Doing It Right

by MaryJanice Davidson

  Kara fastened her bra, pulled her shirt back over her head, and sat down on the couch, dreading the moment Jared would come out of the bathroom. She’d abused him dreadfully, bringing them both to the edge then backing off and walking out without so much as a “Sorry, I’m not that kind of girl.” She wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d wanted to slap her. She was so disgusted with herself she would have stood still for it.

  But only once.

  She tried to pull her hair into a ponytail with trembling fingers, then remembered the clip was still in the bathroom and gave up. “Remember the rules,” she said softly, trying to soothe herself, calm herself. Her voice sounded hoarse and she cleared her throat and went on silently, trying for calm. Usually she didn’t have to try. People you care for die or leave. Sometimes they can help it and sometimes they can’t. Either way, it’s better—safer—to never show true feelings. Don’t get close. Don’t get personal. You stupid cow.

  Scolding herself usually made her smile. Not this time. She had used Jared badly and owed him an explanation she would never let him hear—that she was powerfully drawn to him, that she would take a knife in the kidney before seeing him hurt, that she wished they could be together. Might as well wish she wasn’t a carbon-based life form.

  Jared walked into the room and tossed her hair clip at her, gently underhand. At least he hadn’t fired it at her face with all his strength. She caught the clip and immediately pushed her hair up into it. She couldn’t look at him.

  “It’s my breath, isn’t it?”

  Startled, she looked up and opened her mouth to reply. Might have known he’d turn it into a joke, she thought ruefully, and on the heels of that, You’re not worthy to be sitting on his couch, much less putting your hands on his body, so keep it in mind, okay, doll?

  He held up his hands. Skilled hands, healer’s hands. Lover’s hands. She tried not to stare at his fingers. “No, no, you can tell me. I won’t be mad, I promise. Too many onions on my burger, right? I can take it.” He grinned at her, that crooked smile she was starting to love.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She looked up at him helplessly. “I don’t have an explanation.”

  “That’s okay, I do.” He flopped down beside her and put his feet on the coffee table with a satisfying thump. She wanted to snuggle into him, the warmth of his body. Instead, she stared at the carpet. “You’re secretly in love with me and couldn’t help yourself. Or you’ve been heavily medicated for some time and need new drugs. Or you lost a bet. Or—”

  “You’re very nice,” she interrupted, patting his thigh and then snatching her hand away. His thigh was long and heavily muscled; she wondered what he did to stay in shape. She wondered what he would think if she kissed him where her hand had just been. “But you’re not for me.”

  “Not for you? What, like I’m something you’d pick up at Macy’s?”

  “Not Macy’s,” she said, hating her cool tone but helpless to stop. “Maybe Kmart.”

  His eyebrows arched. “Mee-yeow! Hey, don’t take it out on me because you’re sexually frustrated, sweetie. I was all set to tango … you were the one who called time out. Aarrggh!” He clutched his head, writhing. Alarmed, she reached for him, then forced her hand to drop back to her lap.

  He looked up and speared her with his direct gaze. “I don’t want to fight. Listen, I only kissed you because I couldn’t stand being near you and not touching you. And because I really did want to thank you for taking care of the bad guys in the park. That’s twice you’ve saved my butt. You barely know me and you keep putting yourself in danger for me. It’s maddening, but sexy as hell.” He picked up her hand and she let him, afraid to speak, afraid to return the pressure of his fingers. “Why are you doing this? Why me?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Well, I do,” he said with maddening assurance. “It’s because you’re good, you couldn’t stand to see someone in trouble and had to help. You—”

  She flung off his hand and jumped up. “I’m not good!” she practically shouted. “I’m as far from good as someone like you could imagine.”

  His eyebrows arched. “Someone like me?”

  She ignored the interruption. “I’m helping you because you’ve got a nice body and great eyes, okay? I’m in it for purely selfish reasons, I’m—I’m planning on shoring up your gratitude and trading it for sex, I—stop laughing.”

  He had actually fallen off the couch, was holding his stomach and giggling like an idiot. He choked off his mirth and said, “Sure you are. That’s why you bolted out of my bathroom like your hair was on fire. ’Fess up, Kara. Why are you here?”

  “A very good question,” she grumbled, and stepped over him to leave. Damned if she was going to tell him a thing. Not that she had been planning to. But if she had been—and she had not been—she wouldn’t now. No way. The man turned everything into a joke. She couldn’t bear it if he turned her life into a punch line. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Don’t leave your apartment until I come back.”

  He rolled over, cat-quick, and grabbed her lower leg. Her progress toward the door slowed dramatically as she found herself lugging his two hundred pounds. “No you don’t,” he grunted. “You’re not doing one of your Batman-type fadeouts. We’re going to have a real talk like two people in a relationship.”

  “We’re not in a relationship.” She braced herself and pulled, with no luck. He was stuck to her leg like a lamprey. She had no leverage. She could have loosened his grip any number of ways—kicking him in the eye would be a good start—but couldn’t bring herself to hurt him. Not physically, anyway. “Let go. Before I put you in traction.”

  “I’ll call that bluff, thanks. Bodyguards don’t whup their clients. Besides, we both know you’re crazy about me.” He chortled over what he probably assumed was a gross exaggeration. “Now talk! Who are you? Why are you here? When are you going to marry me?”

  She stopped pulling and looked down at him. He was sprawled behind her, holding onto her calf with white knuckles. “Stop joking.”

  “I’m not,” he said quietly. “I think you’re fabulous. I want to be with you all the time. You’re beautiful and smart and tough and vulnerable and sweet and a fantastic kisser and you have the prettiest breasts I’ve ever—”

  “Stop it! You don’t know me, you don’t know anything about me, now let me go.”

  He did and slowly got to his feet. But she had lost the urge to flee. “There’s something else I know about you,” he said. “You’re scared shitless, but I’ll be damned if I know what could scare you.”

  Complete rejection, for a start. Being left alone—again. She pushed the thought away. “Jared, I’ve told you this before. If you knew me, knew who I really was—what I’ve done, the things I’ve—you wouldn’t like me. You wouldn’t want to be anywhere near me.” She shuddered. “Sometimes I can’t stand to be in my own skin.”

  He yawned. She gaped. “Yeah, yeah, you’re a real badass, worse than Manson and Bundy put together.”

  Shocked, she opened her mouth to say … what, she didn’t know, but he never gave her a chance. “Hey, you don’t have to tell me a damned thing about yourself if you don’t want to. Like you’ve said, this is business, right? That’s assuming you don’t have feelings for me. Which I would have believed before you let me put my hands all over your luscious bod.”

  “That’s not—”

  “You weren’t faking, any more than I was—you feel the same thing I do. The connection. The heat.” He poked her in the chest, an umpire making a point to the pitcher. “Difference is, I’m willing to admit it. You’ve been running away from it for days. So which one of us is the fearless bodyguard and which of us is the coward?” He sighed, while she stared at him, stunned. “Too bad, so sad. I didn’t think you were scared of anything or anyone. So disappointing to be wrong about people you care about.”

  Kara forced her fist to unclench. It’s not nice to punch doctors, no matter how outrageously provocative their commen
ts, she reminded herself. “You don’t know anything,” she snapped. “And you don’t care about me.”

  They were nose to nose, or as close as they could get, as she was a head shorter. “Don’t tell me how I feel,” he growled. “You’re fabulous, dammit, and that’s the end of it.”

  “You don’t even know me.” Her voice cracked with desperation. “Jared, if you knew what I did for a living, the things I had to do to survive, you wouldn’t feel this way.”

  His finger came to rest on the tip of her nose. He didn’t smile. “Prove it.”

  There was a long silence and then she said it, ignoring the way her heart was pounding crazily, the way her head was screaming, Are you out of your mind?!

  “You got it, Dr. Dean.”

  “Uh, Kara.”

  “Shhhhh.”

  “Kara. This isn’t my house. Or yours.”

  “No talking.”

  “So this is breaking and entering.”

  “Well, yes. Technically.”

  “Technically?” he nearly shouted, then remembered he didn’t want to go to jail and lowered his voice. “We’re standing inside a house the size of the Playboy Mansion—”

  She snickered. “That’s not far off.”

  “—and I don’t even want to know how you cracked that lock. Now there’s little red lasers all over the living room, starting about two feet from where we’re standing.”

  “It’s the security system. Don’t walk in there yet.”

  “Duh,” he said with heavy sarcasm. “And now you’re futzing with the alarm. Do you think they’ll let me kiss you good-bye before they cart me off to the local hoosegow?”

  She ignored him, simply popped the cover off the alarm plate and hooked up a small silver box, about the size of an ATM card. She crossed a few wires, then numbers started to stream across the digital display. A few seconds later, the lasers shut off.

  “Cake,” she said, brushing by him. “Don’t touch anything.”

  “Thanks. Maybe you should remind me to keep breathing and any other obvious advice you can think of.” He followed her nervously. Prove it, he’d said, and she had taken him right up on it. Your own fault, moron.

  He’d suspected nothing when she drove them to the house. Hell, he hadn’t even noticed they’d left his own modest neighborhood for the more pretentious Carleton area, where mansions were as plentiful as street lamps. He’d spent the drive trying to figure out a way to prove to her that her past and her current activities didn’t change the way he felt about her. Hell, her past had shaped the woman he was falling in love with. Far from scaring him off, it just made him feel closer to her.

  He was close to her right now, in fact. So close he could have strangled her, which he felt like doing. This was big-time trouble if they were caught. They were both looking at prison terms for the evening’s exercise, all so Kara could prove she was a criminal sociopath.

  “I thought you said we were going hacking,” he muttered, following her through the mansion. “I pictured us in a cozy computer room somewhere, pressing buttons. Not hanging around in a living room that looks like it was decorated by the director of the Guggenheim.”

  “Hacking doesn’t have much to do with computers these days.” She was climbing the stairs slowly, steadily, not looking back. “It’s B&E-speak for getting into a business to steal from it.”

  “But this is somebody’s house. Thirty or forty somebodies, given the size, but still …”

  “It’s a business,” she said with maddening mys-teriousness and wouldn’t continue, no matter how much he kept bugging her.

  Although the house was empty, the owners had left several lights on, shattering another of Jared’s theories about burglaries. Kara wasn’t a twitchy junkie with a heroin habit to feed, the “breaking” of the breaking and entering took about ten seconds, and nothing was broken, and there were lights all over the place, so no creeping in the dark like a demented boogeyman. Jared wondered what else popular fiction had wrong about crime.

  The bedroom was a joke. Something out of a bad movie—a bed the size of his kitchen, covered with a red satin comforter and about a thousand pillows. Mirrored ceiling. Dark furniture the owner’s family probably brought to America via the Mayflower. The carpet—cream shag—was so deep, he could feel himself actually sink into it. The dressers were spotless, except for one large picture of a middle-aged white male, bearded and benevolent looking, with a smile so large, it showed his back teeth. The guy looked like Santa on acid. And, if this was his house, it was kind of in bad taste to have the only photo in the bedroom be of himself.

  Bad taste, Jared thought with grim humor, sure. Almost as bad as breaking into someone’s house.

  There were mirrors everywhere. It was like being trapped in a carpeted disco. Jared could see seven reflections of himself and seven Karas stepping up to a mirror and doing something. And then the mirror was swinging open and …

  “Jesus!”

  They were in a vault. Kara, her fingers safe in surgical gloves, was opening a drawer and withdrawing a necklace worth, he estimated, the GNP of China.

  “You can’t steal that,” he said, trying to sound authoritative, but very much afraid he was whining.

  She smiled at him like a cat. It was irritating, he thought, how beautiful she looked even when she was being sly. “Can’t I? If you mean I don’t have the ability, you’re wrong. If you mean my moral code won’t let me, you’re wrong. If you mean I’ll go to jail, you’re wrong again.”

  “If I mean it’s rotten, I’m right. Put it back.” She moved to tuck the necklace away and he grabbed her wrist. She raised an eyebrow at him and looked pointedly at his hand, but he didn’t loosen his grip. “Look, you’ve made your point. I see what you do now.”

  “Do you?”

  “You’re terrible, awful, evil, a real blight on society, I should have listened to you back at the apartment, blah blah. But don’t steal from these folks just to prove me wrong.”

  “Open the last drawer on the left,” she said quietly. “Use your shirt sleeve, don’t leave prints.”

  “Look, I don’t care how much jewelry they—”

  She pried his fingers off her wrist. “Just open it, please, Jared.”

  He did. At first his eyes wouldn’t translate what he was seeing. When they did, he blindly put his hand out for something to lean on, certain he was about to be sick. Kara was there, not letting him touch anything, letting him sag against her.

  “Those men—”

  “And children, yes.”

  “Filthy goddamned perverts!”

  “Yes, and they’re having terrible luck,” she said sympathetically. He stared at her; she sounded genuinely sorry for them. “The film from their last drop-off was intercepted by the cops. And now they’ve been robbed. When the cops come, they’ll find … this.”

  In a flash, he saw her brilliance, saw the trap she had lain for the pedophiles. “The police can’t search without a warrant,” he said slowly, “but if there’s a robbery … and they happen to find pictures, say, all over the hallway …” He paused. “But you’re never caught.”

  She grinned at him. “We’re going to trip the alarm on the way out. Cops’ll be here in about five minutes.” She opened another drawer full of filth and waved a spare pair of surgical gloves at him. “Want to help?”

  “That was fun,” he said half an hour later, feeling more deeply satisfied than he ever had. Saving lives was fabulous, but preventing the further bru-talization of children was even better. “Now where are we? Is it time for ice cream?”

  “Pross house,” she said shortly, getting out of the car and striding, unafraid, through the worst neighborhood in the city. There were more streetlights out than on, more shattered store windows than whole, and entirely too many rough-looking men giving his Kara the once-over. Jared could feel himself bristling and singled out the meanest-looking one for a good glare. “Keep up, please.”

  “I don’t like the looks of those guys,”
he said, nodding to a gang of thugs clustered under a broken streetlight. “You want I should rough ’em up for you?”

  She laughed. “Aren’t you cute. Jared, trust me. Worry about the ones you don’t see.”

  She bounded up the steps to a battered brown-stone, nodding politely to two teens—either of which could have given your average beat cop a run for her money—and ringing the buzzer. The teens appeared to completely ignore her, but Jared noticed they both made way. He reached out and snagged Kara’s elbow just as she was buzzed in. “I’m with her,” he told the teens, who ignored him as they had Kara, “and don’t get smart or I’ll have her whup you both.”

  Inside, he was pleasantly surprised to find a homey entryway. Shabby, but dignified. “Well, this is something,” he said, looking around. “First, the Playboy Mansion. Then the fence—that’s the guy who cashed in the necklace, right? Now we’re … I have no idea where. What’s a pross house?”

  “This isn’t a pross house,” a warm, pleasant voice said. Jared jumped and spun; Kara turned unhurriedly toward the voice and Jared realized Kara had known they weren’t alone in the hall. “That’s a place where prostitutes, ah, ply their trade. This is a shelter for soiled doves trying to make new lives for themselves.”

  The woman who spoke was astonishingly beautiful, despite the knife scar that bisected her right cheek. Far from detracting from her beauty, the scar served to accent the flawless state of the rest of her face. She had shoulder-length, rich brown hair the color of dark chocolate, eyes the color of a sea lagoon, and skin the color of a really good espresso. She was quite a bit shorter than Kara and if she weighed more than a hundred pounds, Jared vowed to eat the scale.

  “Ma’am,” he said politely.

  “Madam, actually,” she said, and tittered. “Well, former madam. But you know.”

  “Present for you, Meg.” Kara handed her the shoe box in which, Jared knew, there nestled close to half a million dollars.