by Jill Shalvis
He didn’t bother to point out that she was lucky something like this hadn’t happened sooner. She knew. It was all over her face. As was the fact that she hated having to come to him for help. “Why would someone steal this thing and then taunt you with it?” he asked.
“I don’t know and it doesn’t matter,” she said. “I just want it back.”
“It does matter.”
“Why?”
“Because,” he said, “I feel like I’m missing all the good parts of this story. Is this going to be like the game Clue? Colonel Mustard in the library with the revolver?”
She stood up. “This isn’t a game, Joe. And if you’re not going to help me, I’ll find someone else who will.” With that, she headed to the door.
Which was when Joe realized he’d finally met someone more stubborn than himself. And according to his friends and family, that wasn’t even possible.
Chapter 4
#ICouldaBeenAContender
Joe caught Kylie at the door of his office, barely. Wrapping his fingers around her wrist, he tugged her around to face him. “I didn’t say I wasn’t going to help you, Kylie.”
As her name fell from his lips, her gaze went to his mouth. Just for a single heartbeat, but it told him something he hadn’t realized he needed to know.
She most definitely remembered everything about their kiss.
“So you will help me?” she asked.
A missing penguin? Seriously? But the absurdity of the task was eclipsed by the way her pulse raced beneath his fingers, by how her gaze slid briefly back up to his mouth before returning slowly, almost reluctantly, it seemed, to his eyes. He’d had a taste of her and yeah, it’d been . . . off the charts. But he wasn’t a man who went back for seconds. Ever. So he was as surprised as she was when his mouth opened and he said, “Yes. I’m going to help you.”
“In exchange for the mirror,” she said, clearly not trusting him and wanting to clarify and lay out the terms. “Nothing more.”
He smiled. “Where’s the fun in that?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Say it, Joe.”
He let out a low laugh. “Fine. My help for the mirror. You know, you might just be the most stubborn woman I’ve ever met, and that’s saying something.”
“Do me a favor and don’t compare me to the women you date,” she said. “Or whatever you do with them. We all know the only reason you even remember their names is that you take them to the coffee shop in the morning and then read what gets written on their cup.”
Okay, there’d most definitely been a time in his life when that had been true, but he was slowing down in his old age. Having just turned thirty, he was discovering that he wasn’t nearly as entertained by hooking up as he used to be. Not that he planned on admitting that. “If I’m going to do this,” he said, “I need details. All of them, Kylie.”
“Sure,” she said so quickly that he knew she was full of shit.
But it took someone else just as full of shit to recognize it. “Then come back and sit down,” he said. “Fill in some blanks.”
She headed past him, shoulder-checking him as she did, which made him want to laugh.
Even up against the wall, she came out fighting.
She moved past his visitor chairs to his window, looking down at the courtyard below. “The penguin is a wood carving that has no value to anyone but me,” she said. “It was my grandpa’s.” She paused. “It’s all I have of him.”
“Your grandpa . . . Michael Masters, right?”
“Yes.”
“He was an artist,” he said. “A woodworker like you. Is his stuff valuable?”
“It wasn’t,” she said to the glass. “At least not until he died. Almost ten years ago now.”
There was something in her carefully emotionally blank voice that gave her away. His second inkling that nothing about this was a joke to her. “How many of these carvings exist?”
“All I know about for sure is this one,” she said. “My grandpa made it for me as a toy. He said penguins stick with their families for life. Like him and me.” She paused. “I think I remember him mentioning once that there might be another, but I never saw it.”
“Who knew this one existed?” Joe asked.
“No one,” she said. “The penguin was a toy to amuse me when I was little. As far as I know, he never made any for sale.”
But clearly someone else had known it existed. He watched as she turned from the window and looked at him, and he saw a depth of hidden pain and vulnerability that nearly took his breath. Shit. He was really going to do this. He was actually going on the hunt for a toy, a chunk of wood. He never made decisions from a place of emotion. At least not anymore, not since that long-ago time when what he’d had to find was his sister. Then he’d run on pure emotion and it’d nearly gotten her killed. “Tell me more about your grandpa.”
She turned away from him again and took a moment to speak. “He died after a fire in his shop.”
“Were you close?” he asked.
“Yes.” There was another long pause. “I lived with him at the time.”
Hell. He gave her a moment to get herself together and took a deep breath himself. So much for the emotional distance. “Were you hurt?” he asked quietly.
“I wasn’t there that night.”
Joe wasn’t completely heartless, and his chest got tight at the guilt in her voice. “Damn, Kylie. I’m sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.”
Yeah, but as he knew, time didn’t heal shit. Just as he knew—at least in his experience—that crime didn’t discriminate. Bad shit happened to good people. “What about your parents?”
“What about them?” she asked.
“Why were you living with your grandpa and not them?”
She shrugged. “They weren’t really parent material.” She met his questioning gaze. “They were kids when the stick turned blue. They weren’t a couple or anything. My dad didn’t stay around, and my mom wasn’t . . . equipped to deal back then.”
“Do you see them now?” he asked, curious about her. He knew that she was quiet, thoughtful, creative. He’d always wondered what made her tick. Now that he knew she’d been raised by her grandfather, things made more sense, like the way she seemed like such an old soul, or could walk into a room and turned heads but never even realized it.
“My dad works on the oil rigs in the Gulf,” she said. “He blows through San Francisco every few years. My mom’s living la vida loca in the Mission District with her current boyfriend, but we do best with a little distance between calls and visits.”
Joe and his mom had been incredibly close before she’d died when he’d been ten. And though he never knew how to describe his relationship with his father, they were in each other’s lives, forever bound by the ties of blood and family. Same with Molly. The three of them had many faults, but not caring wasn’t one of them. They were in a love/hate and undoubtedly dysfunctional relationship, but he had no doubt they’d stand at his back in any situation, no questions asked.
Well, okay, there’d be questions. And yelling, lots of yelling, but they’d still be at his back.
It seemed the person Kylie had ever had at her back was gone, and though he knew she wouldn’t want him to feel bad for her, he did. It sucked. It also made her life and her success in the artistic world all the more amazing for the fact that she was accomplishing it on her own. “Tell me more about the fire,” he said, not daring to risk her wrath by offering sympathy. “His entire shop burned? And what about any inventory in it?”
“Everything was destroyed,” she said.
“Which would’ve have made any work of his that had already sold instantly more valuable,” he said. “Right?”
She turned to face him, her brow furrowed. “Yes. I guess I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“That’s why you’re paying me the big bucks.” He smiled, hoping she knew he was teasing. “Okay, we’ll start with some paperwork.”
She look
ed startled. And annoyed. “You mean like forms?”
“No, a list,” he said. “How many people knew the both of you? Anyone have anything against either of you, a grudge, a vendetta? Anything?”
She stared at him like he was crazy. “No one had anything against my grandpa. He was the sweetest, kindest, most generous man on the planet.”
Uh-huh. Call him jaded, but everyone had secrets. And everyone had a bad side.
She took in his expression and shook her head. “No one was mad at him.” She paused. “Or me.”
He went brows up.
“Hey,” she said. “I’m a delight.”
He laughed and she rolled her eyes. “Okay, fine, I’m a pain in the ass, whatever. Just find my penguin.”
The way she said that, “my penguin,” like it’d been her most treasured possession, dried up his good humor. He knew what it was like to love family so deeply it hurt and he also knew what it was like to lose them. His dad was still kicking, but Joe had lost him just the same. “So you’re saying no one was pissed off at him or you.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“Then let’s try another angle,” he said. “Greed instead of revenge.”
“Okay,” she said slowly. Doubtfully. And Joe got it. Most people didn’t give a lot of thought to motives behind a crime. Most people’s minds didn’t go there.
He wasn’t most people.
“It’s someone who knew the both of you,” he said. “Or someone who might have heard something from someone who knew the both of you, or they wouldn’t have had any idea that this wood thing even existed.”
“Penguin wood carving,” she corrected him. “It’s a penguin wood carving, not a ‘wood thing.’”
“Right,” he said. “Penguin wood carving.”
“My grandpa was simple,” she said. “And quiet. He didn’t go out, didn’t have friends he hung out with. He liked to stay home and be with me.”
Joe was really glad that she’d had him when it seemed as if she’d not been able to count on her parents, but he could only imagine how lonely and sheltered she’d been. “How about employees?”
“He didn’t have any.”
“No one? Not an office helper or apprentice? No one at all?” he asked, finding that hard to believe.
“I handled his phones and the books,” she said, “although he did have apprentices here and there. I didn’t think about them.”
He nodded, not liking the vision he was getting of how her younger years had gone. She’d lived lean and isolated. “Can you list all the apprentices?”
“I think so. But—”
He pulled out his desk chair, gestured for her to sit, and pushed a pad of paper and a pen in front of her.
“Okay.” She bent over the pad in concentration, her long, wavy, light brown hair falling into her face. With a sound of annoyance, she coiled it up on top of her head with an elastic ribbon she’d had on her wrist. She went back to the list and wrote in silence for a few minutes before handing him the pad.
“Here are the apprentices during the time I was with him,” she said. “There are ten. I’ve given you their names and where they were from. One was older than my grandpa and isn’t a viable suspect. Another has passed away. Two are living out of the country. And out of the ones that are left, I honestly can’t see a single one of them doing this. They all loved my grandpa as much as I did.”
This was a biased point of view and as was habit on this job, he ignored all bias and emotion. “Is there anything else I need to know?” he asked.
She pulled her lower lip into her mouth and gnawed on it with her teeth. After a pause, she shook her head.
He resisted a sigh. She was a shitty liar. “Going to actually need the words, Kylie,” he said, holding her gaze, knowing it was next to impossible to hold a lie while looking someone in the eyes and speaking at the same time. At least for someone like Kylie. Him, he could look into the eyes of a saint and give a good run for his money.
But Kylie didn’t hold the eye contact. She looked away as she spoke. “There’s nothing else you need to know.”
Right. He didn’t believe her, of course, but he knew better than to push a woman who’d dug her toes in the sand. Instead, he scanned her list and stilled. “Your boss is on here.”
“Gib? Yeah,” she said. “But I marked him not a possibility.”
“You’ve marked them all not a possibility,” he said dryly. “But let’s start with Gib. Why isn’t he a suspect in your eyes?”
“Because we grew up together,” she said. “My grandpa taught him everything he knows. He considered Gib one of his own, even gave him a place to stay when he needed it.”
“So Gib would know exactly how important the thing—er, penguin wood carving was to you, right?” he asked. “Not to mention what it must be worth.”
“It’s not Gib,” she said stubbornly. “He’s been good to me, very good to me.”
He didn’t like where this was going. “How good is very good?”
“What do you mean?” she asked suspiciously.
Joe’s instincts were razor sharp and they’d gotten that way because he was a master at studying people. He’d been in Reclaimed Woods several times. He’d seen little to no sexual tension from Gib aimed at Kylie, but he still had to ask. For the case, he told himself, and absolutely not for personal knowledge. “You and Gib a thing, Kylie?”
“What does this line of questioning pertain to?” she asked.
Him being jealous, which was asinine. “Motive,” he said. Look at him showing off his lying skills . . .
“No,” she said. “In the past, Gib and I have never been a thing.”
She spoke with 100 percent honesty. But there’d been a hesitation there that told him he was definitely still missing a piece of this puzzle. “And how about the present or the future?”
She crossed her arms. “I don’t see how this is relative.”
Shit. She had a thing for Gib. He studied her for a minute. “I’m going to ask you that one again. You and Gib going to—”
“None of your business,” she said with surprising finality. “Drop it, please.”
That would certainly be the smart thing to do. “Fine. But he stays on the list.”
“Whatever. Now what?” she asked.
“You go to work, and so do I. I’ve got a surveillance job to get to.” To save time, he began to load up, sliding his comms case into one of his cargo pockets for later. He laced up his boots and unlocked his weapons safe to start strapping on weapons. Glock on his right hip. Knife clipped to the inside of a pocket. Cell phone in front pocket. Sig strapped to a leg. Giants cap on backward, flak vest strapped across his chest and back, and a fucking partridge in a pear tree.
He looked up and realized that Kylie’s eyes had darkened as she stared at him. He was male enough to smirk but smart enough to keep it on the inside. “I’ll get back to you once I make my way through this list. I’ll start tonight after work.”
“What? No,” she said. “I want to be involved. We’re partners in this.”
“I work alone, Kylie.”
He was surprised when she stared him down. “Not this time,” she said.
“Listen—”
“Do you want that mirror for Molly or not?” she asked.
He felt the muscle in his jaw tick. She had balls, he’d give her that. Her courage was shockingly attractive too. “You know I do,” he said.
“Then I’ll see you later. Partner.”
Shit. He was so screwed.
Chapter 5
#FranklyMyDearIDontGiveADamn
After the meeting with Joe, Kylie went to work, but for once her heart wasn’t into her dream job. Her thoughts were on her missing penguin. And also on how Joe had looked strapping on his weapons, because holy cow. For years she’d harbored her not-so-secret crush on Gib because he was handsome, steady, and—let’s face it—safe.
But Joe. Nothing about Joe said safe, and yet the inexplicable
yearning she had for him said a good part of her didn’t care. She hadn’t taken many risks in her life, if any. That needed to change, and if that change included more time with Joe’s incredibly sexy mouth on hers, she was thinking that wouldn’t be a bad thing. His mouth. His body . . . And with that thought, she stupidly overmilled the tabletop she’d been working on for weeks. Trying to correct the mistake, she ended up with a huge splinter jammed in her right palm. “Dammit!”
She flipped off the machine and stared at her palm and then the wood, now rendered unusable.
Not good. Hand throbbing, she called her supply source to get more wood and received bad news. More mahogany lumber would put her overbudget. By hundreds of dollars. Worse, it would take two weeks to arrive.
The whole thing was a costly rookie mistake that would probably also cost her the client.
Both over herself and the day so far, she spent an hour trying to dig the splinter out with her left hand, which only made things worse. Finally, bloody and frustrated, she ran upstairs to Haley’s office.
“Help,” she said and held out her hand, palm up.
“Oh my God, what the hell did you do?” Haley asked. “Stab yourself with a pocketknife—repeatedly?”
“I was just trying to get out the splinter,” Kylie said.
“With what, your pocketknife?”
“Hey, I get a lot of splinters,” she said in self-defense. “And we have a saying in the shop. Mark ’em and take ’em out on our own time—after work. So I was in a hurry.”
“You’re all a bunch of barbarians,” Haley said and brought her into a patient room. She poured some sort of antiseptic over Kylie’s hand and then directed a mobile bright light over her entire palm and went to work with a set of tweezers.
“Ow!” Kylie said.
Haley snorted but didn’t stop working. “You’re okay stabbing yourself repeatedly with your pocketknife, but you’re flinching over my tweezers?”
Kylie sighed. “It’s different when someone else is the one poking around—Ouch!”
“Done.” Haley held up her tweezers, revealing a splinter a good inch long.
