by J. D. Robb
“It’ll hold.” He fastened his trousers. “I’m hungry. Let’s have something to eat.”
“It’ll have to be quick. I’ve got work. I want to go over and take a look at Draco’s hotel room.”
“That’s fine then.” Roarke wandered to the AutoChef, considered, and decided a cool, sleety night called for something homey. He ordered beef and barley stew for both of them. “I’ll go with you.”
“It’s police business.”
“Naturally. Just doing my civic duty again, Lieutenant.” Because he knew that would irritate her, he offered her a bowl and a smile. “It’s my hotel, after all.”
“It would be.” Because she knew he meant to irritate her, she scooped up a bite. And scalded her tongue. It wasn’t a crime scene, she thought as she blew some of the heat from the second spoonful. And she could use Roarke’s eyes, his mind, not that she wanted to admit it.
“Fine.” She shrugged. “But you stay out of my way.”
He nodded agreeably. Not that he had any intention of doing what she asked. Where was the fun in that? “Will we be picking up Peabody?”
“She’s off. She had a date.”
“Ah. With McNab?”
Eve felt her appetite take an abrupt nosedive. “She doesn’t date McNab.” At Roarke’s look of surprise, she stubbornly stuffed more stew in her mouth. “Look, maybe, in some alternate universe far, far away, they have sex. But they’re not dating. That’s it.”
“Darling, there comes a time, however sad for Mum, when the children must leave home.”
“Shut up.” She jabbed her spoon at him. “I mean it. They are not dating,” she insisted, and polished off her stew.
• • •
Some might have called Ian McNab’s ramshackle apartment on the Lower West Side an alternate universe. It was a guy’s space, badly decorated, heavy on the sports memorabilia, and scattered with dirty dishes.
While he did, occasionally, think to stuff some of the worst of the debris in some dusty closet when female company was expected, it was a long way from the sumptuous space of Roarke’s home, and it smelled a great deal like overcooked veggie hash. But it worked for him.
At the moment, with his heart stuttering and his skin slick from sex, it worked just fine.
“Jesus, Peabody.” He flopped over on his back, much like a landed trout. He didn’t bother to gasp for air. He had a lush, naked woman in his bed. He could die a happy man. “We had to break a record that time. We ought to be writing this down.”
She lay where she was, stunned as she always was when she found herself in this situation with Ian McNab. “I can’t feel my feet.”
Obligingly he propped himself on his elbow, but as they’d ended up crosswise on the bed, he couldn’t see past her knees. She had, he noted, really cute knees. “I don’t think I bit them off. I’d remember.” But with a grunt, he scooted down, just to be sure. “They’re there, all right, both of them.”
“Good. I’m going to need them later.”
As the shock wore off, she blinked, stared at McNab’s pretty profile, and wondered, not for the first time, when she’d lost her mind.
I’m naked in bed with McNab. Naked. In bed. McNab.
Jesus.
Always self-conscious about body flaws, she tugged at the knotted sheets. “Cold in here,” she muttered.
“Bastard super cut the main furnace back first of March. Like it’s his money. First chance I get, I’m rerouting the system.”
He yawned hugely, dragged both hands through his long and tangled blond hair. His narrow shoulders seemed weighed down by the mass of it. Peabody had to order her fingers not to reach up to play with the long loops of reddish gold. He had skinny hips, with the right one currently decorated with a temp tattoo of a silver lightning bolt. It matched the four earrings winking in his left earlobe.
His skin was milk white, his eyes a cagey green. She still couldn’t figure out why anything about him attracted her on a physical level, much less how she’d ended up having regular and outrageous sex with him when out of bed they spent most of their time annoying each other.
She’d liked to have said he wasn’t her type, but she didn’t think she actually had a type. Her luck with men was usually, distressingly, piss-poor.
“I’d better get going.”
“Why? It’s early.” When she sat up, he leaned over and nipped suggestively at her shoulder. “I’m starving.”
“Christ, McNab, we just finished having sex.”
“That, too, but I was thinking more of pizza, loaded.” He knew her weaknesses. “Let’s fuel up.”
Her taste buds stirred to attention. “I’m dieting.”
“What for?”
She rolled her eyes, yanking the rumpled sheet around her as she climbed out of bed. “Because I’m pudgy.”
“No, you’re not. You’re built.” He caught the edge of the sheet, surprising her with his quickness, and pulled it down to her waist. “Seriously built.”
As she fumbled for the sheet, he sprang up, caught her around the waist with an affectionate squeeze that both disarmed and worried her. “Come on, let’s eat, then see what happens next. I’ve got some wine around here.”
“If it’s anything like the wine you had last time, I’d as soon dip a cup in the sewer.”
“New bottle.” He picked his bright orange jumpsuit off the floor, stepped into it. “You want some pants?”
The fact that he would offer her his pants made her want to pinch all four of his cheeks. “McNab, I couldn’t have squeezed into your pants when I was twelve. I actually have an ass.”
“True. That’s okay; I love a woman in uniform.” He strolled off, struggling not to brood. He always had to talk her into staying.
In the corner of the living area that doubled for his kitchen, he pulled out the bottle of wine he’d bought the day before when he’d been thinking of her. He thought about her just often enough to be demoralized. If he could keep her in bed, they’d be fine. He didn’t have to think about his moves there, they just happened.
He flipped on his ‘link. The pizza joint was keyed in on memory, in the primo position due to frequency of transmissions. He ordered a mongo pie, loaded, then dug out a corkscrew.
The damn wine had cost him twice what he usually spent. But when a guy was competing with a slick, experienced LC, he needed to hold his own. He didn’t doubt Charles Monroe knew all about fine wines. He and Peabody probably took baths in champagne.
Since the image infuriated him, he glugged down half a glass of wine. Then he turned as Peabody came out of the bedroom. She was wearing her uniform pants with her shirt open at the throat. He wanted to lick her there, just there where the stiff cotton gave way to soft flesh.
Goddamn it.
“What’s the matter?” She asked, noticing the scowl on his face. “They run out of pepperoni?”
“No, it’s coming.” He held out her glass of wine. “I was thinking…about work.”
“Mmm.” She sipped the wine, pursed her lips at its smooth and subtle fruity taste. “This is pretty good. You’re running backgrounds on the Draco case, right?”
“Already done. Dallas should have them by now.”
“Quick work.”
He answered with a shrug. He didn’t have to tell her Roarke had dropped the data in his lap. “We in EDD aim to please. Even after eliminations and probability scans, it’s going to take days to shift the list down to a workable number. Guy gets his heart jabbed in front of a couple thousand people, it’s complicated.”
“Yeah.” Peabody sipped again, then wandered off to drop into a chair. Without being aware of it on a conscious level, she was as comfortable in McNab’s mess of an apartment as she was in her own tidy one. “Something’s going on.”
“Something’s always going on.”
“No, not the usual.” She struggled with herself, brooded into her wine. If she didn’t talk to someone, she’d explode. And hell, he was here. “Look, this is confidentia
l.”
“Okay.” Since the pizza wouldn’t arrive for a good ten minutes more, McNab snagged an open bag of soy chips. He settled on the arm of Peabody’s chair. “What’s the deal?”
“I don’t know. Nadine Furst tagged the lieutenant today, and she was razzed. Nadine, I mean.” Absently, Peabody reached into the bag. “You don’t see Nadine razzed very often. She makes a meet with Dallas—a personal meet. It was serious. They stashed me across the room, but I could tell. And after, Dallas didn’t say a word about it.”
“Maybe it was just personal shit.”
“No, Nadine’s not going to ask for a meet like that unless there’s trouble.” Nadine was her friend, too, and part of Peabody was bruised that she’d been brushed aside. “I think it ties to the case. Dallas should’ve told me.” Peabody crunched on chips. “She should trust me.”
“Want me to poke around?”
“I can do my own poking. I don’t need an E Division hotshot running plays for me.”
“Suit yourself, She-Body.”
“Just lay off. I don’t even know why I told you. It’s just sitting in my gut. Nadine’s a friend. She’s supposed to be a friend.”
“You’re jealous.”
“Bullshit.”
“Yeah, you are.” He was beginning to have an intimate relationship with the feeling. “Dallas and Nadine are playing without you, so you’re jealous. Girl Dynamics one oh one.”
She shoved him off the arm of the chair. “You’re an asshole.”
“And there,” he said as his security bell rang, “is the pizza.”
*** CHAPTER SIX ***
“Don’t touch anything, and stay out of the way.”
“Darling.” Roarke watched Eve slip her master into the security lock on Penthouse A. “You’re repeating yourself.”
“That’s because you never listen.” Before she opened the door, she turned, met his eyes. “Why does a man whose primary residence is New York, whose main source of work is New York, opt to live in a hotel rather than a private residence?”
“First the panache. ‘Mr. Draco keeps the penthouse at The Palace when in the city.’ Next, the convenience. At the crook of a finger, whatever you need or want done for you can be. Is. And lastly, perhaps most tellingly, the utter lack of commitment. Everything around you is someone else’s problem and responsibility.”
“From what I’ve learned of Draco so far, that’s the one I go for.” She opened the door, stepped inside.
It belonged to Roarke, she thought, therefore it was plush and lush and perfect. If you went for that kind of thing.
The living area was enormous and elegantly furnished with walls of silky rose. The ceiling was arched and decorated with a complicated design of fruit and flowers around a huge glass and gold chandelier.
Three sofas, all in deep, cushy red were piled with pillows bright as jewels. Tables—and she suspected they were genuine wood and quite old—were polished like mirrors, as was the floor. The rug was an inch thick and matched the ceiling pattern grape for grape.
One wall was glass, the privacy screen drawn so that New York exploded with light and shape outside but couldn’t intrude. There was a stone terrace beyond, and as the flowers decked in big stone pots were thriving, she assumed it was heated.
A glossy white piano stood at one end of the room, and at the other, carved wood panels hid what she assumed was a full entertainment unit. There were plants of thick and glossy foliage, glass displays holding pretty dust catchers she concluded were art, and no discernable sign of life.
“Housekeeping would have come in after he left for the theater,” Roarke told her. “I can ask the team on duty that evening to come up and let you know the condition of the rooms at that time.”
“Yeah.” She thought of Nadine. If she knew the reporter, the condition of the rooms had been something approaching the wake of a tornado. She walked over to the panels, opened them, and studied the entertainment unit. “Unit on,” she commanded, and the screen flickered to soft blue. “Play back last program.”
With barely a hiccup, the unit burst into color and sound. Eve watched two figures slide and slither over a pool of black sheets. “Why do guys always get off watching other people fuck?”
“We’re sick, disgusting, and weak. Pity us.”
She started to laugh. Then the couple on the bed rolled. The woman’s face, soft with pleasure, turned toward the camera. “Goddamn it. That’s Nadine. Nadine and Draco.”
In support, Roarke laid a hand on Eve’s shoulder. “It wasn’t taped here. That’s not the bedroom. Her hair’s different. I don’t think it’s recent.”
“I’m going to have to take it in, prove it isn’t. And I’ve got a damn sex tape of one of the media’s cream as evidence on a murder case.” She stopped the play, ejected the disc, and sealed it in an evidence bag from her field kit.
“Damn it. Damn it.”
She began to pace, to struggle with herself. All this relationship stuff was so complicated and still so foreign to her. Nadine had told her what she’d told her as a friend. In confidence. The man currently, and patiently, watching her from across the room was her husband.
Love, honor, and all the rest of it.
If she told him about Nadine and Draco, was she breaching a confidence and the trust of a friend? Or was she just doing the marriage thing?
How the hell, she wondered, did people get through life juggling all this stuff?
“Darling Eve.” Sympathizing, Roarke waited until she’d stopped prowling the room and turned to face him. “You’re giving yourself a headache. I can make it easier on you. Don’t feel you have to tell me something that makes you uncomfortable.”
She frowned at him, narrowed her eyes. “I hear a but at the end of that sentence.”
“You have very sharp ears. But,” he continued, crossing to her, “I can deduce that Nadine and Draco were involved at one time, and given your current concern, that something happened between them a great deal more recently.”
“Oh hell.” In the end she went with the gut and told him everything.
He listened, then tucked Eve’s hair behind her ear. “You’re a good friend.”
“Don’t say that. It makes me nervous.”
“All right, I’ll say this: Nadine didn’t have anything to do with Draco’s murder.”
“I know that, and there’s no hard evidence indicating any different. But it’s going to be messy for her. Personally messy. Okay, what else is in this place?”
“Ah, if memory serves. Kitchen through there.” He gestured. “Office, bath, bedroom, dressing room, bath.”
“I’ll start in the office. I want to run his ‘links and see if he had any conversations that involved threats or arguments. Do me a favor.” She handed him her kit. “Bag the rest of the video discs.”
“Yes, sir. Lieutenant.”
She smirked but let it ride.
She worked systematically. He loved watching her at it: The focus, the concentration, the absolute logic of her method.
Not so long before in his life if anyone had suggested he could find a cop and her work sexy, he’d have been both appalled and insulted.
“Stop staring at me.”
He smiled. “Was I?”
She decided to let it pass. “Lots of communications in and out. If I were a shrink, I’d guess this was a guy who couldn’t stand being alone with himself. Needed contact on a constant basis. Nothing out of the ordinary though, unless you count some pretty heavy ‘link shopping—eight pairs of shoes, three snazzy suits, antique wrist unit.” She straightened. “But you wouldn’t count that.”
“On the contrary, I’d never buy snazzy suits via ‘link. Fit is everything.”
“Ha ha. He did have a short, pithy kind of conversation with his agent. Seems our boy discovered that his leading lady was pulling in the same salary for the run of the play. He was pretty pissed off about it, wanted his rep to renegotiate and get him more. One credit more per performance.”<
br />
“Yes, I knew about that. No deal.”
Puzzled, she turned away from the neat little desk. “You wouldn’t give him a credit?”
“When dealing with a child,” Roarke said mildly, “you set boundaries. The contract was a boundary. The amount of the demand was inconsequential.”
“You’re tough.”
“Certainly.”
“Did he give you trouble over it?”
“No. He may have planned to push it, but we never had words over it. The fact is, his agent went to my lawyers, they to me, me back to them, and so on. It hadn’t progressed beyond my refusal before opening night.”
“Okay, that keeps you clean. I want to check out the bedroom.” She moved past him, across a small, circular hallway and through the door.
The bed was big, elaborate, with a high, padded wall behind and covered with sheer, smoky gray. It looked like a bank of soft fog.
She moved briefly into the adjoining dressing room, shook her head at the forest of clothes and shoes. A built-in, mirrored counter held a chorus line of colored bottles and tubes: enhancers, skin soothers, scents, powders.
“Okay, we’ve got vain, selfish, egocentric, childish, and insecure.”
“I wouldn’t argue with your assessment. All those personality traits are motive for dislike, but for murder?”
“Sometimes having two feet’s a motive for murder.” She moved back to the bedroom. “A man that full of ego and insecurity wouldn’t sleep alone very often. He dumped Carly Landsdowne. I’d say he had someone else lined up to take her place.” Idly, she pulled open the drawer of the bedside table. “Well, well, look at the toys.”
The drawer was fitted with compartments, and each was jammed with various erotic enhancers suitable for partnership or solo bouts.
“Lieutenant, I really think you should take these in for further examination.”
“No touching.” She slapped Roarke’s hand away as he reached in.
“Spoilsport.”
“Civilian. What the hell does this do?” She held up a long, cone-shaped piece of rubber. It made cheerful tinkling noises when she shook it.
Roarke tucked his tongue in his cheek and sat on the bed. “Well, in the interest of your investigation, I’d be happy to demonstrate.” Smiling, he patted the bed beside him.
