by Susan Sey
She shook her head. “I may not have your talent for the criminal life, Patrick, but I’m not an idiot either. Until I figure out why you’re really here, I’m not letting you out of my sight. Or out of my house.”
Tiny footsteps approached the kitchen at a gallop, and Patrick’s heart rate kicked up to match the pace. “Look, you have a kid,” he said, seizing desperately on the idea. “I’ll be in the way.”
“For God’s sake, Patrick, get a grip. Evie’s a two-year-old, not a piranha. You’re staying here. Deal with it.”
A tiny scrap of humanity burst into the kitchen, all sticky hands and shining green eyes, her chubby legs chugging, her black ringlets flying. The kid launched herself off impossibly small tennis shoes and vaulted straight into her mother’s waiting arms.
Oh shit, Patrick thought as Mara covered the round little face with noisy kisses. The kid—Evie, he reminded himself—beamed up at her mother with a love so brilliant, so intense, that his heart stopped dead in its tracks. This was purity, he thought dully. This was innocence. This was love. Capital L. The form Plato had waxed poetic about. Truth, Beauty, Justice.
Love.
How the fuck was he supposed to bunk down with this and not screw it up?
“Here,” Mara said, and Patrick bolted out of his frozen panic to catch the child she all but tossed at him. He might not know much about babies, but he was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to drop them. “Evie, this is your uncle Patrick. He’s your godfather, and though in general a very smart and capable man, he’s a little phobic about family. Little girls in particular. You’re going to have to help him out.”
She and Evie exchanged some kind of innately feminine look, which did nothing for the terror chugging around in Patrick’s gut. He carefully shifted until his hands were hooked in the child’s armpits, then he lifted her away from his body. She dangled there at arm’s length, grinning at him and waving her sneakers dangerously close to his crotch.
“Hi, Unca Padwitt.”
“Mara.” It was as close to a plea as he’d ever heard from his own voice. “Please. Let me get a hotel.”
“No.” Mara turned and spoke to the young woman who’d followed Evie into the kitchen. “Hey, Jessica. How was she today?”
“Oh, monstrous,” Jessica said, giving Evie a broad wink and rolling her eyes. Evie wriggled with delight and Patrick shifted his grip somewhat desperately. “Same time tomorrow?”
“That’d be great. Thanks.”
“No problem. See you, kiddo.”
The doorbell rang while Patrick stared helplessly at the child dangling from his hands.
“I’ll get it,” Jessica called from the foyer.
Patrick was still contemplating this new wrinkle in his living situation when Liz appeared in the kitchen, all sober eyes and ugly suit.
God, how he hated that suit, he thought, grateful for the distraction. It was so black, and any fool could see that Liz had been made for color. Not that what she wore was any of his business, he reminded himself. He should be thrilled that she wanted to hide that interesting little body inside gender-neutral cop clothes. But somehow her efforts to downplay her femininity didn’t make it any easier to ignore. It only made him more desperate to see it all on display. Hell of a thing.
“Hello, Liz,” he said. “You’re looking . . . professional.”
Mara shoved an elbow into his ribs. She smiled at Liz while Patrick nearly bobbled his niece.
“I’m so glad you dropped by,” Mara said to Liz. “Are you here in a professional capacity?”
Liz’s brow wrinkled slightly, as if the concept of any capacity besides professional were new and utterly foreign. Or maybe she was just struck stupid by the sight of Patrick O’Connor with a toddler in his arms.
“Um, yes,” she said. “Is this a bad time?”
Mara dismissed the noise and the chaos with an airy wave. “Not at all.”
Patrick rolled his eyes.
“I wanted to let you know that my supervisor officially approved Patrick’s attachment to the counterfeiting case this afternoon,” she said. “I was going to call, but I thought it would be good to confirm in person.”
Patrick lowered the child carefully until her feet hit the ground. She took off like a shot. Mara beamed, first at Evie, then at Liz. Patrick just stared. The kid was a miniature wrecking ball.
“That’s great news,” Mara said to Liz. “We should celebrate. You’re just in time for dinner.”
“Oh, no.” Liz blinked. “I have to get home. I just wanted to talk to Patrick about something before I—”
“Nonsense.” Mara took her by the elbow and dragged her farther into the kitchen. “I was just getting ready to hop downstairs to the restaurant for a minute and Patrick was going to peel these potatoes for me.”
Damn it. He’d been hoping she’d forget about the potatoes. “I was?” he asked.
Liz eyed him skeptically. “He was?”
Mara deposited Liz on a long-legged stool and gave Patrick the sort of good, hard stare he hadn’t seen since their mother had been alive. He shrugged and sat on the stool across from Liz’s.
“He was,” Mara said firmly. “And now that you’re here, I feel like it might actually get done.”
She rummaged in a drawer and produced two peelers. She slapped one in Liz’s palm and tossed the other to Patrick. He caught it automatically, gauging the weight and the balance of it without conscious thought. It felt good in his hand. Solid. Purposeful.
He watched while Liz gave her peeler the same meticulous inspection she’d have afforded a loaded gun. For one weak moment, he actually envied the peeler. What must it be like to be the subject of attention that intense? To wait patiently under it while she worked out how to use what she saw to the best advantage?
Christ. He shoved the thought aside and tore his gaze away from those long, graceful fingers. It was just a peeler. What was wrong with him?
Mara gave him a knowing smirk. “I’ll be back in a few. I want those potatoes peeled and chopped into one-inch cubes. There’s a pot on the stove for them when you’re done.”
She included them both in a cheery grin and headed for the door. Patrick smiled back, a smile that said you are so dead. Mara blew him a kiss as the door swung shut.
Liz shrugged out of her jacket and hung it neatly over the back of a kitchen chair, then started rolling up her sleeves. Patrick made a point of not noticing the way he could almost see the outline of a lacy bra through her plain white blouse. He didn’t want to know if she balanced out the cop clothes with decent underwear. Seriously didn’t want to know.
“So,” he said, twirling the peeler through his fingers but making no effort to actually peel anything. Good tools were always worth using, he supposed. Still, there were appearances to maintain. He gave her an intimate little smile. “What’s on your mind, Liz?”
She selected a potato and began methodically stripping it of its skin. “Before this case goes any further,” she said, her face small and serious, “before you do any work for me in an official capacity, I need to know something.”
Patrick held her gaze, let his brows lift with casual inquiry. “And that would be . . . ?”
“What you’re doing here.”
“Me?” He gave the peeler a jaunty little toss and picked up a potato. “I’m just being a good brother.” The blade was viciously sharp and it pared the skin away from the potato practically by itself. Patrick was impressed in spite of himself. Maybe his favored tools ran more toward laptops and lock picks, but quality was quality.
“And that’s it?” Liz didn’t look away, didn’t smile. “You’re here simply because Mara called you for help. There’s nothing else on your agenda, nothing else on the radar screen? No ulterior motive that’s going to make me look like a fool when it comes out?”
Better a live fool than a dead cop. Not that he didn’t trust her to do her job. Liz was all about the job, much to his eternal regret. But he only said, “Liz. Darling.
Would I do such a thing to you?”
She frowned at him. “The last time I placed you undercover somewhere your parents tried to rob the place.”
He gave her an indulgent shrug and said, “Family, huh?”
“I’d have helped you if you’d trusted me, Patrick.”
He pretended to consider that for a moment. “I don’t believe incarcerating one’s parents is generally considered helpful.”
Liz didn’t answer—what could she say, after all?—but Patrick didn’t have time to savor the victory. He was too busy watching in horrified fascination as the kid emerged from the cupboard at his knees. She wrapped herself around his shins like poison ivy and beamed up at him, her smile full of what looked like half-chewed graham cracker. “Hey, Unca Padwitt.”
He stared at Liz in equal parts bafflement and horror. This time she smiled back with every appearance of spontaneous amusement. She bent and peered around the edge of the counter. “Hey, Evie,” she said.
“I’ll make you a deal,” Patrick said. “I’ll answer all your questions. Just as soon as you pull her off my pants and direct me to the nearest dry cleaner.”
“Serves you right for bringing haute couture into the kid’s house.”
Liz turned back to the kid on Patrick’s shin. “Come on, Evie. Want to play in the sink till your mommy gets back?”
“Yeah!” Evie pulled her hands off Patrick’s trousers with a sound like Velcro separating, and bounced merrily away on the twinkling lights of her shoes. “Sink, sink, sink!” He didn’t even bother to inspect the handprints, just reapplied himself to the potatoes. He suddenly felt the intense need to shred something.
“So you’re just being a good brother, huh?” Liz tossed him a skeptical look over her shoulder while she supervised Evie at the sink. “Nothing going on that I should know about.”
“That’s right,” he said with perfect sincerity. Because Liz definitely should not know about his plans to run his old mentor to ground. She was so . . . rules oriented. She’d only complicate what should be a very simple conversation. “Hard as it is for you to believe, I’m clean. Have been since the night I let you arrest me. The only stuff I pull now is in my imagination.”
There was a long pause, then she said, “Okay.”
Nothing more, just okay. Any other woman would have pushed for elaboration, for details, but not Liz. She’d asked, he’d answered. End of story.
The silence that stretched between them now was almost companionable, and Patrick let himself fall into it. The monotonous hiss of the peeler, the slap of potato peel hitting the counter, the clink and splash of Evie playing at the sink. The evening sun pouring through the French doors at his back was lazy and warm, and something deep in the core of him, something he hadn’t even been aware of, loosened just the tiniest bit.
It was such a novel and unexpected sensation that it threw off his rhythm, and he fumbled the potato. Nearly peeled his knuckle before he could recover.
“Fu—”
Liz cut him off. “Language,” she said primly.
Patrick stuck his knuckle into his mouth. “I nearly sliced off my thumb.”
Liz rolled her eyes and Patrick sighed. Had he expected sympathy? He slid open the knife drawer and paused, arrested.
“Wow.”
“What?” Liz came to look over his shoulder. “Knives? Since when are you into knives?”
“Since never. Violence is the last resort of the terminally unskilled, as my dad always said. But opinions vary on such matters, and I know when to be impressed. I’ve worked with knife men before.”
Patrick broke off as he heard his own thoughtless words. Then he closed his eyes and waited for Liz to pounce. Knife man? Who was that again? Whatever happened to him?
But she didn’t say anything. She just turned away from the glittering drawer full of blades and left him alone with the knowledge that the most dangerous guy he’d ever met was still out there. Somewhere, Jorge Villanueva was sharpening his knife and dreaming of the day he’d plunge it into Patrick O’Connor’s black, betraying soul.
He let that go with a mental shrug. Nothing else to be done on that front. He’d already made his move. The next move belonged to Villanueva. If the guy was even out there. In the meantime, Patrick would focus his energy on keeping the amateurish mistakes to a minimum.
He selected a knife from the drawer and began reducing potatoes to efficient little cubes. When he was done, he slid the cutting board and knife into the sink, then frowned at Evie who grinned up at him from her perch on a stool. She was bellied up to the sink, soaking wet, and even Patrick knew that knives and children didn’t mix.
Liz caught his look and hiked Evie into her arms. “Hey, you want to show me your room?” she asked. “I heard you have Legos.”
They disappeared down the hall, Evie chattering a million miles an hour about something, Liz nodding wisely. Patrick moved to the French doors opening onto a pretty balcony as the sun sank low over the prairie. That novel sense of ease still cruised around in his gut and he wasn’t at all sure he liked it. Especially not if it was contentment, or something like it. Loyalty was expensive, but doable. Contentment was downright dangerous.
A COPSE of red oaks capped a gentle rise behind the casino, and from within its shadows, Jorge Villanueva watched. He lay on the ground silent and motionless, a high-powered spotting scope focused on the bright kitchen window.
O’Connor had come.
Satisfaction flowed thick and hot in Villanueva’s veins. Not because of O’Connor’s cooperation, of course. The man was incredibly predictable when it came to his precious sister. No, it was more the relief of acting after the endless waiting. The meticulous planning. The silent, impotent watching.
He’d stalked Patrick O’Connor for six years now, his thirst for revenge so deep, so elemental, it was like pain. He’d slipped into the country undetected dozens of times over those years, spent countless nights watching, planning, while O’Connor pecked at his keyboard, while he paced that cavernous museum of a house in the desert all alone.
He’d watched, too, on the rarer occasions when O’Connor got all slicked up in a designer suit and walked the red carpet with some overly endowed starlet on his arm, smiled his movie-star smile for the popping flashbulbs and lapped up the good life.
It had stung to watch from the shadows. Of course it had. It stung now, watching the man who’d stolen everything from him welcomed home by a loving family. By that ridiculous, impulsive sister of his and her gap-toothed toddler.
Villanueva had had a family once. He didn’t anymore. Soon Patrick wouldn’t either.
A woman for a woman. A child for a child. Betrayal repaid in kind.
But which woman? He’d assumed the sister, but that was before he’d seen O’Connor and the curvy blond cop together. Before he’d watched the careful distance they gave each other while performing the casual dance of everyday tasks. Before he’d seen his nimble-fingered former protégé nearly maim himself with a potato peeler because he was too busy watching a woman to pay attention to the task at hand.
Which woman indeed?
Chapter 4
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS later, Liz was curled comfortably in the corner of the couch cleaning her gun when Patrick O’Connor strolled into her living room as if he owned the place. She blinked at him, frozen. The highlight of her typical Saturday night ran more toward a trip to Home Depot, but there he was between her and the TV in all his preternatural gorgeousness. It was as if the waste-land of her social life had finally prompted the Ralph Lauren ad people to drop off an extra in her living room.
She was starting to wonder if he was a stress-related mirage when he smiled at her with that wicked mouth of his. Then she wondered if this fantasy was more rooted in libido issues.
“Do come in,” she said.
“Don’t mind if I do,” he said, his grin broadening at her sour tone. “Security systems only work if you turn them on, Liz. And it helps a ton when you actually close and loc
k the door. Doesn’t anybody in this town know that?”
Not a mirage, she thought with a sigh. She took a moment to wish with great fervency that she were wearing more than the bathrobe her grandmother had given her the Christmas before she’d died.
“Guess you caught me,” she said, shifting smoothly to pull the robe over the expanse of thigh that hadn’t mattered so much when it was just her, the gun and Return of the Jedi on cable.
She swept a hand toward the disassembled Glock 9mm on the table between them and said, “Give me a second to get my backup system online. It’s really effective.”
He flicked a glance at the glistening pieces of oiled weaponry and said, “I imagine so, though it might be more effective as a backup system if it was actually online while the primary was disabled.”
For one weak moment, she considered shooting him. Not fatally, of course. She wouldn’t even draw blood, probably. Maybe she could just shoot his sleeve or something. She smiled, imagining the look on his perfect face when she smoked a bullet hole through that fancy summer-weight cashmere sweater of his.
He smiled back at her, as if he could read her mind. “A backup system doesn’t give the bad guys pause if it’s in pieces on the coffee table, Liz. And I’d know, wouldn’t I?”
He looked like an upscale frat boy, all good breeding, excessive privilege and no remorse. Anger surged through her, a sharp, black wave of it, as shocking for its suddenness as for its intensity. Her mouth was engaged before she gave it a decent thought.
“It’s all just a joke to you, isn’t it?” she snapped. “Stealing.”
“A joke?” He considered that. “No, more of a vocation, I’d say. A gift, if you will. One the FBI—and you, Liz—appreciated very much when I exercised it on your behalf.”
She ignored that. “You spent twenty-some years of your life taking things from people, breaking into their homes, their apartments, their hotel rooms, and just taking things. Things that didn’t belong to you, things that were important to them. Heirlooms, investments, wedding rings. And it didn’t matter to you—still doesn’t matter to you, apparently—that you hurt people along the way.”
