Harlequin Romantic Suspense December 2020 Box Set
Page 25
Although, at this point, any work-life balance would be an improvement. Her social life was completely nonexistent. Her gaze refocused regretfully on the huge, dusty boxes of files sitting on the counter in front of her. And it was about to stay that way for a while.
Apparently, her New Year’s Resolution to get out more, or at least date a little, would go the way of most resolutions, scrapped within a week of its making. Ahh well. It had been a nice dream while it lasted.
“You need some help going through these boxes?” Reese surprised her by asking.
“Umm, no. That’s okay. I’m sure you’re plenty busy chasing down leads of your own and doing detective stuff.”
A slight frown gathered between his perfect angel-wing brows. “You sure?” he asked quietly. “That’s a lot of files.”
Cripes. He had a bedroom voice to go with those blasted bedroom eyes of his. Her heart pitter-pattered at the low, sexy rasp. But to be honest, it was the hint of gentleness, concern even, in his voice that did her in.
Nobody ever worried about her. She was smart, collected, organized. Had her life together. She didn’t need anyone to help her out with anything. At least, that was what they all saw when they looked at her.
None of them saw the lonely young woman who often felt like an outsider in her own family. The Coltons had big personalities—big lives, big loves, big fights, big laughter. She was the quiet one of the bunch. An afterthought baby—an accident after the arrival of the triplets. An afterthought child, growing up in the background as the triplets took the lion’s share of care and attention from everyone else in the family. A too-young afterthought when social outings were planned for her older siblings. Mostly, just an afterthought.
“If you change your mind and want some help with these files, let me know, okay?”
“Fine. Whatever,” she mumbled.
Reese turned and left the lab, his frame lean and athletic in the way of a tennis player, or a martial artist. He was one of those naturally graceful people. And she was…not. She could find a way to trip over a crack in a sidewalk. Heck, the shadow of a crack in a sidewalk. Klutz was her middle name.
She sighed and reached for the nearest box of files. Yep. Almost too heavy for her to move down to the floor without dropping it. Sheesh. How did Reese make lifting this onto the counter look so easy? The guy might not be bulked up, but he was stronger than his frame suggested at a glance. The stupid boxes were crammed to the gills with what must be thousands of pages of documents. And it was her job to look at every last one. Ugh.
Depressed, she sat down at her computer to log the boxes of files as evidence and start a trail of custody so they couldn’t be altered or tampered with. She was nothing if not a stickler for proper handling of evidence. Her private nightmare was the ever-present specter of mishandling or contaminating a piece of evidence and a killer going free because of her mistake.
She spent the remainder of the afternoon cataloguing the hundreds of fingerprints lifted from the Dexter home search. Not surprisingly, most of them came from Dex. Yvette had to give his wife, Mary, credit for being a heck of a housekeeper, though. The woman had left only two full sets of prints behind in the entire house. Given the size of the Dexter mansion, that was impressive. Talk about being a thorough cleaner. Her kind of woman.
Quitting time for the nine-to-five employees in the police department came and went, and she heard the police shift change over her head with a half hour or so of scraping chairs, clumping footsteps and vague sounds of laughter and talking. But, by six o’clock, silence fell over the building.
Wednesday was half-price beer night down at Dusty Rusty’s Pub, and a lot of the cops liked to meet up there after work. Ever since she’d come back to Braxville she’d had a standing invitation to join the crew at Rusty’s. Apparently, a bunch of the force was going there tonight to toast surviving New Year’s Eve—the worst working day of the year for police.
She might’ve considered going—chasing after her New Year’s Resolution—except she was wearing an old shirt and a pair of jeans that had gotten too loose in the past few months as she’d clocked too many hours on the Harrison-Crane murders and forgotten too often to eat. Not to mention, she wasn’t wearing a lick of makeup, and this morning, she’d twisted her wet hair up into a bun that would still be damp if she let it down, which meant it would hang in sad chestnut strings around her face.
Goodbye New Year’s Resolution, hello long night at the office digging through dusty, dull construction contracts.
Might as well get comfortable. She turned off the bright, institutional overhead lights and turned on the lamp at her desk, an antique she’d brought in to lend a tiny touch of femininity and personality to the antiseptic lab. It had a printed silk shade with pink cottage roses on it and pretty crystal bead fringe all around its scalloped bottom.
After kicking off her shoes, she slipped on a thick pair of fuzzy socks, pulled up a streaming classical-music channel on her laptop and brewed herself a cup of hot tea while Chopin piano nocturnes played soothingly in the background. “Well, Earl Grey, you get to be my date tonight,” she murmured. “Here’s to us, your lordship.”
She’d been at it for a couple of hours, long enough to know that these boxes of files were going to be pure, unadulterated misery to slog through, when the lab door opened without warning.
She looked up, startled.
“You again! What do you want?” she complained as Reese Carpenter poked his head in.
He stepped all the way inside, carrying a large, flat cardboard box balanced in his left hand, and a six-pack of beer in his right hand. “Figured I’d find you here. I saw Jordana and Clint at Rusty’s, and they guessed you’d still be here slaving away.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve got an annoying detective riding my back day and night, demanding that I magically process weeks’ worth of evidence with a wave of my magic wand.” She gave the pen she’d been taking notes with a swish and flick in his general direction.
“Man, I hate it when cops throw their weight around like that,” he commented wryly.
“Hah!” she responded. “What are you doing here at this hour?”
“What are you still doing here?” he demanded. “Aren’t you a nine-to-fiver?”
She shrugged. “I’m working. I really am up to my eyeballs in evidence to dig through.”
“Right. Enter moi to save the day. Or the night as it were.”
“Seriously. What do you want, Reese?”
“You and me. We’re having a date. Pizza and beers over a pile of Markus Dexter’s files.”
Her jaw sagged.
What. On. Earth?
CHAPTER 2
Sheesh. Did she have to look quite that shocked at the notion of him being a datable male of the human species? He wasn’t a complete troll. Multiple women had told him over the years he had a bad-boy vibe. Apparently, that was a huge turn-on for many women. Never mind that he was a cop and committed to protecting truth, justice and the American way at all times.
Reese stepped fully into the lab, relieved as hell that it didn’t have the same reek of chemicals and death that always pervaded the morgue.
“Mood lighting? Soft music? Were you expecting somebody, Yvette?”
She abruptly yanked her cute fuzz-clad feet off her desk and sat up straight in her chair. “No! I would never—”
“Hey, it’s okay,” he interrupted. “If you want to bring your dates down here, go for it. I mean, it’s a little kinky. Crime lab and all. But it’s still no skin off my nose.”
“What dates?” she muttered under her breath.
His eyebrows shot up. Yvette wasn’t dating? At all? Color him shocked.
“Really? You’re not in a steamy relationship with some smoking-hot guy?” he asked as he set the pizza and beer down on the high counter across the front of the lab and walked around it.
He shrugged. “You could if you wanted to. Tell me about your personal life, that is. I can keep a secret. I know all of your sister’s dirty little secrets, for example.”
“Oh, yeah? Like what?”
He grinned. “Nice try, but my lips are sealed.”
“Can’t blame a girl for testing an assertion like that.”
“What are you up to so late?” he asked, scanning the piles of papers filling the entire surface of her normally pristine desk. As he’d suspected. She was elbow deep in files from the ginormous boxes he’d brought her this afternoon.
She looked up at him with those huge, meltingly dark eyes of hers and he felt his knees go a little wobbly. “You didn’t answer my question, Reese. Why are you here?”
Her skin was like literal velvet, pale and perfect, dewy looking. And he wasn’t a guy who thought about skin being dewy, like ever. But hers was. She was so damned beautiful. He couldn’t understand why every unmarried guy in the department wasn’t down here sniffing around, but it was their loss if they didn’t see her. He bloody well did.
He pulled over a chair from the conference table and sat down at a right angle to her at her desk before he answered her question. “I’m here because I thought you might need sustenance. And another pair of hands and eyes.”
“But…why?” she asked blankly.
“Why not? Doesn’t anyone ever help you just for the hell of it? Because you could use a little assistance?”
“No. Not really.”
“Then, kid, your luck has changed.”
A smile started slowly on that lush, kissable mouth of hers. Her chin ducked a little, and she glanced up at him sidelong, shy pleasure glinting in her gaze.
Good grief, how didn’t every guy in town see how sexy she was? Not that he was complaining. Their loss. Less competition for him…
Whoa, whoa, whoa. He wasn’t in the market for a relationship, and certainly not with his partner’s baby sister. Down that path lay nothing but drama and misery. No way was he going to get himself trapped between two of the Colton sisters.
“What’s your system?” he asked briskly.
“System?” Yvette looked up at him blankly.
“Surely you’re not planning to study each and every piece of paper in this giant pile one by one, are you?” he asked incredulously.
She leaned back, looking mightily irritated. “How would you do my job? By all means. Enlighten me.”
“Well,” he said, scanning the folders on the table between them. “I assume most of the papers in there are construction related. Sales receipts. Contracts. Drawings. Permits. That kind of stuff.”
“That has been the case so far,” she said frostily.
“None of that is likely to have a damned thing to do with murder. I’d make one stack of files that have nothing but dull, boring construction junk in them. Then, the ones with correspondence, complaints, personal stuff—I’d make another pile of those. That one I’d take a closer look at, first. Then, if any clients jump out of that pile, I’d track down the construction files pertaining to them out of the bigger pile.”
She looked annoyed, but shrugged in acquiescence. “That might be slightly faster,” she allowed.
Slightly? It would shave days…weeks…off the process. But he was prepared to win gracefully. “How about you take a preliminary peek at the contents of each folder and then pass each mundane one to me? I’ll alphabetize them by client name.”
“Sort them by year first and then alphabetize within each year,” she directed him.
He shrugged. “Fine. Let’s rock and roll. We should be able to blast through these suckers in a few hours.”
She squared her slender shoulders and reached for the nearest stack of files. “I’ve already looked at these. Nothing interesting in them. You can start organizing those while I get started on the next batch.”
They fell into a rhythm, eating while they worked, her pulling fistfuls of folders out of the cardboard packing boxes, and then passing them to him one by one to put back in the boxes, sorted by date and name. They actually made a decent team. They were both focused and disciplined when it came to work.
After about an hour, though, he called a halt. “Break time. Do you need another piece of pizza or a beer?”
“Pizza,” she said promptly.
He passed her a slice of Torrentino’s finest with extra pepperoni.
“What does it say about me that I went to elementary school with Gus Torrentino?” she asked. “I’m feeling old all of a sudden.”
“His older sister Mia was in a couple of my classes in high school. Nice girl.”
“Her brother was a jerk. Used to pull my ponytail.”
“Did you deck him?” he asked humorously. Gus had been a big kid and was a big man now. He rather relished the mental image of tiny Yvette standing up to the guy.
“As I recall, I kicked him in the shins. I didn’t know yet to aim higher.”
“Violent child, were you?” he asked dryly.
She scowled. “People had—still have—this annoying tendency to pat me on the head and treat me as if I’m some helpless little thing.”
He twisted the top off a second beer and took an appreciative swig from it. “Duly noted. The lady is not helpless.”
She made a face in his general direction. “Thanks for not trying to convince me that Gus liked me because he pulled my hair.”
He frowned. “Bullying is bullying. Any boy worth getting to know would’ve treated you better than that. Been nice to you. Not tried to yank your hair out by the roots. My mama taught me to act like a gentleman around girls whether I liked them or not. My daddy taught me that the whole ‘boys will be boys’ excuse is just that. An excuse for bad behavior.”
“I like your parents,” Yvette declared.
“Have you ever met my parents?”
“No. But I already like them. They raised you right, or at least they tried. I’m now going to have to try to figure out where you went off the rails so badly.”
He grinned at her, unfazed by her insults. Cops teased each other all the time, and his two younger brothers had made it their mission in life to try to get a rise out of him when they were kids. They’d rarely succeeded.
Shock of shocks, she smiled back. It was an intimate moment, made more so by the cozy lighting and pretty piano music playing softly. Glancing around the dim lab, he commented, “Who knew this place could actually be romantic?”
She shrugged. “It’s the people in a space who create romance. Not the place itself.”
“What’s your idea of perfect romance?” he asked, his voice unaccountably rough. Weird. He didn’t have a crush on this woman…right? “Let me guess. An expensive restaurant, a bottle of wine, candles and sparkly gifts.”
She seemed startled that he’d pegged her. As if it was any challenge. Not. She’d hightailed it out of Braxville to the East Coast and a big urban center the day she’d graduated from high school.
“What about you?” she asked. “What’s your idea of romance?”
“I like to be outdoors. I like mountains and beaches and campfires in any combination.”
She laughed a little. “Then why on earth do you still live in Kansas? We have neither mountains nor beaches, here. Just mile after mile of pastures full of cows or fields full of crops.”
“Eastern Kansas is a little hilly,” he said defensively.
“Emphasis on little,” she retorted, grinning.
“Yeah, but it’s home. Family and friends are way more important than having a beach or a ski resort nearby. I can take a vacation to see those. But I like to be able to visit my loved ones easily and often.”
He caught the frown that twitched across her brow. She didn�
�t think family was the most important thing? Okay, that surprised him. She came from a big, loud, warm family. He’d have thought that, as a Colton, being close to family would have been something she identified strongly with.
“What’s wrong with your family?” he asked curiously.
She looked startled at that abrupt question. “Nothing’s wrong with them,” she answered defensively. “They’re fine.”
What wasn’t she saying about her family? He sensed a mystery. And it wasn’t as if he’d ever walked away from one of those.
She reached for another stack of files at the same time he did, and their hands bumped. A jolt of…something…passed through him. Hyperawareness of her and of how close they were sitting, their shoulders practically rubbing, and their knees bumping into each other from time to time as one of them turned in their seat.
She spoke briskly, with what sounded like false energy. “We’d better get back to work.”
Trying to distract him, perhaps? Or maybe hiding something. Which seemed out of character for her. She didn’t strike him as the least bit secretive. Was she more shy than she let on? He had a hard time buying that explanation. She came across as supremely self-assured. But then, he’d only ever talked with her about forensics stuff before.
He leaned back, stretching his shoulders. “What do you like to do when you’re not here and chained to your desk?”
She looked up, a startled expression on her face. “Umm, I like to garden.”
Made sense. Her white cottage, with its wide porch and gabled roof, was neat as a pin and flanked by beautiful landscaping full of bright flowers. No matter what time of year he drove past her place, it looked like a postcard.
“What else do you like to do?” he demanded.
“Not much.”
His radar for evasiveness fired off hard. “Nothing else?” Dammit, the interrogatory was out of his mouth before he could stop it.