NIGHT WATCH

by Carla Neggers

  Joe inhaled sharply at the sight of her. Rowena felt self-conscious, deeply aware of his eyes on her, but also strangely exhilarated. She wondered how wild-eyed she looked, how out of control, how alive. But he only said, in a tone that was curtly professional, “I figured I should spend the night.”

  “You saw Eliot?”

  A single nod.

  “He wasn’t threatening in any way. I’m sure he won’t be back tonight.’7

  “Do you want to take that chance?”

  She licked her lips. “It’s not much of a chance. I don’t believe he poses a physical threat to me. If he is out for revenge, it’ll be in the form of trying to ruin my reputation, my livelihood, just as I did his—but he’s given no indication of planning to do that. He says he’s responsible for what happened to him, not me.”

  Joe didn’t seem to be listening. He said, “Then you want me to leave?”

  “No!” It was out before she could stop it. She spun around out of the doorway, heard him coming inside, shutting the door behind him. “There’s a bedroom on the second floor you can use. It’s more comfortable than the pantry, unless you want to remain on the first floor to watch for bogeymen.”

  “Rowena,” he said.

  “What?”

  He sighed, apparently abandoning what he had intended to say. “If I’m going to stay, I need to run back to my place and pick up a few things. I’ll be back in twenty, thirty minutes.”

  “I’ll be here.” She thought, Where else would I be?

  * * *

  The bedroom Rowena offered Joe was almost normal. There was a thick line, however, between almost normal and normal. Joe dropped his bag onto a hand-hooked rug featuring a huge red amaryllis and took in the ornate brass double bed, the empty Victorian bird cage on a stand in one corner, the huge, carved wardrobe. Cream-colored lace hung on the windows and covered the bed, and the wallpaper was an overpowering design of red flowers.

  A little much, perhaps, but nothing too weird.

  The artwork was what just about crossed the line for Joe. He nodded to a painting above the bird cage that showed a half-dozen wolves prowling through snowy woods. “What’s that for, in case a guest might be prone to sweet dreams?”

  Rowena seemed to notice it for the first time. “It is rather vicious-looking, isn’t it?”

  “Not real restful.” He pointed to the portrait above the bed of a bearded, dour, beady-eyed old man in a turn-of-the-century suit. “And who’s that sourpuss? Be tough to thrash around in the bedsheets with him looking on.”

  Rowena glanced at him quickly, then carefully cleared her throat. “That’s my great-grandfather—Aunt Adelaide’s grandfather, Cedric Willow.”

  “Was he weird, too?”

  “He made quite a lot of money in railroads. He was quite the adventurer. He hunted buffalo and ventured to Alaska, the Far East. He built this house.”

  Joe grunted. “Enough said.”

  “Aunt Adelaide was a good-hearted woman,” Rowena went on, without prompting, “but she didn’t have a normal upbringing. She lost her only brother, my grandfather, when she was still a little girl. He was much older, already married with a child of his own.”

  “That child was your father?”

  She nodded. Her eyes seemed even bigger in the dim light, her cheekbones more prominent. Joe acknowledged his desire to pull the pins from her hair, to stroke it, feel its softness beneath his fingers, but he fought against the urge. He had sensed Rowena’s wariness upon his return from Mario’s with his overnight bag-not of him so much as of herself and her own feelings. He thought he understood.

  “This was an unusual place to grow up, I now realize,” she said without resentment. She accepted—if didn’t approve of—her odd upbringing. “Aunt Adelaide did her best to provide me with a happy childhood. She had her quirks, and money was always a struggle because she refused to sell this place. But I’m afraid I’m a lot like him.” She gestured to old Cedric.

  “In what way?” Joe asked. “You sure as hell don’t look like him.”

  She smiled. “He had a gift for remembering things as well. Not many of his contemporaries understood him, but that was all right with him. He had his friends, and even if they were few in number, they were very close. But never mind. I’m sure you’re tired. There’s a bathroom down the hall, second door on the left. If you need anything, just give a yell up the stairs.”

  “The third floor’s all yours, is it?”

  She glanced back over her shoulder at him, on her way to the door. “The whole house is mine, Sergeant. Goodnight.”

  He could have let her have the last word.

  But he wasn’t the type.

  He said, “Rowena,” and was behind her in two long steps, and when she spun around, she came within inches of barreling into his chest. He said again, more softly, controlling the heat surging through him, “Rowena,” and touched her hair. It was as soft and silken as he had imagined. It fired not only his body but his soul. He traced her mouth with his thumb, then followed with his lips. Just his lips. He felt the shudder go through her but kept himself from deepening the kiss. He needed to show restraint—not just for her sake, but for his—when making love to Rowena Willow.

  Because he would. One day very soon he would.

  Now.

  No. Not now.

  He pulled himself away from her softness, saw the want in her eyes. He wanted more than a chaste kiss, so much more. But he heard himself say, “Good night, Rowena.”

  She said nothing in return. She retreated quickly, quietly, and in a few seconds Joe could hear her padding softly up to the top floor of her bizarre castle.

  He checked out the bathroom down the hall. It was elegant but old-fashioned, straight out of the 1930s. Pale yellow Egyptian cotton towels hung on a freestanding rack, and there was a porcelain dish of oatmeal soap. Even the woman’s soap was made of oatmeal.

  Joe got cleaned up and returned to his room.

  He wasn’t sleepy. Didn’t feel like reading. Couldn’t pace around the big drafty house in his underwear. Didn’t even have a radio in his room. The place was quiet as a tomb. Hell, he thought, recalling the drawing room, it was a tomb.

  He pulled back the bedcovers and lay down flat on his back on the soft, cool sheets.

  Nobility was for the birds. Every fiber of his being wanted to be on the third floor with Rowena Willow.

  He wanted to see her smile, hear her laugh, feel her wanting him again.

  He physically ached.

  His only consolation was that he was positive—beyond the realm of doubt—that she was upstairs suffering just as much as he was.

  So why don’t you march on up there and make love to her?

  Because you can’t. You promised yourself.

  He had indeed. Rowena had to be ready. He wasn’t going to let her off the hook by making the first move, capitalizing on the electricity between them. He wasn’t going to create the moment for them to get carried away with. Nope. No way. Uh-uh. It was her turn.

  If he just wanted to satisfy his physical desire for her, he would leap up to the third floor in a single bound. But he wasn’t interested only in taking from Rowena. He wanted to give to her as well.

  Give her what?

  He was a burnt-out cop. He lived in a crummy two-room apartment above a bar. He blamed himself for his partner and best friend’s death. He didn’t know numbers, and he hated computers. All he could give Rowena Willow, he thought, was one hell of a night in bed.

  Maybe that was all she wanted from him.

  He stared at the ceiling and tried to imagine making love to Rowena and then walking out of her life forever.

  He couldn’t.

  * * *

  At precisely four o’clock in the morning, Rowena gave up on getting back to sleep. She had watched three o’clock and three-thirty come and go on her clock radio and couldn’t stand tossing and turning another minute.

  She jumped out of bed and pulled on a hotel-weight white
terry cloth robe over her filmy nightgown and crept downstairs. She fought an urge to peek in on Joe, just as for the past hour she had fought images of having him in bed with her. She had more success stopping herself from turning down the hall to his room than she had had stopping the images that had her wide-awake and on her way down to the kitchen for a cup of hot herbal tea.

  Mega and Byte materialized beside her as she filled the kettle. To her surprise she had dropped off to sleep without incident, the wine, excitement and exhaustion having caught up with her. But she hadn’t stayed asleep. Awakening, she’d found herself incapable of getting back to sleep, only of thinking about her houseguest.

  Her entire house seemed to pulsate with Joe’s presence.

  “Up kind of early even by your standards, aren’t you?”

  His rough, deep voice caught her by surprise, and she whirled around, seeing him slouched against the door frame. He wore nothing but a pair of jeans. His arms were folded on his chest, a muscular wall of muscles and dark, sexy hair. She noticed a thick scar on his lower right side, a reminder of the dangerous work he did. He didn’t look relaxed, either. His dark eyes were half-dosed, watching her; his hair was tousled, as if he’d run his hands through it in frustration too many times.

  How could she have fallen for a man so unpredictable and earthy?

  But she had.

  “Yes,” she said, annoyed at how her voice cracked, “I am up a bit earlier than usual. Did I wake you?”

  “No.”

  She didn’t think she had. “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “No, thanks.”

  His tone didn’t change. It sounded as if someone had dragged his vocal cords through sand.

  Rowena’s eyes drifted down to his bare feet. “I have hot water for coffee.”

  “Too early.”

  “Sergeant—”

  “Here we go again. It’s Joe. At four o’clock in the morning, Rowena, it’s Joe.” His eyes held hers. “Say it.”

  She swallowed. “Joe.”

  A smile softened his hard features, instantly relaxed her. “It’s an easy name, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Not like Rowena.”

  “Rowena’s a pretty name—different.” He straightened and glanced around the kitchen. “Kind of chilly down here, isn’t it?”

  “I was thinking about having tea upstairs in my sun-room.”

  “Mind if I tag along?”

  Her hesitation only lasted a moment. She wondered if he even noticed. “Of course not.”

  She fixed her tea tray, using her big white porcelain teapot and two plain white cups and saucers, the only two she had that matched, and brought it upstairs. Joe followed. Rowena could hear his footsteps echoing in the stairwell. Her own hardly made a sound.

  Neither spoke.

  Finally, as they approached the third floor in the murky darkness, Joe murmured, “We could use some creepy music, don’t you think?”

  A week ago she would have been highly offended at such a remark. She would have gone on the defensive. Now she smiled to herself at Joe’s wry tone. One couldn’t take oneself too seriously with him around.

  “A big tough cop like you,” she said, “scared of an atmospheric house.”

  “Atmospheric, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  They came to the landing, and she led them down the twisting hall and up the narrow stairs into her tower sunroom. It wasn’t quite light enough yet that they could do without the overhead, and she flipped it on as Joe walked past her, in among the pillows.

  “My, my,” he said.

  “The pillows are my doing.” She set the tea tray on the floor near the side wall. “This room was much like the other rooms in the house—even worse—when Aunt Adelaide died. I got rid of the furniture and replaced it with pillows.”

  “Why pillows?”

  She shrugged. “They’re fun. I collect them.”

  “Something to do, I guess.”

  But she could see from his expression that he thought her room, her pillows, were just as weird as the drawing room display of her great-grandfather’s taxidermy collection. Just weird in a different way.

  “I had only myself to consider. I could do whatever struck my fancy. My friends never come up here. I wanted something comfortable and informal—totally different from the rest of the house. I didn’t want any furniture, any machines, nothing to come between me and the view.” She looked out at the nightlit skyline. “Beautiful, isn’t it? Sometimes it feels like I’m floating over the city.”

  Joe moved beside her. “I can understand now how you managed to spot me.”

  “The ever-practical Joe Scarlatti. You know, you do stand out in this neighborhood.”

  “I guess so.”

  She plopped a fat tapestry pillow against the wall and sat down with her knees drawn up. Joe remained on his feet. She poured the tea. Her hand, she noticed, had a slight tremble. She blamed lack of sleep.

  But Joe could have stopped in his room and put on a shirt.

  From his narrowed eyes she guessed that he’d noticed her trembling hands, her sudden awkwardness. He was a man trained and conditioned to notice everything about his immediate surroundings. He was anchored in the present. In contrast, an hour could pass in which Rowena would be totally unaware of her surroundings.

  “You’re sure you don’t want some tea?” she asked.

  “Why not? I’ll have it with milk and sugar since I don’t usually drink the stuff.”

  She handed him a cup and saucer, his fingertips brushing hers as he took it. The tea was hot and slightly strong, just what she needed just before dawn with a shirtless man in her tower sunroom.

  “I used to play up here as a little girl. I think I read Little Women and Anne of Green Gables a half-dozen times each in Aunt Adelaide’s horrid old chaise lounge. Sometimes I liked to dream I was a princess.”

  Joe turned from the window and looked down at her. “A handsome prince would scale the walls to your tower?”

  “Mmm.”

  She met his gaze. He wasn’t handsome. He wasn’t a prince. He hadn’t forced his way to her tower. There were no dragons to slay, no witches to outwit, no evil stepmothers to undo. He had asked if he could come up and she had said yes.

  “What do you want now, Rowena?” he asked. His voice had lost its teasing quality; there was an edge to it that hadn’t been there before.

  “What other people want.”

  “I mean now, at this moment. What do you want?”

  She didn’t answer right away.

  He turned his back to her and stared out at San Francisco as if to give her space to think. But instead she noticed the jagged scar just above the waistband of his jeans, the breadth of his back, the taut muscles, the narrow hips. Instead she wondered how fast he could run and how high he could jump and how far he would go to keep her from harm.

  She would go a long, long way, she thought suddenly, to banish the pain from his eyes, to keep him from hurting.

  But she knew what she wanted. Right now, at this moment. She knew. And she was willing to admit it. She said, “I want to finish what we started yesterday in your kitchen.”

  Ten

  “And what was it we started?”

  Joe hadn’t turned from the windows. Rowena felt her mouth go dry. She set her cup and saucer back on the tray; tea sloshed out onto a delicate paper napkin. He hadn’t touched her and already she was responding to him. She saw the rigidness of the muscles in his arms and knew he was holding himself under tight control. He also was not oblivious to their being alone together just before dawn, to the simple fact of their physical attraction to each other.

  It seemed almost easier, Rowena thought, to comprehend a handsome prince wanting her than this cop who had seen too much of the dark side of human nature.

  But she took the plunge.

  She said, “We started to make love. That’s what I want. Here. In this tower room. Now.”

  “In spite of where it could lead you?�
�

  “Because of where it could lead us. I’m not worried. We’ll take the proper physical precautions and let what comes tomorrow come.”

  “That’s not your usual way,” Joe said, without condemnation, simply stating the obvious.

  “No, it’s not.”

  Joe turned around. Then, very deliberately, she tugged pins and combs from her hair, one after the other, quickly and expertly, dropping them on the floor.

  He never took his eyes from her.

  Long, thick, shiny locks tumbled down her back.

  There, she thought, I’ve let my hair down.

  “I’m not caught up in the impulse of the moment, Joe, and I’m not planning for the next century, either. But you asked what I want, and I’ve answered you.”

  Joe’s response wasn’t what she expected.

  He exhaled heavily and took three strides toward the door. She thought for sure he was gone. Common sense had returned. Whatever it was that kept pushing him away from her had prevailed. She would remain untouched. Maybe even untouchable.

  But he stopped at the door and looked back at her. He raked her with his eyes. She felt exposed, more than just physically naked. Her breasts strained against the silken fabric of her nightgown. She was hot inside the robe, intensely aware of the few inches of leg it didn’t cover, even of her bare toes.

  “Pull the drapes,” he said.

  In a moment the lights of San Francisco were obliterated and it was just the two of them in the small room, amongst the pillows. Rowena didn’t hesitate as she turned from the windows. Joe’s eyes were still on her.

  Without blushing, she let her robe drop to her feet. Then she pulled the spaghetti straps of her gown over her shoulders and let it, too, fall.

  He gazed at her for a long time, not moving from the doorway.

  “Joe,” she whispered, “come to me.”

  He was there in an instant. She didn’t think she’d seen him move. He swept her up into his arms, murmuring things she couldn’t make out but understood in the deepest part of her being. He laid her down on her sea of pillows and kissed her. It was a long, sweet, aching kiss that told her how much he wanted her, how easily he could fall in love with her. His passion and emotion left her delirious with desire.