by Anne Stuart
“Rafferty, there is no human being in the city of Chicago who can’t use a VCR,” she said, certain he was kidding. He just stood there, looking at her, and she found she believed him.
“All right, all right,” she said, moving past him, skirting him carefully, not wanting to touch him. Simply because she wanted to touch him. “What do you want to see? I’ve got slapstick comedy, screwball comedy, gangster movies, lots of Alfred Hitchcock, musicals, you name it.”
“Anything but gangster movies.”
She smiled wryly. “Now I would have thought that would be just up your alley.”
“I’m not in the mood. Give me something to make me laugh.”
“How about the Marx Brothers?”
“Did they end up being in the movies?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Rafferty,” she said, finding Duck Soup and pushing it into the VCR.
“Aren’t you going to watch it with me?” he asked, as she started past him.
She wanted to go back and hide in the bathroom, wash the makeup off her face. She wanted to hole up in her bedroom, concentrating on her files and not on the six feet plus of disturbing male flesh that had somehow invaded her life.
“Of course,” she said, taking the armchair that was well away from the far more comfortable sofa.
His smile was faintly knowing as he returned to the couch, stretching out on it. “Hey, Helen,” he said softly as the credits flickered on the huge television set.
“What?” she said, concentrating fiercely on a movie she’d seen no less than thirty-seven times.
“I like your perfume.”
MS. HELEN EMERSON was too damned easy, Rafferty thought. It made him feel guilty, a completely ridiculous emotion, given that his lies and subterfuge were to protect her, at no little cost to his own plans for forty-eight hours of pleasure.
But if she accepted him as easily, as innocently, as quickly as she had, even knowing he’d lied to her about Abramowitz and God knows what else, what possible match could she be for a psychopathic manipulator like Ricky Drago?
He no longer regretted his decision. Sure, he regretted the loss of some anonymous woman’s clever body wrapped around his. But when he tried to summon up the image, all he could see was Helen’s pale face and huge, brown eyes.
Not that he was going to have her wrapped around him. Or look down to see her face, her hair spread out against a white pillow, her eyes glazed and her mouth…
He shifted on the sofa. She was watching the Marx Brothers as if they were the sermon on the mount, but she wasn’t laughing. Neither was he.
Why couldn’t Helen Emerson be someone a little looser, a little more casual, a little more getatable? Why couldn’t he simply seduce her and spend the rest of his forty-eight hours in her bed, keeping her safe? It seemed to be the most sensible solution, and with anyone else he’d at least try it, before moving on to other things.
But he wasn’t going to try it with Ms. Emerson. It would be a waste of time. She might be attracted to him, and he knew women well enough to recognize that she was, but she was also a virgin, or damned close to one. She wasn’t ready to go to bed with a stranger. She wasn’t ready to go to bed with anyone at all.
And when she was, it wouldn’t be any of his business. He’d be off in some sort of limbo, while some other man was stripping off those glasses, threading his fingers through her thick, silky hair and tilting her face back to kiss….
“Don’t you like the couch?” Her cool voice startled him as he shifted once more.
“Why do you ask?”
“You keep thrashing around on it. I’ve always found it very comfortable.”
“Then why aren’t you sitting here? It’s a big couch.”
She shook her head with a small smile, not rising to the challenge, and his opinion of her intelligence, already high, increased. “I don’t think that would be a very wise idea, Rafferty. It’s not that big.”
“Big enough.” If he could get her to sit next to him maybe the next step would be that much easier. Hell, he should have asked for something a little more erotic than Groucho Marx and Margaret Dumont. Maybe she had something hot and steamy among those black boxes she called videos. Not that he needed any stimulation—just smelling that damned, faint perfume she’d put on was trigger enough. And he had to be going out of his head, to be having erotic fantasies about a woman who was everything foreign to a man like him. A state prosecutor, a virgin, a woman too damned near thirty and from a family of cops besides. Hell, the fact that they were from different time periods was almost a minor issue.
He liked blondes, he reminded himself. Women who knew how to have a good time without expecting anything but pleasure. He liked women who were stacked, women who giggled, women who drank and smoked and didn’t mind bending a law or two here and there. Not a virgin pledged to uphold it.
So why was he practically shaking with the ache to touch her? Why did he want her more than he could remember wanting anyone in his life, including the late great Crystal Latour?
It was a short movie. She picked up another, smaller black box and pointed it toward the television, the movie flicked off, and the screen was filled with a noisy ad for underarm protection, whatever the hell that was. Why did people need to protect their armpits?
“You really like soap operas?” she asked.
“I like everything on TV,” he replied, trying to keep from staring at the black piece of plastic in her hand.
“This one is supposed to be good.” She tossed the little box to him, and he caught it, staring at the little buttons in fascination. A moment later the show came back on. And he couldn’t have asked for anything better.
As far as he could tell, neither of the people on TV had a stitch of clothing on. The long-haired man was lying on top of the woman, a sheet pulled discreetly over his hips, and he was kissing her with an enthusiasm Rafferty found commendable, if a little unnecessary at that stage of the game. They were both moaning, and the music in the background was fairly torrid as well.
“You want to change the channel, Rafferty?” Helen said in a strangled voice.
He turned to look at her, keeping his gaze innocent. “Why?”
She was blushing again, and he wondered how anyone could be so innocent in a world that had grown astonishingly sordid in the past sixty or so years. “Well,” she managed to say, “since we’re not familiar with this particular soap then we don’t have any emotional involvement with the characters, so what they’re doing isn’t particularly interesting.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Rafferty said critically, as the man began to move down the woman’s body.
“Change the channel.”
He gave her a charming, helpless smile. “I don’t know how this thing works,” he said, holding up the black keypad.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” She jumped up and pushed a button on the oversize television, only to have the screen filled with still another couple, this pair fully dressed, sinking onto a sandy beach.
She pushed the button again, and a game show appeared, full of noise and flashing lights and cheering crowds. Rafferty glanced at her flushed face and considered seeing whether he could make the little black box work, then decided against it. She was still capable of kicking him out.
“You don’t like love scenes?” he asked comfortably enough, setting the machine down on the cluttered coffee table.
“That’s not it.”
“You don’t like sex, then?”
“That’s not it, either.”
“You do like sex?” He couldn’t resist teasing her, even knowing it was dangerous.
“Rafferty…” Her voice carried just enough warning. “I’m going to work in my room. You can watch anything you please. We’ll have to figure out how much time to allow to get to the Morettis…”
“Fifteen minutes. I know a shortcut.”
She stared at him for a moment. “For someone who doesn’t spend much time in Chicago you certainly seem to know yo
ur way around the city.”
“Not really. They keep changing the streets, making them one-way when it’s not the way I want to go. But I get around okay. I’m a good driver.”
“You’re atrocious,” she said flatly. “I’ll be ready to go by five-thirty. I believe in being prompt.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“In the meantime, I have the yellow pages by the phone. You might make a few calls and find yourself a place to stay.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said again, mocking her.
She walked out of the room without a word. A moment later he heard the bedroom door shut over the noise of the game show. He lounged on the sofa, not moving, as he thought about her.
With any luck he’d have to go wake her up. With any luck neither of them would leave that bed. Billy would understand. He’d been shocked as hell to find Rafferty there with her, and he’d taken Rafferty’s terse account of Drago’s attempt with both fear and fury. “You can’t leave her, Rafferty. Not until we do something about the situation.”
“I’m not about to leave her, Billy. Not until I have to.”
And both of them knew when that moment would come. By the dawn of February 15.
Chapter Five
Helen Emerson had made some stupid moves in her life, but getting back into a car with Rafferty had to be one of the most spectacular ones. There was only one more idiotic action on her part, and that was wearing her black dress.
She knew about that dress—she couldn’t fool herself into thinking it was accidental, couldn’t even pretend it was the only thing she had to wear. Her brother Harry had told her that dress ought to be declared illegal, and he wasn’t far wrong. She hadn’t even dared wear it in her father’s presence.
For one thing, it was much too short. Two inches above the knee, and even wearing opaque black stockings didn’t tone down the effect of her legs. She had good legs—she considered them her only claim to beauty, and she couldn’t resist the temptation of letting Rafferty get a good look at them.
The dress was also snug across her narrow hips, and admittedly cut too low. She told herself she wasn’t well endowed enough to make it indecent, ignoring the fact that the dress made her seem positively curvaceous. She put on the dress, defiantly, spruced up her makeup, sprayed herself with another spritz of perfume and walked out into the living room with the tallest pair of heels she owned.
Rafferty didn’t move for a minute, turning his attention from a home shopping show to stare at her, and she remembered how unnerving she found his stillness. It was all she could do not to tug at her neckline, pull down her hem. “Is this too dressy?” she asked, trying to keep the nervousness out of her voice.
“No,” he said, sitting up on the couch, his dark eyes watching her. “Mary’ll like it.” There was a deliberate pause. “I like it.”
Belatedly she wished she’d put her hair up. At least she had her glasses on to offer some sort of protection, as he rose from the sofa, clicked off the television and started toward her.
She wasn’t going to back up. He wasn’t a threat, she reminded herself. She trusted him, even if he made her uneasy. “Are you sure this is a good idea?” she asked, the question surprising her.
His smile was wry. “I’d ask you what you meant,” he said in that deep, still voice, “but I think just about everything involving you is a bad idea, for me at least, so I’ll just give you an unqualified no. Nevertheless, Mary wants to thank you personally for dropping the charges, and a spaghetti dinner is the best way she knows how. She’s even willing to put up with sitting across the table from me for a few hours to do it.”
That was enough to distract her from his troubling statement. “Why wouldn’t she want to sit across a table from you? Doesn’t she like you?”
His voice was lightly mocking. “What’s not to like? Mary’s afraid of me.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Helen said. “Why should she be afraid of you?”
Rafferty didn’t say a word. He was doing it deliberately—she recognized that fact, even as she felt herself respond. He was trying to frighten her as well as Billy Moretti’s pregnant wife, and it was a wonder he wasn’t succeeding. Or maybe he was, unnerving her in ways he hadn’t intended.
She pushed a hand through her thick mop of reddish-brown hair. “Give it up, Rafferty,” she said with a commendable amount of asperity. “I’ve spent time with serial killers, rapists, sexual deviates, the absolute scum of the earth. I’ve seen killers who would make Hannibal Lecter seem slightly antisocial. You can’t psych me out.”
“Hannibal Lecter?”
“You didn’t see Silence of the Lambs?”
“Never heard of it. Is it a movie?”
Helen shook her head, aware that the tension in the room had lessened slightly. “What planet did you just arrive from, Rafferty? Mars?”
He smiled then, and the tension sizzled right back through her nerve endings. A tension she recognized, even though she’d never felt it before, as being purely sexual. “Pluto,” he said. “You gonna let me drive?”
“Not on your life.”
He did it then, what she’d subconsciously been waiting for, knowing it was coming. He reached out and touched her, put his long fingers through her thick, reddish brown hair in a caress that was so subtle, so soft that she couldn’t reprimand him. “Come on, counselor. I heard on television that you only go around once in this life, and you have to grab for all the gusto you can get. Now I haven’t seen much gusto around, but I’d sure like to drive that ridiculous little car of yours.”
She gave in, not quite knowing why. Afraid it was just too easy to give in to this man. “You’ve got to promise you’ll drive a little more carefully,” she acquiesced. “I’m too young to die.”
“So am I, Helen,” he said, his voice flat and emotionless. “So am I.”
He did his best, she had to grant him that. Considering that his best was a speed better suited to the Indianapolis 500 than the city streets of Chicago, Helen simply clutched the door handle, closed her eyes and prayed. By the time the car jerked to an abrupt stop outside a neat-looking tenement building on the South Side, she realized she’d be unable to find her way back. She was doomed to one more ride with the madman behind the wheel.
“Wasn’t that better?” he asked with innocent pride.
“Since we’re still alive I guess it was all right,” she said grumpily, unfastening her seat belt with shaking fingers and sliding out of the car. He hadn’t bothered to fasten his in the first place, and she knew she ought to berate him. Considering her knees were still a little weak, she decided she needed to sit down on something that wasn’t hurtling along the streets, and she needed a drink.
Billy met them at the door, a proud, anxious expression on his face. His hair was combed back carefully from his boyish face, his clothes were neat and worn and he had his arm around a very pregnant young woman. Helen took one look at Mary Moretti’s round, calm face, and knew she’d made the right decision. Even when Mary’s eyes slid past her, nervously, to glance off the tall man standing directly behind her.
The apartment was surprisingly large, with three rooms, including a spacious kitchen, absolutely spotless and sparsely furnished. Billy had her seated on a sagging old sofa that wasn’t much worse than the antique in her own apartment, a glass of rough red wine in her hand, before she had time to think about it.
“Have you still got my suitcase, Billy?” Rafferty asked. “I’d give ten years off my life for a shower and a change of clothes.”
To Helen’s amazement Billy proceeded to choke on his wine. When he managed to catch his breath he glared at Rafferty. “It’s in the bedroom. Help yourself.”
“You left your suitcase here?” Helen asked. “How long has it been since you were in Chicago—a year?”
“Exactly,” Rafferty said. “I travel light. Got any shaving soap?” He ran a hand over the faint stubble, and Helen realized with a trace of a shock that she rather liked it. She usually found the
unshaven look pretentiously scruffy. With Rafferty it was definitely appealing. But then, despite her common sense, she was finding just about everything about Rafferty appealing.
“I’ll find it for you,” Billy said, following Rafferty into the bedroom with the air of a man about to give someone a piece of his mind.
“I’d better check on dinner,” Mary said, turning toward the kitchen.
There was no way that Helen was going to sit alone in the shabby, immaculate living room and sip her wine. “I’ll help,” she said, heading after Mary with the not very noble intention of pumping the woman for information.
“But you’re our guest,” Mary protested.
“Nonsense,” Helen said briskly. “Give me something to do and point me in the right direction.”
“Well, maybe the salad…”
“I’m very good at salads,” said Helen, who was a great believer in supermarket salad bars. “So how long have you and Billy been married?”
“Eight months,” Mary said, suddenly looking pale. “The baby’s due in late April.”
“He’ll be a big baby,” Helen said offhandedly.
“Yes,” Mary said with an effort. “Ms. Emerson, I wanted to thank you for dropping the charges against Billy. He’s a good man, and there were circumstances, things he can’t explain….”
“I understand,” Helen said soothingly, though she wasn’t sure she did. “I agree with you—he’s a good man. I trusted my instincts. And Rafferty’s.”
Rafferty hadn’t been exaggerating. The normally stalwart Mary Moretti looked definitely uneasy at the mere mention of Rafferty’s name. “He’s been a good friend to Billy.”
“But you don’t like him.” Helen decided it was time for a little prodding.
“Oh, no!” Mary protested. “It’s not that. He just makes me a little…uncomfortable. I guess it’s those eyes of his. They look like they could see right through to a person’s insides.”
“You should ask him if you’re going to have a boy or a girl.”
Mary looked startled, then managed a weak smile at Helen’s joke. “I’d rather be surprised. Besides, it won’t be much longer.”
