. His only concession to the heat in the Jeep was the deep red flush on his cheekbones and the glimmer of sweat at his hairline. The scent of his skin, his sweat, was engraved on her memory, and oh, she wanted him. He could make her forget all her troubles, at least for now.
“I want to stop thinking for a while,” she admitted.
Emotion flickered in his eyes, unreadable and almost imperceptible, and as the seconds passed she began to wonder if she’d seen it at all. “Stay there.”
Following his order was good practice for that by-the-book officer/civilian thing he kept talking about, so she waited, marking time by the slow thump of her pulse in her wrists and throat as he walked around the Jeep and opened the door for her. He stayed close, protective or possessive, or both, as they walked up the ramp to the front door. She was hyperaware of his body, hot and substantial next to hers, as he guided her through the door and down the hall to the workout room. The light hung soft and heavy between late afternoon and twilight, light enough to see herself, six inches from the mirror, Matt visible behind her.
“Watch,” he said.
She blushed so hard her cheeks were darker than the soft pink blouse. “I can’t possibly,” she said, even as her gaze skittered over the strangely demure woman in the mirror, feet primly together, knee-length skirt, shirt that skimmed her curves without drawing attention to them. She looked sweet, maybe even innocent.
His hands rose to the first tiny button on her soft pink blouse, unfastened it slowly, moved to the second. He gained deftness but scorned speed as he moved down, exposing her throat, then her collarbone. “What was all that about choosing mirrors over cuffs last night?”
They hadn’t made it anywhere near the home gym. “You were supposed to watch,” she said. “Not me.”
He bent his head, the gesture at once both protective and authoritative, and murmured in her ear. “We’re both going to watch.”
Electricity cracked through her, igniting heat in her nipples and deep in her belly, and sending another flare of color into her face. He shifted focus from his big hands at the slowly parting edges of her blouse, and smiled. “I can’t believe the sexiest cocktail waitress in Lancaster is blushing at having sex in front of a mirror.”
“That’s different,” she said. “That’s an act. I wear a costume, say lines. You get that.”
“So you really are sweet and innocent?” he asked as he opened the last button.
“Shy,” she murmured, because his fingertips were hot through the white microfiber bra, casually brushing her nipples as he tugged the fabric down her arms and off to puddle at her feet.
He said nothing, just drew the side of his little finger between her breasts and down the middle of her abdomen to the top of her skirt. She took in details as he slowly stripped her, noting the way her nipples hardened as he slipped the hook-and-eye free, slid the zipper down, gave the skirt the merest nudge to send it to the floor.
Then he cupped her breasts through the bra and brushed his thumbs back and forth over her nipples, the slow, measured movements rasping the fabric over nerve endings on full alert. When she gave an involuntary undulation Matt unhooked her bra, pulled it down and away to drop on the floor, leaving her in nothing but the sheer white panties and dusky twilight.
Her eyelids drooped, part response, part reluctance to take in the carnal image in the mirror. Her nipples were red, hard. The urge to look away overwhelmed her. She turned her head to the side, but Matt laid fingers along her jaw and turned her to face the mirror. “Watch,” he said again, and this time the command held a hint of steel.
She met his eyes in the mirror. “Are you watching?”
“Hell, yes,” he said. His gaze held hers for another long, searing moment, the hazel gone dark and deep as his pupils expanded in the growing darkness. Then he deliberately looked at her mouth, then her breasts, then the shadow of dark curls covering her mound. She made an inarticulate sound and lifted her hands to cover something, her body, her breasts, maybe her eyes. He caught them, flattened her palms to the mirror at shoulder height.
That was easier, as if something to push against channeled the heat surging through her. She pressed her hands firmly against the glass, felt dampness slick the smooth surface. He slid his fingers over her hips and lowered her panties to the floor, leaving her naked in front of the mirror. She tipped her head forward enough for her hair to unmoor from behind her ear and slide into her face, hiding one eye.
“You’ve got nothing to hide,” he murmured, low and rough.
Only how she felt about him.
The thought disappeared when he stepped into her back and braced his forearm on the mirror over her head while his right hand skimmed down her belly, between her legs. He knew her body now, dipped into the folds to trail moisture up to her clit. She gave an inarticulate little cry and strained into his unyielding body. Oh, that helped, the glass under her palms, the length of him against her back.
He didn’t stop. They both focused on his hand, dark against her hip and thigh, touching her so intimately, so confidently. Another slow circle around her clit and she shuddered again, the fabric of his shirt and pants chafing her skin as she watched her mirror-self spread her legs. His finger circled her clit, sending darkly erotic pleasure in waves through her abdomen. Strung tight between her hands on the mirror, her feet on the floor, and her back and ass braced against his body, the tension climbed from her sex, seared along nerves connecting her nipples and clit. Her mouth dropped open, and a gasp shuddered into the air. The long muscles in her thighs began to tremble as the pleasure coiled dark and hard under his relentless touch. Then she shattered, waves of release pulsing out in time to the soft cries she stifled in her shoulder.
She sank to her knees on the floor, pushed her hair out of her face, and tried to catch her breath as she peered up at him in the mirror. He was fully dressed, hands on his hips, the tiniest of smiles lifting the corner of his mouth. “Still thinking?”
No. “Yes,” she said. The vulnerability of kneeling naked on the gritty floor while he stood fully dressed behind her registered in her brain as slightly embarrassing and very arousing. She lifted her chin at him. “Take something off. Please.”
With efficient movements he unbuttoned his shirt, tugged it free from his pants, shrugged it off. That was a little better, and yet wasn’t any better. His lean, muscled torso distracted her until he dropped to his knees behind her and began to unbuckle his belt. Without a word he freed his cock from his pants and situated her with her hands against the mirror again, making her wait while he smoothed on a condom. Then he gripped her hips, positioned himself at her entrance, and pushed inside.
Climax made her sensitive, so he paused, lodged just inside her, and while he waited for her to stop trembling he leaned against the mirror and put his deft, knowing mouth to her neck. The sheer female submissiveness of the position coupled with the scrape of his teeth against her nape crashed over her in a wave of sensation. She tilted her head to give him better access, watched his hands smooth up her abdomen to cup her breasts, pinching the nipples firmly. The current running between her nape, her nipples, and the soft, aching walls of her pussy intensified.
Then he started to move, slowly but not gently, insistent demand in his rhythm and strokes. She took each thrust, balanced on the razor’s edge of pleasure and pain, and arched her back for more. Her attention wavered between the interior sensations of his cock churning millions of nerve endings into screaming need and the image in the mirror, her widespread knees, the damp curls at the apex of her thighs, his tanned hands on her breasts, her parted lips. Fire licked through her, and she turned her head.
It was a mistake, because in the mirrors to their right she could see the finely honed length of his ass and back rippling as he thrust, felt the head of his cock drag against swollen inner tissues. The ache contracted tight and hard in her belly. “Oh, God,” she gasped.
When he turned his gaze, dark and fierce with desire, and met hers, the jolt of recognition sent her over the edge. A second orgasm, deeper, more intense than the first, rocked through her, and she dimly heard soft cries echo in the room in time to the contractions. A growled curse, then he wrapped his arms around her torso, buried his cock inside her, and came.
“Was this payback for teasing you about the remote?”
A laugh ruffled the hair at her temple. “You looked too sweet to go after payback,” he said, low and assured. Then he bit her earlobe, the pressure enough to sting, the sting enough to remind her that no matter how often they’d done this, the heat never entirely went away. “Next time you’re wearing that leather outfit and you flip me that attitude, it’s game on.”
Sparks flew under her skin. “Promise?”
“Count on it,” he said. “Still thinking?”
He’d very effectively shut down her brain. “Not anymore,” she said with a smile.
“Good.” He pulled out and walked out of the room.
Water ran in the bathroom as she looked in the mirror. Her eyes were a languid green, amused and satisfied all at once, but as the pleasure continued to ebb from her body, realization stole through her consciousness.
She could do more than like him. He’d handled dinner with her family under strained circumstances, and come out unfazed. Reality was tilted on its axis, and she could easily feel more than she should.
He appeared in the doorway, dressed in cotton shorts and nothing else, and just the sight of his torso made her want to fuel up and start all over again.
“What?” he asked when he saw her still on the floor.
“Nothing,” she said. “Still up for pizza and the game?”
“Sure,” he said as he helped her to her feet and picked up her skirt, “but it’s a working dinner.”
“A working dinner?” She clutched her clothes to her belly and turned for the bathroom.
He gave her a smile that managed to be both rueful and energized at the same time. “Playtime’s over. We’ve got twenty-four hours to get you ready for a prolonged undercover operation.”
And with that, reality began to seep into the fantasy. “Right,” she said. “Just let me get dressed.”
* * *
On Tuesday reality returned with a vengeance. While Eve washed the lunch dishes, Matt sat down at the dining room table and armed himself. He pulled the leg of his jeans over the knife and stood up to find Eve watching him with wide eyes.
“Were you wearing all of that every time you came to work?” she asked while she wrung out the dishcloth.
“Not the Sig,” he said, trying to gauge her reaction. Sometimes women found it sexy, which was a little on the weird side, and sometimes they thought he was paranoid, which was probably true. But the stakes were higher now. Eve was putting herself in danger to help them. They’d install a radio in her apartment, but most of the time it was just him and his wits against a deadly threat that appeared with no warning. There was no room for mistakes. Things were different now. She was his to protect, for real.
She pressed her lips together and draped the dishcloth over the faucet to dry.
“The concealed weapons law doesn’t apply to law enforcement,” he pointed out. “I need a longer T-shirt too.”
“You can try a few of them on,” she said doubtfully, “but they’re designed to show off your body, not hide a gun in the back of your jeans.”
When the dishes were done she packed up her few toiletries and her clothes, gathering her things from around Matt’s bedroom and bathroom and zipping them into her overnight case. She was unusually silent as she worked, so he used the spare minutes for a pop quiz.
“My real cell.”
She shot him a look as the bag’s zipper caught on something inside, but recited the phone number.
“When do you call that?”
“It’s my ‘oh shit’ phone,” she said. “I use it only if I’m in trouble and you’re not with me so there’s no way to trace Matt Dorchester to Chad Henderson.”
“And you’ll never have to use it because from now on out, you’re stuck with me. Chad’s cell.”
She jerked at the stuck zipper before calming down enough to slide the zip back, shove the fabric fully into the case, and close it, all while rattling off the number.
“Call that anytime. Sorenson’s numbers. Cell, work, home.”
She folded her arms across her chest, recited them, then added McCormick’s, and dispatch in a flat tone. He ignored the attitude. “Good. All of them backup “oh shit” phones. McCormick will get there faster than Sorenson; she’s in court the next few weeks but he’s assigned to patrol. Don’t call Ian. He’s in meetings most days.”
He’d done his best to prepare her, drilling her on Chad Henderson’s backstory, talking through what she should do when Lyle showed up, talking through a dozen other ways to respond to any kind of threat. She’d let him show her how a semiautomatic worked and, at his insistence, picked it up and showed him she could thumb off the safety and jack a round into the chamber, but she’d flatly refused to go to the firing range with him.
Everyone had boundaries they established to define who they were, and for Eve, handling a gun clearly crossed a line. They’d had a short argument about it at one in the morning. He’d lost, and he wasn’t happy about it.
A car door slammed in the driveway. Matt moved through the living room to the window, one hand automatically moving to the small of his back while the other parted the slats of the blinds covering the front windows. He peered out, then let them close. “It’s Luke,” he said, and opened the door.
Shoulders and arm muscles bunching with effort, his brother rolled up the ramp and into the foyer. He stopped in the act of removing fingerless leather gloves when he saw Eve standing in the hallway.
Wide-eyed, he looked at Matt, then at Eve, then at Matt again. “I’m gone for three days and this is what I come home to?” A broad smile spread across his face as Eve held out her hand and looked to Matt for an introduction.
“Luke, Eve. Eve, my brother,” he said, and went back down the hall to the bedroom.
Luke went back to removing his gloves. “Hi, Eve. Yes, I’m his brother, and you are…?”
Matt brushed past both of them, Eve’s case in one hand, his own duffle in the other. “She’s a friend,” he said as he walked down the ramp to his Jeep.
A friend? After the events of the last two weeks, specifically sex both frequent and hot enough to melt steel, if he were Eve he would have kicked his ass. But he couldn’t think of any other way to describe “I pretended to be her bartender, nearly slept with her, saved her from gunfire, did sleep with her, then talked her into working on the investigation with us.”
He tossed the bags into the backseat of the Jeep. When he walked back through the door, Eve gave him that glinting little smile again, then Luke spun to face him, his eyes dark. “She says she owns a bar and you’re working for her. Goddammit Matt, you said things weren’t that bad,” he said, his voice rising.
One hand on his hip, Matt rubbed his forehead with his thumbnail, his keys under the curled fingers of his hand. “They’re not. No worse than usual. She’s part of a case I’m on. I’m staying with her for a while.” Matt snagged the gym bag sitting on Luke’s lap and brushed past Eve to toss it into Luke’s room.
His brother was no fool. Luke lifted one eyebrow and opened his mouth, but Matt cut him off. “I’ve got my cell. If you need to talk, leave a message and I’ll call back when I can. If it’s an emergency, call Sorenson or the LT. They’ll get in touch with me.”
“How long are you going to be gone?” Luke asked.
“I’m not sure.” He turned to go.
“Give me the number for the AC guy,” his brother said. “I’ll get an estimate, call around to comparison shop.”
“I’ll do it when I get back,” he said.
“For fuck’s sake, Matt,” Luke said, resigned. “It’s a couple of phone calls. I won’t sign anything.”
“I’ll take care of it later,” he said tightly. “We have to leave. I’ll check in when I can.”
Luke muttered something Matt pretended not to hear as he guided Eve down the ramp and into the Jeep.
“It sounds like he just wants to help you,” she observed.
“He shouldn’t have to help,” Matt said. “His adolescence disappeared when he was fourteen years old. He deserves to have as normal a life as possible, and that means not worrying about mortgages or HVAC systems or medical bills when he can’t find a full-time job.”
Eve shifted her weight away from him and crossed her legs, and he regretted the way he barked at her. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “It’s none of my business.”
“It’s fine,” he said. “It’s just … complicated.”
Silence reigned for the rest of the trip to Eye Candy. Noonday heat blistered the blacktop parking lot, the smell of fresh asphalt rising in shimmering waves. Eve reached for her small rolling suitcase and hefted it out of the back of the Jeep. Matt grabbed both her bag and his duffle in one hand and said, “Up the stairs. Now,” scanning the parking lot then the rooftops, looking for slow-moving SUVs, hiding places, any threat, letting the sixth sense he’d honed over the years put out feelers into his surroundings.
She hurried up the stairs, him hard on her heels.
“Keys.”
He unlocked her apartment door and entered first; at his okay she stepped inside. First things first. She hurried into the bathroom and turned on her curling iron. Then she looked around. New glass gleamed in her kitchen and bedroom windows. When Matt emerged from looking around her bedroom, she was picking up the pieces of her speakers.
“I’ll play music on my computer for a while,” she said, trying to make the best of it.
“That was a Bose SoundDock,” he said. “You’re going to notice the drop in sound quality.”
She looked at him, eyebrows raised ever so slightly, then swept the fragments into the trash. “It’ll have to do. I can’t afford a new dock.”
Her apartment was a shoebox, but she shoved clothes to one side to make space for his stuff in her crammed closet, and cleared a two-square-inch spot on the sink for his electric razor. While attempting to wedge his toothbrush into the caddy on her sink he burned his hand on her curling iron, and cursed under his breath as he ran cold water over the reddening strip of skin.
She grabbed the curling wand, intending to move it to the back of the toilet, except he’d put his shaving kit on the tank. “I’m sorry,” she apologized, missing the knuckles of his other hand by millimeters as she set the hot iron down in its original position.
“Forget shaving. Women like the scruffy look,” he said, then backed into the door. As the stopper twanged, he said, “Jesus. I’ll be downstairs. I want to check the alley and interior.”
He checked the storeroom and dish room, then opened the door to the alley. All quiet. Nothing suspicious. When he came back through the storeroom, Eve was making her way down the stairs from her office. She wore the black skirt she’d worn the day she interviewed him, a green silk blouse, and her boots.
“I need keys to all the doors and a list of who else has them.”
“I’ve got a spare set locked in my desk. We can make copies while we’re out this afternoon.”
He looked at the rubber pouch on top of a three-inch stack of paperwork. “Deposit?”
“Including Lyle’s first deposit,” she said, wishing she’d worn gloves to handle the dirty money.
He put down the knife and wiped his hands on a wet towel. “I’ll drive. The bathrooms are clean. I checked stock. You’re low on gin and rye whiskey, and you’re really low on vodka. When’s your next liquor delivery?”
“Tomorrow,” she said. “You really worked in a bar? You must have … you could mix drinks, or did you practice before applying?”
“My Academy class didn’t start until almost a year after the accident,” he said. “I worked private security, bartended, EMT shifts. Anything I could scrounge together with late afternoon or overnight hours. Doctors and physical therapists work nine to five,” he said and dug his car keys from his front pocket.
She was giving him that look again, the look that looked right through him. Somehow, despite relaying what felt to him like bare-bones details about his life, every time he opened his mouth he gave something else away. But what? Nothing about his life was closed; the background check for the Academy took care of that. So what did Eve see that no one else saw?
They duped her keys at the corner hardware store, then doubled back down Thirteenth Street to get to the bank. “I know her,” Eve said as they walked into the lobby and headed for the only available teller. The sound of her heels, staccato and sharp, rapid-fire against the floor, paused for a second.
“Close friend?” he asked, his hand shifting to the small of her back to urge her forward.
“She thinks so, but for our purposes, she’s actually better than that,” she said, regaining her stride. “She’s the biggest gossip on the East Side.”
Stella slid Matt a look through thickly mascaraed eyelashes, and took in his Eye Candy T-shirt, his hand at her back, and the possessive tilt of his body as Eve slid Saturday night’s take through the window. “Who’s your friend, Eve?”
“Stella, meet Chad,” she said, giving Matt’s arm a possessive little pat. Her every move screamed boyfriend, the way she leaned into his body, let the curve of her hip nestle into his, and Matt felt an odd shift in his consciousness, like one of those posters for sale at the mall, the kind that if you stared at long enough, you saw something else in the colors and shapes. Old woman, young woman. Undersea garden or dolphin. Eve as a community-oriented partner in the investigation or Eve as his lover.
Eve as his.
“Stella and I went to high school together,” Eve said, snapping him back into reality. “Chad’s working for me at Eye Candy.”
Her gaze slid over Matt as she double-checked the deposit. “Must be nice to be the boss. You from around here, Chad?”
“L.A.,” he said, neither discouraging, nor encouraging, just enough to answer the question.
Stella ran the money through the machines and slid Eve a deposit slip. “I keep meaning to come by, but getting George to watch the kids is like pulling teeth,” she said as Eve picked up a pen. It spun from her fingers, the ball-chain slithering against the wooden counter.
“I’m clumsy today,” Eve said with a bright, false laugh. Matt dropped a hand to her hip and stroked his thumb over the soft curve. Her shoulders relaxed. She picked up the pen again, signed the slip, the movements casual and precise. Normal.
She calms down when you touch her. Touch her a lot. To keep her calm.
“You won’t believe what I heard. Guess who’s back in town?”
“Who?”
Arms folded on the counter, Stella leaned into the window like she was sharing state secrets. “Lyle. Murphy. Can you believe it?”
“I saw him last week,” Eve said like it was no big deal. Good girl, Matt thought. Calm, collected, laying the framework for any sightings with Lyle or his band of merry thugs and dealers.
“He had the total hots for you in high school,” Stella recalled.
“We were friends! Just friends,” Eve said. “My dad and Lyle’s dad go way back.”
“Honey, you are so blind,” Stella said, then turned to Matt. “Every guy in the school wanted to go out with Eve, but after what happened to Nate, none of them dared. You know Caleb?”
“We’ve met,” Matt said noncommittally, felt Eve swallow a laugh.
“I bet,” Stella said as she retrieved the deposit slip from Eve. “Be good, you two.”
“You think she’ll talk?” Matt said as they left the bank. Part of the plan was to generate as much buzz as they could about Eve and her new boyfriend and hope the gossip got back to Lyle.
“She’s probably group texting everyone we know from high school right now,” Eve said. “Why L.A.?”
He guided her down the empty sidewalk leading to the bank’s front door. “It’s big enough that if someone says “Do you know my aunt Millie?” I can easily say no, but I was stationed at Fort Irwin, so I know the city well enough to handle most conversations,” he said.
They rounded the railing protecting the landscaping from people cutting across the grass to the parking lot, and Eve reached for his hand as she scoped out the storefronts across the street. Lancaster Savings and Loan was located on a prime strip of the East Side, in the middle of local shops and restaurants. It was the middle of the afternoon, so gauging traffic from the lunch crowd wasn’t easy, but a few people sat at tables at the front of the new sandwich and coffee shop across the street, and the lot on the corner that provided free parking for shops along Thirteenth Street was better than half full.
A blue Escalade emerged from the parking lot and pulled into an on-street parking space across from the bank. Lyle Murphy got out.