by Anne Calhoun
Moments passed. The thumping club rhythm seeped back into her consciousness as the tension eased from his shoulders and arms, then his back. The fingers gripping her hip twitched then went lax. Still deep inside her, he relaxed, letting her bear some of his weight. They were in the same position, her limbs entwined around the strong column of his body, but the attitude was completely different. He wasn’t a figure carved from living granite but a man, sharing a stolen moment with her as the pleasure ebbed from their bodies.
And then she knew. Knew what she was feeling, the thing at odds with the stress and fear and helplessness. She was falling for Matt Dorchester, a man completely capable of acting the role of a lover while feeling nothing at all. He was inside her, his sweat salty on her lips, his body under her hands, and she was falling for him.
Unlike the sex they’d just had, she was falling hard and fast.
As if she’d shouted the words aloud, something changed in the air. He cleared his throat, stepped back, and turned to the trash can. Cool air sidled up her torso, making her shiver. She slid off the counter, pulled on her panties, kicked her shoes upright so she could step into them, and rewrapped her dress.
A rattle of the doorknob, then a knock over Natalie’s voice. “You naughty kids, I know you’re both in there. Eve, an unexpected bachelorette party just arrived. We need you out front, sweets. You too, handsome. There’s a blonde looking for her Chad special, whatever that is.”
A distraction from her distraction. Eve looked at him, lifted an eyebrow and her hand to his mouth. “A Soul Kiss,” he said after she wiped lipstick off his mouth and neck with her thumb.
“A little more subtle than asking for Sex on the Beach,” Eve said as Matt unlocked the door and hauled it open.
“Well, hey, sugar,” Nat said sweetly. “Make yourself useful?”
Matt ignored her, but Eve saw a muscle jump in his jaw before he disappeared into the bar.
“The things you put up with for your job,” Eve called after his departing back, then stifled a hysterical giggle.
Natalie peeked in the door. “You decent?” she asked, then added, “You okay?”
No. She had to start thinking through her decisions. Helping the investigation wasn’t an impulse. Tempting Matt into sleeping with her was, but she wasn’t trained to work as an undercover agent. She didn’t have an alter ego or a cover identity; she was just herself, mightily attracted to Matt Dorchester and acting on that attraction.
“I’m fine,” she said. “But if people don’t stop asking me that, I won’t be. Let’s go.”
* * *
She walked into a nearly full house, music rolling through the crowd like waves after a storm. Natalie directed her to the bachelorette party. She smiled, complimented outfits, laughed, congratulated the bride-to-be, bought the first round, and took picture after picture as the maid of honor passed phone after phone from group members to Eve.
“Thanks for doing this,” Miranda said, handing over another smartphone.
“My pleasure. Thanks for celebrating at Eye Candy.” Eve shifted the lens so Matt’s face wasn’t included in the shot. She’d done her best, but a few pictures ended up on the web. It couldn’t be helped. “On three. One, two, three.” The flash went off.
“We booked a couple of tables at Miss Martini but the vibe sucked, so we left early,” Miranda explained as she exchanged phones with Eve. “My cousin had a birthday party here last month, and my office is thinking about moving into the East Side business park. I wanted to check out the neighborhood.”
“That’s great,” Eve said.
“Quite a few employees live across the river. The location’s great, but there hasn’t been the … infrastructure to justify the move. The business park would change all of that.”
“You should try Cindy’s cupcakes,” Eve said. “They’re sin in a small package. So good.”
“As soon as I’m done dieting for this wedding. Fucking mermaid dress,” she said conversationally.
Startled into laughter, Eve asked for one more for the Eye Candy Facebook page. iPhone in hand, she backed up to get a little more of the bar in the shot and bumped into a warm male body. She turned around to apologize.
Lyle stood right behind her.
“Oh my God!” she gasped. Her hand flew to her chest and she dropped her phone. The hard shell case cracked open and it and the phone itself skittered in different directions. One of the bridesmaids nearly put a stiletto heel through the phone.
“You okay?” Lyle asked.
She swallowed the hysterical laughter. “No. You scared me half to death!”
Miranda, the only remotely sober woman in the party, gave Lyle an appraising look, one he returned, with interest. Eve took advantage of Lyle’s distraction to look for Travis. He seemed to be alone.
Helpful patrons found the shattered shell and handed it and the phone to Eve. The phone had a couple of new scratches but appeared functional. The case was a total loss.
“I need to talk to you.”
It was the peak of a Saturday night. “I’m a little busy at the moment,” she said. It took everything she had not to look in Matt’s direction to see if he’d noticed Lyle. She was sure he would have. All she needed to do was act natural. “I’m a little busy … but I’ve always got time for you. Let me just take one more picture,” she said to the party, and held up her phone. “Great. Thanks so much! I’ll check in with you later. The next round’s on me.” Then she turned to Lyle. “What’s up? I haven’t seen you in a while.”
“Let’s talk upstairs.”
She looked at him and saw a man who wasn’t her friend, who wanted her dead, the reason why she was living with a cop and going out of her mind. “Fine. Give me a second,” she said, and hurried toward Matt. She strolled around the end of the bar, stepped into his warm body.
“Get them whatever they want, sweetheart,” she said as she laid her hand on Matt’s hip, making sure to look over her shoulder as she spoke. Lyle’s face tightened. Then she turned back to Matt. “He wants to talk in private,” she murmured.
“He doesn’t get what he wants,” Matt said, and he didn’t need volume to convey utter authority. The absorbed, attentive lover was gone, replaced by a cop. Had the lover ever really existed?
She slid her hand under the hem of his shirt and looked up into his face. “I’m checking in with you so he thinks you’re a domineering asshole. Now I’m going upstairs.”
“Goddammit, Eve!”
She slipped from his grip and hurried around the end of the bar, deep into the crowd. Lyle followed her up the staircase, into her office. Eve closed the door and pulled out her cell phone.
“You don’t need your new boyfriend?”
“Who? Chad? Why would I? Just a second,” she said, not giving him a chance to respond. “I need to post those pictures to Instagram.” She swiped to the app she wanted, tapped it, then set the phone down and went on the offensive. “We’ve got a problem. Someone shot out my windows last week. Talk to whoever you have to and make that stop. It’s bad for business.”
Lyle settled into one end of her sofa and smiled that dark-eyed smile. Eve smiled back, studying his face. To her, he didn’t look any different, but Matt had been closer, able to see Lyle over the roof of the Jeep. Or maybe her new “boyfriend” landed a little farther down the paranoid spectrum. “I didn’t hear anything about it.”
“Then I’m telling you now. Someone shot out the windows to my apartment last week. I wasn’t hurt, thank God, and neither was Chad. It sure as hell killed the mood.”
That got her a smile, the small one she remembered best. “I’m surprised, Eve. He’s not your type.”
“He’ll do for now,” she said, giving him her best sexy cocktail waitress glance to cover her pounding heart, her stomach’s roller-coaster ride from her throat to her knees.
Lyle threw back his head and laughed, the sound unforced but with an edge she’d never heard before. It made the hair stand up on the back of he
r neck as some primitive part of her brain recognized the kind of threat that made animals everywhere go wide-eyed as they hunched in fear. “You haven’t changed a bit, Evie.”
She gave a nonchalant shrug. It was a struggle to confide in him as she would have when they were teenagers, to act like she hadn’t caught on. “I needed something different from Caleb’s lawyer friends.”
He glanced out the floor-to-ceiling windows. “Your parents can’t be happy about that.”
She had to assume he knew she’d taken “Chad” to Monday dinner. “I didn’t exactly ask for their permission,” she said wryly. “They’ll just have to get used to him.”
The smile didn’t change, a little smug, a little cold. “There’s the bad girl I remember,” he said. “And how’s business? Your new man getting involved?”
She let out a laugh that trilled through the octaves, and winced as she heard it. “Never mix business with pleasure. I need a ring and a prenup before that happens.”
“You don’t see him much on the Facebook page. I had to search to get a good look at the man who’s captivated our little Evie. It’s like you’re hiding him.”
Something like that. She looked at the iPhone. “He’s not the best-looking guy behind the bar. I don’t choose what customers post or tag. Look, Lyle, it’s a Saturday night and I’ve got a full house. Did you want something?”
He kept that unreadable dark brown gaze fixed on her. “Have you heard anything from the city about the property behind you?” He looked over his shoulder to indicate the alley and the vacant building behind the apartment.
He had her attention now. The deadline for bids passed the prior … Wednesday? No, Thursday. She’d assumed the city assessor called Caleb with the news, and Caleb, in the middle of a trial, had forgotten to call her. “No.”
“An associate of mine won the auction.” He all but sprawled on her sofa, completely relaxed, at ease. “Told you I was interested in investing in the East Side.”
Her blood turned to ice water in her veins. She’d lost the biggest space standing between Eve and SoMa, between Eye Candy and the rest of the existing East Side businesses and the East Side Business District. With the property in someone else’s name, even if the police caught Lyle the forfeiture laws wouldn’t apply.
The only way for her to get that property was to deal with Lyle.
“Wow,” she managed, and cleared her throat. “Congratulations to him. What does he plan to do with it?”
Lyle smiled. “He’s going to open a welding business. Or a strip club. He’s not sure which.” A laugh, then, “Jesus, Evie. If you could have seen your face. I’m kidding. You bid for it, didn’t you?”
She nodded. “Oh well. I couldn’t really afford it.” She couldn’t afford not to have it either.
“Should have let me help you,” he chastised. “I could see if he’d cut you a deal. He’d make a little money fast and you’d get the lot.”
“Brokering,” she said. “There’s usually a fee involved.”
“Just doing a friend a favor.”
And there it was, the truth Matt had seen before she did. Lyle wanted to own her in every possible way. She let her eyes widen, like he’d just offered her the secret recipe for the hottest drink on the market, and tried not to gabble in fear. “That’d be … that would be great. I’ll pay you back. I can’t now, but I will.”
He gave her a courteous, old-fashioned nod, and stood up. This time he let himself out, back into the bar. Eve paused at the bottom of the stairs and watched him walk through her building, her crowd, her business, like he owned it.
Matt materialized out of the crowd, gripped her upper arm, and all but yanked her into the phone alcove. He was white to his lips, his eyes hard. “What the fuck were you thinking?”
“He’s not going to shoot me upstairs in my office with three hundred people in the building,” she pointed out rationally, and jerked her arm loose.
A hand landed on either side of her head as he got right in her face. “There are a dozen other things he could do to you, Eve, starting with taking you out through your apartment door without anyone knowing,” he said.
Her eyes widened. It was the most vivid display of emotion she’d ever seen from him. “I didn’t think of that,” she said.
Matt visibly got himself back under control. “What happened?”
“We can talk about it later,” she said. “Two more parties are coming in.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
After Eye Candy closed, Eve powered down the lights, and found a small task force assembled in her office: Matt, Sorenson, Carlucci, and Hawthorn.
“Murphy approached you?” Hawthorn said without preamble.
“In the middle of the rush,” she said, rubbing her eyes without a care for her mascara. She was so tired. So wired, and she’d gotten them nothing they could use.
Sorenson got her notebook. “What exactly did he say?”
In response, Eve set her iPhone on her desk and opened the voice recorder. She pressed play, and the conversation broadcast into the office.
Matt stood beside her, arms folded, back to brick wall.
“I was listening when we talked at your house,” she said in a low voice.
“I lost ten years off my life when you walked up those stairs alone,” he said. His voice was equally low, his eyes focused on the iPhone as Sorenson replayed the conversation. “Do that again and I’ll make ‘forceful’ look like riding the carousel at the zoo.”
Certain he was joking, she stared at his unyielding profile, waiting for the tight line of his jaw to relax. Then he turned to look at her. For a moment of time measurable only by the atomic clock the real Matt Dorchester, the man locked away behind duty and honor and service, inhabited his hazel eyes, and she stopped breathing. He blinked, then disappeared.
Oxygen returned to the room, so she could speak. “I’m sorry,” she said defensively. “It was the best option.”
“The fuck it was. The best fucking option was to tell him that after some lowlife motherfucker nearly fucking killed you your domineering boyfriend won’t let you do anything alone.”
Lyle got stupid when he was angry. Eve got impulsive. Anger brought out Matt Dorchester’s Army vocabulary and a glare that somehow managed to be both ice-cold and white-hot.
She opened her mouth.
“Later.”
Her teeth clicked shut. “Yes,” she said. “Later.” She folded her arms across her chest and leaned against the wall. In the mirror on the back of the door, her jaw and Matt’s looked identical, mulishly set.
Sorenson looked between the two of them as she took the phone from Eve and connected the phone to her computer, then transferred the recording to the laptop. “How did you get away with starting the recorder?” she asked, rummaging through a variety of cables in her bag.
“I said I was posting bachelorette party pictures online. Which I was. Then I started the app.”
“That’s a really tempting offer,” Hawthorn said mildly.
Eve rubbed her forehead. “He’s definitely got the upper hand. It’s bad enough if that building doesn’t come down, but if someone puts up a welding shop or a strip club, it sabotages the whole redevelopment effort.”
“You’re doing great, Eve,” Hawthorn said. “We’ve got accounts, numbers, a history of transactions. We can track the outflows back into the Strykers. Just a little bit longer.”
“I’m fine,” Eve said. “I can do this. I can.”
“And nice job with the voice recording,” Sorenson said. “You were thinking on your feet.”
“It was Matt’s idea,” Eve said without looking at him. “We talked about a variety of scenarios over the weekend.”
Sorenson gestured for Eve to meet her by the door. “How are you holding up?” she asked quietly, her gaze holding Eve’s.
Her voice was too low for either Hawthorn or Matt to hear her words, but she could tell Matt got the gist of the question by the way his jaw tightened.
/> “Fine,” Eve lied.
“He’s just doing his job,” Sorenson said.
“I know.”
The space between her and Matt seemed as wide as the ocean after Sorenson, Carlucci, and Hawthorn left. She closed her apartment door and turned to find him leaning against the door to her office. There couldn’t have been more than ten feet between them, but the gulf seemed impossible to cross, and in that moment, Eve knew her whole life was crashing down around her ears. Lyle would win. She’d lose Eye Candy, and the East Side would lose support for the redevelopment bid. Worst of all, people were dying, and she …
She was if-you-don’t-say-the-word-love-then-it’s-not-real falling for a man so afraid of emotion he locked away everything he felt, everything he was, behind layers of fictional identity. Ten minutes earlier, for a split second, she’d seen the real Matt, the man suppressed under the bartender, the cop, the brother. The lover.
Now she knew. The sex, the laughter, the teasing banter, none of it was really him.
He leaned against the door, his fists jammed tight in his pockets, probably to keep from shaking her until her teeth rattled in her head, but she would have welcomed that, because it would have been real. Not this artificial, thrumming silence.
“I had to do it. He never would have given away so much if you were in the room. If we’re going to end this anytime soon, we need that evidence.”
“Fuck the evidence. You don’t ever go anywhere alone with him again. Understand?”
She saw red. For the first time in a volatile, impulse-filled life, she actually saw red with anger. “I’m not your partner,” she flung at him. “Or your girlfriend. You don’t have any right to talk to me like that.”
She’d just swung at a hot button with a sledgehammer, but for once it wasn’t an impulse. Her reward was a second glimpse of the searing, wild emotion lighting up his eyes. The long muscles in his forearms, exposed by the short-sleeved Eye Candy T-shirt, tightened, standing out in stark relief under his skin. In the still darkness of her apartment emotion poured from him in waves. It was like standing in a lashing, pelting thunderstorm, the air crackling with electricity, sheer human feeling buffeting her like slaps of wind and rain.
