by Joanne Rock
Too bad the only thing that came to mind was how much she loved Wes Shaw.
With that realization making her more determined than ever to get away, she reached into her purse with her free hand and flicked out the last remaining object. The newspaper photo of her with Wes.
She watched the clipping float down to the pavement for an instant before it succumbed to the deluge, a wet piece of paper plastered to the concrete, no doubt smudged beyond recognition.
WES DIDN’T HAVE a clue where he was going.
He raced through the darkness after disconnecting his distress call to the police dispatcher. They’d send somebody as soon they could.
Probably not soon enough.
Cursing the city’s permanently overtaxed department, Wes knew his own efforts would have to be enough this time. He just needed his instincts to kick in. Anytime now, damn it.
Slipping on a piece of paper, he paused long enough to make out the slick magazine-style cover of Soap Opera Digest, a trio of glitzy daytime TV stars grinning up at him to mock his total lack of understanding when it came to Tempest.
Or to give him a new direction?
Soap Opera Digest couldn’t have been lying in the street for too long since the inside pages weren’t soaked yet. Instinct—or the hopeful imaginings of a man in need of a second chance—told him Tempest had dropped it there to give him a lead.
Scanning the street, he searched the rain-slicked darkness for more hints that she’d been here. The deluge hit the pavement so hard it drowned out the rumble of traffic two blocks away, filling his ears with blaring white noise that stifled all other sounds.
Would it drown her out if she cried out? Fear pummeled him at the thought of Tempest alone and vulnerable. Where the hell was Vanessa tonight?
Trying not to assume the worst, he told himself she had to have been nearby. No way would a second partner let him down.
He drew his gun—a Smith & Wesson 9 mm he’d be all too glad to fire tonight—and hastened his step. Even in the darkness, his searching gaze picked out a comb, a gum wrapper that may or may not have been hers and a sopping newspaper clipping of him and Tempest when they’d been photographed together outside her offices.
She’d saved it.
Love for her funneled through him, fueling his steps even when the bread crumb trail of her belongings disappeared outside a deserted gas station near the Hudson. The perfect isolated place to commit a crime.
Jamming the wet assortment of Tempest’s belongings in his pants pocket, he raised his gun higher and swallowed back the mixture of fear and fury tangling inside him. Ran like hell for the old Shell station. If the rain impaired his hearing, it would keep Tempest’s captor at a disadvantage, too.
Finding the front door locked, he eased around the back to look for a window.
And discovered two figures struggling on the pavement behind the building. A man bent over a woman’s prone body.
Tempest’s body.
Horror washed through him—a cold, endless wave that sucked out his backbone and left him weak in the knees. But he refused to acknowledge the possibility that anything had happened to her for more than a split second. With a roar of fury, Wes charged the guy as he saw the flash of a blade at Tempest’s throat.
Her attacker never saw him coming—he was preoccupied with threatening a woman who rescued stray dogs from trash cans when she wasn’t romanticizing the world with her sculptures.
Son of a—
Wes hit him like a freight train, directing all his fury toward her assailant. The guy’s head met the blacktop beneath Wes’s chest as Wes rolled over him with continued momentum. The knife dropped to the ground, the discordant clank of metal sounding through the down pour.
He forced himself to limit his gun use to a crack across her attacker’s temple, coldcocking the bastard into last year. But if he found out the guy had hurt her…
“Wes?” Tempest shouted behind him, her voice soothing a raw wound inside him.
Whipping around, he saw her slowly coming to her knees, her clothes covered in dirt and mud.
“You’re okay.” He told her instead of asking her, willing it to be so. “Are you okay?”
He couldn’t go to her until he’d cuffed the guy who could only be the jealous boyfriend of the woman he’d been sitting with at Mick’s. Still, Wes dragged him to a rusted sign pole and secured his wrists on either side so that he could help Tempest. Pocketing the keys, he finally heard the squeal of police sirens in the distance, the rain slowing enough so that he could hear more than his own heart beating.
“Vanessa disappeared in midtown.” Tempest swiped a blotch of mud from her cheek and straightened the skirt she wore beneath Wes’s trench coat, which he only just realized he must have left at her place for the second time.
He helped her up off the ground, so damn grateful to have reached her in time. Smoothing his hands over her face, her neck, her shoulders, he reassured himself she wasn’t hurt.
And then her words began to sink in.
“What do you mean disappeared?” He’d trusted Vanessa to watch over Tempest. She wouldn’t neglect her job unless… “Something must have happened to her.”
Nodding, she pursed her lips and winced as a result of the cut on her mouth. He hadn’t seen it before with a swath of dirt across her chin, but now that the slowing rain washed it away he could see her lower lip was split, the swollen flesh dripping a narrow track of blood.
Regret stung him that she had to be dragged into this at all. Vanessa should have protected her, damn it. “He did something to her.” She didn’t need to point. She tracked an accusing gaze toward her attacker. “I don’t know what, but while he was dragging me down the street he said something about following us after we left Bliss’s—”
“Who’s Bliss?” Where were those squad cars? He needed to get Tempest somewhere safe and find Vanessa before this case exploded any further in his face.
He told himself this wasn’t a replay of two years ago when his first partner had gone missing. Vanessa was better than that. Stronger than that.
And damn it, he trusted her. Whatever had happened today must have been pretty bad to wipe out his ninja backup who’d never let him down.
Before Tempest could answer, he put in another call to dispatch to provide their exact location, since they’d come a long way from Mick’s Grill. Although he had every intention of finding Vanessa, his first priority was getting Tempest—the woman he loved—to safety.
Once he hung up the phone, she related the events that had taken place earlier in the day when she and Vanessa unearthed the source of the call girl rumors. He couldn’t help but admire Tempest’s determination to wrest answers from the MatingGame operations manager, but his main concern now was finding his partner.
“So Vanessa vanished after you left this woman’s house?” Wes waved over the police car that finally found them in the rain outside the forsaken Shell station.
“We went into one of those wooden tunnels they put up around construction sites and—”
“Shaw.” A uniformed officer burst from the arriving police car before it came to a stop. “Detective Torres just checked in. She got rolled in midtown and the guy took her phone.”
Relief swept through him, making him feel stronger. Taller. And more certain of his judgment than ever. Vanessa hadn’t betrayed him.
“She’s okay?” He slid an arm around Tempest’s waist, surprised how much the feel of her could bolster him. More than anything, he wanted to get her alone. To explore every inch of her firsthand to make sure she hadn’t been hurt.
The officer nodded while his partner frisked Luther. “Torres is pissed about letting someone get the drop on her, but other than that she sounded okay.” He jerked a thumb toward Tempest’s attacker. “Was this the guy who did it?”
Another squad car pulled up and two more officers stepped out. The back door of the car opened more slowly, revealing…
“Vanessa.” Wes’s grip tightene
d on Tempest, but he didn’t move to help his partner, not even when she wove a bit drunkenly on her feet through the last of the slowing raindrops.
He knew his ninja colleague well enough to know she’d probably drop-kick him if he offered her a hand.
Vanessa held a blood-spattered handkerchief to her temple, her color pale, but her eyes seemed focused and alert.
“I screwed up, Wes.” She moved closer slowly, her gaze scanning the gas station parking lot enveloped in thick mist as the rain slowed to a stop. She watched the officers bagging the assailant’s knife and reading him his rights. “I let myself get too caught up in the investigation and I took my eyes off her to call you.”
Relief poured over him. Sure he was frustrated Vanessa had taken Tempest out of the safety of her apartment, but she was entitled to make mistakes. She’d done her best, and he couldn’t reasonably ask for anything more.
Especially since she looked like she’d be carrying around some serious guilt about the incident for a long time. Her normally proud shoulders slumped with the weight of the mistake.
“You did what you could.” Wes watched the other officers haul the attacker to his feet. “And bottom line, we’ve got our killer in custody.”
Tempest watched Wes try to cheer Vanessa and admired the way he tried to lessen the woman’s sense of responsibility. Still, guilt nipped Tempest as she wondered if she should have done something differently after they’d left Bliss’s apartment earlier that day. Should she have spent more time looking for Vanessa?
She moved out of Wes’s arm to look at Vanessa’s head.
“What happened to you anyhow? You were a few feet in front of me and then you disappeared in the rush hour crunch.” She brushed aside the other woman’s long dark hair to inspect the cut.
Her own muscles ached from being hauled through the lower West side by a madman. Her feet burned from a hundred little places where her skin had been rubbed raw against the pavement, but none of her injuries seemed significant next to the laceration on Vanessa’s temple.
“I heard a noise in the construction tunnel.” Vanessa winced as Tempest picked a few strands from the drying blood caked around the wound. “The guy probably just whistled to get my attention. But as I turned into the outlet that connected the tunnel to the subway to wait for Tempest and check out the noise, I got nailed in the head with something.”
Tempest watched the mixture of emotions cross Wes’s face—anger, worry, the need for vengeance. She didn’t know how she’d missed so many feelings within the man before—when he’d asked her to give them an other chance—but she could see them now.
And knew she had a lot more to learn about Wesley Shaw.
One of the uniformed officers jogged over to them, carrying some kind of black handle with a leather strap attached to it. “Guy’s name is Luther Murray and he just admitted to winging you with a slingshot.” He bran dished the weapon that looked like something a cave man would use, along with a Ziploc bag of small silver balls. “The ammo isn’t high tech, but I bet it could do some serious damage.”
“Great,” Vanessa muttered. “Knocked unconscious by a kid’s toy. Thanks, Collins.”
“You’d better get this stitched up, Vanessa.” Tempest told herself she would not be queasy from the sight of someone else’s wound. Vanessa had taken the hit be cause she’d been protecting her, after all. The least she could do was offer a little support before she fainted from the sight of all that blood.
And the thought of how much worse the injury could have been.
Vanessa nodded, swiping away a trickle of blood sliding down her cheek. “Will do. But I had to see if Wes needed help first.”
Tempest could see the wealth of anguish in the other woman’s eyes and she would be willing to gamble it had little to do with the gaping gash just below her hairline. Vanessa simply hated letting Wes down.
“Thanks, Torres.” Wes leaned in to clap her on the shoulder before he stepped back to sling an arm around Tempest again. “I found her, and that’s all that matters. My last date at Mick’s tipped me off when she mentioned a jealous boyfriend who didn’t want her dating anyone else, but I couldn’t figure out why this woman’s ex would trash Tempest’s place until she told me about MatingGame hiring former prostitutes.”
Tempest watched a dazed Luther ride away in the back of one of the police cars, amazed to find herself still standing strong by Wes’s side even after facing abduction. A knife. The threat of missing out on a second chance with Wes.
She didn’t know which had scared her the most, but she did know she’d survived to embrace her future with both hands. The time she’d spent keeping herself alive with Luther Murray’s knife pressed to her neck had assured her she had deeper reserves of strength than she would have ever guessed.
“Tempest helped me see the connection when she knew your screen name, KingKong.” Vanessa gave Wes a soft slug in the arm while the two remaining police officers waited by their squad car, the lights silently flashing through the mist. “She’d make a hell of a partner for someone who deserved her.”
Touched that Vanessa seemed to have forgiven her for taking off after she disappeared, Tempest smiled back. She also appreciated the good word of mouth with Wes since she wanted him to see her that way—as a genuine partner and not just a spoiled socialite in need of protection.
Winking with her good eye, Vanessa walked back ward toward the squad car. “Besides, I’ve got an appointment with the E.R. to make sure I don’t have a BB pellet lodged in my gray matter.”
“That’s right. The invincible ninja was taken down by stone age know-how.” Wes flashed her a grin as she slid into the car. “You’d better rest up for all the grief you’re going to get around the precinct for this one.”
Rolling her eyes, Vanessa settled in the back of the police car while one of the officers in the front seat called over to them. “You need a ride, Shaw?”
“Hell, no. I’m taking my own sweet time to get back to the station because I damn well earned myself some slack today. I’ll be there as soon as we can scrounge up some dry clothes.”
The vehicle pulled away, leaving Tempest and Wes alone in the heavy white mist, which was turning gradually to big, fat snowflakes.
“Are you sure we didn’t want that ride?” Tempest blew on her hands to thaw them, her outfit soaked and chilled despite Wes’s trench coat around her shoulders.
Wes pulled her closer, tucking her hands inside his jacket. “I wanted you all to myself for five minutes be fore we head over to the station. You know you’re going to have to come with me since I need to take your statement about what happened today?”
Warmth flowed through her at the tender concern in his eyes, the gentle way he touched her. By some miracle, she’d won her second chance with Wes and she didn’t have any intention of blowing it.
“Fine by me since I have a lot of statements I want to make to you, Detective.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
WES GOT HIS SECOND WIND at the precinct two hours later as he typed up his final report for the night.
He’d stuck around long enough to hear Marianne Oakes’s tearful apology for using the MatingGame dating service, and the pieces to the puzzle had finally all fallen into place in his mind. Apparently Marianne was too scared of her ex-boyfriend to hit the bars around her home at night or to meet men in the New York dating scene, so she’d hoped Blind Date might help her meet people anonymously in remote locations Luther Murray wouldn’t find.
Even Wes’s chief of detectives, a hard-boiled cop who’d seen the worst the city had to offer, seemed to sympathize with the former hooker. Especially when her mother showed up at the station with Marianne’s three-year-old daughter. Bliss Holloway might have opened a can of worms by hiring an ex-prostitute looking for a way out, but Wes could appreciate the woman’s desire to give people a second chance.
Then again, maybe Wes had a particular soft place in his heart tonight for second chances, since his thoughts never str
ayed far from Tempest and all the ways he wanted to make things work between them. He’d given her the high-pressure pitch earlier that day, thinking he needed to sell her on a relationship before she booted him out of her life for good. But now that he realized he loved her and the feelings he had for her weren’t ever going to go away, he didn’t see the need to push her into something she wasn’t ready for yet.
He’d still be crazy about her tomorrow and next week and next year. She’d get the idea sooner or later, and frankly, he had all the time in the world to wait.
For that matter, maybe he’d get another tattoo. Only this time, he wouldn’t put it around his wrist like a ball and chain to keep him tied down. He’d scrawl her name right over his heart where she’d already made a permanent place for herself.
Closing his eyes while he saved his document in progress, he savored the thought of Tempest in his life. His imagination was so strong, so vivid, he swore he could smell her sweet almond fragrance.
“Can we blow this clambake, Detective?” Her voice cut through his thoughts as she leaned over his shoulder to peer at his computer. “I’ve already given my statement and MatingGame has been cleared of any wrongdoing.”
“We?” Anticipation fired through him at the thought of them together for a little longer tonight. He clicked Send on the report before shutting down the computer for the night. “I hope that means you’re going to let me drive you home.”
Tempest let his words slide over her, grateful for the sound of his voice and the warmth of his presence after those terrifying moments when she’d feared she’d never have another chance to be with him. She pulled his damp suit jacket off the back of his office chair and handed it to him. Although he’d asked their cabdriver to stop off at Tempest’s apartment so she could get some dry clothes on the way to the precinct, he hadn’t taken time to change.
Always putting her needs first.
“I’ve been waiting for a chance to talk to you alone.” She stared up into his eyes, remembering that Friday night he’d calmly strolled into the mayhem of her life and helped her restore some order. Her priorities had crystallized since then, her focus narrowing to the things—and people—most important to her. “Besides, Vanessa left Kong at my place. She and Eloise have been alone there for half the day.”
