“Why don’t you just sweep the house?” She asked the question only to prolong the conversation. She’d hoped he’d say something that would confirm her suspicion that he was not what he pretended.
He watched her as he spoke. “The house is too big to sweep daily. I’d miss some nook or cranny.”
Unconsciously chewing her thumbnail, Toni looked up suddenly. “That’s why you stay in this apartment. It’s small, easy to sweep, and no one knows it’s here so it’s unlikely they’d bug it anyway.” She paused, looking around the room with new understanding. “The phone must be secure, too. Probably has a bug signal, doesn’t it? What if someone tries to trace a call? Does it give them some sham number in Brooklyn?”
He stared at her for a long moment, and finally shook his head. “You seem to know a lot about this stuff, Toni. You want to tell me why that is?”
She’d allowed herself to get caught up in her own excitement and run off at the mouth, she realized grimly. She tried to look nonchalant and shrugged. If he was a cop, she must be making him hellishly uncomfortable. If not, she might very well have put herself at risk. “I read a lot of spy novels.”
His jaw was tight, and his brown eyes probed hers like surgical instruments. “Then you ought to be able to see why it would be a big mistake to mess with the panel again. That alarm going off when I’m not even in the house is as good as a flare going up on a dark night. The wrong people notice it, it will be as bad for you as it will be for me.” His tone was calmly dictatorial—as if he expected no disagreement on her part. As if he would not tolerate any disagreement.
He had a way of putting things so they made perfect sense, even in this crazy situation. She found herself feeling guilty for setting off the alarm. “I’ll promise not to try it again if you’ll stop disappearing without a word. I was wor—I was scared when I got up this morning and you were gone. What was I supposed to do? I wasn’t even sure you’d be back. I couldn’t just sit in front of the television and wait for a news report to tell me your body had washed up on a beach somewhere—”
“What the hell are you talking about?” He shook his head, puzzled. Then understanding crept over his face. “You were listening last night?”
“Not long enough,” she shot back. She was tired of playing games with him. “I didn’t hear a word to explain why two seemingly sane men would deliberately put themselves into the middle of a shooting match.”
He caught her chin and tilted it up so he could stare down into her eyes. She hoped to God he couldn’t see what caused the intense burning behind them. “Don’t tell me you were worried about me.”
She jerked her chin free, angry because she had been, no matter how much she wanted to deny it. “Dream on, Manelli.”
“I will if you will, del Rio.”
He referred to her dream last night, of course. She could have slapped him for that remark. She couldn’t help it if her subconscious mind was unstable enough to conjure images of him, of them…
She shook her head and pretended she didn’t know what he was talking about. “I just don’t care to be left in the cell when the jailer checks out.” She glanced at him again, sensing a chance to get a clue to the truth from him. “Why would you risk your life for Lou Taranto? Don’t you realize he is personally responsible for seventy percent of the cocaine in this city?” She shook her head. “I would think that when you lost your own brother to that garbage you’d—”
“You are a good listener, aren’t you?” He kept a tight hold on his anger, but she could see it there. It flashed in those deep brown eyes. “My brother is none of your business.” His gaze wavered. He looked at his hands. “He’s dead and buried. He has nothing to do with me or what I choose to do with my life.”
The raw agony in his voice was like a whip lashing her heart. It also gave the lie away. His brother had everything to do with his life. She couldn’t stop her hand from going to his arm. “That was hitting below the belt. I’m sorry.” He didn’t look at her. “Nick?”
“Go change,” he told her. “I’ll take you down to the gym for an hour.”
All day Nick tried to shake the feeling of impending doom. The damn woman was hiding something from him; he was sure of it. She knew about bugs and sweeping for them. She knew about phone taps and bug signals. Worse than that, he was sure she suspected his “good-fellow” routine was the sham it was. She wouldn’t let it drop. She was like a dog with a three-day-old bone. She had to keep gnawing at it.
And the ways she had of getting at him! When she looked at him with those giant, black-jewel eyes, he wanted to tell her everything. When she’d mentioned his brother, he nearly had. To let her think he could work for Danny’s killer was too much—but he had to do it.
He’d left her alone in the gym for over an hour. When he’d finally interrupted, she was doing transverse sit-ups on an incline bench. For a moment he just watched her. Her face was red. Her hair was damp and sticking to her face. The T-shirt she wore had wet spots beneath her breasts and between them.
He felt bad for having kept her cooped up the way he had and he tried to make up for it. He took her swimming, then served her lunch in the formal dining room, warning her first they’d have to remain quiet. He took her on a tour of the entire mansion and found himself enjoying it, although neither of them could speak above a whisper.
The day passed quickly. She was soaking in a hot bath now to ease her muscles after the workout she’d inflicted on herself. While she was occupied, Nick plugged in the phone and dialed Harry’s number. He needed to know what the background check on Toni had turned up. He was told that Harry was “unavailable.” He could be reached later tonight, but then Nick would be unavailable. He’d have to wait until tomorrow.
She emerged from her bath with all that wild black hair, still damp, pulled back in a ponytail. She wore a pair of baggy gray sweats and a matching pullover with Yosemite Sam on the front. How was it possible, he heard himself wonder, for a woman to look so alluring with Yosemite Sam spread across her chest?
“What’s the matter? Do I have something caught between my teeth?”
Nick shook himself. “What?”
“You were staring,” she told him. She moved through the living room, into the kitchen, and yanked open the refrigerator. She took out a can of cola, popped the top and took a long drink. Nick watched her throat move as she swallowed. He had to force his gaze away from her.
When he glanced up again, she was the one staring. Her eyes were focused on a point just beyond him, and her face was slightly pale. He turned to see what had caught her attention. The bulletproof vest he’d dug out was slung over the back of the couch. She looked at it as if she thought it might come to life and bite her.
“You’re really going to do this, aren’t you?”
“I don’t have a choice, Toni, and if it’s all the same to you, I’d just as soon not spend the next hour and a half talking about it.”
She blinked fast and averted her face. “But you could be killed—”
“Only if you pray real hard.”
Her head snapped around, her eyes hard as coal chips. “I wouldn’t pray for that! How could you think—”
“I was kidding. Lighten up, will you?” He stepped closer to her. “Look, I’d rather think about something else until it’s time to go.”
He saw her eyes narrow as she regarded him.
He pointed to the box on the coffee table. “I was referring to that. Of course, if you’d rather—”
“A jigsaw puzzle?” Toni frowned and went to the table, picking up the colorful box and shaking it so the pieces rattled. “You’re ready to walk into a shooting gallery disguised as a duck, and you want to put a jigsaw puzzle together?”
“It’s a ritual.” Nick shrugged. He took the box from her and dumped the pieces in a chaotic mound on the carpet. “Helps me to stay focused.”
He didn’t mention that it would also—he hoped—help him keep his mind away from the thought that had been recurring
all day: that if he were to die tonight, and if he’d been given a last request, it would have been to spend several hours in bed with his little Gypsy. Visions of her small, firm body, unclothed and crushed against his, crept into his mind unbidden. Whenever he touched her or caught the barest hint of her teasingly erotic scent, he had to restrain himself from taking her into his arms and kissing her breath away. When had this obsession with having her taken over? He was about to go into battle, for God’s sake—yet all he could think about was how it would feel to love every inch of the ebony-eyed minx.
He sat cross-legged on the floor and began sorting the outside pieces, forcing himself to concentrate on the task at hand.
Toni stopped arguing the sanity of doing a puzzle at a time like this as soon as she thought about how nervous he must be. She tried to imagine how she would feel if she knew that in a short time people would be shooting at her. She’d go along with the puzzle thing, she decided, if it would help Nick not to think about what was ahead of him tonight.
She watched the intense concentration make a furrow between his brows and ignored the urge to put her finger there and smooth it away.
“I probably had a hundred jigsaws when I was a kid,” he said softly.
“I had a couple,” she responded. “But my favorite pastime was paint-by-numbers. You remember those black velvet ones? Took forever to dry, but they were so pretty they were worth the wait.”
He glanced up at her, and his relaxed smile took her breath away. “I’ll bet it killed you—the waiting.”
“Drove me crazy! I could only do one color, then wait and wait for it to dry before I could do another. I used to prop the picture on a chair and point an electric fan at it.”
“Wouldn’t a hair dryer have been faster?”
“Who has patience enough to stand around holding a hair dryer for hours on end?”
“Not you, that’s for sure.” He held her gaze with his, then looked down again and fit a corner piece to another. “When did you start writing?”
“I don’t know exactly. It’s just something I’ve always done. First it was journals and silly poetry and fairy tales. It wasn’t until high school that I got into the serious stuff.”
He looked up again, his gaze intense. “Such as?”
She frowned for a moment before deciding it wouldn’t hurt to be honest with him. “Social injustice, corruption, that kind of thing.” She wondered if he would get bored with the subject. He leaned forward, the puzzle momentarily forgotten.
“Okay, so what was the first so-called serious thing you wrote about?”
“Prejudice.”
She didn’t elaborate. Nick studied her. “Tell me about it.”
Toni looked at him. She hadn’t talked about it in a very long time. It was a painful subject. In her entire life, the only person who’d been allowed to glimpse just how painful had been her mother. And even she didn’t know the extent of Toni’s guilt. She was struck all at once with the urge to share it with someone—with Nick.
She cleared her throat. “It was during my senior year—a nurse was raped and murdered, her body found in the hospital parking lot. There were no witnesses, no fingerprints. The blood type was so common it was practically useless. And this was long before the advent of DNA fingerprinting.”
She couldn’t go on with his eyes focused unblinkingly on hers. She got up and walked a few steps away. “The only clue was a tie clip found at the scene. It was one of three that had been awarded to three of the hospital’s outstanding surgeons something like twelve years earlier.”
“That must have narrowed it down,” Nick said. He sounded puzzled, and in a moment she heard him get to his feet, as well. “Did you know the woman?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“One of the suspects, then?”
She nodded. “My father.”
She heard Nick suck in his breath. She hurried to continue before he could say something that would make her change her mind. “None of the surgeons were able to produce their tie clips. It had been twelve years, after all. They all had alibis for the time of the murder, but people lie, so none were rock solid. My father was home that night. I know because I was home that night, too.”
She glanced at Nick and found him frowning. “What happened?”
“The other two were Caucasian,” she said softly. “My father was one hundred percent Puerto Rican. What do you think happened?”
Nick shook his head. “The blood type—”
“Could have been any one of them.”
“But they didn’t convict him—not with evidence that flimsy.”
“No,” she told him. “It never went to trial.” She shook her head. “I saw what was happening. Dad was ostracized. The hospital suspended him. He was shunned by the community. We started getting hate mail and crank calls.” She shook her head. “He was dying inside. I could see it happening right in front of me and I wouldn’t admit it. I just kept thinking everything would be all right. Then the day came. He kissed me goodbye…” She looked down and shook her head again.
Nick stood in front of her, his hands on her shoulders. He searched her face when she looked up, not understanding. “Where did he go?”
She squared her shoulders. “They found his car at the bottom of a ravine. It was ruled an accident. But it wasn’t. I knew. I knew before he left, but I wouldn’t believe it.” In her life she’d never uttered the confession to anyone else. It had been eating at her soul for thirteen years. “I could have stopped him, Nick. But I didn’t have the courage to do it.”
“My God.” He pulled her into his arms and held her to him. “It’s okay, cry.” She did, letting the hot tears soak into his shirt and absorbing the utter strength of him.
“This is stupid. I’m not a little girl anymore.” She sniffed and tried to straighten.
He looked at her, shook his head. “You’ve been living with a heap of guilt, Toni. It had to come out sometime. It wasn’t your fault. You might have seen the signs afterward, but hindsight is always clearer.”
“I should have stopped him,” she repeated. “God only knows why I’m telling you all this.”
“Maybe for the same reason I told you about my parents,” he said slowly.
“Maybe,” she whispered. She thought it might be the most honest moment to have passed between them since their first encounter. She blinked her eyes dry and cleared her throat, allowing the pain to slip away. “I guess that’s why my mother and I are so close. We leaned on each other after that. Anyway, when my grief subsided enough to vent some of the anger, I wrote a lot. Scathing editorials about prejudiced bigots who see everything according to its color. The focus broadened gradually, until I was writing about anything I saw as unjust and exposing those responsible.”
Nick nodded and then his eyes narrowed. “Is that what you were doing in the alley?”
She was surprised by his insight. She hadn’t intended to give herself away by revealing some of her past. Her face must have confirmed his suspicion because he let the arms that had been giving soothing comfort fall to his sides. “Tell me the truth, Toni,” he said slowly. “For God’s sake, don’t keep secrets that could get us both killed.”
She looked at him for a long time and then at the floor. “You want the truth? Truth is, I’m some kind of fool, Manelli. Truth is, I’m getting used to having you around and I’d really hate to see you riddled with bullet holes. So much so that I’m willing to tell you all of it…if you’ll call this off.” She made herself face him. “I don’t want you to go.”
He swallowed hard. She saw his Adam’s apple move. His hands flattened themselves to her cheeks, and he tipped her face up, searching it with his eyes. She felt his warm breath on her lips. When his lips parted, she thought he would kiss her. Instead, he whispered, “Then there is something you’re not telling me.”
Disappointment rinsed through her. His look had been so intense—but she banished that thought. “No more than what you aren’t telling me.�
�� She would have pulled her face from his hands, but the look on his face paralyzed her. For an instant she glimpsed pain and raw longing. Then his lips came down to hers. He kissed her softly, parting his lips to capture hers between them and sipping at them like a fine wine.
Toni’s knees trembled. Her heart fluttered in her chest, and before she’d made a conscious decision to do so, her hands had slipped across his broad chest, then slid around to press against his back. Her body seemed to have melded to his. Her lips relaxed open at the first gentle nudging of his tongue, and when its warm, velvet length plunged into her mouth, she welcomed it. She moaned around it.
Nick’s hands left her face to cradle her head. His fingers tangled in her hair. His stroking tongue set her on fire, and the subtle movements of his hips told her that he was just as aroused. When he lifted his mouth away, she stood on tiptoe and caught his lips to her again. With a low groan, he complied with her unspoken request and kissed her once more. He kissed her until her breathing was broken and ragged, until her head was spinning and her entire body throbbed with wanting him.
Finally he straightened and held her to him. Her head rested against his chest. His heart hammered like a drum. He was breathing as erratically as she was. His voice was barely more than a whisper when he spoke. “You’re seeing things that aren’t there.”
She frowned and would have looked up, but he held her where she was.
“You’d rather believe a fairy tale than to admit the truth, Toni,” he went on. “I’m not hiding a damn thing. I’m exactly what I seem. Your problem is you can’t stand to admit that you’re hot for Lou Taranto’s right-hand man.”
Toni stiffened, and this time he let her step away from him. He turned his back on her, picked up the vest and put it on. His words were like knives in her heart—mostly, she realized, because they were true.
“You want to pick up where we left off when I get back, I’ll be happy to cooperate,” he said. “I just like my women to know who’s taking them.” He slammed a clip into his gun with the heel of his hand and worked the action. He never even looked at her. “Right now I have to go. Lou’s counting on me.”
Reckless Angel Page 9
