Sudden Engagement

by Julie Miller

  He reminded her of an untamed animal on the prowl, poorly disguised in civilized dress. She felt ill equipped to be his keeper. Or even stand in the same cage with him.

  “Is something wrong?” He’d caught her staring. The memorial service must have rattled her more than she realized for her to be so careless.

  “No.” She quickly looked away, unable to come up with any excuse, and unwilling to admit how much she’d been thinking about him. “We’re here.” She’d never again complain about clichés as the ding of the elevator bell saved her from further explanation.

  She’d excused herself from an offer to share lunch with the Taylor clan under the pretext of not feeling well. By doing so she’d taken Brett from his meal, and now, as they stepped into the hallway and apartment 709 came into view, she wondered if he expected to be invited in for lunch.

  She lowered her face to look in her purse for her keys and hide her wry smile. Poor Brett. If he only knew what kind of hostess she was, that her cooking skills were limited to the microwave and the toaster.

  The man would have to be starving before she’d invite him into her sanctuary. Before she’d allow the emotional roller-coaster ride that was Brett Taylor disturb her sublime refuge from the real world.

  His hand grazed her back, blanking her smile. “It’s 709, right?”

  She nodded and inserted her key into the dead bolt. But she didn’t unlock it. Brett deserved more than a goodbye and a door shut in his face. Without him at her side, she couldn’t have gotten through the morning.

  Still debating her words, she turned and tipped her chin up. “Thank you. Thank you for…” For what? Forcing me to face my fears? Helping me cope with them? Making me wish I still had some faith in myself?

  “You’re welcome.”

  “But…” He shushed her open mouth by pressing a finger to her lips. Didn’t he realize she hadn’t finished explaining her gratitude? That she wasn’t sure how to finish?

  Maybe he did. He drew that same finger along her cheek, caught a tendril of hair and tucked it behind her ear. She watched his eyes as they followed the movement of his hand, until his palm came to rest against her jaw.

  She should have moved away. She could have simply turned her head to deny him the contact. But she couldn’t. He was warmth and strength. And she seemed to be in short supply of both right then.

  The corner of his mouth curved into a half smile. “I should have listened to you this morning, and not put you through that. I can be pretty bullheaded sometimes.”

  “I noticed.”

  A full smile blossomed on his mouth. The familiar laugh lines crinkled beside his eyes. “Feeling better, I see.”

  “It’s a big job to cut you down to size, Taylor. I have to stay in practice.”

  “Ooh, strike two.”

  Without thinking, she reached out and spread the flat of her hand across the center of his chest, drawn to the movement of laughter. Crisp cotton teased her palm. Warm man radiated through the thin material. “I think you like it when I call you on your ego.” Ginny barely recognized the sound of teasing in her voice.

  He leaned one arm on the door frame beside her head, angling his body so close that she had to lean back against the door to maintain eye contact with him. The fingers at her jaw tunneled into her hair and cupped the nape of her neck. “Careful, angel. I’m going to think you’re flirting with me.”

  “Me, flirt?” She was genuinely puzzled. “I don’t think I know how.”

  “Probably not. You don’t play games. That’s one of the things I admire about you.”

  “Admire?” A twinge of warning made her curl her hand into a fist, though she still didn’t pull away.

  “Yeah. I want you to feel you can be honest with me. Like you were this morning. That meant a lot to me.”

  He began to gently knead her scalp, releasing the tension gathering within her. “You have to know that sharing something like that isn’t easy for me,” she admitted.

  “I’ll be patient.”

  She frowned, trying to keep the upper hand in this conversation, but feeling herself falling behind. “I know you better than that, Taylor.”

  A boyish smile lit his face. He rephrased himself. “I’ll keep trying?”

  Her fingers relaxed as she fell under his earnest spell. She leaned into him for balance and rose on tiptoe, rewarding him for putting up with her foibles and phobias, rewarding herself. “So will I.”

  She waited in anticipation for his mouth to close the gap between them, forgetting that she might be making a promise she couldn’t keep.

  The slide of a dead bolt jolted her eardrums. She dropped to her heels, just beyond the reach of Brett’s kiss.

  “Oh. I’m sorry.” A hushed, erudite voice intruded. “Is this a bad time?”

  Brett’s lips flattened out in a frustrated sigh. When she nudged at his chest, the sigh seemed to expand throughout his entire body.

  She didn’t wait for him to step away. She scooted around him and confronted her neighbor. “Dennis. Do you spy on me all the time?”

  He pulled those little half-glasses off his nose and pointed them at her in self-defense. “How was I to know you were coming home for lunch? I heard a noise in the hall and thought I’d check it out.”

  Brett stepped in front of her. He splayed his hands on his hips and puffed up to an intimidating size. “She’s fine.”

  She tugged at Brett’s elbow. “I don’t need you to protect me.”

  Dennis was no slouch in the proprietary-male department, either. “She doesn’t usually bring men home, you know.”

  “Dennis!”

  Brett grabbed her left hand and held it up for Dennis to see. “I happen to be her fiancé. Who the hell are you?”

  Suppressing a few choice words of her own, Ginny freed herself. She fisted her hands in royal frustration and shook them at the two men. Flustered, angry and embarrassed, she unlocked her apartment and stormed inside, leaving Brett and Dennis to verbally duke it out. She didn’t have time or patience or interest in seeing which male earned the right to be king of the hallway.

  She tossed her purse onto the chair and made a beeline for the kitchen. By habit, she punched the answering machine to play her messages. She opened the fridge, pulled out a bottle of water and bolted two large swallows. She relished the icy chill running down her throat, cooling her blast of temper as it settled into her stomach.

  The first message was from Merle. “I’ve tried your cell phone twice, but there’s no answer. Call me when you get in. I have some info on that 911 search.”

  The ending beep diverted her attention to the voices in the hall. Less intense, more wordy. At too low a volume to make out anything specific.

  She listened to another message from Merle. His sweetly persistent voice reminded her that she needed to contact Maggie Wheeler and requisition another cellular phone.

  After the third beep, she noticed that she didn’t hear anything from the hallway at all. Good. Providence had spared her a firsthand view of the overbearing behavior of the Neanderthal-male species. And she’d made her escape from Brett.

  She took another, slower drink, and gave thanks that she’d been given time to recover from her emotional battering that morning. She’d almost made a dangerous mistake by kissing him. She’d already revealed too much of her personal life to him. She’d gone so far as to depend on him, to enjoy the ongoing battle of words and wills between them.

  As she replaced the water bottle, she saw the rich blue sapphire on her left hand. Suddenly, that white-gold band felt like a lead weight.

  She felt a similar weight in the pit of her stomach. This whole relationship with Brett was just a game. She had a job to do. “My feelings for Brett aren’t real,” she muttered to herself.

  So why did he make her so angry? Why had she wanted him to kiss her?

  The machine beeped with yet another message as Ginny stood in front of the open refrigerator and breathed in the cool air.

 
“Stay away from things that don’t concern you, Detective.” Her blood ran cold all on its own. The mechanically altered voice played through her apartment in shrill, robotic tones. She shut the refrigerator and stared at the answering machine as if it were creating the message itself. “I warned you. Let the past stay buried.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  Ginny whirled around at Brett’s emphatic curse. “What are you doing here?” She tromped across the room to the man whose brawn filled the open doorway. She’d left the apartment unlocked, and he had the gall to invite himself in. “Get out.”

  Her hand hit his chest. She shoved.

  He didn’t budge.

  Dennis peeked his head around Brett’s shoulder. “Is there a problem?” he asked, so full of innocent concern that Ginny wanted to scream.

  “Go home, Dennis.”

  They’d violated her haven. Brought the outside world to her sanctuary.

  “Call the police and report that.” Brett crossed to the phone even as he gave her the order.

  “I am the police.” Ginny hustled after him. She snatched the receiver from his hand and slammed it back down onto the phone. She leaned her shoulder into his rib cage and pushed again.

  His hands closed around her arms and he set her back a step, stopping her momentum as easily as if she were a child. “What do you do in a case like this?” he asked, refusing to let go. “Does the precinct assign some sort of protection?”

  She twisted inside his grip and raised her foot with every intention of grinding it down on his instep. “They trained me to protect myself.”

  “I’m not the bad guy here.” With amazingly quick speed for such a big man, he sidestepped her attack and picked her up off the floor as he had done twice before, pinning her to his chest, dangling her in space.

  “Stop doing that!” Eye to eye, heartbeat to heartbeat, she stared him down. “I am a grown woman. A professional police officer.” She enunciated each syllable. “Let me do my job.”

  He dropped her. Her feet hit the floor with a hard jolt and he backed away, his head shaking, his hands raised in surrender.

  “Dammit, Ginny. That was a threat on your life. He said warned you, past tense. Have there been other threats? Aren’t you going to take it seriously?”

  “I’m always serious. Remember?”

  She stormed to the door and held it open, impatiently waiting for him to walk through so she could slam it on his backside. An eternity passed between each step as he followed her across the room. He paused in front of her. His fingers perched at his hips and he leaned his shoulders slightly forward in that overtly masculine stance of his.

  “You’ve been threatened before, haven’t you?” She turned her face to the side to avoid eye contact with him. With his finger and thumb, he forced her chin back to face him. “Haven’t you?”

  “Once.”

  Her breathing skipped its natural rhythm. The same panic that had attacked her at the mortuary tried to seize her again. She jerked her chin from his gentle grip, fighting off the traitorous desire to share her fears and hurt with him. She had to be strong. She had to get through this. Alone. She couldn’t afford to get used to his comfort, his compassion. She couldn’t expect him to be there for her when her job or her life got to be too much. She shouldn’t want him to be.

  “I received a note at work,” she admitted. She intended to end this personal conversation. “I handled it.”

  The gentle concern shading his eyes absorbed the brunt of her dismissive glare. “I’ll just bet you did. You’ll take on anything life throws at you, won’t you?”

  “You can leave anytime. The door’s open.”

  “You’re not mad at me.” He called her bluff. “You’re scared.”

  She clasped one hand at her throat, hiding the proof of her leaping pulse at the pinpoint accuracy of his statement.

  His deep gentle voice almost made her believe in trust again. “Angel, it’s okay to be scared.”

  She stepped back and pointed to the hallway, refusing to succumb to his seductive lies. “Get out.”

  Dennis Fitzgerald suddenly appeared in the open doorway across the hall. His agitated shifting from foot to foot distracted her from her mission to get Brett out of her apartment. “Ginny. Turn on your television. There’s a story on the noon news about the Ludlow Arms.”

  “I don’t want to watch television.”

  “You’ll want to watch this. They found another dead body.”

  FEELING TOO RAW to argue with Brett, to even speak to him, Ginny mutely agreed to let him drive her down to the Ludlow Arms.

  Strangely enough, the familiar flurry of police cars and yellow tape, the technicians and medical examiner’s van, even the crush of reporters and curious onlookers, returned a sense of normalcy to Ginny’s mind. This kind of stress she could handle. She could even distance herself from the tragedy of death so long as she could focus on her job and didn’t have to cope with big bossy Neanderthals turning her personal life upside down.

  She climbed out of his truck and clipped her badge onto her belt. Brett fell into step beside her as she crossed the street and pushed her way through the crowd toward the front steps of the Ludlow.

  When he lifted the yellow tape for her to pass under, she stopped. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “It’s my building.”

  “It’s my case.”

  “It’s our case.” He took her by the hand and pulled her through beside him. He caught her fingers again and flashed the ring before her eyes. “Equal partners, remember?”

  “You’re never going to let me forget.”

  She snatched her hand free and climbed the steps into the lobby. Brett lingered behind, scanning the crowd, then tipping his face up toward the Ludlow’s roofline. After his dogged insistence on staying with her, the unexpected pause made her come back outside. She, too, looked up, wondering what it was about the towering bricks that had caught his attention.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “We have to move these people back, and cut down to the bare minimum of personnel and equipment inside.” He looked down at her and shrugged. “It’s just a feeling. This old girl doesn’t have much life left in her. You touch it and she falls apart.”

  To demonstrate his point he reached out and swiped his fingers across the outside wall. The open hand he held in front of her face had picked up red brick-dust and pea-size chunks of mortar. “I don’t think she’s too happy to give up all her secrets.” He clutched his hand into a fist and dropped it to his side before brushing it clean on the pant leg of his good suit. “I wonder how many people have to die before she surrenders.”

  “It’s just a building, not an entity. She’s not a suspect.”

  She heard herself use the feminine appellation, saw the grim acceptance in Brett’s tight expression, and realized she half believed him.

  The Ludlow Arms was an elegantly engineered mix of steel and brick and wood and stone. But she remembered the collapse of the Bishops’ fourth-floor apartment, the way the split in the floor had seemed to chase after Brett.

  Ginny shivered in the warm April sunshine. “I’ll find out who the scene commander is and you can fill the officer in.”

  When Brett’s hand settled at the small of her back to guide her inside, she didn’t mind.

  Soon enough she fell into the routine where she functioned so naturally. Turning on her calm, rational mind and shutting off her emotions, she pointed out the officer in charge of the scene and waited for Brett to take him off to the side before seeking out Merle.

  Mac Taylor and his crew were scattered about, taking photographs and marking blood samples. She found Merle kneeling beside the covered body itself at the bottom of the basement stairwell. She touched his shoulder, indicating her presence before stooping down beside him.

  “What do we have?” She lifted the corner of the tarp and gasped. She identified the man on a whispered prayer. “Zeke Jones.”

  She covered t
he old man’s face and pulled out her pen and notepad to mark down Merle’s observations. “That’s why I didn’t label it accidental death. He was your witness, wasn’t he?”

  Ginny nodded. “He said he could describe Bishop’s killer.”

  Merle’s surprise was obvious. “How’d you get that out of him?”

  “Brett Taylor. He acted like a commanding officer, and Zeke reported in to the real world long enough to respond to him.”

  Merle pushed himself to his feet. “What’s the deal with you and Taylor, anyway?”

  Ginny took a deep breath before standing. She found it hard to choke the words past the lie in her throat. “We’re engaged.”

  “So I heard. How come I never heard of you two being an item before now?”

  She poked around in the corner, ostensibly looking for clues. “You know I like to keep my private life private.”

  “Still, as your partner, I figured you’d clue me in on a major life change like that.”

  She faced him, feeling defensive. “How much do you tell me about your personal life?”

  “As much as you let me.” He met her challenge with a dose of reality. “I like you, Ginny. I like the way your mind works. I think I’m lucky to have you for my partner. You’ve got enough experience so I don’t feel like such a rookie, but not so much that I can’t relate to you. But you’re a tough nut to crack in the friendship department.”

  He surprised her by giving her arm a supportive squeeze. “I’m glad Taylor managed to get through to you. I hope he makes you happy. I’d like to see you happy.”

  Did she really seem so negative? So dissatisfied with life? Maybe what she’d seen as self-protection others had interpreted as disinterest or disdain. And why the hell was she worrying about this right now? Had she allowed Brett to tear down so many of her walls that she couldn’t control her own reactions anymore?

  Judging by the worried look on Merle’s face, she needed to give some kind of response. “I like you, too,” she admitted, avoiding mentioning Brett altogether. “You keep me sharp. On my toes. You’re not afraid of hard work. And nobody handles that computer like you do.” Why had she never told him that before? They’d been teamed up nearly a year ago. They’d shared a few working lunches, discussed the merits and myths of Star Trek. But she’d never really gotten to know him. Or more accurately, she conceded, she’d never given him a chance to get to know her.