Jase swallowed a last mouthful of pizza. “It’s the same with the papers she slipped into the book.” He held up an advertisement torn from a glossy magazine. In the margin was what Maddie guessed to be an earring in the shape of a spiderweb.
Eyes narrowing, she reached for it.
“What?”
“The design.” The moment Jase handed it to her Maddie placed it carefully next to the page she’d been studying. “It’s the same one she drew in the five o’clock time slot the night before she was run down.”
Rising, Jase stepped over the coffee table and knelt down next to her so that he could study the drawing too.
“I don’t think it’s a design,” he said. “It’s the logo for the club that’s being advertised—the Golden Spider.”
Quickly, Maddie scanned the ad. There were quotes from newspapers and magazines extolling the virtues of the Golden Spider club as one of Manhattan’s premier night spots—“the latest place to be seen in the Big Apple.” The in place to be. Then she saw it. The text was layered over a faint drawing that matched what Eva had doodled in her appointment calendar and again in the corner of the ad.
Frowning, she flipped back through the pages to the night of the robbery. Then using one finger she began to skim down each page until she found what she was looking for. A week after the robbery, on the day she’d visited Jase at his office, Eva’d sketched the same spiderweb. “Here it is again. I assumed it was an idea for a piece of jewelry, but maybe not.”
Jase strode to the dining table on the level above them. “Something’s tugging at the back of my mind. I’ve seen it before someplace.”
Maddie studied him. The energy that he always seemed to keep tightly leashed was much closer to the surface. “You think it means something?”
“Maybe.” First he leafed through the sketch book. “Nothing here.” Then he picked up something from the table. “Well, hello.” He tossed it to her.
Maddie caught the matchbook, and her heart skipped a beat when she got a close look. “The Golden Spider.” She glanced up at Jase.
“I’d say we have a clue.” He descended the two steps and began to pace. “I’m still thinking that I saw that design before. Some place besides the matchbook. I saw a lot of jewelry sketches pinned to the wall while we were in the workroom at Eva Ware Designs. Would your mother have seen a logo like that one and purposely sketched it with the idea of turning it into a piece of jewelry?”
“I…don’t know. We’ll have to ask Jordan.”
“No.” Moving forward, Jase dropped to his knees beside her and grabbed her shoulders. “I’m asking you. You’re more like your mother than you realize.”
A skip of panic moved through her. “I don’t think so.”
“You’re both designers. Your brains are hard-wired in a certain way.”
“That doesn’t mean I know her.”
“Fine.” But he disagreed with her. Maddie was coming to know her mother more and more. The problem was she wasn’t quite comfortable with that knowledge. Releasing her, he picked up the message pad she’d been taking notes on and held it for her to see.
Maddie studied the doodles she’d made in the margins. She hadn’t even been fully aware of drawing them. A few were designs she’d been experimenting with for quite a while.
She drew in a deep breath and let it out. “I sometimes do that when I’m worried or thinking through a problem.”
“Yeah. From the looks of it, your mother had the same habit. So now I want you to take your best guess. Would your mother have seen something like the spider design and ‘borrowed’ it as the basis for a piece of jewelry?”
“No,” Maddie said firmly.
Jase nodded. “Then she had to have some other reason for her doodles. My theory is that your mother came across it in the ad or on the matchbox, or some other place. Either way she started thinking about it or worrying about it. I can’t imagine that she was doodling this because she was a regular visitor at the Golden Spider. You with me so far?”
Maddie thought of the desk in Eva’s apartment, piled high with sketch books, littered with drawings. It had been a potent testimonial to what Eva had done when she got home from the gym or the store every night, and it argued forcefully against her mother having had any nightlife. Come to think of it, Maddie herself didn’t have a nightlife either. How many evenings did she return to her studio to work? There was a sudden tightness around her heart that had her rubbing her fist against it.
“In the morning, I’ll have Dino see what he can dig up on this club. And I want to get to Eva Ware Designs before anyone else does, including the police. I’m still thinking that I saw the spider logo somewhere when we were there today. I’ll also fill Stanton in. He’s going to be questioning everyone at the store tomorrow. He might as well ask if any of them have been to the Golden Spider.” Jase smiled slowly. “That may just stir something up.”
Maddie narrowed her eyes. “You want to stir something up, don’t you?”
Jase’s smile faded. “You bet I do.”
He pressed down hard on the anger that had been simmering inside him ever since he’d seen that car in his peripheral vision. “I want to get my hands on the bastard who nearly ran us down and who killed your mother.”
Just saying the words had an image he’d been battling against for hours running through his head—Maddie lying in that street, bleeding. Lifeless.
Ruthlessly he blanked it out, but beneath his rage something else—determination—iced.
“Me too. Got any ideas?”
“Not yet.” That was the hell of it. “I’m drawing a blank. Not even the spiderweb makes sense—yet. But it will. Investigative work is a matter of gathering pieces that don’t seem to fit and then finally seeing the whole picture.”
His cell phone rang and he fished it out of his pocket. The caller ID told him it was Stanton; he tilted the phone so that Maddie could hear too. “Yeah?”
“Mixed news. I’ve gotten nowhere with Michelle Tan, and Cho Li has yet to appear at his apartment.”
“Could something have happened to him?” Maddie asked.
“I doubt it. One of the uniforms watching the building chatted up the doorman. The guy claims Cho stays out all night two or three times a week.”
“Maybe he has a lady friend,” Jase said.
“That’s my first guess. I’ll have my men bring him in as soon as he shows up. We’re having better luck with Eva Ware’s car. It was parked in her garage. The dent on the hood and the fabric we found on the undercarriage suggest that it was used to run her down. I hope to have lab results confirming that tomorrow. There’s no garage attendant on duty. The gate can only be opened with an electronic key card. You find anything like that in her effects?”
“No. No spare car keys either,” Jase said.
“So someone close to her could have seized an opportunity to lift both,” Stanton mused. “There’s a surveillance camera that takes pictures of anyone leaving or entering the garage. I’m hoping to have the tapes early tomorrow, and we may get lucky. Anything new on your end?”
“Have you ever heard of a night club called the Golden Spider?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“Eva referred to it a few times in her appointment calendar, and I’m going to have Dino check it out in the morning.”
“I’ve got a friend over in Vice. I’ll see what I can find out.”
Jase repocketed his cell, then turned to Maddie. “My gut instinct tells me that things are going to start to move quickly tomorrow. That’s one of the reasons I want to arrive at Eva Ware Designs before anyone else does. I always found when going into an op, it paid to get there early.”
“How can I help?”
“Depending on how the morning goes, we may have to improvise on the spot.” He thought of what she’d done with Michelle, playing the sympathetic cop. “Think you can follow my lead?”
She met his eyes, lifted her chin. “You haven’t lost me yet, have
you?”
“No.” He leaned down and kissed her mouth softly. He meant to keep it short, sweet, but he couldn’t resist lingering, luring. I nearly lost her. When he felt himself sinking, he reluctantly drew away.
“Let’s try a different tack.” He pushed aside the notes he’d jotted down and handed her a blank piece of hotel stationary. “How good are you at sketching faces?”
She stared at him. “Sketching faces?”
“Yeah. I want you to draw likenesses of the people who may have had access to the security codes at Eva Ware Designs.”
Maddie began with a quick drawing of her cousin Adam. Jase passed her a second sheet and she attacked Cho.
As he watched her pen fly across the page, he marveled at how good she was. She was biting down on her lower lip, concentrating hard. He’d seen Jordan do the same thing sitting at her computer.
“I have photos of everyone in the files that Jordan prepared for me.”
“That would spoil the experiment. You’re like your mother. You think while you draw.”
“Oh.”
Her hand paused for a moment, then continued to fly across page after page. The sketches were clever and insightful caricatures. She managed to accurately capture Adam’s ego, Arnold Bartlett’s pomposity, Cho’s serenity and Michelle’s eagerness and seeming innocence.
“Where did you learn to do this?” he asked.
She glanced at him. “In high school, I worked on the school newspaper.”
“Try Carleton and Dorothy.”
At her raised eyebrow, he elaborated, “If Adam had access to the security codes, theoretically so did they.”
When she’d finished, he lined the sketches up in two lines. “If Michelle, Cho, or Arnold robbed the store and Eva suspected one of them, their jobs would be at stake and there would have been a scandal that would have made the front pages of the newspapers.”
“But if family was behind it—” Maddie lined up Adam, Dorothy and Carleton next to the others “—then the scandal would go even deeper. Eva might have been afraid that the store or the business would have been hurt.”
For a few moments, silence stretched between them as they studied the two columns they’d fashioned out of the drawings.
“It all comes back to the same old suspects—someone in the family or someone employed by Eva Ware Designs.”
“The question is, who has the most at stake?” Jase said.
“And if Eva’s murder is related to the robbery, who stood to gain from both?”
Jase gave her shoulders a squeeze, then gathered up her sketches and stacked them into a pile. “Enough for tonight. Sometimes I find the best way to shine new light on a problem is to sleep on it.” He rose, drawing her to her feet with him. “Let’s go to bed.”
14
TAKING her hand, Jase drew Maddie with him into the bedroom. When they reached the bed, he said, “I haven’t let you sleep much.”
Maddie smiled at him. “I think that I made my contribution to the no-sleep agenda.”
When she reached for him, he took her hands and raised them to his lips. “Something’s happening between us, Maddie. Something I don’t quite understand.” But he thought he did understand. He was very much afraid that he was falling in love with Maddie Farrell. And it had him feeling jittery.
It gave him some satisfaction when he saw the change in her eyes. Perhaps he wasn’t the only one feeling a bit out of his depth.
“You feel it too,” he said.
“Yes. A little. I’ve given it some thought, and I think it would be wrong to make too much of it. We’ve been on a roller-coaster ride, emotionally, physically.”
Impatience flared but he tamped it down.
“We’re smart. We’re adults.”
Her fingers had tensed in his.
“What we’re feeling right now—”
“Is real,” he insisted.
“Perhaps. But it could fade when the crisis is over.”
Knowing the value of keeping an opponent off balance, Jase raised their joined hands and kissed her fingers. “You may be right. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
But he was pretty sure his feelings weren’t going to fade. He’d just have to convince her that hers weren’t going to either. “We have an early morning. I think we should go to bed.”
“I thought you’d never ask.” Her hands were already busy, gripping the hem of his T-shirt and pulling it up and over his head. But he intended to keep the pace slow. Even when they tumbled onto the bed and began to strip off the rest of their clothes, he kept nibbling her mouth, tasting, teasing. He wanted, no, he needed to savor her—something he hadn’t allowed himself to do before.
Her taste was familiar now, sweet, potent, drugging. And yet each time their mouths clung, separated, then fused again, there was something new.
Her hands moved faster than his and he felt the energy in her, heard her moan his name and sensed the imminence of the all-consuming fire. Still, he fought to keep it at bay.
“You don’t have to seduce me,” she whispered.
But he did. He wasn’t sure if it was for her or him. But he did.
She framed his face with her hands and whispered against his mouth, “I want you.”
The three words took his breath away as surely as a sucker punch to the gut. He felt his head spin, his heartbeat quicken. He levered himself up far enough that he could see her. In the moonlight pouring through the window, her skin was pale, delicate. Her hair the color of spun gold. He took out the pins and threaded his fingers through it.
“Jase…”
“I just want to look and touch.” With one finger, he traced her forehead, her cheekbones, then moved along her jawline to her throat where her pulse beat hard and fast. He continued to touch her—breasts, stomach, thighs—and then he took his mouth on the same journey. Desire stabbed through him when the hands on his shoulders went lax and she began to tremble. Little by little he lost himself in the sound of her breath catching, then releasing on the whisper of his name.
STEEPED in sensation, Maddie felt herself begin to float. This wasn’t what she’d expected, wasn’t what she’d thought she wanted. Even when his mouth finally returned to hers, there were so many new things to absorb. The flavor of his lips was different, and it went to her head like wine. Totally seduced, she began to run her hands over him, learning his secrets just as he was learning hers. Wherever she touched, he trembled. Wherever she tasted, he shuddered.
“Maddie,” he murmured as he made a place for himself between her legs and entered her. His face, his eyes filled her vision, her world.
Even then, they moved slowly, watching each other as they climbed higher and higher. When they drew close to the edge, he lowered his mouth to hers and with one final shudder, they tumbled over together.
AFTERWARD, Jase held Maddie tightly, her head resting on his chest, her legs still tangled with his. One of his hands was pressed against the small of her back, holding her in place; the other was in her hair. The steadiness of her breathing told him that she was sleeping. But his own mind wouldn’t shut down.
Instead of trying to fight his wakefulness, he let his mind run through some of the things they’d learned. His gut instinct told him that Maddie had been right all along, and Eva’s appointment calendar had given them a vital clue.
His instincts also told him that time was running out. Eva’s hit-and-run had been carefully and methodically planned. Hiring a professional hit had also taken planning. But the person who’d tried to run Maddie down had taken a huge risk by using the same car.
A killer driven to desperate measures was more dangerous than a careful and methodical one.
Maddie sighed, then settled.
And they hadn’t narrowed their list of suspects down one bit.
The digital clock on the night stand read 2:53 a.m. If he wasn’t going to sleep, there was work he could be doing. Instead of waiting until morning to give Dino the job, he could be finding out what he cou
ld about the Golden Spider club and why Eva had been so worried about it during the last few weeks of her life.
But he simply didn’t want to move.
As long as they were here in bed together, he could keep her safe.
And she was his. She’d been his from the moment she’d climbed mistakenly into his bed. Only it hadn’t been a mistake. It had been right. She’d been right for him from the beginning. The certainty of that moved through him like a slow-running river. There were things he wanted to tell her. Needed to tell her. But it wasn’t the time. Not just because a killer still had her in his sights, but because her life had turned into chaos.
Instinctively, he held her even closer. Patience was a virtue he’d cultivated over the years. He’d needed it when he’d been working special ops. He also needed it in his business.
But he wondered just how long he could wait before he settled things with Maddie.
MADDIE STIFLED a yawn as Jase hurried her along 50th Street. He’d woken her at six-thirty and told her to get ready. The attentive lover from the night before had morphed into security-agent man again. He’d already showered and shaved, and while she gulped room-service coffee and struggled to catch up, he’d been on his phone—to Dino and Stanton she supposed.
It wasn’t until the cab had dropped them off on Fifth Avenue around the block from Eva Ware Designs that the caffeine finally began to clear the fog out of Maddie’s brain. She’d asked why the taxi hadn’t dropped them off directly in front of the store, and Jase explained that the store was probably being watched.
The blunt reminder that she was still a target had her nerves knotting and her mind going on full alert. Somehow working to decipher her mother’s appointment calendar and then making love with Jase had pushed fear about the imminent danger to her life onto the back burner. Quite suddenly, as if everything had shifted into sharp focus, Maddie was very much aware of her surroundings. Brownstones lined up like so many soldiers on either side of the street. In spite of the early hour, a few people were out and about. They passed a man in work clothes fiddling with an awning. A young woman in shorts and flip-flops was walking her dog. A taxi pulled up about three buildings down, and a woman in a business suit hurried down the steps. Jase’s hand tightened on her arm, and she was very much aware that his other hand had slipped beneath his jacket to his gun.
One-Click Buy: June 2009 Harlequin Blaze Page 66
