It took James a moment to draw his eyes away from hers and resume something that resembled clear thinking. “Look, I think you’d better find someone else to address your class.”
The puppy was yipping. She scratched Felicia behind her ears. “I understand,” Constance told him. “You’re too busy.”
She made it too easy for him.
So where was this wave of guilt coming from, threatening to drown him? He was busy. He and Santini were up to their armpits in restaurant robberies and clues that led nowhere, but had to be followed up nonetheless.
And yet fifteen minutes could be dug up somewhere without hurting anything.
James frowned, trying to ignore this thought. And the woman standing in front of him. He had little luck with either attempt.
“Yeah, I am busy,” he told her tersely. “And besides, I don’t know how to relate to kids.” It was true. He felt like he’d never been a kid himself, so there was nothing to draw on there and Dana had been two when Janice, his ex-wife, had taken her away. Not that he’d done all that much interacting with the little girl up to that point, but he had always meant to. Wanted to.
Shifting Felicia around to her other side, Constance looked at him. There was an indulging expression on her face. As if she thought what he was going through was needless.
“You don’t have to relate to them, James. They’ll relate to you. If you just leave yourself open to the process, the kids’ll take it from there,” she assured him. Her smile grew, pulling him in. Taking his breath along with it. “You’re an authority figure and they’re at an age where they’re still in awe of that, even if they don’t always admit it outright.”
But he shook his head, needing to stand firm. It wasn’t just the kids, it was her. He had to pull back now before things got out of hand. More out of hand, he amended. He’d already gotten in further than he’d ever thought he would.
Served him right. He should have asked Santini to place the ad in the newspaper about the cameo. And he really shouldn’t have come over to her apartment, bearing a dog. It gave her the wrong message. That he was interested. He wasn’t interested. He wouldn’t allow himself to be.
“I can’t do it.” His answer was firm, leaving no room for even a pin to be wedged in to widen the space for a rebuttal.
Constance was disappointed, but she did her best to cover it. Maybe it was for the best. She could feel herself being attracted to him. Her last less-than-stellar venture into the garden of romance still loomed large in her mind.
She paused to brush her cheek against the puppy’s soft head. She’d always derived infinite comfort from Whiskey when she’d done that.
“All right, I can do something else that day.”
For just a split second, he was jealous of a dog. He needed his head examined. She was just trying to manipulate him, he thought. Well, he wasn’t buying it. “What, there’s nobody else you can ask? What about the guy who cooks?”
She tried to make sense of his reference. And then she realized he was talking about Nico. “He was already there last month.”
The wind left his sails. Stumped for another suggestion and wishing himself thirty stories down, in his car, he mumbled, “Well, that’s not my problem.”
“No,” she agreed cheerfully. “It’s not.”
The wave of guilt grew, resembling a tsunami now. “There’s nobody else you can ask?”
She moved her head slowly from side to side. “I’ve used everybody they might be interested in hearing.”
He sighed, refusing to be taken in by the look in her eyes, the tone of her voice. He had trouble in a monosyllabic conversation, what the hell was he going to do standing up in front of a bunch of fourth graders, delivering a speech? He’d wind up tongue-tied and looking like a fool. Talking to kids was not his thing. If it had been, he would have signed up for the D.A.R.E. program a long time ago.
Enough was enough, he thought. He jerked a thumb at the doorway. “I’ve got to go.”
Constance nodded, not offering any protest. “Thank you again. I love Felicia.”
Okay, so this was a good deed, nothing more. He could live with that. Right now, he needed to get away because his knees felt funny. “I’ll let Eli know.”
“Thank him for me, too.” She raised her voice as he took one step away. “And for the food.”
“Right. Sure.” All he could focus on was putting space between him and her perfume. Between him and a woman with eyes that could have been magnets. But as he attempted to turn his back on his dilemma and her, the puppy caught hold of his sleeve. Clamping down with all her might, Felicia held him fast.
“Hold it!” Constance warned, seeing the problem before he was even aware of it.
He felt as if he were standing in quicksand as he swung around to glare at her. “Now what?”
“You’re going to wind up tearing your sleeve,” she told him. Still holding the cloth right before Felicia’s mouth to prevent any further ripping, Constance shifted the puppy back to her other arm. “I don’t think Felicia wants you to go.” She didn’t bother looking up at him. Instead, she worked away at the material. “Wait a sec, I’ll have you freed in a jiffy.”
Jiffy.
Nobody said jiffy anymore, he thought. And nobody looked like that, either. Like they’d just stepped out of the pages of some magazine where the flattering photograph was the results of camera angles, lighting and artistic airbrushing.
Her head was bowed right before him as Constance worked the fabric out of the dog’s determined teeth. He could smell her hair. Honeysuckle. Like her perfume. It filled his head, disorienting him. Making him think irrationally.
Her fingers brushed against his arm as she got the last bit of cloth out of the dog’s teeth. He didn’t notice the dog or the shirt. He noticed the warmth that traveled up the length of him, filling in the emptiness. Seeping into the craters that comprised the terrain of his soul.
“There,” she cried triumphantly as she set the dog, now devoid of any material in her teeth, down on the floor. Her triumphant tone melted down to almost a whisper. “You’re free.”
They were barely an inch apart from one another. So close that their breaths mixed and became one.
All sorts of things were going on inside of him. Things he couldn’t understand or unravel. Things he felt it best not to examine.
“Not hardly,” he said, more to himself than to her.
Her heart jumped up into her throat and made itself at home there just beneath the oval of the cameo.
And then everything else stopped.
For all she knew, the world had abruptly stopped turning on its axis. Because she felt the room tilting instead.
James placed the crook of his finger beneath her chin and raised her head a fraction. Placing her lips just within reach. Their eyes met and held. Seconds were knitting themselves into eternity.
She wasn’t sure who cut the tiny distance between them into nothing. Probably her because, despite the fact that she was raised in an atmosphere where life was supposed to flow slowly, like warm summer breezes through cottonwood trees, there had always been an eagerness within her. An energy that wanted to reach out, seize the moment and create something out of it.
And the electricity she was feeling between them made her want to create wonderful things that touched the sky and would endure forever.
She was creating havoc, or rather, he was. Because he was kissing her. Because his hands had gone around her back and were pressing her to him now. Constance laced her fingers through his hair. She felt his body, hard, rigid and full of desire.
In less than a heartbeat, she forgot all about her promises to herself after Josh had been sent packing. The promises that were meant to keep her away from situations just like this. To keep her safe. She needed to keep that promise because she was a lousy judge of men.
She gave her trust too easily and that wasn’t safe.
Constance wasn’t thinking about safe right now. She was thinking about free-falling.
And loving it.
With very little effort on his part, she could become an obsession for him. The woman he was kissing, the one he was desiring, tasted of everything precious and sweet.
And forbidden.
He had no idea what had possessed him to do this. To somehow allow himself to arrange things so that he was here, in this exact place and time, kissing her.
It only made things more difficult. He didn’t want this, didn’t need the added aggravation. What he needed was space. Preferably a moat between himself and the rest of the world. Specifically this woman.
Too late.
She probably thought he was crazy.
With a jolt, James forced himself to step away from her while everything inside of him lobbied for him to go forward. To at least kiss her longer. Until all of him was rendered totally mindless.
There were worse states to be in, that small, undermining voice whispered.
It took effort for her to catch her breath. When she could speak without a telltale wheeze, she asked, “Was that my consolation prize?”
At first, he just stared at her, not comprehending the question. “Consolation prize?”
She nodded. Breathe, Constance, breathe. “For not coming to speak to my class.”
“No.”
He was good with that word, she thought. Like an old-fashioned gunslinger who was quick on the draw, he’d whip that word out, having it explode in the air.
She nodded at his response, accepting it without argument. “It didn’t feel like a consolation.” She wanted to kiss him again. And she could see he wanted to leave. She wasn’t going to stand in his way. “You’re a hard man to figure out, Detective Munro.”
He nodded, more to himself than to her. “I didn’t used to be.”
And with that, he left.
“You gave her a puppy?” Landing in the chair beside James’s desk, Santini looked like a man who had just been struck by lightning.
“It wasn’t mine,” James bit off.
He wore the same jeans he’d had on last night. When he’d gone to retrieve his keys out of his pocket, he’d pulled out a dog treat. Not bothering to hide his amusement, Santini had asked him if he was carrying them around for Stanley. Which was when James had made the mistake of saying that they were for the puppy he’d brought to Constance.
He wasn’t thinking clearly, but who could blame him? Every which way his mind turned, visions of last night, of kissing her and the sensations that generated through him, would take his thinking process hostage. He was completely and utterly unaccustomed to that.
Frowning now, he muttered, “Someone I know was trying to get rid of a litter and I took one off his hands. When she came over with dinner the other night, Constance said the dog she’d had died and she missed having a pet.” There, that should take care of it. But it didn’t. There was a smirk on Santini’s face. “What?” James demanded in a barely controlled voice.
Santini attempted to look like the soul of innocence and failed miserably. The illusion of innocence had eluded him long ago.
“Nothing.” He spread his hands wide, then couldn’t resist adding, “Just in some countries, you’d be engaged by now.”
James had no idea if he was kidding or not. Santini was a walking treasure trove of useless and near-useless information. “You’ve gotta make your wife let you watch something besides the Discovery Channel, Santini. You’re putting my feet to sleep.”
Santini eyed him knowingly. “Don’t change the subject.”
“There is no subject,” he declared with a finality that was enough to jar the other man’s teeth. He pushed the files they’d been going through into the middle of his desk and began flipping through them. When he’d left last night, the night-shift task force had been working on them. “Where are we on this case?”
Santini blew out a breath. “Still fishing. I know somebody in forensic computers who’s inputting all the data we’ve collected. She’s going to try to come up with some kind of common thread besides baked goods.”
“Forensic computers?” James liked to think that he kept up on the latest techniques and technology that were being brought into the department, but this was something he’d never heard of. He hated being out of the loop. “What the hell is forensic computers?”
“Just what it sounds,” Santini explained.
James listened in silence. While his partner spoke, his mind was operating on a different plane, trying valiantly once more to connect the dots. Or at least to come up with a new theory about the placement of the dots.
As Santini concluded his mini-edification, something occurred to James. “Hold it. What if the common thread we’re looking for is nothing we can get from the restaurant owners’ input? What if the common thread is a customer?”
They’d examined employees, past and present, suppliers of every item on the menu as well as what went on the table and the linens. This was something they hadn’t looked at. “Come again?”
New, with all the possibilities that entailed, the idea caught fire. “Follow me here. What if it’s some guy—or woman—who frequents the place, maybe comes in at the same time every day and watches what goes on. Waiting to see when the perfect opportunity to pull off a lucrative robbery might arise.”
“And just how do we find this ‘common’ customer?” Santini asked. “There are no fingerprints to go on. In most cases, everything has been washed a hundred times over since the robbery took place. And most of these places don’t use surveillance tapes.”
“The old-fashioned way, Santini.” James was already rising to his feet, ready to roll. “We talk to the waiters and waitresses to see if they noticed anyone.”
“Which waiters and waitresses?” Santini asked.
“Which do you think?” James checked his weapon in his holster before slipping on his jacket, which felt as if it weighed a thousand pounds in this heat. “All of them.”
Santini groaned, following him out of the squad room. “I was afraid you’d say that.”
He hadn’t lied to her.
He had too much to do. Once he’d come up with his theory of a common customer, he and Santini went at it for hours, using up that day and the next, going from one restaurant to another. They quizzed the food servers at each of the five restaurants if they’d noticed any regular customers. Each positive answer put the food server together with a police sketch artist. The sketches were compiled, then compared. It was slow going especially with the chief demanding results. There was enough work to keep them, and the night shift, busy for days.
So why was he here, standing in front of John Jay Elementary School, bracing himself to face a room full of pint-sized adults?
It didn’t make any logical sense.
Neither did the way her face insisted on haunting him. In his mind’s eye, he could see that look in her eyes when he’d turned her down. Over and over again. So often, part of him began to entertain the idea that he was losing his mind.
The other part was convinced he already had.
If he hadn’t lost his mind, he wouldn’t be down here, wouldn’t have taken several hours of personal time to go to the school.
Shaking his head, he wrapped his hand around the doorknob and pulled open the door.
“All right, is everyone clear on this lesson?”
Constance scanned the room slowly. Every seat in her classroom was filled. When she had first come, she’d been warned that student “illness” was up twenty percent from the previous year. When the students did show up, the teacher often wished they hadn’t. They were restless, rude and ready for trouble. Constance had set out to win over every one of them and hadn’t stopped until she had. It had been tough going. Her first year had been fraught with frustration. Trust wasn’t given easily, especially to someone who clearly wasn’t from the neighborhood.
But she’d won her battles one student at a time. That was three years ago. Now, students came to her, begging to be allowed to take her class. The other fourth-grade teacher was now grudgingly following her lead. Constance felt each day was a mini triumph.
She glanced at the history books sitting open on the students’ desks. Books she, in a good many cases because funds were short, had bought herself. She knew without asking that everyone had read the assignment. They were a good bunch of kids who wanted to learn. To make something of themselves. They had every right to expect to reach their goals, no matter how lofty. All they had to do was try. And continue to try.
A girl named Grace Mendoza raised her hand. She pointed over her head toward the door. “Ms. B., there’s a man outside looking in the window. I think he’s trying to get your attention.”
Constance turned to look, as did the rest of her class. But they were left to speculate as to the person’s identity and his reason for being there. She knew the one and hoped that she knew the other.
She tried to sound nonchalant as she said, “So there is.”
Constance rose to her feet and went to open the door. Her pulse had launched itself into triple time, making all of her feel as if she were vibrating.
She glanced over her shoulder as she opened the door. “Best behavior,” she instructed the class and then slipped out, closing her door behind herself.
She turned her face up to him, part of her still thinking that maybe she was just imagining all this. But then, her class would have been involved in the same hallucination. “You found the time.”
She was doing it again, he thought, lighting up like a Christmas tree.
And making him want to repeat his mistake of the other night.
He deliberately kept his hands in his pockets. “Looks like. You still short a speaker?”
The look she gave him made him feel as if he were ten feet tall. “Not anymore.”
“Don’t expect anything good to come out of this,” he warned.
“It already has,” she contradicted him. He could hear the Southern lilt coming into her voice. It always seemed to appear when she spoke with emotion.
He was noticing things about her, subtle things, and that wasn’t good.
Constance surprised him by taking his hand, as if he were one of her students facing stage fright. “C’mon. I’ll introduce you to the class.”
The noise level within the room died down the moment she opened the door. He had to admit he found that unusual. Kids were kids and noisy these days, if not worse. But then, most classes didn’t have Constance as its teacher. He would have been quiet, too, if she’d been his teacher. He was more than half-convinced that she was a witch and they were under her spell. He wasn’t all that sure that he wasn’t, too.
“Kids, I’ve got a real treat for you,” she announced. Letting go of his hand, she gestured toward him. “This is Detective James Munro and he’s going to tell you all about what he does. I want you to give him your very best attention.” Her gaze swept over them, taking in each student. “There’ll be questions later.”
As she indicated that he should stand in the center of the room, James thought the first question was what the hell was he doing here?
The experience turned out to be far less agonizing than he’d anticipated. He’d barely gotten started when one of the students raised a hand and asked a question. He’d no sooner answered that, than another hand shot up. And another and another. He hadn’t expected questions until after he’d come to the end of his hastily composed lecture.
He discovered that it went better that way, answering questions instead of trying to figure out what to say that might interest them. The fifteen minutes she’d asked of him became twenty. And then twenty-five. Constance had to cut him short because they ran out of time. The next minute, the lunch bell rang. Everyone jumped to their feet, their minds on food and freedom.
But no one left, he noticed. They were waiting for Constance to dismiss them.
She approached the door, holding it ajar. “Okay, kids, what do you say?”
“Thank you, Detective Munro,” they chorused. Constance opened the door and they filed out of the classroom. Filed, not ran, not pushed and shoved, but filed.
Once they were alone, he looked at her in amazement. “You’ve got them well trained.”
She took no credit. “They’re a good bunch of kids. They want to learn.”
There was a huge gap between wanting to and learning. He’d found that out for himself. “That’s because you make it interesting for them.”
“That’s all it takes,” she agreed. “Interest.” He could feel her eyes on him, as if she were trying to decide something. “So, how was it, talking to them? On a scale of one to ten.”
He shrugged carelessly. “Five.”
Constance suppressed a smile. She had a feeling that it was a little better than that, but she didn’t press. He was here, which was what counted. “What made you change your mind?”
“The look in your eyes the other night before I left made me feel about ten inches tall.”
That hadn’t been her intent. She hated manipulation. Josh had tried to manipulate her during the course of their relationship. She’d sworn to herself that she’d never do that to anyone. “I didn’t mean for it to do that.”
“Yeah, you did. And it worked.”
She didn’t feel like arguing. Once he got to know her better, he’d realize that wasn’t her way. “I’m surprised you’re swayed by the look in anyone’s eyes.”
“That makes two of us,” he replied. The words left his lips in almost slow motion.
He was keenly aware of the fact that she was standing too close again.