by Anne Calhoun
Jesus. She was offering to help get him a job. A better job. The kind of job a bartender with a paraplegic brother and a stack of medical bills would want.
He gaped at her for a long moment, then pulled himself together. “Thanks,” he said. “Let me think about it.”
She blinked, and he knew he’d fucked up. A guy in his situation should have been all over that, and connections were the best track to a good job. “I’m not suggesting you need to be something other than a bartender,” she said. “I just thought—”
He cut her off. “Not a problem, boss. I’ve got a couple of other options, that’s all. I didn’t want to say anything because it would mean quitting here.”
“Oh,” she said, her face clearing. “If you leave for a better job, not because I’ve had to fire you for public indecency, then I’m happy to see you go,” she said. “Maybe I wouldn’t even have to miss you too much.”
She flashed him a smile and turned to the bar to collect the night’s take. Under the bright lights, the pale skin of her shoulders gleamed, the taut muscles and line of her collarbone completely transfixing before she flashed him a smile and disappeared upstairs.
As soon as the door closed Natalie gave her two-fingered, piercing whistle. The DJ, eyes closed, swaying to a slow, relentless Euro-techno-groove, snapped to attention. Nat made a cut-it-off motion across her throat and the DJ pulled the plug. That strange, reverberating silence hung in the bar while everyone cleaned up. As the staff trailed out, Eve walked through the building, clicking off the lights and checking door locks. Tired to the point of incoherence, Matt braced a shoulder against the doorframe and watched her walk, mesmerized by the smooth shifts of her body in the leather. In that vibrating silence permeating the point of no return, his conscience battled duty.
His conscience won. “Eve. I can’t.”
She took a deep breath in through her nostrils as she looked around the bar. Mario and Tom were finishing cleanup. Natalie was upstairs getting her bag. Cesar sat by the open door, watching Eve.
“Then we have a problem, Chad,” she said, quiet and even to put his instincts on full alert. “I like you. I like talking to you. I like listening to music with you. But I’m under a lot of stress right now. I need sex, and if you’re not willing, then I’m going to make a couple of calls.”
She wasn’t threatening him, just being Eve. She knew what she wanted, and how to get it. “Don’t do it,” he said over the sick lurch of his stomach. He was her friend, and he knew it, even if she didn’t, but that friendship he found himself hoping would hold through the inevitable betrayal hung in the balance right now. “It’s not that bad, boss. Let’s get dinner and we’ll talk.”
“Sure. After you bring all that intensity you’re locking down inside to bed with me.” She looked him straight in the eyes, and he felt the emotions sear along his nerves to the tips of his fingers, down his thighs, tightening him. Her gaze flicked to the hand resting on the bar, and he followed her glance.
The hand was clenched into a fist. Worse, one of the scabs had cracked open. Blood trickled from his first knuckle into the hollow of his hand.
He consciously relaxed it. When he looked back at her, those ocean-deep, ocean-dark, ocean-dangerous eyes had softened with understanding.
“I think we both need this,” she said, very, very quietly. “You might eat what’s bothering you, but I think it’s eating you alive.”
He felt he’d taken a leg to the backs of his knees, sweeping his feet out from under him and knocking him flat on his back. The thought of her walking over to Tom and with a few smiles and a choice comment or two, suggesting he hang around after close while Matt walked out the door and got in his Jeep made him sick to his stomach. Not just because he’d go home alone and nearly out of his head with lust but because he knew, he knew he’d driven her to that point. The last thing they needed was another man in the mix, when he could be that man.
Rationalize much?
“Say yes,” she said, low, intent, thinking she understood exactly why he was hesitating, thinking he was a good guy, trying to do the right thing by her, not afraid to nudge him a little.
You can’t. You can’t say yes. You can’t say no either.
There was no clear right thing to do here. She’d already hate him. Might as well eat something else and keep Tom out of it. She’d need a friend afterward.
Yeah, you’re a saint.
“Yes.”
Her gaze searched his, then she said, “Lock the front door for me.”
For a brief moment the emptiness he felt when he woke settled into his mind. Chad crossed the dance floor, glanced out over the parking lot to make sure it was empty, then kicked up the stopper bracing the door open. Chad secured the bolt and repeated the movements on the second steel door. Chad watched Eve return from locking the storeroom door. Chad watched her cross the dance floor and hold out her hand.
But Matt Dorchester took Eve Webber’s hand and followed her up the spiral staircase into her office.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Matt waited while Eve unlocked the door leading to her apartment. The air was dark and close, heating around them as she fumbled with the key. Goose bumps lifted on Eve’s bare shoulders. Without thinking he put the tip of his index finger to her spine, tucked between her sharp-edged shoulder blades as she struggled with the sticky lock. A hitch in her breathing, then the bumps disappeared into smooth flesh.
“Cold or nervous?” he asked. Find an angle. Make her stay dressed, make her rethink her determination to get you in bed.
Christ. If he were anyone else, he’d find this hilarious. Alone in the dark with the sexiest cocktail waitress in Lancaster, and he was trying to make her put on more clothes and keep her hands off him.
“Neither, now,” she replied, looking over her shoulder through the tumbled mass of black hair gleaming in the red light from the EXIT sign over the office door. Inside the apartment she shed her bag and laptop on a small table by the door and walked into the kitchen to turn on the light over the stove.
“Water? Soda?” she asked as she opened the fridge.
“I’m fine.” He sat gingerly on the arm of her love seat, and refined his strategy as she poured herself a glass of red wine. He would not undress. He would not unfasten, unzip, unbutton, or unhook anything on her. He would keep her hands off him, focus entirely on her. He would not walk through the open bedroom door to his left. He would stay on the love seat that was too small for any real trouble.
Who was he kidding? He’d gotten into plenty of trouble in smaller spaces. Like the front seat of his Jeep.
Wine in hand, she strolled back into the living room to set her iPod in the sound dock and clicked through to a playlist. The sounds of Maud Ward’s latest hit drifted into the air, the volume too low for him to make out the words but high enough for him to hear the melody and bass line. His brain peripherally occupied with filling in the words to the song, he savored the way she was put together. Under his gaze her body relaxed, a small smile lifting the corners of her mouth, disappearing, then reappearing as she looked over her shoulder at him. She looked happier, calmer, as if she wasn’t carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders, and he hadn’t even touched her yet.
She took another sip of wine, then set the glass down on the shelf next to the sound dock and walked over to stand in front of him. He reached out and set his hands on her hips, let his thumbs stroke the bare skin between the bottom edge of the corset and the waistband of her skirt. When he closed his eyes, he couldn’t tell where the leather ended and her skin began except by the way her breathing stumbled.
He kept his eyes closed, because with him sitting down, the smooth, pale tops of her breasts and the sharp line of her collarbone were right at eye level, but darkness only heightened the sensation in his fingertips and the scent of Eve, mint and rosemary and a delicate soap underneath it all, rising into his nostrils. She slid her hand into the hair at his nape and bent forward, resting her forehead on the
top of his head. The limitless black space in his mind blasted wide open, the heat and scent of Eve dissolving through him, opening him.
I need this.
I can’t want this, let alone need this.
She pushed at his shoulders as he looped his arm around her waist, and then he was on his back on the love seat, the sweet soft weight of Eve all along the length of his torso. Their legs tangled together as he shifted back to get as flat as possible, and she pressed her mouth to his. He took her at her word and wove his fingers into her hair, gripping her skull and holding her to him for kiss after kiss, the click of teeth and the wet slide of tongues audible as the song selection changed. He was delirious, losing himself in the music and Eve’s mouth, now moving over the scruff on his jaw to the spot where his pulse pounded in his neck.
She was lying between his sprawled legs, which wasn’t going to work for either one of them, so he left one hand in her hair and bodily shifted her so her legs clasped his. Then he curled his fingers in body-warm leather and hitched her skirt up until it barely covered her ass, allowing her knees to drop to either side of his. Mouth open against his, she gave a little gasp and pressed her mound against his hip bone, the movement grinding against his cock. Involuntarily he gripped the curve of her ass and pulled her closer. His shirt rode up just enough to press the soft skin of her belly against his abdomen, another tantalizing reminder of what he wanted and couldn’t have.
She was slowly going up in flames in his arms, breathy kisses and a rhythmic grind against him, and for a moment he thought he was off the hook. Then she stopped and looked at him.
“We are not doing this again,” she said, nearly kneeing him in the balls as she struggled upright in the tight space.
He braced his foot against the high arm of the love seat, hitching himself out of harm’s way as he grasped for something to keep her there. “I like watching you like that,” he said, but she wasn’t listening. With a haste he would have found hot as hell under any other circumstances she gripped his right ankle to push herself upright.
Except she didn’t get ankle. She wrapped her fingers right around the Kahr in his ankle holster.
The most fundamental component of who he’d been for the last twelve years triggered a harsh automatic response. His hand flashed out, fingers clamping around her wrist so tightly he felt tendons and ligaments grind against bone.
Too late.
Her eyes went huge, and in an instant he knew there was no hope he could pass it off as a leg brace for an old injury. She scrabbled backward, inadvertently kicking him in the ribs with her motorcycle boot. He grunted and released her hand, and she completed her backward crawl off the love seat to stand in the middle of the room.
“That’s a gun,” she accused, jabbing her index finger at his ankle.
He scrambled to his feet. “Eve, let me—”
“Have you been carrying that in my bar? There’s a big sign right on the front door that specifically prohibits concealed weapons on the premises, Chad!”
Fuckfuckfuck. Arms folded, aggressive stance, well on her way through righteous indignation, into fury. “I know, but—”
“So you saw the sign and wore a concealed weapon to work anyway? Who does that?”
Goddammit, those signs don’t apply to me! trembled on the tip of his tongue as his brain jerked into overdrive, trying to find an explanation that wouldn’t blow his cover.
“Explain yourself!” she demanded.
A shadow darkened the glass in the kitchen window, then POP! POP POP! The tinkle of glass shards splintering into the kitchen sink shattered the supercharged moment.
Instinct and training took over. He tackled her, slamming her to the floor behind the breakfast bar separating the kitchen from the living room while someone emptied half a clip into the apartment, taking out the sound dock in a shower of sparks and plastic. She cried out when her shoulder rammed into the bar stool neatly lined up under the counter. The gun was now in his right hand, so he used his left to cover her head and hunkered down beside her.
“Stay down!” he hissed.
No questions, no screaming. She rolled flat on her belly and covered her head with her arms. A scuffling noise on the landing, then more gunshots shattered the glass in the bedroom window. The clearest threat was outside, not in the bar, so he yanked Eve to a stumbling crouch and shoved her toward the windowless bathroom. “Lie flat in the tub and cover your head.” When she obeyed, he spun and sprinted for the apartment door.
Too late. Before he was halfway down the stairs the sound of feet pounded toward the far end of the parking lot, a car door slammed, then tires squealed on a vehicle he’d bet didn’t have plates. Cursing steadily under his breath, he trotted back into the apartment and took up position in the bathroom doorway between the black-leather-clad, chalk-white woman huddled in the far corner of the bathtub and whoever just tried to kill them both.
Gunfire changed everything. He dialed dispatch from his department-issued cell phone and blew his cover straight to hell.
“Dispatch, three Nova eighteen. Shots fired. 1497 East Monroe, corner of Lexington, second floor apartment accessed from the alley behind the bar. Repeat, shots fired. Unknown assailant. Request immediate backup.”
“Copy three Nova eighteen.” The voice on the other end of the line stayed calm, but the pitch jumped a notch or two as the dispatcher parroted back his call sign and the address. A cop under fire and asking for backup would trigger an immediate and formidable response.
“Who are you?” Eve asked, bewildered.
“Three Nova eighteen, advise responding units U/C on scene, repeat U/C on scene,” Matt said, his gaze flickering from the apartment door to the office door to Eve’s face. Best-case scenario, he’d hand her the phone to maintain contact with dispatch while he did any number of useful, situation-appropriate things, like search the apartment, the alley, or the bar. One look at Eve nixed that idea. She was putting together gun and questions, Lyle and radio jargon, and based on the twist to her mouth, the answer tasted like raw sewage.
In the distance he heard the faint wail of an approaching siren, then a second one, the rhythm slightly off from the first. Sorenson was monitoring the radio; she’d be racing for her car, right behind the first responders, along with Lieutenant Hawthorn.
“Tell me who you are,” Eve said, but this time her voice was a cold and flat demand.
“Three Nova eighteen, responding units request your exact location.”
Not getting shot by an adrenaline-jacked responding officer took priority over confessing to Eve, so he relayed his position. Then he tucked the phone away from his mouth and looked at her.
“Detective Matt Dorchester, LPD.”
Her eyes narrowed. If looks could kill, he’d drop dead right there in the doorway, carotid artery sliced open by her ice-green gaze.
“Detective Dorchester,” she said, and the acid dripping from the words seared right through his rib cage, into his heart, “you’re fired.”
* * *
He was an undercover cop. He’d been undercover in her bar. He wasn’t a bartender. He was a cop.
At some functioning level Eve knew her thoughts circled in a truly dimwitted fashion, but she forgave herself for being a little on the slow side. One moment she’s dropping through arousal to hot need and seconds later she’s manhandled into her bathtub while someone shoots out her windows.
Then her bartender calls 911 and transforms before her eyes into a cop. A detective, no less.
When she felt straps encircling his calf and the distinctive shape of a gun under the leg of his jeans, all the heat froze into an icy fear. In her experience, only two groups of people carried concealed weapons: criminals and cops. Both appalling possibilities warred in her brain for the split second she had before she heard the popping noises, then found herself flattened between about two hundred pounds of muscle and bone and the equally unyielding floor.
Under a cop. An undercover cop. She’d been a breath an
d a heartbeat away from going to bed with an undercover cop. She felt his eyes on her but refused to look at him. Matt. Not Chad. Matt Dorchester. Matt sounded a little like Chad, but …
“I guess that explains why you look at me so strangely when I call you Chad.”
All activity in the room halted as two detectives, a lieutenant, three uniformed members of the Lancaster Police Department, and the CSI team stared at her. Had the words actually come out of her mouth? Oh God, she hoped only the last sentence and not her entire bewildered train of thought had been audible.
He said nothing.
Moments after she fired her newest bartender uniformed police officers had arrived in a flurry of shouting, the calls of “Clear! Clear!” creating a dizzying montage of television medical and police dramas. Chad … Detective Dorchester stayed in the middle of the doorway, blocking most of the curious glances as he directed the new arrivals to do a complete search. They’d stomped through every nook and cranny of her apartment, the bar, and the alley before Chad … he let her get out of her bathtub and go into the bedroom to change. Now dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, iPhone in hand like a security blanket, Eve huddled on the love seat in the middle of all the commotion. The sound dock was a total loss. The iPod looked okay, but she didn’t trust her knees to hold her if she got up to check. Without glass in the windows the ninety-degree, humid outside air rapidly heated her apartment, but she couldn’t stop shaking.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Dorchester murmur in Sorenson’s ear. The blonde detective crossed the room to crouch down by Eve. “Do you want a sweater, Ms. Webber?” she asked gently.
“Yes, please,” Eve responded automatically.
Dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and a tailored blazer, her gun and badge clipped to her waistband, Sorenson disappeared into the bedroom and returned with a cashmere V-neck in a deep green. Eve tugged it over her head and wrapped her arms around her torso. The shaking stopped, replaced with hot fury.
