by Joanne Rock
He took the leather case from her hand, their fingers brushing briefly. The current of awareness surprised her since it was something she hadn’t experienced in a very long time. Had he felt the jolt?
Yanking her hand back, she recalled her promise to herself when she first realized she needed to leave her ex. No more men for a while—sizzle or no sizzle.
“Warren Vitalis. I’m not on duty tonight. I just happened to be walking my dog when I heard a shot. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine. Just startled.” She felt as though she’d been living on too much sugar and caffeine—all spun up but shaky and empty. “You said you were walking a dog?”
“Buster’s outside. He’s not a police dog so he didn’t get to come in.” The detective packed up his protractor and shifted his attention to the back of her sofa. He frowned at a dark mark in the middle of the worn fabric. A bullet hole. “Got a plastic bag or some household gloves?”
Tabitha could only stare at the bullet lodged in her couch. The bullet that had invaded her privacy, her life, her safety.
“Ms. Everhart?” His voice softened on the syllables of her name, making her eyes burn with the realization that she could be in serious danger.
“Yes.” Grateful for a job that would pry her eyes away from the tiny bit of metal that could have been deadly, she raced into the kitchen before she lost control of her emotions. Ten seconds with her head under a faucet pouring cold water on her face and she’d be okay.
Please God, let her be okay.
It wasn’t until a bit of lace around her thighs snagged on a shelf in the pantry as she leaned in for the sand-wich-sized plastic bags that she remembered she’d been wearing a silky little nightgown around her apartment tonight. In an effort to ward off a dark mood she’d tried to pamper herself and feel beautiful, to soak her toes in a foot bath and luxuriate in her best silk nightie, instead of hanging out in a ten-year-old T-shirt and flannel pajamas with her hair in a ponytail.
No wonder Detective Vitalis had quickly busied himself with crime-scene investigation instead of asking her about what happened.
She’d been giving the man a free show he’d been too polite to point out.
* * *
WARREN THANKED JESUS, Mary and Joseph for the clothes Tabitha Everhart had decided to put on while she’d been retrieving a plastic bag and he’d called for backup. At least now, he could make eye contact with the sizzling redhead for more than two seconds. The inherent male need to check her out had eased since she’d ditched a mostly transparent swatch of lace and silk for the thorough coverage of flannel pajama bottoms and a bulky fisherman’s sweater that hid a truly stellar set of curves.
If only his memory hadn’t recalled the sight of her half-naked quite so well.
Petite and delicate-boned, she’d inherited the superfair skin that often goes with red hair, the bridge of her nose dusted with light freckles. Thin, arched eyebrows outlined wide brown eyes and her high cheekbones glowed a pink shade that hadn’t been there before she left the room.
He sat across from her now on a battered wooden rocker draped with a pink silk scarf, making a few notes while she scratched Buster’s head. He’d tried to tell her that Buster was a dog he’d rescued, a candidate for doggy death row because he’d bitten his former owner, even though Warren had never seen any evidence of viciousness. The dog was protective—sure. But what cop wouldn’t appreciate a canine that didn’t let anyone get the drop on him? And Buster had always liked women best anyway, the damn player. The animal lay with his head on Tabitha’s thigh, giving Warren surreptitious looks of superiority out of one contented brown eye.
“You can’t think of anyone who’d want to hurt you or even just harass you? Since the curtains aren’t completely opaque, I have to think the shooter didn’t aim to hit you. Did you realize how visible you are from the street?”
He didn’t mean to censure her for her wardrobe choices, but damn. She needed heavier curtains if she was going to wander around in a street-level apartment dressed in that outfit she’d been wearing. Residual heat flared to life all over again at the memory.
“Oh. I guess not.” Her hand stilled on the dog’s head. “And no one I know would resort to such openly brutal actions. In my business, people tend to do more damage to one another at a social level. You know, slight someone at a party or start a rumor about an enemy.”
He wondered if people like her had any idea how privileged they were to live in that kind of world, a far cry from the open cruelty Warren had witnessed his whole life.
“A patrol car will be here soon to go over the scene more thoroughly, but as long as I’m here we could get a few of the questions out of the way.” When she didn’t protest, he followed up on her last comment. “Where do you work?”
“I’m a body double.” The answering lift of her chin was slight but noticeable.
He wondered why the job was cause to be defensive.
“Is there much call for that kind of work in New York?” He pictured that as a Hollywood profession, but he could certainly see this woman fulfilling that kind of role.
And thanks for the reminder of the high, full breasts and sweetly puckered nipples that he’d glimpsed beneath her negligee. He’d be lucky to get through this interview without breaking into a sweat.
“I keep busy enough. A lot of the soap operas are shot in New York and now that they allow more skin on daytime television, the actresses are put in more compromising positions than ever before. If they don’t feel comfortable with a shower scene or a love scene, I stand in for the most brazen moments.”
“Any resentment among your peers for how much work you get or jealousy from the women you stand in for?”
She looked down at Buster and cupped his ear as she stroked his fur. Was she thinking or stalling?
“My ex-husband had affairs with a few of the women on daytime TV, but I don’t see why any of them would resent me these days. My husband and I parted ways nearly a year ago and the divorce has been final for months.”
That sounded like a recipe for disaster. And what kind of scumbag landed a wife like this woman and then turned around and sabotaged it by screwing around behind her back?
Even Buster lifted his head long enough to look incensed.
“Was the divorce contentious?” He tried to maintain an open mind about the woman. She might be hot, but for all Warren knew she could be possessive or high maintenance. Women in film had a certain reputation, after all.
“He cheated on me with multiple women, Detective. It was definitely difficult.” Her lips pursed tight. Held.
“But you don’t think he’d want to hurt you?”
“Not with violence.”
“Ms. Everhart, I’m going to be honest with you and say I think there’s a decent chance your window was pierced by stray gunfire from a dispute that didn’t involve you. But you can’t be too careful when there was only one bullet fired in a neighborhood that doesn’t see a lot of random criminal mischief.” He asked her for the names of the women her husband slept with as well as the ex himself before scribbling them down on a pilfered piece of paper from a stray notebook on her overloaded coffee table. “So let the police help you decide who might be violent and who isn’t before you withhold information about a recent divorce. Are you sure there’s no one else in your life that might want to make trouble for you?”
“No one that I’m aware of.” She clutched a bright yellow satin throw pillow to her chest, the movement jerky. Uneasy.
“Are you sure you’ll be all right alone tonight?” He hated it that this had happened on his block, the same route he jogged every night and considered his backyard. “You definitely don’t want to stay in your apartment with the window compromised and the lock broken on your door.”
He regretted the need to bust in here, but she could have been hurt…or worse.
Tonight’s incident with Tabitha hadn’t exactly mirrored the hellish night of his sixteenth birthday, but the scream and the gunshot had fr
eaked him out for a few minutes, had him busting into her apartment like a SWAT guy. But the mental trip down memory lane never failed to bring out his inner vigilante—the need to protect that went beyond his badge.
“I’ll be fine. I’m sure the shot wasn’t meant for my window and I’ll call tomorrow to have the glass replaced.”
“But you won’t try to stay here.” He didn’t want her anywhere near the apartment until they’d had the chance to go over everything in detail.
He’d seen the shell casing embedded in the back of her couch earlier and he’d toyed with the idea of removing it but it had been lodged tightly in a hardwood interior and he didn’t want to compromise the scene without the proper tools. Besides, seeing a bullet pried out of their possessions tended to freak some people out and he hadn’t had enough time to accomplish the task while she’d been out of the room. As a longtime ballistics expert, Warren already knew the shell belonged to a .38, a weapon that wasn’t exactly the firearm of choice of today’s bigger-is-better street thugs.
“I can stay at a hotel tonight. I’ll be okay.”
Something about her tone made him think she was trying hard to convince herself more than him. But then, Warren would bet his badge this woman was an expert in talking herself through hardship. Her whole apartment spoke of hard times covered over with brightly decorated facades, optimism in the face of anguish. He had to admire that kind of grit.
“Fine. There’s just one more thing. I’ll run a few tests on the bullet just to see if anything unusual comes up, but is there any chance you know anyone who carries a .38?”
She stilled. Buster nudged his snout back under her hand to restart her attentions.
“Ms. Everhart?”
“Call me Tabitha.” She scratched the dog idly but didn’t meet Warren’s gaze. “I don’t know any sane person who would carry a gun around the streets of New York, Detective.”
That answer begged a follow-up question, but she stood abruptly and strode toward the kitchen, her bare feet falling with the smallest of sounds on the hardwood floors covered with thin throw rugs.
“Can I get you some water? You said you were out running.” She came back with a bottle for him and then hastened to the sink to fill a bowl for Buster. “You both must be thirsty.”
When she had run out of activity and stood awkwardly beside her dining room table some twelve feet away from him, Warren asked the question she so obviously didn’t want to answer. The lights of an approaching squad car reflected blue and red through the window, broadcasting the arrival of his backup.
“Who owns a .38, Tabitha?”
She paused for a long moment, then cocked a hip against a lopsided table propped up by a stack of books on one end, the movement of her body a subtle reminder of the famous curves that hid beneath the big sweater.
“Honestly, Detective? I do.”
CHAPTER 2
TABITHA SAT ON the fire escape outside her on-location shoot the next afternoon and tilted her face up toward the sun’s rays. Wrapped in her winter coat over a bathrobe, she waited for her call to the set and tried to swallow down the attack of nerves that always came with her body double work.
“We’ll be ready for you in just a minute, Tabitha,” one of the set assistants called out the door where she sat in a cast-iron patio chair chilled from months of a New York winter.
“Thanks.” She smiled weakly, her game face not quite assembled yet after last night’s stray bullet scare and a sexy cop diving headfirst through the front door.
Oddly, she half wondered which event had rattled her more. The bullet had been scary, no doubt. But the man…wow. After her divorce, warm feelings for men in general had sort of disappeared. And there was a certain comfort in that lack of emotion after life kicked your butt. Last night had been a wake-up call to her snoozing hormones, however. Warren Vitalis ignited some serious heat with just one look.
In the distance she heard a police siren. Would she ever see the hot detective again? Or had he handed over her case to the patrol cops who had shown up later in the evening after she’d admitted the only person she knew with a .38 was her? Detective Vitalis’s suggestion that her ex could have been involved in the shooting last night was ludicrous since her former husband had always been far too concerned with appearances and what other people thought of him to lower himself to gangster tactics.
No, Manny Redding had too many other more subtle weapons to hurt her. The cheating creep.
“We’re ready now, Tabitha,” the set assistant called out, ending any time for psyching herself up for this scene.
Damn it.
Today wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill soap opera shower scene. Tabitha had been a little nervous about this gig—a prime-time movie special for a cable network—from the moment she’d learned she would be standing in for the actress playing a prostitute. Worse, the prostitute was in her late teens and Tabitha’s body was clearly that of a woman on the far side of twenty-five. She’d be thirty next year. Could she still pass off her bod as a nineteen-year-old’s?
Planting one foot in front of the other, she congratulated herself that at least she hadn’t resorted to any of the unhealthy eating tactics she’d struggled with in the past. She’d worked her tail off for the lean muscle tone she had these days. One of the best benefits of her spectacularly messy divorce was the clear head that allowed her to be healthy again. She’d silenced her ex-husband’s voice in her head telling her she wasn’t cut out to be on film. That she shouldn’t share her talents with the world when he needed her working behind the scenes for him.
And finally, that no other man should look at his wife.
The subtle possessiveness that started off as sort of endearing eventually became suffocating and for a few dark months toward the end she’d staved off the anxiety with food. The bulimia she’d struggled with as a teen resurfaced with a vengeance.
She was under control again now. Every day that she bared her body for the camera now soothed a little more of her wounded ego and healed the part of her that knew she’d stayed in a bad marriage for too long. Besides, body double work was just a means to an end to finance her return to filmmaking.
Allowing her coat to slide off her shoulders, she didn’t bother counting the number of people on the closed set the way she used to when she first started life as a body double. By now, she didn’t care how many people saw her mostly naked because she was stronger. More fearless.
And screw them if they couldn’t appreciate an almost thirty-year-old’s body forged of sweat and discipline.
Letting the bathrobe slip from her shoulders, she allowed the world to see her flesh-toned body stocking that covered only the most crucial parts. The custom-made nude thong matched her skin color exactly. The pasties she wore on her nipples weren’t half as cute as the one Janet Jackson had once famously displayed to the world, but Tabitha’s more functional brand made sure her nipples didn’t show up unexpectedly in any camera shots.
There were no costume malfunctions when Tabitha was in charge.
Tabitha walked toward the bed where the scene called for her to fake a sexual encounter with the aging former Hollywood bad boy who’d been relegated to made-for-TV movies after hitting rehab too many times. He was handsome enough, she supposed, if you liked a guy in makeup with a sock covering his privates.
But as Tabitha strode toward the bed, her mind suddenly replaced the actor with a vision of Detective Warren Vitalis lying between those sheets waiting for her, his virile male body taking up much more of the bed than her current co-star.
A wave of want halted her in her tracks and sent pleasurable shivers over her bare skin.
Ooh.
There couldn’t have been a more supremely bad time for her mind to play tricks on her or for her hibernating libido to come roaring back to life. Her cheeks flushed, not from embarrassment so much as that preorgasmic full body tingle she’d only vaguely remembered until this moment. Her nipples tightened beneath their cover-ups and she hal
f feared the self-adhesive pasties would pop right off her suddenly excited body.
Scavenging every bit of willpower she possessed, she forced herself to see the makeup line on her co-star’s neck, to remember where she was and that she wanted to get this scene over with. The sexy detective might have her fantasizing, but she couldn’t allow wishful thinking to cloud her vision ever again.
Lust had landed her in the worst sort of marriage. She’d be damned if something so insubstantial as sexual attraction would ever steer her into the arms of any man who didn’t see beyond the surface to appreciate the woman inside.
* * *
WARREN STALKED THROUGH the old building a block behind Central Park West in search of the camera crew. In search of one woman in particular. Tabitha’s casting agent had given Warren a hell of a runaround this morning, but once he’d finally pried an address out of the guy, Warren had hightailed it to the shoot to have another crack at the closemouthed body double.
She hadn’t been totally honest with him the night before and that pissed him off. She’d admitted to owning a .38 that had been a gift from her husband while they’d been married. What she hadn’t bothered sharing was the fact that it had been reported stolen long before her divorce was finalized.
She also hadn’t bothered sharing the fact that her divorce had been acrimonious and high-profile since her ex was a powerful New York producer. Why would she want to protect a guy who—judging by the claims volleyed at her in the tabloids—had been determined to drag her name through the mud during divorce proceedings?
The questions gnawed away at him after he’d gone to the station to file an incident report and do a little homework. Tabitha’s vacant eyes when he’d first entered her apartment had eaten at his conscience, telling him she’d probably been in shock when he dove into her apartment and pointed a gun at her.
“Detective Vitalis, NYPD.” He announced himself at the door once he found the right apartment and then flashed his badge a few more times to gain access to the room where Tabitha was shooting.
