by Susan Crosby
“While I was under contract with the D.A., I was a police agent and I was hindered by rules of evidence. On my own, I can approach an investigation differently.”
“Illegally?”
“Differently.”
She smiled slightly. “I doubt I could afford you.”
“No charge. I told you before,” he said before she could ask why. “I know what you’re going through.”
He’d never seen eyes so bright a shade of blue.
“So, a P. I. with a soft heart,” she said.
“We’re not the hard-boiled detectives shown on television. We have hearts, and consciences. I got into this business to help the innocent and the helpless.”
“Because you’d been in that position yourself.”
He didn’t answer, but she seemed to read it in his eyes just the same.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
“I don’t talk about it anymore. I overcame it. I just don’t want your life to be thrown into misery like mine was.” And I want to see what could happen between us.
She moved off the stool, taking her soda with her. “I tried to check out your company, ARC Security & Investigations. I couldn’t find anything. No Web site. You’re not even listed in the Yellow Pages.”
“We get our business by word of mouth, reputation and recommendation.” He approached her, liking how she held her ground. At least she wasn’t nervous around him. “Look, Claire, this is about my reputation, too. Jennifer got away on my watch. You don’t think that ticks me off? It’s the first time it’s happened. I’m good at what I do. Damn good. I want to fix it.”
“You want to prove my sister is guilty.”
He didn’t think he would have to prove that. “I want to salvage my own reputation, and I want to keep you from getting hurt. What happens to your sister depends on her innocence or guilt, not whether we find her.”
She held his gaze for a long time, as if seeing into him layer by layer until she could see his soul. She needed to believe him, to trust him. He understood that. He found her unwavering stare incredibly sexy. He found everything about her incredibly sexy.
Even if he had intended to stay involved only in a business sense, it was too late. He wanted to sit her on the counter, unfasten the hooks on her overalls and slip his hands under her T-shirt. He’d bet her skin was warm and soft. He’d bet if she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled herself close that she would smell fresh and flowery. He’d bet she put her heart and soul into a kiss.
Maybe he should test the theory….
Five
Claire forgot what the question was. Or the issue. Or whatever it was that he was waiting for her to say. Something about Jenn….
She liked the way he looked, liked his strong features and amber eyes, and his logic and calmness. She believed him when he said he understood what she was going through. People often said things like that, but they didn’t really know. He did, apparently. He’d been in her shoes. If she let him help, she stood a much greater chance of finding Jenn—if she wanted to.
But it also created two problems. First, she was attracted to him, an attraction she didn’t think would die with familiarity but would instead become stronger. It had already transformed from the strictly physical and chemical response when they’d first met to something else, something more. Second, if they were successful and found Jenn, it could mean Jenn might end up in jail. Could Claire be part of that? Live with that? The repercussions were huge.
She should be very, very careful not to fall for him—
No. She was sick of being careful. She wanted to kiss and be kissed. To hold and be held. To have a partner. Why couldn’t she fall for him? Why couldn’t they fall for each other?
But she knew why—he believed Jenn was guilty, and Claire believed she was innocent, at least of stealing the money from Beecham. Jenn may have always wanted more, but she wouldn’t steal to get it.
“Claire.”
Quinn’s voice startled her. She’d been staring right at him but had forgotten he was there.
“Okay,” she said, turning away and picking up her empty soda can to put in the recycling bin. “We’ll work together.” And see where it goes.
He needed her, she realized with sudden clarity. He was too serious. He needed some fun in his life, needed to smile more. She could do that for him.
“When do you want to start?” he asked.
She thought about her grungy work clothes, and the fact that she hadn’t showered or fixed her hair. Not the most auspicious way to start a…a what? Courtship? No. A wooing? Maybe it was an old-fashioned word, but it seemed to fit.
“I guess my schedule is more flexible than yours,” she said. “I’ll leave it up to you.” How about tomorrow, when I could look my best?
“Now?” he asked.
She managed not to sigh. “Sure. What first?”
“Her bedroom.”
Claire headed out of the room, expecting he would follow, then walked ahead of him up the stairs, aware of him close behind her. Rase bounded past them, waited on the landing.
“Do you have the key to her car?” he asked as they neared the top.
“No. Do you think she hid stuff in there?”
“Maybe.”
Before they entered the room she said, “I need you to promise me something.”
“What’s that?”
“If I decide at any time not to continue looking for Jenn, you have to honor my wishes.”
“Don’t handcuff me, Claire. This is what I do for a living. I will, of course, respect your wishes, if I can. That’s as much promise as I can make. If you can’t deal with that, let’s stop here and now.”
Claire’s reasons for continuing had more to do with her own needs. She wasn’t going to take the chance of Quinn walking out of her life yet. “Okay,” she said, then opened Jenn’s bedroom door.
Claire was embarrassed by the messy room, even though it wasn’t hers. The room was as Jenn had left it—clothes strewn on the unmade bed and heaped on the closet floor. Claire had removed the dirty dishes left behind then closed the door on the disaster.
“Doesn’t win the Cleanest Camper award, does she?” he said, stopping inside the doorway.
“She says her DNA is missing the clean gene.”
Rase made a nest of a pile of clothes and went to sleep. Claire stood by as Quinn poked through Jenn’s belongings, rifling through a drawer stuffed with sexy lingerie, looking under the bed and the mattress and pulling out paperwork from both places. He glanced at each item, then tossed it on the bed, adding more papers he found scattered around the room.
“Does she have a computer?” he asked.
“A laptop. She took it with her.”
He pulled out every dresser drawer to look behind and under, as well as inside the dresser itself. He looked behind the three framed prints of Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s wedding on the walls. Strangely, the room seemed to be getting neater as he worked. She realized he was folding clothing and stacking items. Maybe he’d noticed how embarrassed Claire was by the mess.
Jenn didn’t own many books, but he took each off the shelf and shook it. A couple of CD-ROMs fell out of one.
Claire met his gaze.
“I’ll get my computer from the car,” he said.
She waited until he left the bedroom, then scooped up all the paperwork he’d tossed on the bed and went downstairs, for the first time seriously considering that Jenn might really be guilty of something.
Quinn set his computer on the dining room table. Claire had already placed all the papers he’d unearthed in the middle of the table. She stood with her hands shoved in her pockets.
Long-buried memories blasted him. He recalled the men who’d brought boxes of paperwork out of his parents’ bedroom, his father’s office and even the garage. He’d stood much as Claire did now, scared and vulnerable, not knowing what they would find, not even knowing what they were looking for. He’d tried to stop them.
His mother had ordered him to his room until they were gone. He’d refused. Then they wouldn’t let him be there while they searched his own bedroom. No one had told him why. Not even his mother.
He wouldn’t leave Claire in the dark like that. What he found, he would share.
He put two chairs side by side and invited her to sit. She moved like a whisper, taking a seat beside him then linking her hands together in her lap, her knuckles white.
“It’s better to know than to wonder,” he said.
“I guess.”
“Trust me. It is.” He gave her hands a brief squeeze, being careful not to linger. “Ready?”
She nodded.
He loaded the first CD-ROM and ran it through his virus-detection program. Claire moved closer, trying to see the screen along with him. Her shoulder pressed against his arm, but she didn’t pull away. Nor did he.
He turned toward her. She raised her gaze to his. The need to kiss her rushed through him. He couldn’t, of course. Shouldn’t. It was way too soon. They barely knew each other. She would be embarrassed and pull away. It would make them uncomfortable with each other.
He looked at her mouth. Full lips, parted just slightly.
Couldn’t. He looked away, tried to focus on the screen. Shouldn’t.
She moved just far enough that she wasn’t touching him anymore, but close enough for him to still feel heat rising from her.
“Claire,” he said.
“What?” Her voice was pitched a little higher than usual.
Emotion, but which emotion? Hell. He was over-thinking it. There really wasn’t anything to consider. He couldn’t kiss her.
Shouldn’t.
He was known for his patience, for recognizing the time for action and the time to wait.
But he’d wanted to kiss her since she’d threatened to sic her dog on him. She was gutsy. He liked that. Like when she’d told Santos she wasn’t required to answer his questions. Her haughty tone had turned him on, especially coming from the girl-next-door package.
What the hell. He cupped her face, waited two seconds for her to object, then he kissed her. He felt her breath stop, then she took a long, slow breath and kissed him back, a throaty little moan rising from her as her hands pressed against his chest then slid higher. Before she wrapped her arms around his neck he pulled back.
He wasn’t going to apologize for something she apparently wanted as much as he did. Except that he had rules, and he’d just broken one. “Okay,” he said after a minute. “We got that out of the way.”
She leaned her cheek against his arm, but not before he saw her smile.
“What?” he asked.
“You. You’re funny.”
He was? He couldn’t remember anyone thinking he was funny. Not ever. He angled his head enough to see her face. “If you say so.”
She smiled for a second longer then looked as if she was trying to suppress it, like she knew something he didn’t know. “Shall we get this over with?” she asked, pointing to the computer.
Apparently she hadn’t been as involved as he’d thought, or as needy as he’d been, if she could switch gears that fast. Or maybe she was too nervous about what they would find on the CDs. He wanted to assure her that life would still go on. Instead he scanned the names Jenn had given the folders. They looked like—
“Music,” Claire said. “They’re all song titles.”
He opened one. A song with a hard beat and indecipherable lyrics blasted them from the tiny computer speakers. He felt Claire’s relief.
“She probably downloaded them illegally, so she hid them,” he said, opening another song, then another. He would go through all of them to make sure. The next CD was the same.
They sorted through the paperwork—receipts from her spending spree of the past two months, including her expensive car and credit card statements, lists of things to do, some items crossed off, some not, nothing important, mostly things to buy. No clues emerged as to her current whereabouts or her plans. No airline or hotel information. No travel brochures. No names and addresses of friends or business associates. If she had an address book, she’d taken it with her.
“Let’s go to the garage and check out the car. Does it have an alarm?”
She nodded, then put a hand on his arm briefly. “Are you hungry? I made a pot of chicken-and-rice soup yesterday. I could put it on to heat while we’re in the garage.”
“That would be great.” He was surprised she felt like eating. It was a good sign that she wasn’t knocked completely off balance by her sister’s…what? Cruelty? Deception, at the very least. Quinn wasn’t sure what to call it, not until they knew her motives for running. Maybe Claire was right, and Jenn was just punishing Claire for telling her to move out. Then again, there was that large amount of cash she’d withdrawn the day before.
“How is it that you’re close to Jenn’s mother?” he asked as Claire turned the heat on under the soup pot.
“My parents maintained a friendly relationship with Marie. I spent the night at her place a lot, as Jenn did here. My father had asked her to marry him when he learned she was pregnant, but she refused, believing they would end up divorcing. She was probably right. She never denied my father his rights to his daughter, and my mother accepted and loved her.”
“Marie or Jenn?”
She smiled. “Both. You can’t help but love Marie.”
“Jenn was more of a challenge?”
“In every way. She always felt denied. Nothing was ever quite enough for her.” She could have walked past him on the way out of the kitchen, but she laid a hand along his shoulder blade, her fingertips trailing away after a few seconds. “Let’s go.”
Her proprietary touch both pleased and worried him. He liked that she already felt comfortable with him. He was worried that she would expect more of him, more than he could give. Or should give, anyway.
He followed her out the front door, shutting the door on an unhappy Rase. “Does she have a lot of friends?” he asked.
“Jenn? Yes. Although not ones who’ve been around forever. No leftover friendships from high school. She accumulates people then tosses them aside when their usefulness has passed.”
“What about Craig Beecham?”
“What about him?”
The morning haze was gone, replaced by a sunny day, warm for San Francisco in June. Activity surrounded them—people and pets and traffic.
“Did you meet him?”
“I saw him at the trial. She’d lived with him for about a year. I didn’t see her much during that time. Just for Christmas, I think. Then Mom and Dad died, and a week later Craig was arrested. Jenn didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
She punched her code into the control panel on the outside of the garage.
“You should put your hand up to block anyone from seeing your code as you enter it,” he said.
“Your job must make you really paranoid.” She hit the Enter button.
She was probably right. “How did she behave at the trial?” he asked. “Did she try to talk to him?”
“Yes. She visited him in jail, too.”
“Did she know he was guilty?”
The door opened, revealing the red sports car. “She didn’t defend him to me.”
“Was she called as a witness?”
“Yes. And she said she didn’t know anything about his business or any missing money.”
Quinn would get a copy of the trial transcript and read it for himself. He found the car locked. A blinking red light on the dashboard indicated the alarm was set.
“Can you bypass the alarm?” she asked.
“Doubtful, but I know someone who can. If you’ll give your permission.”
“I want this over with.”
“Right.”
“It’s not my car, though,” she pointed out. “Does my permission matter?”
“It’s on your property. That’s good enough for me.” It was the tightrope he sometimes walked.
They return
ed to the house. As she dished up the soup, he stood by the dining room window overlooking the street and called one of his investigators.
“James Paladin,” said the voice on the other end.
“Jamey, it’s Quinn. Would you have time to break into a car for me?”
“There’s a question you don’t hear every day. Can it wait until tomorrow? I’ve got three interviews back-to-back, then my first date in four months after that.”
“Sure. I don’t think the car’s going anywhere.” He gave Jamey the address. “How about ten o’clock tomorrow morning?”
“I’ll be there.”
Quinn ended the call just as Claire set the soup bowls on the table. She added a basket of sourdough rolls, butter and iced tea, then they took their seats. Rase tried to lie on Quinn’s feet.
“You haven’t taught your dog any manners,” he said, walking Rase to his bed in the breakfast room.
“I tried. I thought he was untrainable.”
“They’re all trainable,” he said, sitting down. “Just make sure he knows you’re the boss.”
“I’d have to be promoted,” she said with a smile. “How does your friend know how to bypass car alarms?”
“It’s a skill he picked up along the way. Jamey was a bounty hunter for almost twenty years, but he did some repo work on the side, as well, although not recently.”
“Does he work for you?”
“This soup is great. Thanks.” Not only good but also spicy, unusual for a chicken soup. “He’s one of the investigators I hired. The other is Cassie Miranda. I lured her away from a law firm where she’d been an on-staff investigator for about five years.”
“So, you’re a three-person business?”
“With the backing of the much bigger home office in L.A. I imagine we’ll grow. We’ve got a support staff of three, as well.”
“What makes your company so exclusive?”
“The three original owners decided that was the market they wanted. They had some connections to get going, but their reputation spread fast.” He broke off a piece of the roll and buttered it. The comfortable domesticity of the moment struck him. He eyed her as she ate. She wasn’t quite as curvy as her sister, although he’d thought so originally when she’d been wearing Jenn’s clothes, but she was in many ways sexier. Maybe it was the fresh look about her—the simple hairstyle and little amount of makeup, if any. Her neck was slender, her skin pale, with a few tiny freckles across her cheeks and on her arms.
