After a brief hesitation, she typed: ‘Who is this?’
A second later, her phone buzzed again. There was just one word on the screen.
Luke
Harper’s stomach flipped.
‘Damn,’ she whispered.
With the Whitney case occupying her waking hours, she’d mostly pushed him out of her mind. She’d convinced herself that he must regret taking that chance. Risking his job.
And she’d told herself she was fine with that.
Now, though, everything came back to her in a rush of heat – the feel of his body pressing against hers. The clean smell of him. The way his hands felt against her back.
‘Damn,’ she whispered again, turning the phone over in her hand.
The question was, with everything that was unfolding around her, did she want to get involved with Luke right now?
She was in the middle of a murder investigation – in the middle of something much bigger than she’d ever worked on before. She could be on the verge of solving the murder that had destroyed her life.
And yet.
The whole time she’d been with him that night, all thoughts of murder and death and corruption had left her mind, for a few minutes.
There’d been nothing but heat and emotion and sensation.
It had been wonderful.
An image flashed through her memory of him, standing on the street, his gun trained over her shoulder at three armed men. A look of cold, protective fury in his eyes.
Heat flooded her body.
Before she could change her mind, she wrote a quick reply.
You know where to find me.
When she walked out of the newspaper building at midnight, some part of her expected Luke to be standing outside, waiting for her.
But the street was empty.
Harper hated how disappointed she felt.
That’s why this is a bad idea, she chided herself. This is a distraction. You have too much to do. There’s no time for this.
She should be thinking about the Whitney case, her mother, and how the hell she was going to do what she had to do.
Not about Luke.
Suddenly weary, she climbed into the Camaro and sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel, staring at the empty road ahead. A full minute ticked by before she started the engine.
All the way home she forced herself not to think about him. She would text him again when she got home. Tell him the truth.
They couldn’t do this. She had too much at stake now.
By the time she pulled into her usual spot under the sheltering branches of an oak tree, her mind was made up. Grabbing her bag, she climbed out of the car and turned towards her house.
Only then did she see him.
Luke was leaning against the door of a black sports car. His arms were crossed casually across his chest. He wore jeans and a black T-shirt that accentuated the bulge of his biceps.
All her doubts evaporated like a warm breath on a cold night.
She crossed the street, her feet oddly light.
He watched her steadily. Waiting.
‘This is a bad idea,’ she told him, but her voice sounded unconvinced, even to her.
‘Probably,’ he said.
He reached for her hand.
His fingers were warm and strong. When he pulled her closer she didn’t resist.
He tilted his head down towards her. His eyes were dark blue and she could see no doubt in them.
‘It’s the best bad idea I’ve had all day,’ he said.
Then his mouth found hers.
This kiss was more demanding than the other night. More urgent. And she felt that same need in her whole body.
With a sigh, she pushed back against him, her lips teasing the corners of his mouth. Her tongue found the soft indention from some unknown injury, as she explored him without apology.
Her hands slid up his arms, across the hard muscles of his shoulders to tangle in the soft strands of his hair.
His breath hitched, his hands sliding down to her hips, pulling her against him.
The way their bodies moved together felt so natural, so familiar. As if they somehow fit.
Suddenly, Harper didn’t care if the newspaper and the police department came down on them with a stack of rule books. If she was right about Blazer, her career in Savannah was probably over anyway. The police would never forgive her.
Smith would never forgive her.
Everything was about to fall apart. She could sense the tremors rattling the foundations of the life she’d carefully built for herself.
Couldn’t she have this one thing first? Didn’t she deserve this?
She drew back.
Luke searched her face. ‘Harper?’
Nobody had ever said her name quite like he did. Like it meant something to him.
Harper’s chest ached, like she’d been holding her breath for years. And at last she could breathe.
‘Let’s go inside.’
Chapter Twenty-one
When Harper woke late the next morning, Luke was gone.
His phone had rung shortly after three in the morning. There was a murmured conversation before he slipped from the room.
She’d been wide awake when he returned a few minutes later, dressed in his jeans, his T-shirt in one hand.
When he bent over to brush his lips lightly against hers she could smell the toothpaste mint on his breath.
‘I have to go.’
For a second, she thought that, like last time, it was all he was going to say. But then he seemed to change his mind.
‘One of my CIs managed to get himself arrested,’ he explained, tracing a fingertip across the bare skin of her shoulder. ‘I’ve got to go see if I can get him out before they lock him up.’
Harper knew how important confidential informants were to detectives. She also knew the fact that he’d told her was a sign of trust.
Stretching up, she pulled his head down until their lips met again, letting the sheet slip down to her waist. The kiss was passionate and lingering. His hand slid up to cup her breast.
‘Dammit, Harper,’ he whispered against her lips. ‘You’re not making this easy.’
With slow reluctance, he disentangled himself, crossing the room with a long, loping stride Harper thought she could pick out in a crowd of thousands.
In the bedroom doorway he stopped to look back, lips curving into a rueful half-smile.
‘Now we really are in trouble.’
And then he was gone. She’d listened to his footsteps down the hall. The sound of the door unlocking and closing behind him with a muffled thud. A minute later, the rumble of the sports car’s engine as it started and then faded away.
After that she’d stretched out on the bed, taking up as much of it as she wanted, and slept like a baby.
Now the sun sent strips of light through the blinds, striating the rumpled sheets.
Zuzu was nowhere to be seen.
With a sigh, Harper padded naked down the hall to the bathroom. While she waited for the shower to heat up, she reached for the toothpaste, only to find it wasn’t where it should be.
She looked around the neat space, puzzled. Things had been moved. The toothpaste wasn’t to the right of the sink where it always was. A damp washcloth had been put back in a different place from where she usually left it. The soap dish had a bit of water in it.
In the mirror above the sink, her reflection stared back at her – thoughtful hazel eyes with a smoky smudge of mascara beneath them, and tangled auburn hair around a pale, oval face.
Normally, this was the point where she started getting anxious about having someone in her house – someone touching her things. Getting too close.
She’d always been terrible at dating. Men didn’t understand her life. Or they felt threatened by the fact that she spent most of her working day hanging out with cops. And she didn’t like them in her house – moving things.
It was easier, in the end, not to do
it.
There had been odd dates here and there, usually with men foisted on her by Bonnie. But it never came to anything.
There’d been the California graduate student two years ago. He’d charmed her with his surfer looks, all shaggy hair and tawny skin, but their lives had been so different. He taught classes on T.S. Eliot to sleepy-eyed undergrads, didn’t believe in owning handguns, and found Harper’s job bizarre.
‘Show them your scanner,’ he’d say, when they were out with his friends. And Harper would have to pull out her scanner so they could listen to the police.
‘She’s a cop-chaser,’ he’d explain with an odd mixture of pride and distaste as they looked at her, wide-eyed.
She’d known he didn’t understand her life. When he stayed over it felt like an invasion.
After a while she told him it wasn’t working out, and that was that.
She’d never missed him.
Even if she’d wanted to, dating was nearly impossible when you worked from four in the afternoon until one in the morning. By the time Harper got off work, pretty much everyone who wasn’t an alcoholic or a criminal was in bed.
Her options were largely limited to other journalists, police and paramedics. The police were (supposed to be) out of bounds. Journalists were hopeless. Paramedics were mostly married.
Which left pretty much nobody.
She’d preferred being alone, anyway. Fewer complications. Fewer distractions. Her job consumed not only her nights but, in some ways, her days as well.
Bonnie, however, disagreed. Vocally and frequently.
‘You’re not fooling anyone with this loner act,’ she’d said more than once.
‘It’s not an act,’ Harper would reply. ‘I am actually a loner.’
But Bonnie wouldn’t let go.
‘God, Harper. There’s more to life than work. Tell me you can see that.’
Harper never really had seen it, though.
Privacy mattered to her. It felt weird that Luke had spent half the night in her bed and used her washcloth and toothpaste.
Weird. But, to her surprise, not bad.
This was different.
The way he’d looked at her, with genuine tenderness – that had been real. The things they’d said to each other – the whispered words in the dark – those had been real, too.
Whatever barrier had kept them apart all these years, last night they’d knocked it down.
Luke had always been careful about what he told her – their friendship stopped at the door of the police station. When he disappeared on undercover jobs, it was pointless asking where he’d been.
Still, Harper had secrets of her own – things she chose never to discuss with anyone.
Last night there had been no secrets.
‘Where did this come from?’ she’d asked, running her fingertips across a long, narrow scar on his abdomen.
It had been after two in the morning and her head was on his chest. His fingers were in her hair. The night felt languid and limitless.
‘I made someone angry,’ he said. ‘That someone happened to have a big knife.’
The only light in the room came through the window, from the streetlight outside, but Harper could see that while the scar was slick and healed, the edges were still tinged with red.
‘This is recent.’ She raised herself up to see his face.
He was watching her – his eyes dark. Somehow, she sensed he wanted her to ask the next question.
‘Where were you? What happened?’
He’d stayed silent for so long she thought he wouldn’t reply. But then …
‘I was investigating a gang in the county, outside of town,’ he said. ‘They’d been supplying the projects for a while. Really pure product. Lots of it. I came in as a new supplier, who could hook them up with coke and pharmaceuticals.’
His fingers still stroked her hair gently but, with each word, she could feel him tensing beneath her; muscles coiling inward.
‘Did they figure out you were a cop?’ she asked.
‘No. There was a guy who never liked me. One night he did too much sampling of his own product. Went for me without warning.’ He put his hand over hers, pulling her fingers away from the scar. ‘Things got hairy for a while. But it’s not as bad as it looks.’
An image of him in some isolated farm, surrounded by thugs and bleeding, flashed in Harper’s mind, and she shuddered.
‘What happened to him?’ she asked.
Luke let out a breath. ‘The other guys went for him. They pulled him off me. Cut him up.’ Seeing the look on her face he brushed her hair back. ‘Don’t worry – he survived. But barely. He got lucky.’
She touched the scar again. ‘You got lucky.’
‘Can’t argue with that,’ he said.
‘I still don’t know why you moved to undercover,’ she said. ‘Do you like the work? Is it better than Homicide? Because it seems really awful.’
‘It is awful.’ His voice was tinged with self-loathing. ‘And I don’t like it. I hate it. The things we have to do undercover – you don’t know, Harper. We have to live their life. We have to become what they are. It changes you. I think it’s changing me.’
‘What do you have to do?’ she asked, a prickle of worry climbing her spine. ‘What have you done?’
He seemed to stop breathing for a long moment, looking off into the darkness.
Then he shrugged, and she felt the moment pass. ‘Nothing. I’m just … I’m tired, Harper. I’m not making sense.’
But she didn’t want to let it go. Not yet.
‘Why do you do it?’ She raised herself up on her elbow to see him better. ‘Why don’t you move back to Homicide? You were so good at it, Luke. You’re a natural.’
‘It’s not that simple.’ His voice sharpened. ‘You can’t always have what you want. That’s not how it works.’
Before she could ask what he meant, he pulled her closer.
‘I don’t want to talk about any of this stuff.’ Wrapping her in his arms, he rolled them both over until he lay above her, looking down into her eyes.
‘I want to do this.’
He kissed her then with such insistence and hunger Harper let it go.
But as she brushed her teeth, her thoughts kept returning to that moment.
One thing was clear. Whatever happened to him on that last job, it had left more scars than the one she’d seen.
He’d always been a by-the-books cop, so obsessed with rules his nickname among the detectives had been ‘Robocop’.
That Luke would never have allowed last night to happen. And he certainly wouldn’t have told her what happened on the job.
This new Luke took more chances. He went for what he wanted.
If she couldn’t go to Smith about Blazer, maybe she could go to Luke? After all, he’d already offered to help with the Whitney case.
Involving him in her research would put dangerous pressure on what was happening between them. He might feel like she was using him. He would doubt her.
She couldn’t tell him yet. Maybe later.
The one person she needed to talk to, though, was Miles.
After her shower, she recovered her own clothes from around the apartment, putting everything back in its place. She had to search for some time before locating her bra deep underneath the sofa.
Zuzu stayed gone until Harper finished straightening, when she slinked in through the cat door, shooting her an icy green glare before heading to her food dish.
‘Who are you? My priest?’ Harper snapped.
Zuzu ignored this with cool dignity.
When all evidence of last night’s activities had been put away and the apartment restored to order, Harper grabbed her phone and called Miles.
‘Jackson.’ Beneath his terse voice, Harper could hear the rumble of a car on the road.
‘Where are you?’ she asked.
‘On my way to Hilton Head,’ he told her. ‘Got an assignment from some hotshot agency shooti
ng a golf tournament. They’re paying a fortune and all expenses.’
Harper swore under her breath. He’d be there all day.
She didn’t want to talk about Blazer on the phone. She needed to tell him in person – see his face.
‘When are you getting back?’ she asked. ‘There’s something we need to talk about.’
‘Tonight,’ he said. ‘Late. Can it wait?’
Harper was so impatient, for a fleeting moment she considered driving after him – Hilton Head was only a few hours away. But she had to be at work by four and it was noon now.
‘It can wait,’ she said reluctantly. ‘But call me as soon as you get back. No matter what time.’
‘What’s going on?’ he asked, his interest piqued. ‘Did something happen?’
Harper paused, then shook her head. ‘I’ll tell you later.’
‘Everything OK?’
‘Everything’s fine,’ she assured him, although she wasn’t sure that was true.
‘All right then,’ Miles said. ‘I’ll call you tonight. Man, I hate golf.’
The line went dead.
After her conversation with Miles, Harper couldn’t sit still. It was too early to go to work and she felt too antsy to stay home. She needed to be investigating Blazer. But she felt as if she’d gone as far as she knew how to go without talking to Miles.
After dressing quickly, grabbing everything she’d need for work, she climbed in the Camaro and headed to Pangaea.
Before she even walked in she knew Bonnie was there. Her pink, twenty-year-old pickup truck was parked outside the door.
The coffee shop was crowded. Modern jazz flowed from the speakers and the air smelled so strongly of coffee she got a caffeine buzz from breathing.
She found her sitting in a corner, a sketchpad sharing space on the table with a pot of tea. Most of the pink had faded from her hair now, and she wore it plaited loosely over one shoulder, as she often did when she was drawing. Slim, in an ankle-length skirt with biker boots and countless bracelets on her wrists, she looked ethereal – a blonde, boho, gypsy girl, her charcoal dancing across the page.
When Harper sat down across from her, clutching a gigantic mug of coffee, Bonnie’s face lit up.
The Echo Killing Page 18
