by Maggie Price
“Expression hard. Noncommittal.” Her fingers kneaded his shoulder. “Unyielding.”
“What do you know about cop mode?”
She smiled. “Oh, I’ve matched a few police officers.”
His eyes narrowed. “Matched?”
“Making matches is my business—”
“Matches, as in ‘close cover before striking’?”
God, he was so intense…and handsome. “Matches, as in relationships. I have a high success rate. I can just sense when two people belong together—it’s a gift.” Having found her opening, she plucked a business card from the evening bag that dangled on a slim chain from her shoulder.
“Here you go.”
Jake moved his hand from her waist to accept the card. “‘Meet Your Match,”’ he read, then moved his gaze back to hers. “You work there?”
“Yes. I also own the company.”
He looked back at the card, arched a dark brow. “You’re a romance engineer?”
“That’s right.” She was proud of the title, of her com pany’s success and the knowledge that she offered people the potential for a lifetime of happiness. “I engineer relationships. Quite successfully, if I say so myself. I’m working on franchising.”
As if mulling that over, he remained silent. Around them, muted conversations hung in the air as couples drifted past, swaying to the soft music.
“In other words, people pay you to fix them up on blind dates,” he finally commented.
“Not ‘blind dates.’ When we sign on a client, we conduct background checks and do an intense interview. The person actually knows a lot about their date, including what they look like, before they even meet.”
She gave a subtle glance at the firm left hand that cupped her right. Interest—a purely business one, she told herself—stirred when she saw he wasn’t wearing a wedding band. “So, Sergeant Jake Ford, is there a special woman in your life?”
The slow song ended, another began. Without missing a step, he continued moving in the same smooth rhythm.
“No.”
“Maybe you’d like to check out our services?”
He handed her card back. “No.”
This time, his hand settled against her back where silk gave way to bare skin. His touch was light, but potent enough to widen her eyes as an unexpected flash of need took her by surprise. Air clogged her lungs. She stiffened her spine beneath his palm and willed her feet to keep moving while she kept her gaze on his.
He was watching her with seeming ease, but she could see the shimmering intensity in his dark eyes.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Fine.” She needed oxygen. She wasn’t into self-deception. Just like another man in her past, Jake Ford’s looks, his demeanor…his touch were tempting. Too tempt ing. Already, her hormones were surging in a direction where the fine edge of reason began to blur.
Now that she’d felt the heat of his flesh against hers, she wanted his touch to continue. Deepen.
Not going to happen, she told herself, putting mental skids on her thoughts. She would never again approach a relationship with her emotions calling the shots. She’d been down that road with her ex, and found it was full of potholes. Now she was smarter. Wiser. And she had learned how to face a problem head-on. The thing to do in this instance was to take control and go on the defensive.
She would feel a whole lot better—safer—if Jake Ford were off-limits. And she was the perfect person to make that happen.
“I have a client who might be perfect for you,” she said as she began tucking the card into the breast pocket of his suit coat. “She’s a doctor. A medical doctor, intelligent and gorgeous. Let me know if you change your—”
Her words slid back down her throat when he snagged her wrist. His hand was steady, his fingers unyielding as steel.
His dark eyes narrowed. “Not interested. And I won’t change my mind.”
The image of those firm, controlled hands exploring every inch of her body clicked into her brain, sending heat surging into her cheeks.
A shadow flickered across his eyes, then disappeared. He released her wrist. “No offense.”
“None taken.” Pursing her lips, Nicole dropped the rejected card back in her purse while regarding him. “Has anyone ever mentioned that your biorhythms might be in the negative range?”
He missed a step, picked the beat back up again. “My what?”
“Biorhythms. You strike me as being overly tense, so yours might be in a negative cycle. Sebastian says if a person’s biorhythms are negative, it’s hard to do well in certain areas.”
“Who the hell is Sebastian?”
“Sebastian Peck, my personal trainer at Sebastian’s.”
Jake’s mouth curved into a sardonic arch. “The prissy gym on the northwest side of town,” he commented.
“Actually, it’s a health club.”
“Bet it’s got piped-in music and a juice bar.”
“That’s right.”
“Not my kind of place. I work out at the police gym.”
Nicole’s left hand slid down to settle on his biceps. The well-formed muscle evidenced a strenuous workout regime.
“Sebastian isn’t taking new clients now, but he owes me a favor,” she said, undaunted. “I can set up an appointment to get your biorhythms charted. It doesn’t take long.” By then, she might have figured out how to convince Jake to agree to a date with the gorgeous doctor.
“My biorhythms are fine.”
“Just think about it. I’m in the book—call me if you change your mind.”
His eyes narrowed at the same instant the music faded. From the opposite side of the dance floor, an uncle of the bride’s announced that the wedding couple was getting ready to leave the reception.
“We should wish them well,” Nicole said.
“You give Whit and Bill my best,” Jake stated evenly. “I’ve stayed too long as it is.” His hand was a light presence on her elbow as they walked to the edge of the dance floor.
Squaring her shoulders, Nicole turned to face him, offered her hand. “It was nice to meet you, Jake. Give me a call if you decide you want to try out my services.”
He hesitated for a brief instant, then cupped her hand in his while he flashed a careless grin. “Your services?”
Her throat tightened. Even as her brain told her that retreat would be wise, she allowed her hand to remain in his. Only one other time in her life had a man had such an immediate, stunning effect on her. Then, she’d gone with emotion, listened to her heart instead of her head, and she’d wound up betrayed and hurt. Desperately hurt.
Now all of her senses screamed at her to do an about-face and run for the hills. For some incomprehensible reason, she stayed put.
“My company’s services, of course,” she amended, keeping her voice light. “You might wake up some morning and decide you want to meet the doctor after all.”
He kept his eyes locked with hers while his thumb stroked the inside of her wrist. Her pulse stuttered, then her stomach dropped to her toes.
“I won’t.”
Even as he turned and walked away she took a step backward. Then another.
Feeling the aftershock of his touch in every pore, she curled her fingers over her palms. She remained unmoving, her gaze tracking his progress toward the door while she waited for her pulse to settle. It didn’t.
Hours later, her nerves still thrumming, Nicole lay in her bed, thinking about Jake Ford. About his dark eyes and ruthless good looks. About the way the attraction she’d felt for him had hit her like a freight train and hadn’t abated.
Even for a woman who knew he wasn’t the type of man she wanted, those thoughts made him dangerous.
Too dangerous.
Stifling a groan, she dragged a pillow over her head and breathed deeply of the soft scent of vanilla that drifted from the linen pillowcase. At least Jake wasn’t part of her brother’s new family, she reasoned. He was Whitney’s partner; there was no reason she an
d the cop with the whiskey-colored eyes would ever cross paths again.
And that, all of her instincts told her, was a very good thing.
Chapter 2
He shouldn’t have danced with her. Shouldn’t have touched her, shouldn’t have stroked his thumb across her wrist.
Jake scrubbed a hand across his face. Over a week had dragged by since Bill and Whitney’s wedding. Over a week. He had lost track of how many times he’d berated himself on the subject of Nicole Taylor. Even now, his mind kept wandering out of the parked detective cruiser in which he sat and back to the hotel’s glittering ballroom. To the heady feel of her in his arms. To her tempting scent.
To her.
“Dammit!” Setting his jaw, he pushed away the maddening thoughts and focused his mind. He stared out the windshield at the decrepit brick apartment building that looked like a hulking mammoth on the dark, weed-infested lawn. A bare bulb glowed above the building’s crumbling cement porch, sending weak rays into the moonless night. His most reliable snitch had sworn that the girlfriend of Ra mon Cárdenas, primary suspect in the drive-by homicide of seven-year-old Enrique Quintero, planned to show up at the apartment building sometime tonight.
Jake had been on the stakeout since sundown. So far, no girlfriend.
He had the cruiser’s windows open; the heat of late September hung heavy in the still night air. In the distance, traffic rumbled along the interstate that cut a swath through downtown. Several houses away, a dog broke into a flurry of barks, ending when a gruff male shout splintered the air. The police radio in the cruiser’s dash crackled softly, the dispatcher sounding as if he were speaking a foreign language.
As if on automatic pilot, Jake’s brain processed the garbled information, which included a female patrol officer notifying dispatch of a Signal 7 at Stonebridge, a swanky gated housing community in the far northwest part of the city. A Signal 7 meant a dead body. One of the Holy Grails of police work was that an unexplained death got treated as a murder right from the start. If his name had headed Homicide’s list to take the next call, Jake would have responded. He glanced at the luminous dial of his watch, knowing that the team of detectives pulling night shift this month would head to the scene in a matter of minutes.
Settling down in his seat, he swallowed the last dregs of his convenience-store coffee, then tossed the foam cup over his shoulder. He gave an unconcerned glance at the back seat, littered with the wadded sacks and empty cups from that week’s take-out meals. He had a few days before Whitney got back from her honeymoon—he would shovel out the cruiser before then.
With the bitter taste of coffee still on his tongue, his hand automatically went to the pocket of his chambray shirt, found it empty. He scowled. Dammit, he hadn’t smoked in two months, five days and seven hours. When the hell was he going to stop reaching for the pack of cigarettes that wasn’t there?
Smoking was the least of the things he missed, Jake reminded himself, his mood turning as dark as the night around him. He couldn’t quite forget the bite of aged Scotch. Or the heady feel of a woman. A soft woman with stunning blue eyes. A woman who smelled good enough to make a man wonder how it would feel to have her move beneath him in the dark.
A woman like Nicole Taylor.
He exhaled a slow breath. He could still feel the way her pulse had spiked beneath his thumb. After that, it had taken all of his control not to press his mouth to that soft place on her wrist and find out if she tasted as good as she looked.
Doing that would have only compounded the already idiotic move he’d made when he’d slicked his thumb across her flesh. He didn’t want to start something he knew didn’t have a chance in hell of going anywhere. Didn’t want to sample what he couldn’t allow himself to have.
Yet, because he’d given in to the impulse to hold on to her longer than he should have, he couldn’t forget the gratifying stutter his touch had put in her pulse.
That memory wasn’t the only thing giving him trouble.
Until that night, all he’d wanted was to rid himself of the clawing dream that dragged him to that second in time when a bomb ignited and ripped apart his world. The dream had faded the past several nights, just as the police psychologist had assured him it would. Problem was, his subconscious had replaced that dream with one of Nicole. A dream that, in one way, was far more disconcerting because there was no therapy for it. No way to talk the woman out of his head, no logical way of ridding his system of her.
She was there. Inside him. All of his instincts told him he was going to have one hell of a time shaking her presence. But shake her, he would.
He had learned the hard way that what fate tossed out was not always kind. Learned in the most horrific way how fast a person’s life could change. How, in a slash of time, happiness could transform into grief. Numbing, ceaseless grief.
Before he could switch off his thoughts, he saw again the memorial service crowded with relatives, friends and cops, where music drifted and the cloying scent of roses hung in the air. There had been no caskets—there couldn’t be, not when jagged shards of the plane’s fuselage were all that had been left floating in the Gulf of Mexico. He’d bought one cemetery plot, stood alone in grim silence while a granite headstone with the names of his wife and twin daughters was positioned at the head of the empty grave. He hadn’t gone back to the cemetery since that day.
With the memories closing in on him, Jake rubbed the heel of his hand over his heart. Never again. Never again would he leave himself wide open for fate to deliver another staggering blow. For that reason, there was no room in his life for Nicole Taylor, or any other woman.
The sudden ring of his cell phone cut through the still night air, jolting him from his thoughts. Jake clicked the unit on, said his name.
“It’s Ryan.”
“What’s up, boss?”
“Any luck on the surveillance?”
Lifting a brow, Jake propped his elbow in the door’s open window. Lieutenant Michael Ryan didn’t usually call to check on the status of a stakeout. “Negative. I plan on giving it another couple of hours for Cárdenas’s girlfriend to show. Unless you’ve got something else you need me on.”
“That’s why I called. I want you to take the Signal 7 that dispatch put out about ten minutes ago,” Ryan stated, then gave the location that had been broadcast on the radio.
“I heard the uniform call it in.”
With a habit he’d picked up from a veteran street cop when he was a fresh-out-of-the-academy rookie, Jake grabbed a pen off the dash, angled his hand to catch the pale wash of a streetlight, then jotted the address on his left palm. “Any reason you don’t want Gianos and Smith on it?” he asked, referring to the detectives pulling night shift that month.
“It’s not that I don’t want them on it,” Ryan commented. “In fact, Gianos gave me a call from the scene—he and Smith were wrapping up an interview a couple of miles from there when the call came out. After Gianos got ID on the woman who found the guy’s body, he figured he’d better give me a heads-up. He was right. Taking that into consideration, I think it’d be best to put you on this one. Since you’re without a partner while Whitney’s on her honeymoon, Gianos and Smith can give you a hand with follow-up interviews and paperwork if you need help.”
“Okay.” Jake glanced across the street at the apartment building that seemed to breathe neglect. He wouldn’t get a lead on Cárdenas tonight, but he would get the bastard. He’d made that promise to himself and to little Enrique Quintero’s grieving mother. Jake knew too well what it felt like to lose a child.
“So, Lieutenant, who’s the woman who found the body?” he asked as he switched on the cruiser’s ignition.
“Your partner’s new sister-in-law, Nicole Taylor.”
Jake began to swear, slowly, steadily, as he stomped the accelerator and the cruiser shot from the curb.
Fifteen minutes after he’d hung up from talking to his boss, Jake pulled to a stop in a pool of light at the wrought-iron gate that bloc
ked the entrance to the exclusive housing community. To his left sat a tidy security building; to his right, small spotlights hidden in manicured shrubs illuminated a brick wall with Stonebridge in flowing brass script.
He tugged his gold badge off the waistband of his faded jeans. “Sergeant Jake Ford,” he said, flashing the badge at the guard on duty inside the building. While the guard logged him in, Jake noted the nearby panel of buttons where visitors could contact one of the residents to get buzzed through the gate if the guard wasn’t around.
Inching the cruiser forward, Jake waited while the gate drifted open on silent gears. On the far side of the gate sat several sprawling houses, outlined in the glow of gas lamps that lined the street like rows of tiny moons. Even at night, the houses all looked massive. About one hundred times too massive for a cop’s salary, Jake decided as he steered the cruiser through the entrance and along the well-lit street.
After checking the address he’d inked on his palm, he turned a corner. The pulse of a blue-and-red strobe from the scout car parked in a circular driveway had him bearing down on the accelerator.
The house beyond the driveway was brick, and as immense as the others in the neighborhood. Jake figured if the stiff owned the house where his body had wound up, he was a very rich stiff.
Seconds later, Jake inched the cruiser past the medical examiner’s black station wagon. He parked behind the lab’s crime scene van, then climbed out. As he reclipped his badge onto his waistband beside his holstered Glock, the night air settled around him, still and gauzy, full of humidity.
Yellow tape had been strung from the house’s columned front porch to manicured shrubbery, then fanned out to loop around two of the matching gas street lamps. From the back seat of the scout car that sat idling in the driveway, Jake caught the glint of light off golden-blond hair.
Nicole.
While he ducked beneath a stretch of crime scene tape, it registered in his brain that the last thing he expected to feel when he saw her was pleasure. As if sensing his presence, she turned her head, her gaze meeting his through the scout car’s back window. The stress in her eyes tightened Jake’s throat, had him hesitating with an inexplicable need to go to her, to comfort. He set his jaw. She had found a dead body—whether it was a homicide or a natural death, proper procedure was for him to get the facts from those already working on-site, then view the body himself before he talked to any witness. Doing that gave the investigator a better idea of what questions to ask. And an edge on knowing if a witness was lying, which happened a lot during homicide investigations.
