Rafe drove his pickup past a line of large warehouses, and parked in a lot in front of a nondescript building. White stucco. Bright blue trim. Roxy did a quick count. Fifteen floors. She left the truck and waited while Rafe took his time getting out. They walked to the front door together, and Roxy stepped inside while Rafe held the door for her. There was a small foyer with an elevator on the left and a hallway on the right.
“What floor?” Roxy’s hand floated over the elevator button.
“This way.” Rafe grabbed her hand and pulled her down the hall, past closed office doors, to a metal door with a picture of stairs on it.
“What floor?” Roxy asked, hoping for a low number. Like one.
“Fourteen.”
“Fourteen.” Fourteen flights of stairs were at least ten minutes of cardio. “Today’s not my cardio day. Why don’t we just take the elevator?”
“There are cameras in elevators. We don’t want anyone to know we were here.”
“Do we really care fourteen floors of stairs worth?”
He shook his head with a laugh. “Come on.”
He opened the metal door and started up the stairs. One flight. Two flights. No problem. Three flights. Four flights. Bring it on. Her breath came in pants. Feeling the burn.
Halfway through the fifth flight, her muscles twinged. Just a little twinge. Her breathing was—maybe—a little labored. A little. Stairs are easy.
By the sixth floor, her legs were more than a little twingey. When was the last time she’d actually done cardio on cardio day? She needed to go back to the gym or at least climb some serious steps. Breathing was a problem. Her legs were lead beams, her muscles struggled to move them up and down. Okay, it wasn’t that bad, but it still sucked.
She wanted to call uncle. She wanted to drop to the floor and plead for the torture to stop. But despite swearing she was on her last leg, her two legs kept moving up and up.
“Still alive back there?” Rafe climbed like a darn monkey. He wasn’t breathing heavy. He looked like he was having a grand old time. Masochist. He stood at the landing of the seventh floor and pulled the door open.
“Are we taking a break?” Thank goodness.
“No, we’re here.”
“This isn’t the fourteenth floor.”
He smiled. “I might have been exaggerating.”
She didn’t know whether to kiss him or knee him in the balls. Since she could barely lift her legs, kneeing seemed like way too much work for so little reward. Anyway, she didn’t have to climb anymore stairs.
That was a win in her book.
They entered the hallway and passed door after door. Lawyer’s office. Flower delivery service. Accountant. They made it to the last door. No helpful sign. Nothing but a number. 712.
She tried the handle. Locked.
“Don’t touch anything.” Rafe pulled out two pairs of leather gloves. “Here.”
“Where did you get these?” She took the pair he offered and slid them on.
“They were in my glove compartment.” He put his on. “Never touch anything without gloves.”
“Got it. Do you need a credit card? They picked a lock on TV the other day with a credit card.” She slipped a credit card from the pouch on the back of her phone case. “Discover work?”
“This door only takes Visa.” He produced a slim metal bar and a wavy metal pin from his wallet as he laughed. Smart ass.
“I meant because this card is thicker than most.” She slid the card back in the phone case.
Rafe knelt on the tile in front of the door and stuck the metal pin in the lock.
“Wait. I want to watch.” She could hear the sexual connotations in that statement.
His eyebrow lifted. Apparently, he could hear the sexual connotation too. “What exactly do you want to watch?”
“How you’re picking the lock.” She bumped his shoulder with her hip. “You perv.”
“Not a perv. It’s not my fault your mind was in the gutter. I was just interested in what you wanted to watch me do.” His voice was all mock injustice.
She wanted to argue the gutter point, but her mind was in the gutter. She blamed him.
“That.” She pointed at his hand at the door. “I want to watch you do that.”
“First, you put the tension wrench in the keyhole.” He held up the slim metal bar so Roxy could see the angled tip. “Tension wrench.”
“Got it.”
“You want to put the wrench inside, jiggle it to see which way the handle should turn. One way will have more give. Here.” He slid the wrench into place. “Grab the wrench and twist back and forth.”
She leaned over him. Her hand bumped his as she put her fingers where his were. She would like to say she felt nothing. But that was a lie. Not that it mattered, she was currently breaking and entering, so who cared. His touch meant nothing. See? No one cared.
“Slow down a bit.” He guided her hand back and forth. “Can you feel how it gives a little bit when you slide it to the right?”
How the hell was she supposed to feel anything through the gloves and with his hand on hers?
“You want to keep pressure on the wrench and slide the rake into the top of the keyhole.” He inserted the wavy pin. “Now you move the rake, tapping each pin up one at a time until you have them all lifted.” His wrist jiggled as his fingers worked the rake thingy. The wrench moved. The lock popped open. “Easy.”
Easy was how he made it look. All she’d done was put a bit of pressure on the wrench. That had been easy enough. If she just brought him with to wiggle the wavy thing, she’d be great.
He slipped the tools in his pocket as they entered the office. Although office might be a stretch. It was a room with a desk. Papers covered every surface and were piled on the side beside stacked boxes. A small flowerpot sat on the windowsill.
“Where do we start?” She ruffled the edge of the papers filling one of the boxes.
“Start there. I’ll go through the desk.”
This was her case. He was the locksmith. She was the PI. “You start with the box. I’ll take the desk.” There. She told him.
He smirked. “As you wish, Roxanna.” Heswitched places with her.
“The Princess Bride?” Roxy slid open the top drawer of the desk.
“It was my favorite movie.”
“Was? Past tense?” How could anyone like The Princess Bride in past tense? Cinematic gold and he just tossed it to the side. She held her hand over her heart. “I was almost impressed by you.”
Rafe didn’t turn his head. “Was. Past tense.”
“What’s your favorite movie now? What could possibly dethrone the Princess Bride?” She sifted through the capless pens and loose paper clips before giving up and shutting the top drawer.
“Nothing dethroned it.” He finished the first box, and moved to the next one. “I just grew out of it.”
“How do you grow out of it?” Roxy opened the bottom drawer. Empty. Almost empty. She pulled out black tubing with a squeeze bulb on one end and a clear cylinder on the other. “What is this?”
His eyes grew wide. “You might want to put that back.”
“Why?” She dropped it in the drawer.
“That’s a penis pump.”
Ew. Gross. She ran her gloves back and forth on her thighs until the cooties were gone—or, at the very least, aggravated. “You mean a pump to make a penis bigger.” Donnie probably needed to do something to get that many women to jump into bed with him—without leaving cash on the nightstand.
“Yes.”
Roxy stared at the drawer, hoping that thing wouldn’t jump out at her. She never would have guessed that there was a pump for that. In fact… “How do you know what one of those are?”
“A penis pump?”
“Yeah.”
“Instructions came with the penis handbook.” He laughed.
Sexism was alive and well. They got a handbook. All the problems that came with women’s plumbing, and there was no handbook. No instructions. Nothing.
Rafe nodded as he dipped into the third box. “Finding anything?”
“Besides the pump? No.” That was it for the drawers. The top of the desk was remarkably free of paper, and had only a phone and a large desk calendar. She flipped open the calendar. There were a few scribbles. A lunch here. A dinner there. But then she found something interesting. It seemed interesting. Along the bottom of one of the pages. “Look at this. Presley, nine months. Seven-twenty.” Presley. There was that name again. “Donnie’s wife mentioned she thought Donnie’s girlfriend was named Presley.” Roxy ripped the piece of paper of the pad. Presley. 9 months. 7/20.
“I thought Amethyst was the girlfriend,” Rafe said, abandoning the boxes.
“Maybe it’s her real name?”
Rafe took the piece of paper. “No. We ran a background check when she got a job at the club. We would’ve known if she was called by another name.”
“Maybe he had more than one.” She took the paper away from him and shoved it in her pocket. She looked around the room. Maybe there was something else about Presley or Amethyst.
She crossed the flattened and stained red carpeting to examine the flowerpot on the windowsill. The plant was a brown, shriveled mess. When she looked out the window, two people crossed the lot to the front of the building. MacAuley and his partner.
“Cops are here. They just went in the front door. They’ll probably take the elevator.” She tried to keep the frustration out of her voice, but her legs still hated her from the trip upstairs.
“Probably.” He restacked the boxes and opened the door. Glanced into the hall. “Let’s go.”
They ran down the hall. Silent, except for the sound of their shoes hitting tile. Fifty feet. That’s all they needed to cover, and they’d be in the stairwell and away from the cops.
And she needed to stay away from the cops. They’d warned her. They’d named her a suspect. If they found her here, she’d never hear the end of it. Mostly because she’d be stuck in a jail cell where they would have twenty-four-seven access. She’d never be able to drop the soap again.
A ding came from the elevator. Not just a regular ding, the loudest elevator ding on the planet. They were only halfway to the stairwell. Rafe grabbed the nearest door handle and twisted. Nothing. Roxy reached for another one and the knob turned. “Here,” she whispered as she slid inside. No windows. Nothing giving off light.
Rafe pushed her deeper into the room and shut the door. Her foot bumped a bucket and wood clanked against the wall. If it wasn’t so damn dark, she was sure she’d be looking at a fallen mop.
“Shh...” He pulled her to him and whispered in her ear, “They’re coming.”
Her body was flush against his. She could feel all of his hard muscles. If she didn’t get her mind out of the gutter, she’d be the one coming. Not just the cops.
“It should be just down the hall.” MacAuley’s voice was muffled through the door. “The key says 712.”
Rafe smelled good. He smelled so good she almost couldn’t hear the voices outside the door. All right, she could hear them, but she almost didn’t care.
“Why won’t you even listen?”
“If you said something worth listening to, I would.” MacAuley’s voice passed by the door.
His partner’s voice stopped in front of the door. “She did it. She has motive and she found the body.”
Found the body? As in her? Rafe’s body tensed in her arms.
“Look, I know it’s not Roxy.” Apparently, it was about her. But at least MacAuley was defending her.
“Roxy? You mean Roxanna Horne, don’t you? She’s sketchy as shit and you can’t see past the big tits.”
Something hit the door with a smack. “Back off.”
“You’re seriously going to fight me over her. Are you sleeping with her?”
“Darren, you’re crossing the line.” MacAuley’s voice was deep and threatening.
“I’m just trying to figure out what the hell is going on.” The partner’s name must actually be Darren. Surprising. She had been convinced it was Asshole.
MacAuley sighed. It was a loud one since she could hear it through the door. “I’m just trying to figure all this out, too. But my gut is telling me she didn’t do it.”
“For your sake, I hope you’re right.”
The voices disappeared.
All that was left was silence and Rafe’s body against hers. Her heart thumped in her chest. Because he was so close or because she was hiding from the cops or because, apparently, the partner thought she was guilty—she didn’t know.
The partner was ticking her off. What had she ever done to him? She didn’t have murderer written on her forehead. No criminal background—well, not much of a criminal background, but peach schnapps made her clothes fall off. There wasn’t a song about it, but that didn’t mean it didn’t happen. “He thinks I’m guilty.”
“MacAuley doesn’t seem to think so.” Rafe didn’t seem to be impressed with MacAuley’s defense.
“Is there a problem?”
“No.” He drew back and opened the door. He looked left, then right. “We should go.”
They headed down the seven flights of stairs. She let the conversation go, but Rafe had to know she wasn’t done with him.