Cuff Me

by Lauren Layne

  They’d bring the suspect in for questioning, and that’s when Vincent generally passed the baton to Jill.

  If his skill was in figuring out who did it, her skill was coaxing—or tricking—them into confession.

  But from the second Vincent had stepped foot in the stunning home of Lenora Birch on Eighty-First and Fifth, he’d known something was wrong.

  The scene was clean. Too clean.

  He got no immediate vision of what must have happened. No gut sense of how the legendary actress came to be lying dead on her foyer floor.

  He hadn’t panicked. By the time they talked to all the key players, he’d have something to work with.

  But he hadn’t.

  Nothing from the utterly useless housekeeper.

  He hadn’t gotten the flicker from Lenora’s sister.

  Nor Lenora’s latest boyfriend.

  Nor her ex-boyfriends and ex-husbands.

  Hadn’t gotten it from her longtime best friend and legendary Broadway actress.

  By the time he and Jill had called it a day with some much-needed caffeine, not only did Vincent have zero sense of who might have pushed Lenora over her staircase railing, he did not have an idea where to start.

  Ignorance was not bliss.

  Adding to Vin’s nagging sense of unease was the woman currently sitting across the table from him.

  He didn’t know what had compelled him to ask Jill out for drinks.

  They did it often enough, but usually it was a natural continuation of their day when they were still knee-deep in work talk.

  Today had been different.

  Today they’d both been exhausted, frustrated from the lack of leads and lost in their own heads.

  He should have left it at coffee. Let them both get enough caffeine to make it through the remaining hours of the day, then dropped Jill off to call her fiancé, while he decompressed with a beer and whatever was on TV from the comfort of his couch.

  But then he’d come out of the restroom at Starbucks, seen her lost in thought, smiling to herself, and he’d felt a surge of panic.

  Panic that he didn’t know what she was thinking.

  Panic that he didn’t know what was making her smile. (Although he was terrified that he did know.)

  Panic that he was losing her.

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  She was supposed to have come back from Florida feeling like he had that day he impatiently counted the hours until he saw her at the welcome-home party.

  She was supposed to feel what he was feeling.

  If he only knew what that was.

  Jill cradled a beer in her left hand, her phone in her right as she scrolled through. Then she winced and glanced up, holding her phone up to him. “Story broke.”

  He reached for a handful of the complimentary bar snacks the pub offered to customers. “Took them long enough.”

  “Right?” Jill said, turning her attention back to her phone. “I’m surprised the media didn’t beat us to the scene. How the hell did this stay quiet all day in the age of Twitter?”

  “Lenora Birch is old-school. Way old-school. Everyone we interviwed today was in the geriatric set. You really think they’re on Twitter spreading the news?”

  “Everyone’s on Twitter,” Jill muttered, never looking up from her phone.

  “I’m not.”

  She snorted. “Please. You can barely maintain a relationship with one person, much less hundreds of followers.”

  Vin sat back in his chair, and damn if he didn’t feel a little… wounded.

  It was strange, considering how long they’d been working together, but Vin had never really given conscious consideration to what Jill thought of him. Their relationship had always been both horribly complicated and wonderfully simple.

  Those two elements canceled each other out so that when it came right down to it, Jill and Vincent were beyond definition.

  They simply were.

  He’d always thought they’d shared a secret understanding that the fact that what was between them couldn’t be named was precisely what made it theirs.

  Now, he was realizing that this had been one-sided. That all this time, he’d merely been her colleague while she’d been his… everything.

  “Can you put the damn phone away,” he heard himself snap.

  Jill glanced up in surprise, and he saw guilt flash across her face. She immediately locked her phone and set it facedown on the table.

  “Of course. I’m sorry.”

  Her apology was simple. Sincere.

  And yet it did nothing to mollify him. He didn’t want Jill to pay attention to him just because he begged her to. He didn’t want to have to compete for Jill’s attention at all. He wanted—

  Fuck. He didn’t have a clue.

  He reached for his beer, then instead changed course and grabbed one of the laminated menus at the back of the table.

  “You hungry?”

  “Always,” she said. “Nachos? Wings? Ooh, we could split a burger!”

  Vin lowered the menu and gave her a look. “One does not split a burger.”

  “One can and one should when the burger is as big as it is here,” she said.

  In the end, they ordered nachos for her and a burger for him.

  “I’m not sharing,” he said, pointing his newly refilled beer at her.

  “Of course not,” she said soothingly, picking through all of the nuts to get at the almonds and leaving the peanuts for him.

  Vin grunted. He knew that voice. He was definitely going to end up sharing that burger.

  “I must be out of practice,” Jill said with a tired sigh. “Because for the life of me, I don’t know where we start tomorrow with this case.”

  “Me either,” he admitted.

  She lifted an eyebrow. “I wondered why I wasn’t getting your smug, I-know-it-was-you vibe all day. I thought I was rusty on my Vincent-reading skills too.”

  You are, he wanted to say.

  But that wasn’t fair. Not really.

  He couldn’t expect her to read him, when he didn’t have a read on himself.

  He didn’t know what he wanted her to look at him and see. He only knew that something was very, very wrong. Starting with the fact that she was going to marry another man in…

  “When’s the wedding?” he asked.

  Jill’s beer glass froze halfway to her mouth, and she lowered it without taking a sip. “So I guess we’re not talking about the case then.”

  He popped a handful of nuts in his mouth. “We’re off the clock.”

  “That hasn’t stopped us from talking about work before.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Are you avoiding the question?”

  Jill puffed out her cheeks and then slowly blew out a breath the way she always did when she was annoyed. He took a sip of his own beer and studied her.

  Interesting.

  Interesting that she should be annoyed about a topic that should send her over the moon.

  And she’d been plenty happy to talk about wedding stuff with the women of his family last night, so it was obviously just with him that she didn’t want to discuss it.

  He leaned forward. “Come on. If you can’t give me a date, at least promise me I’ll get to be a bridesmaid.”

  She smiled, and he was relieved to see that it reached her eyes. “You’re going to look so pretty in pink.”

  He winced. “Don’t tell Nonna that. She’ll make it her life’s mission to get me into a pink bow tie. Seriously though, when’s the big day?”

  “We don’t know yet.” She fiddled with her glass. “It’s all been happening so fast.”

  “You think?”

  She glanced up. “If you don’t approve, you can just say so.”

  “Who said I didn’t approve?”

  She gave him a look. “Your scowls. Your grunts. Your silences.”

  He shrugged. “I’m always like that. Even when I’m happy.”

  This time it was Jill who lean
ed forward. “So you are happy?”

  “You are so damn annoying,” he muttered.

  She sat back in her seat and studied him, then leaned forward again, her face all kinds of animated. “Okay, two things. First, that is such a pathetic non-answer. I’m disappointed in you. Second, it doesn’t even make sense considering earlier today you accused me of not being happy.”

  He leaned even closer. “Speaking of non-answers, you didn’t exactly rush to reassure me that you’re over the moon about your fiancé.”

  He drew out the last word, and it came out just slightly mocking.

  She didn’t look away, but he had the sense that she wanted to. “I answered.”

  “So you are happy?” he asked, turning her own game around on her.

  Someone who didn’t know her as well might not have noticed the half-second pause. But he noticed.

  “I’m happy,” she said.

  “Uh-huh. So just to be clear, you’re one hundred percent happy to be marrying this Tom guy, whom you’ve known for all of three months?”

  “Absolutely. Very happy.”

  He studied her face for several seconds, then shrugged. “Then it’s like I said. I’m happy if you’re happy.”

  That was mostly true.

  “You don’t mean it.”

  “Well, you’ll have to excuse me if the news of you marrying some tassel-shoed millionaire isn’t the impetus I need to turn into Mr. Smiley.”

  “What is the impetus you’d need then?” Jill snapped back. “Because I’ve known you for years, and I’ve yet to see a damn thing that makes you feel anything other than irritable.”

  Vincent took a sip of his beer, annoyed to realize that this was the second time in one evening that he’d felt an uncomfortable sting at her words. Vin had no illusions about the type of man that he was. He knew he was prickly and guarded and too intense.

  But for some reason, he’d always thought that Jill saw past all that—beyond it. He’d always thought that Jill got him. Liked him for who he was.

  But now—now he wasn’t so sure. Maybe she didn’t know him.

  Because he sure as hell wasn’t sure that he knew her anymore.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked quietly.

  “Like what?”

  “With so much… dislike.”

  “I’m not.”

  Jill threw her hands up in frustration. “I’m so glad you asked me to drinks so that you could alternate between telling me how unhappy I am about my engagement and then not talking to me at all.”

  “I’ve never been particularly talkative,” he said slowly. “Never seemed to bother you before.”

  “Well, it bothers me now,” she said, mostly to herself.

  They were saved from a full-blown argument by the arrival of their food, and before he realized what he was doing, Vin was cutting off part of his burger—not quite half, but at least a third—and was putting it on a side plate and sliding it across the table.

  He watched her face, feeling almost shy… wondering if she would accept the shared burger for what it was. A peace offering.

  And from the sunny smile she gave him, he warmed just a little. She understood.

  But the warmth vanished as quickly as it arrived with her next words.

  “You asked about a wedding date. We’re thinking June.”

  June. That was in four months.

  The fry and ketchup in his mouth suddenly didn’t taste as good.

  “That’s fast,” he said eventually, because he had to say something. “You got a hankering to be a June bride or something?”

  “Not really.” She fiddled with a burned corn chip on the edge of the nacho platter and didn’t look at him. “Tom thinks we should get married before we move.”

  Vincent’s burger paused in midair, halfway to his face. He slowly put it back down again.

  “Move?” His voice sounded rusty. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Move where?”

  She was slow to meet his eyes. “Tom’s opening up a new property. It’ll take up all his time, and we want to spend our first months as newlyweds together, so—”

  “Jill,” he interrupted. “Move. Where?”

  She licked her lips. “Chicago. We’re moving to Chicago in the summer.”

  It was the second time in twenty-four hours that Jill Henley had dropped a bomb on his head, but this time, his subconscious must have been prepared.

  Because no sooner were the words out of her mouth, then Vincent knew.

  Knew that there was no way he was letting Jill Henley walk away from him. Walk away from them, and what they had.

  Whatever that was.

  He only knew that the thought of her moving away…

  … It felt like he couldn’t breathe.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Even before Vincent and Jill had become partners—before they’d even known of the other person’s existence—they’d both lived in Astoria, Queens.

  Manhattan rent was outside of a comfortable cop’s salary (unless you were like Vin’s brothers and had a grandmother hooked up with rent control).

  Brooklyn was slightly more affordable—or at least it had been, back when Jill was looking for her first New York apartment a few years ago—but then she’d toured the cozy one-bedroom in Astoria and she’d felt…

  Home.

  Sure, it was a longer-than-desirable commute into the city, and yeah, there was nothing trendy or particularly sexy about it. It wasn’t the New York City one saw on TVs or the movies, or even the gritty NYC one saw in the other types of movies.

  Astoria was one of those New York neighborhoods that inspired loyalty in its residents for reasons they could never quite explain to nonresidents. You either lived there and got it… or you didn’t.

  But Vincent? He got it.

  Jill knew this because he, like her, had never voiced interest in moving anywhere else, even when their most recent raise might have allowed for it.

  And living just a few minutes away from her partner had other perks, like easy carpooling.

  The morning after her and Vincent’s gorge on nachos and burgers and beer, Jill dropped into the passenger seat of the car with a grumpy huff.

  “Caffeine,” she said. “I need all the caffeine.”

  She jumped a little in surprise when a travel mug appeared in front of her face. She started to push his wrist aside. “No, not your coffee. You know I don’t like it all thick and tarlike.”

  It was one of their many differences. Vin preferred his coffee blacker than his wardrobe. Jill preferred cream. And sugar. Preferably mass amounts of both.

  “You know, all this time together, and I never realized how you drink your coffee,” Vincent said in a sarcastic voice.

  Jill turned to look at him.

  He looked… the same.

  Same aviator glasses, same simply styled black hair. Same dark shirt, same leather jacket, same dark pants.

  But something was different today.

  She narrowed her eyes as he extended the mug to her once more with his right hand. And this time she registered that he had a second mug in his left hand.

  One for him…

  And one for her?

  “Don’t worry,” he said, giving it a little shake. “I dumped in all sorts of cavity-causing goodness for you.”

  “Thanks?” Jill said. She accepted the mug, taking a tentative sip. It was good. Really good. Not just a packet of sugar and a splash of milk good, but like…

  “Is this vanilla flavored?” she asked, staring down at the mug.

  Vincent still hadn’t pulled away from the curb outside of her apartment. “French vanilla if you want to get fancy.”

  She shifted in her seat to stare at him. “This is your backup travel cup, which tells me you brought this from home, not a coffee shop. Which begs the question… why does a man who thinks anything other than black coffee is a sin have French vanilla coffee creamer at his apartment?”

  He looked at her over
the rim of his own mug. Took a sip without a response.

  She sat up straighter. “Did you meet a woman while I was gone? A sweet-flavored-coffee-loving woman?”

  Vincent merely held her gaze, and Jill kept her smile in place, but she also wanted to shake him. To demand that he answer.

  “I already told you I’m not seeing anyone,” he said.

  Jill felt her shoulders relax a little; told herself that it wasn’t because she didn’t want Vincent to have met someone. Of course she wanted her partner to meet a nice woman. To settle down and—

  She pushed the thought aside. Lifted her mug. “Explain.”

  He shrugged before putting his mug in the cup holder and turning the ignition. “I stopped at the store last night for eggs and paper towels. Then I saw the foofy coffee creamer stuff, knew that you rarely get your ass out of bed in time to make your own coffee…”

  Vincent broke off with a shrug as he began to drive, and Jill could only stare at him in puzzlement.

  “Six years we’ve been doing this,” she said, “and you’ve never made me coffee. Brought me coffee, yes. Picked up a cup for both of us while we’re working OT, sure. But this…”

  She held up her mug and stared at it.

  Vincent made an irritable sound like he wanted to rip the mug away from her, but then he surprised her—again—by changing the conversation once more.

  “How’d you sleep?”

  Jill sighed and took a sip of coffee—a big one. “Didn’t. Not much anyway.”

  “Me either.”

  She tapped her nails against the cup, stared out the window. “I’d forgotten about this part. Forgot that it’s always like this on the first night of a new case. Especially one that doesn’t have so much as a hint of a clue.”

  “Same.”

  Jill pivoted her head to look at him. “I think we should start with the scene. There’s got to be something we missed. Maybe run through a couple scenarios…”

  “I was thinking we start with questioning the sister,” he said. “Her prints are all over the place.”

  “Yeah, because it’s her sister,” Jill said. “The housekeeper said Dorothy was at Lenora’s all the time.”

  “Still want to question her,” he said.

  If Vincent bringing her coffee had shocked the hell out of Jill, it was nothing compared to the jolt his next sentence had on her: