I'll Be Seeing You
Beverly Bird
SURPRISE #1: Her client, dead in his salad plate.SURPRISE #2: Detective Raphael Montiel.Caterer Kate Mulhern's life was suddenly full of surprises. And her knee-buckling attraction to the rogue cop assigned to protect her was the biggest shock of all. For steel-bodied Raphael wasn't the sort to get cold-cocked by Cupid. So Kate had to remember that his strong embrace was merely a tactic to make her safe. His heated, watchful eyes were only keeping surveillance. And his kisses were nothing but…pure love?
She could handle the flirting.
She could. She was practical enough to know that Raphael didn’t mean anything by it. All she had to do was look at him to understand that.
He was all animal grace and golden good looks.
Tall, gorgeous women were Raphael’s type, Kate thought, not someone who was five foot four if she stood on her tiptoes, someone who did not have a bad hair day now and again but was having a bad hair life.
The problem was…his eyes.
Raphael had a way of looking at her when he said things, a steady way, with that smoky green gaze, while one corner of his mouth crooked up in a secret smile. Like there was something shared between them…
Dear Reader,
As the Intimate Moments quarter of our yearlong 20
anniversary promotion draws to a close, we offer you a month so full of reading excitement, you’ll hardly know where to start. How about with Night Shield, the newest NIGHT TALES title from New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts? As always, Nora delivers characters you’ll never forget and a plot guaranteed to keep you turning the pages. And don’t miss our special NIGHT TALES reissue, also available this month wherever you buy books.
What next? How about Night of No Return, rising star Eileen Wilks’s contribution to our in-line continuity, A YEAR OF LOVING DANGEROUSLY? This emotional and suspenseful tale will have you on the edge of your seat—and longing for the next book in the series. As an additional treat this month, we offer you an in-line continuation of our extremely popular out-of-series continuity, 36 HOURS. Bestselling author Susan Mallery kicks things off with Cinderella for a Night. You’ll love this book, along with the three Intimate Moments novels—and one stand-alone Christmas anthology—that follow it.
Rounding out the month, we have a new book from Beverly Bird, one of the authors who helped define Intimate Moments in its very first month of publication. She’s joined by Mary McBride and Virginia Kantra, each of whom contributes a top-notch novel to the month.
Next month, look for a special two-in-one volume by Maggie Shayne and Marilyn Pappano, called Who Do You Love? And in November, watch for the debut of our stunning new cover design.
Leslie J. Wainger
Executive Senior Editor
I’ll Be Seeing You
Beverly Bird
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
BEVERLY BIRD
has lived in several places in the United States, but she is currently back where her roots began on an island in New Jersey. Her time is devoted to her family and her writing. She is the author of numerous romance novels, both contemporary and historical. Beverly loves to hear from readers. You can write to her at P.O. Box 350, Brigantine, NJ 08203.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 1
Perfection had its own kind of rush, Kate Mulhern thought. It was a tingling flow of adrenaline that made her want to hold her breath in anticipation of the final result.
She stopped moving for a split second in the kitchen of one of Philadelphia’s finer Society Hill brownstones and looked—just looked—at what she had created. The china she’d selected for Dinner For Two, her unique catering business, was a fragile ivory with gold trim. On each plate a filet nested among roasted scallions with a touch of potato thins to the side. Perfect.
Kate smiled and got back to business.
She’d left the couple she was catering for alone for eight minutes now. They had their wine to keep them company—an excellent South Australian ’84 Pinot Noir—but the man was rapidly moving through that. It was time to get on with the meal’s centerpiece. Kate left the plates on the kitchen’s center island and turned away to retrieve the orange béarnaise and julienne rind that would top the steaks.
A crash splintered the kitchen’s quiet.
She let out a yelp of surprise and whirled around, her hand pressed to her chest. What she saw was preposterous! “Hey!” she yelled. “Hey, you! No, wait, stop!”
And the dog did.
It was a dog! In the kitchen? Her client hadn’t mentioned that he had one. But she’d left the back door open a crack while the broiler had done its business—it was August, and Kate considered it to be in poor taste to hike her client’s air-conditioning up without asking. So she’d left the door slightly ajar to let in what scant breeze there was, and a dog—some scrappy little Chihuahua type thing—had come in instead.
Kate’s skin pulled into gooseflesh. Not just any dog, she thought. That dog.
It looked back at her and wagged its tail. Kate let out a strangled sound. The dog dropped the filet that was clamped in its jaws to bark once, a cheery hello, then it snapped the meat up again and trotted out.
Twelve and a half minutes down the drain, she thought, her blood still jittering with astonishment. So there was no time to dwell on the dog or what it had done. She was prepared—of course, she was prepared for any contingency, even this, the outrageous. She had two more filets in the fridge. There go my profits. Reputation was everything. She could salvage this. Twelve and a half minutes behind schedule. She had to move, had to get two more steaks in the broiler wrapped with the bacon she’d take off before serving them.
Instead, she rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands.
It had not been that dog, she decided, finally turning back to the broiler. The dog she was thinking of had disappeared into Manhattan four months ago after turning her old roommate’s world upside down. What had Shawna named the mutt? Belle. Belle had blasted into Shawna’s life for two short weeks, leaving love, murder and mayhem in her wake.
Kate cooked new steaks, watching the timer impatiently. She wondered if she should make an excuse for the delay or just proceed blithely and hope no one noticed. She slid the filets onto two new plates, abandoning the filet that the dog hadn’t eaten. Then she took a deep breath. She felt perspiration slide between her shoulder blades and hoped it didn’t show. She picked up both plates and stepped over the shattered china on the floor. She didn’t even want to consider what that plate had cost her.
She pushed through the door into the dining room, a smile pasted on her face. The sight in front of her made her pulse give another hitch. The man, her customer, was laying facedown in his hearts-of-palm salad.
His date—a voluptuous blonde in shimmering silver—came through the opposite door at the same moment and started screaming.
“Wait a minute, just calm down,” Kate murmured. She eased the plates onto the table. Maybe he had just passed out. Please, don’t let it have been the food.
But it wasn’t the food. Kate’s biggest weakness was detective novels, and cop shows. It was the only vice she indulged in, but she did it with fervor. A thin ribbon of blood ran down the back of the man’s neck. She knew what blood like that meant. It was a gunshot wound to the back of the man’s head.
This job was turning into a nightmare!
Kate forced herself to touch the man’s wrist, even though her fingers shook. His skin was warm and she felt hope shoot into her blood. Then everything inside her recoiled.
No pulse. Kate tried again, and her heartbeat took off. No pulse!
The blonde’s cries changed to howls. Kate did the only thing she could. She stepped around the dead man and slapped the woman hard.
When the blonde’s wails had subsided to hiccups, Kate ran to find a telephone. She fumbled with the buttons twice before she managed to punch in 911. A voice answered immediately—cold, detached, almost mechanical. Kate cleared her throat.
“Uh, yes. Please send someone immediately. There’s a dead man in my salad.”
Lieutenant Detective Raphael Montiel preferred to think of adrenaline as something hot and sharp that hurt the underside of his skin. It was rarely a pleasant feeling.
It drove him hard as he shot his aging Explorer around the corner of Third into Willings Alley. His left shoulder rammed against the window when he jerked the SUV straight again. He didn’t have to look for the address. He knew the brownstone without the police cruisers that hurled red and blue light up against the walls of brick that bracketed the alley. He’d had his eye on the home’s owner for a while.
Phillip McGaffney was dead.
Raphael cursed roundly, most of his fury aimed at whoever had taken McGaffney out—not that the killer had done so in the first place, because that had been inevitable for months now—because the SOB hadn’t waited three hours and forty-two more minutes to do it. Raphael’s suspension from the force lifted at midnight. Now, twenty minutes after the 911 call had come in, his dashboard clock remained stubbornly stuck at eight thirty-eight.
He’d flatten the man who called him on it. McGaffney was his. Two warring factions of Philadelphia’s powerful Irish underground had just begun sniffing around each other thirty days ago when Raphael had taken his suspension in the teeth. He’d spent the last month staving off boredom by continuing to track every move the family made. Lou O’Bannon, the mob’s kingpin, had died ten days into Raphael’s suspension—of cancer, a virtual anomaly in his world. It had been a slow, natural death that had given Phil McGaffney and Charlie Eagan plenty of time to begin recruiting their supporters. Both of them fully intended to take over O’Bannon’s throne.
It had been only a matter of time before full-fledged war broke out between the groups. But Raphael hadn’t expected it to start this way, with Eagan’s boys shooting right for the other guys’ top dog.
He drove the Explorer into half a space between two black-and-whites. The SUV braked to a hard stop, and Raphael was out before it had settled back on its shock absorbers. He jogged across the alley and up the steps to McGaffney’s front door.
“Where’s Plattsmier?” he demanded of the cop manning the entrance.
“Not here yet.”
But his captain would probably be here soon, Raphael thought. “Who’s in charge?”
The officer grinned. “Fox.”
Some of the constriction eased across Raphael’s chest. Having C. Fox Whittington catch this stiff was good. It was very good. Fox was his partner.
Raphael passed the cop and went inside. He began stalking the first floor of the brownstone looking for Fox. Then he stepped into the dining room and his jaw sagged.
It was a long, narrow room with a cherry-wood table in the center. Dark wainscoting traced around the ivory-papered walls. The chandelier in the center of the ceiling was heavy with too much bronze that robbed the sparkling white light of its innocence. There was a door to the kitchen on one side of the room, a door to a hallway on the other.
McGaffney was facedown at the head of the table.
The blood that seeped from the gunshot wound at the base of the man’s skull was congealing now, going tacky and brown. It was nothing Raphael hadn’t seen before. The scene on the floor, however, rocked him a little.
The woman at the bottom of the pile was leggy—very leggy, he thought, given that the metallic fabric of her dress was pushed up nearly to her backside. It was all Raphael could see of her because there was a brunette sitting on top of her, deposited right on the small of the other woman’s back. Her knees were drawn up and her chin rested in her hand. Every once in a while, the leggy woman kicked, but the brunette wasn’t budging.
Raphael had no idea if the brunette was leggy or not. She wore navy blue trousers and a starched white shirt. Raphael had spent his childhood in parochial schools. He hated starch, despised it on mere sight.
“What the hell?” Raphael muttered.
The brunette’s head came up at the sound of his voice. He had never seen hair like hers in his life, Raphael thought. It was a million shades of onyx shimmering to deep copper in the chandelier’s light. He thought maybe it was supposed to be tied back or something, but who could tell? It was wild, with corkscrews zinging everywhere.
She reached a hand up to smooth it as though reading his opinion of it in his eyes. “She’s bigger than me,” she muttered. “It was a fight.”
Raphael cleared his throat. “Come again?”
“It was a fight to keep her away from the table. From him. To keep her from messing up your evidence. Aren’t you a cop?”
“Yeah.” He’d even be an employed cop in another three hours or so.
The woman gave a heartfelt sigh. “It’s about time you got here. She’s all yours.” And with that statement, she stood. The woman beneath her let out a yowl that stirred the hairs at Raphael’s nape. Then she rolled onto her back, sat up and sprang to her feet.
“Philip!” she cried.
Finally, too late, Raphael understood why the brunette had been sitting on top of her. This came to him in the split second before he recognized the other woman. He should have known her from her legs.
Allegra Denise.
She hurled herself in the general direction of McGaffney’s corpse in that long, ankle-length dress that draped her like a second skin and caught the chandelier’s light. Raphael stepped quickly to block her. She hit his chest like a battering ram, and she had arms and legs that were everywhere.
“Whoa,” he murmured. “Let’s ease up here.”
“That’s what I told her,” said the brunette.
“Phillip!” the blonde wailed again.
Raphael took an elbow in his gut, and one knee came perilously close to his groin. He tucked one of Allegra’s arms behind her. He used it to lever her into a dining room chair, then he leaned close enough to her ear to inhale the sweet, clinging scent of her perfume. “Quiet now, or I’ll let the lady sit on you again,” he whispered.
“Phillip,” Allegra whimpered.
“Cut me a break. You had dinner with Bonnie Joe Donnelly last weekend. How attached to Phil could you have gotten in, what, six days?”
Allegra blinked up at him, her eyes swimming. “How do you know?”
“I know.” Raphael straightened away from her and looked at the brunette again. “And who the hell are you?”
He watched everything about her draw up and in. She couldn’t be more than five foot four, but for a second she reminded him of his second grade teacher—a behemoth, stern, unforgiving and wicked with a ruler. Then he blinked, and she was petite again.
A voice came from behind him. “She’s the caterer. Allegra here was having an intimate dinner with our pal.”
Raphael turned to find C. Fox Whittington grinning at him. He grinned back. They just barely restrained themselves from several hearty slaps on each other’s backs.
“You ready to get to work?” Fox asked, laughing.
“Better check with Plattsmier on that one.” But a smile kept twitching at one corner of Raphael’s mouth.
“No need. I’m wearing a watch.” Fox looked at it and gave a groan that almost vibrated with pleasure. “Three more hours with the rookie.”
The brass hadn’t broken up other partnerships to cover a one-month suspension. They’d brought up a Homicide wannabe to replace Raphael during his time-out without pay. Raphael knew all about it. He and Fox spoke every other night or so.
There was an odd sound from the brunette. They both glanced her way.
“What?” Raphael demanded. Starch, drawn-up shoulders and that sound she’d just made. Like a tsk. All of it was like sandpaper on his nerve endings. “What’s the matter?”
“You’re having a kaffeeklatsch,” she murmured. “But a man’s dead.”
“We’ll take care of him, ma’am,” Fox said politely. He looked at Raphael, then he tilted his head in the direction of the brunette. “She was in the kitchen when it went down. Why don’t you deal with her? Under the circumstances, I’d better handle the scene myself.”
Raphael nodded. Anything he found in the house would be inadmissible in court. He wasn’t back on the payroll yet.
“An excellent approach,” said a baritone from the doorway.
Raphael felt something wither deep in his gut. It was Plattsmier. He turned slowly, edgily, to face his captain.
“I could order you off the scene,” the man said.
Raphael gritted his teeth. “What would be the point?”
“I’d make the commissioner smile.”
Raphael snarled. The sound was out before he could bite it back. Fox put a warning hand on his shoulder, but Plattsmier only nodded sadly.
“You still don’t get it,” his captain said.
“Sure I do. Thirty days.” Raphael bit out the words. “A chunk of change. What’s not to understand?”
“I supported you.”
Raphael was too angry to answer.
“I may well have done what you did, Montiel, in my younger days,” Plattsmier said. “However, I would not have done it in front of an Eyewitness News Action-Cam. That’s why the commissioner was distressed with you.” He paused, then his temper showed. “It’s why I couldn’t save you a suspension. Damn it, do you think I wanted you out? If I’d wanted you out, you’d still be out. Internal Affairs wanted to suspend you for three months. And I wouldn’t have let Fox catch this case. Then you’d have no way in on it at all. As it is, you’ve just got to cool your heels for another few hours and you guys will be a team on it.” He paused, and some of the anger went out of him. “Between the two of you, you’re the best I’ve got in the area of organized crime. So let’s let bygones be bygones and do our respective jobs here.”
Raphael heard what Plattsmier didn’t say. The case was going to blow wide open. The city of Philadelphia was on the verge of an ugly mob war. None of them doubted it.
Which made Plattsmier right. They had work to do.
“Take her for now, like Fox said.” Plattsmier thrust a thumb at the brunette.
Raphael glanced her way, and damned if she didn’t do it again, that deep indrawn breath, that squaring of her shoulders. “I have a name,” she said stiffly.
Plattsmier wasn’t impressed. He rarely was. “Good,” he said. “Give it to him.” He pointed at Raphael and left the room.
Raphael looked at Allegra. He wanted to talk to her. Allegra traveled in these circles. She’d probably know more about this murder than Charlie Eagan and his supporters had forgotten. And all of that information would be pertinent to the case.
Three more hours.
While he chilled, waiting for the clock to chime midnight, he’d have to see what he could do with this shoulder-squaring brunette with the wild hair. “Let’s go into the kitchen,” he suggested.
He went ahead of her. As Kate followed him, her chest began to hurt and it felt hard to get air. A man had just been killed! She’d held herself together, had called the cops, had kept that crazy blonde from ruining any evidence the authorities might need. She’d done everything right! And this cop, this Montiel, seemed to think it was all just some kind of reunion with his pal out there in the other room.
Kate’s stomach felt sour. If she didn’t keep her hands tightly fisted, she knew they would begin to shake again. She bit back a groan as she stepped around the broken china on the floor and sat on one of the stools next to the kitchen’s center island. She was cold to the bone in spite of the heat. Maybe the dead guy’s air-conditioning had finally kicked on.
To keep her teeth from snicking together, she asked, “What did you do?”
Montiel glanced at her, then he poked his nose into the baking sheet with the potato thins. To Kate’s disbelief, he popped one into his mouth.
“Stop that!”
He looked at her again. “What, you’re saving them for McGaffney?”
“No! No, of course not. It’s just…”
He watched her levelly. Kate found she couldn’t explain why she was so appalled.
It was his irreverence, she decided. He stood there, not so much tall—maybe five foot eleven—but with the kind of presence that seemed to bleed life from everything else in the room. He had dark blond hair, golden really, and it was unkempt and too long. She doubted if he had shaved since morning. The T-shirt he wore, a well-washed and faded blue, was untucked. He had bottle-green eyes, but as he waited for her to finish her perusal they went to the color of the sea on a cloudy day. They’d hold secrets, Kate realized.
Where had she gotten that from?
The answer was there beneath his infuriating indifference to what had just happened. It was at odds with it. Kate had never had a talent for nuances, except maybe in recipes. She had never been very good with people, or with reading them. Yet she felt a certain intensity beneath Montiel’s who-gives-a-damn manner.
He’d come to investigate a murder and he was eating her potato thins. But his eyes were darkening and turbulent.
“What did you do?” she asked again, more softly.
“With what?” he countered, moving on to munch a scallion.
“What did you do to anger the commissioner so you can’t work until midnight?”
“Doesn’t matter. We’re here to figure out anything you saw or heard tonight.”
He was eyeing the one remaining filet now. “Miss dinner?” she asked.
That brought his gaze to her again sharply. “What?”
“If you’re that hungry, I’ll reheat it. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just…stale.”
“Stale.”
“Prepared, then permitted to return to room temperature.”
Permitted? Who used words like permitted in casual conversation? The fact that she did irritated the hell out of him. Coupled with the fact that he was exiled with her in the kitchen, it made Raphael’s voice rough and gravely. “I coldcocked Gregg Miller on Eyewitness News.”
Kate felt something like shock move through her system, feather-light and cold. She’d almost forgotten her question. “That killer? The one…”
“The one,” he agreed flatly. “Then I caught a thirty-day suspension from Internal Affairs for my trouble.”
“Why? Why did you hit him?”
“What he did wasn’t enough?”
As near as Kate could remember, Miller had killed four women, had held the entire city in the grip of terror for the better part of a month. She hadn’t really followed the news broadcasts all that closely. Between her catering business and her second job cooking at a diner, between all the chores one had to do in order to keep on top of life, there’d been precious little time for her to peruse the media accounts of the murders. But she knew Miller had been preying on single women in their late twenties and early thirties.
Kate frowned. “You’d need more,” she decided.
“Who are you, Freud?”
That snapped her spine straight again. “You’d see death in your line of work nearly every day, I would imagine. But you don’t run about—what did you call it?—cold-cocking suspects all the time. Or do you?”
“Tell you what, you’re better with these crunchy things than you are with analysis.”
Her stomach rolled again at the bite in his tone. “You don’t like me.”
“Do you like me?”
“Not particularly.”
Well, she was honest, he thought. He almost grinned. But she’d done it again. Words like particularly didn’t belong in general conversation. Then Raphael heard himself answer her and he felt a dull inner pang even as his words hit the room.
“We were bringing Miller out of the van,” he said, “for his arraignment. I’d taken him in the first place, so I wanted to be part of the detail. He knew all about me through his spree, during the whole investigation. He made it his business to know who was closing in on him. So he turned around just as he was being led through the courthouse doors. He looked at me, and he said—”
Miller had said what Raphael hadn’t yet told anyone.
Raphael hadn’t made excuses for his behavior that day. What he’d done, he’d done. And he’d taken the fall. He clamped his mouth shut.
This had all the melodrama of an excellent story, Kate thought. “He said what?” she breathed.
“Don’t tell me,” Montiel drawled. “You’re heavy into cop shows.”
Kate blinked. How had he guessed? She almost denied it, but what would be the point? “Books, mostly. There’s a certain element of escapism there.”
“Element? Damn it, can’t you just talk?”
“I am talking!”
“No. You’re giving a lesson in vocabulary!” And he didn’t know why it bothered him so much. Maybe it was just his overall mood. But he doubted it.
“I was just asking a question.” She sniffed.
Raphael found himself answering her—again. “He told me that Anna was the best of the lot. He told me how she screamed. Damn it, he picked her because she was associated with me!”
There was a stretch of silence in the kitchen, drawn out enough to thin the air. Kate’s heart hurtled over a beat. “Anna Lombardo?” One of Miller’s victims, she remembered. Maybe the last. And then Kate understood. She cleared her throat carefully. “You knew Anna.”
“Yeah.” He took a knife from a drawer and cut into the steak. “I knew Anna. We’d been seeing each other.”
“You loved her.” It was, she thought, a heartbreaking story.
But Montiel laughed in a raw sound before he chewed and swallowed. “Not yet.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’d only met her two weeks before she died.” But maybe it could have been something, he thought. They’d never know. Miller had strangled her with piano wire.
“Montiel.”
The voice came from the kitchen door. They both turned sharply, almost guiltily, as though they’d been caught in the act of something they shouldn’t have been doing. It was that man, Kate realized. Plattsmier. And the other one, Fox. Both stepped into the kitchen. Kate watched the three of them confer near the doorway.
Something was happening.
There was a lot of gesturing. Then something changed in Montiel’s expression. His jaw hardened. His eyes went thin, but just before they did, Kate saw them shine like glass.
He turned to her. “Clean up your stuff, Betty Crocker. You’ve got five minutes, then I’m taking you home.”
Kate came off the stool. “I don’t need a ride.”
“Good. Because you’re not getting one.”
Her heart was hammering almost as hard as it had done when she’d found the body. The air in the kitchen felt suddenly humid and heavy, and it made it hard for her to breathe again. “Then I don’t understand what you’re implying.”
“I’m implying that I’ll follow you in my own vehicle.”
“To where?”
“To your home. We just covered that.”
“But it’s not necessary.”
“It is if I’m going with you. I’m not leaving my Explorer here. And it looks as though you’ve got yourself one damned overqualified baby-sitter.”
With that, he threw the fork he had been holding into the sink. It bounced right out again with the force of his strength. Impossibly, it landed prongs-down in a single scallion.
Kate closed her eyes briefly. It was that kind of a night.
Chapter 2
Kate broke all her own rules. She chucked the shells from the oysters Rockefeller into her client’s trash—he was hardly in a position to pass on word of her unprofessionalism. She dumped the rock salt back into its bag without checking off a use on her master list. She did a cursory cleanup and grabbed a wine bottle off the counter on her way out the back door. She paused in the alley and chugged from it.
Then she looked around quickly to make sure no one—heaven forbid, Montiel—had seen her. She was alone.
Everything went out of her. Kate leaned weakly against her panel van. What had happened here tonight? And why was it necessary for that cop to follow her home? Kate could not remember a plot she’d ever read that had involved the authorities baby-sitting a witness, unless that witness had turned State’s evidence. But she didn’t have any evidence to turn.
Suddenly, her heart nosedived into her stomach. Was she actually a suspect? Did they think she had killed that man?
She needed a lawyer.
“Okay, Betty Crocker, lead the way.”
Kate came away from the van quickly as Montiel left the kitchen door and came into the alley. She tucked the wine bottle behind her. “Do I need a lawyer?”
“What for?” He jiggled the handle of her panel van. “Unlock this thing.”
“Absolutely not.”
He turned back to her slowly. There was a streetlight on a nearby corner. It flung mild light into the alley, just enough that she could see something tic at his jaw.
“You don’t want to push me right now.”
Kate held her ground but her voice quavered a little. “I simply want a few explanations before I allow you in my vehicle—and besides, you said you had your own.”
“I do. It’s out on Willings. You’re going to drive me around. And damn it, you’re going to stop elocuting while you do it.”
When she opened her mouth to protest, he came toward her and he did it fast. Kate gave an involuntary cry and took a step in retreat. She brought her hand up to ward him off.
Unfortunately, it was the one with the wine in it.
His gaze flashed to it. “Misdemeanor. Slap on the wrist if you have no priors.”
“What?”
“For stealing the wine. Is that why you wanted a lawyer?”
“I brought the wine!”
“Did you charge McGaffney for it?”
“Of course!”
“Then you’re a criminal if you leave here with it. Unless he gives his permission.”
“He’s dead!” Then she realized that he was deliberately provoking her into forgetting her question. “Why won’t you just talk to me?”
“Because you do it funny.”
“I do not!”
He turned his back to her. “Come on. Drive me around to Willings and give me some vague directions in case I lose you in traffic.”
“Some cop,” she muttered.
A stillness came over him. “Come again?” he said neutrally.
In for a penny, she thought. “Aren’t you trained for this? For tailing people?”
“What I’m trained for,” he said without looking at her, “what I’ve spent fourteen years working my way up in the ranks for, is a hell of a lot more than what I’m doing right now. I’m not happy about that. So if you’re smart, you’ll stop ticking me off.”
Kate knew suddenly that that wouldn’t happen if they stood out here for days. She rubbed him the wrong way, and that made her heart sink in a way that was all too familiar.
“I just want to understand,” she said quietly.
He finally looked at her. “Do you know who that guy was? The dead one?”
“Of course. Phillip McGaffney.”
“Not his name. Who he was.”
“I—” She broke off, took a deep breath. “No.”
“Second in line for the O’Bannon throne.”
“O’Bannon?” She knew the name from somewhere, but couldn’t place it.
“Some say third in line. There are probably a hundred or so gun-wielding idiots in this city who think that Charlie Eagan damn well ought to replace O’Bannon instead. Ten to one, those are the guys who killed McGaffney.”
Kate finally understood what he was talking about, and it almost knocked her legs out from under her. “You’re talking about, like…the mob?”
“I’m talking about like the mob.”
Kate gave up the effort. She sank slowly to sit on the street. “I served dinner to a member of the mob?”
“Don’t lose any sleep over it. They eat just like the rest of us.”
“I served dinner to a member of the mob.” She looked up at him. “The woman?”
“She’s known in these circles, too.”
“I tackled her.”
Though Raphael had thought five minutes ago that he would never smile again, he felt a grin pull at his mouth. “Wish I could have seen that part.”
“She was being stupid.”
“Allegra is known for it.”
“Allegra…” Kate whispered it, giving a name to the very strong, very tall woman who had been trying to fling herself all over Phillip McGaffney’s body. “I don’t feel very well,” she murmured.
Raphael lost the urge to smile. “You’re about to feel worse.”
“Why?”
“The way the department has it figured—and I agree with them—is that something went way wrong here tonight.”
“Then tell me.”
“McGaffney is…was…flamboyant. It wasn’t his style to entertain ladies at home, especially when they look like Allegra. If he was home, he was alone. Everybody knew that. So tonight was out of pattern.”
She still didn’t get it.
“His killer—or killers—didn’t know you or Allegra were there.” He fought the urge to ask what exactly she had been doing there. He hadn’t seen anything in that house that would have required a caterer. But that would come later, after midnight. “We can’t keep a lid on both of you being here. Not indefinitely. The press are vultures. That’s why I’m going to stick close to you for a while until this either blows up or cools down.”
He reached and gave her a hand up. Kate came to her feet unsteadily. “They’ll try to hurt me?”
“Honey, you’re as good as dead unless someone is around to stop it.”
Kate looked at him sharply. When she did, something happened to the streetlight in the distance. It blurred and tilted.
Raphael’s instinct to protect started in his toes. She swayed, and he grabbed her shoulders. “Hey—”
“Don’t touch me.”
Raphael jerked his hands back. Anger drummed behind his eyes, giving him a headache. “That should be no problem.”
“I didn’t…I mean…” Kate trailed off and closed her eyes. Damn him. He had all the compassion, the sensitivity, of a rock. He’d laughed with that other cop in the dining room with a dead man no more than two feet away. She could talk until sunup, and he wouldn’t understand that she felt as though any kindness right now would shatter her.
In all her twenty-eight years, she had never really known fear. Now it made her palms sweat even as everything rational inside her struggled with what he’d just said, picking for some way to convince herself it wasn’t true. You’re as good as dead.
She couldn’t believe any of this.
Kate stepped around him, holding herself together. “I’m going home.”
“And that might be where?”
Did she have a choice? She’d let him tag along, she decided, until she could figure this thing out. “South on Second. The corner of Bainbridge. I rent space in a garage on Bainbridge for the van. It’s called Lucky’s.”
“Not tonight it’s not.”
Kate made a strangled sound.
She went around to the driver’s side of the van. When she got behind the wheel he tapped on the passenger side window. Kate ground her teeth together. She shot the key into the ignition and let the big engine rumble. “See you on Willings,” she muttered. Then she put the van in gear and rolled off, resisting the urge to look at him in the mirror.
Raphael jogged through the town house and out the front door onto Willings Alley. Until this night, until this very moment, he hadn’t known there could be so many facets to his temper. He felt reasonably sure that in the last hour he’d experienced all of them. The little fool! She’d driven around to the main alley by herself like there was no possibility whatsoever that someone could have waited on the corner for her, to end it then and there.
His Explorer waited for him. Raphael jumped behind the wheel with a second to spare before her atrocity of a vehicle lumbered into the alley. She beeped at him and kept on driving. Raphael swore and made an illegal U-turn to follow her. She was the most irritating, stiff-spined, starched, tsking, hardheaded, cop-show-watching, nosy fool he’d met in his fourteen years on this job. And she’d sat on Allegra.
Raphael grabbed the radio handset from his dashboard. “Who’s got Allegra?” he demanded when he got reception and was patched through to the watch commander.
“Vince Mandeleone,” said a disembodied voice.
Mandeleone. Fox’s rookie partner for the month. He wasn’t a rookie to the department, but to the Robbery Homicide Unit. “I’m back with Fox in two hours.” Even Raphael thought he sounded like a jealous lover.
“Yeah, that’s the word,” came the voice soothingly.
“So how come they’re not sending Mandeleone back down?”
“He did some good stuff this last month. They’re keeping him up.”
That was okay. Raphael didn’t want to hurt the kid, he just wanted his own space back. But something stuck in his craw. “They’re letting him question Allegra?”
“Hell, no. I thought you meant who was making sure she doesn’t get whacked over this. Fox is going to spend some time with her first before Mandeleone takes her home and bunks on her sofa.”
“That’ll last one night.”
The voice cackled. They all knew Allegra, by reputation if not by experience.
“Anyway, Fox said to tell you to keep your cell phone with you. He’ll touch base as soon as he’s finished with Allegra.”
“Will do.” Raphael signed off.
He was beginning to get a feel for things here. When Plattsmier had assigned him to the caterer, all he’d heard was his own blood rushing in his ears. But now he could see how things would play out.
In two hours, he and Fox were legit again. They would be running this investigation. Raphael was just going to have to do his part with the rigid little brunette in tow.
She was going to be his personal albatross for a while. There was no getting around that. The commissioner wasn’t going to let bygones be bygones quite yet. But Plattsmier, damn him, had accommodated them all—Raphael and the commish and himself as well. The commissioner would get his extra ounce of Raphael’s blood by saddling him with the witness. And Raphael was on the case so it had a prayer of getting solved.
The panel van tucked into the driveway of a garage just ahead of him. He stopped the Explorer in front of the entrance. A moment later, he saw her heading up the tunnel again, coming toward him on foot. Her head was down and too much of that crazy hair spilled forward to hide her features. Not bad features, he thought grudgingly, as he remembered them. Small, almost delicate. Then his eyes narrowed. For the first time he realized that she was towing a small red wagon behind her, and it was loaded.
Raphael drove a shoulder against the Explorer’s door and flung it open. He left the SUV idling in the street and jogged around it to meet her.
Whatever he had been about to say died in his throat when she looked at him. Her eyes were huge and bleak. They were indigo, he realized, more blue than blank.
“I don’t even know your name.” She whispered it as though it were the saddest thing in the world.
“Montiel.” His voice was hoarse. Probably, he thought, with the restraint it took not to try to comfort her again. Don’t touch me. He never made the same mistake twice.
“No, I meant your first name.”
“Oh. Raphael. Rafe’ll be fine.” Then it struck him. He hadn’t questioned her yet—that was by design. Once he’d gotten the lay of the land from Plattsmier, he’d known he’d do better to wait until midnight. But he hadn’t even asked her name. He opened his mouth, and she cut him off as though reading his mind.
“It’s Kate. Kate Mulhern.”
“Kate.” It was pretty. It made him think of sunflowers and Kansas. Oh, hell, maybe she wasn’t that bad.
She waited for him to offer to take the wagon from her. It was heavy and hard to pull. It would be an overture, she thought, an olive branch of sorts so maybe they could get through this night somewhat amicably until his superiors let him leave her alone again. But he only watched her.
Kate pulled her shoulders back. She moved around him, dragging the wagon.
“So how fast do you think you can run with that thing behind you, Kate Mulhern?” His voice took on an edge again.
“As fast as I have to. But it’s got to come with me. I’m not leaving it in the van, no matter…no matter…” She trailed off without pausing in her march.
What had happened tonight, he finished for her. He couldn’t for the life of him figure out if she was as cold as the moon in January—what kind of woman would have the presence of mind to sit on Allegra after finding a body in her salad?—or if, in fact, she was falling apart. He didn’t have the chance to ask her. She whipped around the corner of the garage entrance with the wagon, out of sight.
Raphael had to run to catch her. She stopped in front of glass doors on the corner. Pale light spilled from a dim lobby. He looked at his Explorer.
“Don’t move an inch until I come back.”
He went to the SUV. He parked it illegally in the nearest space and stuck his PPD card on the dashboard. It would do for the rest of the night.
He grabbed his cell phone and a tape recorder from the glove box and went to where she stood. She yanked open one of the glass doors and pulled the wagon in after her. It started to swing shut again before Raphael followed her, and it almost took off his nose.
He had a spare moment to look around the lobby. There were a handful of hot spots—a lot of fake ferns in one corner that could conceal a man, and a reception desk that someone could easily hide behind. There was no doorman.
Kate was punching the elevator button. He caught up with her.
“What’s through there?” He nodded at a nearby door.
“Stairs.”
“What floor do you live on?”
“The third.”
There were too many ways up, he thought. He didn’t like it.
“The elevator stops running at midnight,” she said, as though reading his mind.
“Sounds like a real witching hour.”
She looked at him quickly, and he thought she might smile. Then the elevator opened, and she simply nodded and towed the wagon inside. Raphael stepped in after her.
The elevator spit them out on the third floor. She moved down a short corridor and thrust a key into the lock of a door.
The apartment was something of a hodgepodge, and it startled him. He’d expected something stark and agonizingly organized. Rigid, maybe stuffy. Instead, there was a lot of wood, none of it matching. An old sideboard sat against one wall—it had been pressed into service as an entertainment center—and an afghan that was the color of the sun was draped casually over the back of the sofa. The rear wall was all windows, open to the summer night. The sounds of the city were close—a horn blared briefly, tires rolled over asphalt, a dog barked somewhere. It felt like a home.
“You live alone?” he asked. “No kids, no husband?” Extra people, he thought, would complicate things.
“No, there’s no one. My roommate moved out in April.”
She pulled the wagon into a tiny kitchen sectioned off from the main room by a breakfast bar. When she looked at him again, her eyes seemed very dark, almost black. She’d left one light on in the living room, but all it did was throw shadows across her face.
“How long are you going to be here?” she asked.
She bit off the ends of her words as though she was in a hurry to get them over with, he thought. But her voice was low, vaguely throaty. Raphael shrugged as though it had touched his skin. “I don’t know.”
“You’re sleeping on the sofa.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
That stung, even knowing, as Kate did all too well, that she was not the kind of woman who stirred men to passion. “I meant,” she said, “that this is a one-bedroom unit.”
“And I meant that the sofa’s just fine with me.”
Her hands were shaking again. Kate looked at them, then she fisted them on the counter. “You’re waiting to question me until after midnight, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
Kate looked at a mantel clock that sat on the sideboard turned entertainment center. Healthy green plants were piled on either side of it. She took a deep, fortifying breath. “Then I’d better put on some coffee.”
Chapter 3
The coffee was good. It was rich and dark, the way he liked it. After an hour, Raphael agreed to another pot, as much to give her something to do as for the fact that he needed the caffeine.
He watched her unload the red wagon and put things away, then rearrange it all in the cupboards and drawers. When she was done, every spice bottle faced forward, its label visible. He felt his eyes bug a little as he observed the process, and something happened to his blood pressure. Then finally the clock on the window seat began to chime midnight.
Her shoulder blades shifted under that starched white cotton as though she was bracing herself. “Okay, let’s get this over with. I’m tired.”
He wouldn’t argue with her on that one. Raphael leaned forward to take the tiny tape recorder from his jeans pocket and put it on the coffee table.
She cleared her throat carefully. “I’ll ask you again. Am I a witness or a suspect?”
“You’re a witness unless you say something that would indicate otherwise.”
“What if I lawyer up?”
It happened again, yet another facet of temper. This one was a small man standing inside each of Raphael’s temples, battering with tiny, hot fists. “Lawyer up,” he repeated.
“Ask for a lawyer.”
“I know what you meant.” He clenched his jaw. “How about if you leave the cop jargon to me?”
“Fine.” Kate dropped onto the sofa opposite the small love seat he’d chosen. She clasped her hands together and bracketed them with her knees. Her eyes widened as he went through the routine for the tape—his ID, who he was interviewing, the location and the time.
He thought, in spite of himself, that she really did have beautiful eyes. The slant of light from the fringed lamp made them look almost black again, and they shone.
“Okay. First question. What were you supposed to be catering tonight?”
Kate blinked at him and said nothing.
“Care to have me repeat the question?”
“Of course not. I heard you. You just never struck me as stupid.”
Raphael turned the tape off with a deliberate snap. “Can we leave the personal opinions out of this?”
“I wasn’t—”
“Just answer my questions!” He lowered his voice. “Like you would if you were in one of those books you said you liked. You know, the ones where they lawyer up.”
“Then you might try questioning me like they would in those books. What do you think I was catering? It was food. You ate some of it.”
More tiny fists, Raphael thought. Boom-boom-boom at his temples. With a careful, precise motion, he turned the recorder on again. “There was no party in that house tonight. What did McGaffney need a caterer for?”
“Allegra, I would imagine. I didn’t ask. It’s none of my business, except in the respect that it affects what I serve and how I serve it.”
Raphael pressed his thumbs against the little men inside his head. “Ms. Mulhern. I’ll ask again. What were you catering?”
Kate flopped against the sofa cushions, looking at him disbelievingly. “Filets with orange béarnaise sauce for the entree. The appetizer was oysters Rockefeller, followed by a hearts-of-palm salad. Well, you saw what he did to that.” Raphael reached for the tape again, and she hurried on. “We never got to dessert, but I had pears in a caramelized brandy sauce for that course. Is that what you wanted to know?”
“All this for two people?” Raphael clarified. Something in his jaw ticked again.
“That’s what I do.”
“You cater for two people.”
“That’s my niche. Otherwise, I’d be just like every other caterer in Philadelphia. I needed to do something different if I was going to stand out, make my mark.” She shrugged. “I’ve gone for as many as dinner for six, but then it starts negating my purpose.”
Raphael began to understand. “So you do take-out dinners.”
Kate stiffened. “Of course not. Restaurants do takeout. But what do you get? Food in little cartons that someone has to reheat—”
“And then it’s stale.”
She nodded urgently as she would at a clever child. “That’s it exactly. And someone has to be in the kitchen to do all that, to spoon it all out and put it on the table. But I cater.”
“You bring it over and spoon it out and put in on the table.”
He might have just suggested that she shot McGaffney herself. She pulled her spine straight again. Somewhere Raphael thought he heard fingernails scraping down a blackboard.
“I prepare on the premises,” she said stiffly.
“You took all this food over there and cooked it for McGaffney, and served it.”
“Yes. I do all the elegance and service and variety of eating out, but in the privacy and comfort of one’s own home.”
“So how much did this cost him?”
“Two hundred and eighty seven dollars. Plus tax.”
Raphael felt his brows climb his forehead. “McGaffney paid three hundred dollars to have dinner at home with Allegra Denise?”
“He did unless his check bounces. What’s wrong?” She didn’t like his expression.
“Why?” he said, almost to himself. “Why would he do that? Did he call you himself to set this up?”
“I don’t remember. But I can tell you in a minute.”
She got up and disappeared down a short hallway. Raphael waited, wondering. Why hadn’t McGaffney just taken Allegra out, especially for that kind of money? Obviously, he had wanted to be alone with her. But why?
Sex came readily to mind. But knowing Allegra, McGaffney would have gotten that regardless. So he must have had something important to discuss with her. Inside word on the Eagan clan?
Kate came back with a notebook. “He called me himself,” she said, waving it at him.
Raphael nodded. “When?”
“Two days ago. On Wednesday at three forty-seven p.m.”
“You wrote down the time?”
“Of course.”
“Why?”
Why not? There was no specific reason for it, but it didn’t hurt to do, and who knew when she might need the information, like now? She stared at him without answering.
Raphael looked at her a moment too long. She made a good witness, but her ingrained sense of perfection was irritating the hell out of him. “Did he say why he wanted to engage your services?”
She seemed to think about it fiercely. “No.”
“Nothing,” Raphael clarified.
“He just said he was having a lady over.”
“Did he say where he had gotten word of your business?”
“No, but I had a great review in the newspaper in June. Ever since then, I’ve been doing four or five dinners a week. I’ve even had to cut back on my hours at the diner.”
“You cook at a diner, too?”
She nodded.
“Why? If you’re doing five of these dinners a week, you’re knocking back maybe fifteen hundred dollars, right?”
“Wrong. That’s before costs. And paying the help. And taxes.”
“Who helped you tonight?”
“No one.”
“Then what does your help do?”
Kate sat back and rubbed her forehead. “Four out of five clients call already knowing what they want. You know, they’ll request lobster or…or just something specific. They call with these silly, preconceived notions of what a gourmet meal should be. If I have to cook to their prerequisites, I can’t always orchestrate it so that I can do the whole thing myself. I can’t be serving if I need to be in the kitchen doing something to whatever’s simmering there. On those occasions, I pay a second pair of hands to serve.”
“How many employees do you have?”
“Two now. They’re on call. If one can’t do it, the other one generally can. Actually, I just hired Beth four days ago.”
Raphael’s antennae twitched. That was convenient. It would bear some looking into. “Beth who?”
“Beth Olivetti.”
“Who’s your other employee?”
“Janaya Thomas. She’s been with me for about two months now.”
“But no one was with you tonight?”
“No. I just told you that. McGaffney gave me carte blanche to prepare whatever I wanted so I could streamline the meal.”
“Okay. Let’s move on to that. To what you did tonight.”
Kate nodded, sitting forward again. She didn’t entirely understand all his questions, but she was beginning to enjoy this—in a matter of speaking. It was intriguing, she admitted, watching him work through what had happened. “I didn’t hear anything.”
His eyes narrowed. “Let me ask the questions, okay?”
“But that was what you were going to ask next, right?”
It had been, but he’d be damned if he’d say so.
“Anyway, I didn’t. I just took the steaks to the dining room and there he was. Splat in the salad.”
“No gunshot.”
“No.”
The killer had used a silencer then, Raphael thought. But she’d been right there in the kitchen, through a solitary door. “What about a…like, pffting sound?”
She thought about it. “I didn’t hear anything like that. But then, there was the matter of the dog.” As soon as the words left her, Kate felt her face go scarlet.
Raphael sat forward, his eyes narrowing sharply. “What dog?”
Kate got to her feet unsteadily. She looked warily at the door, where the little beast had once slept religiously whenever Shawna had gone out. Love, murder and mayhem. Belle had trailed those things behind her like a banner. And she had also saved Shawna’s life.
As she had saved Kate’s tonight.
It had been Belle, Kate realized. Because if she had taken those steaks to the dining room—the first steaks, twelve and a half minutes earlier—she could very well have walked in on the killer. McGaffney’s skin had still been warm when she’d felt for his pulse. He hadn’t been dead long.
Her heart caught, and Kate hit her chest with her fist to start it again. “Uh, I had just finished the steaks,” she explained. “The first steaks, that is. There was a crash. She…this dog…came in through the back door I’d left open. She got up on the center island somehow and stole a steak and knocked one of my plates over. I had to cook two new ones.”
Raphael frowned. “A dog came in and stole a steak.”
“Correct.” She really bit that word off.
“Did McGaffney have a dog?”
“Not that he mentioned.” She bit her lip. “I don’t think it was his.”
“So where did it come from?”
“I just told you that. The back door.”
“Uninvited?”
“Well, I certainly didn’t offer her a nine-dollar-a-pound tenderloin!”
“Maybe it smelled the food.” Raphael frowned. There was more to this, he realized. Unless he badly missed his guess, something really bothered Kate Mulhern about this dog. “Go on.”
Kate shrugged meticulously. “There’s nothing left to say. The whole thing set me behind twelve and a half minutes.”
“Knock it off,” he growled, deciding to get a little rough with her.
Kate flinched a little. “Knock what off?”
“You’re hiding something.”
“I am not!”
“Honey, I’ve been asking questions like this for a lot of years and I know evasion when I see it.” Her eyes wouldn’t quite meet his, he thought. Then she surprised him.
“Okay!” she cried. “Okay. You want to know the truth? I know that dog.”
It wasn’t what he had been expecting. “So you’re saying what—it followed you there or something?”
“Or something.” Then she gave a giddy laugh that bordered on the hysterical. “Four months ago, my roommate was walking to work. Some homeless woman stopped her and gave her a dog. That dog. And while Shawna was trying to figure out what to do with it, she was mugged.”
“Yeah?” Raphael frowned, wondering what this had to do with anything.
“And Gabriel Marsden rescued her.”
“Gabriel Marsden, the writer? The ex-cop?”
“The one who was on the run from that crazed Broadway producer at the time. The producer who was trying to kill him.”
Raphael was starting to get it. A little. He remembered the story. It had captivated newsmongers for broadcasts on end.
“Shawna ended hooking up with him and they spent the better part of two weeks running for their lives.” Kate took a deep breath. “With the same dog I saw tonight.”
Raphael felt dazed. This was turning into the oddest witness interview he’d ever conducted. Why didn’t that surprise him?
“Shawna named her Belle. Belle saved their lives—a couple of times, actually. And then she just disappeared into Manhattan once Gabriel and Shawna had brought the killer down.”
More cop jargon, Raphael thought, wincing.
Kate didn’t tell him that Shawna and Gabriel had become convinced that the Chihuahua was…well, some kind of an angel. “Anyway,” she finished quickly, getting back to McGaffney, “when I went out there the first time, with the appetizers, McGaffney and Allegra were just sitting there talking. And when I took those plates back, I thought they might be getting, well, tipsy.”
“Tipsy,” Raphael repeated. Another word he rarely heard in normal conversation.
“They’d gone through one bottle of the wine already. His glass was empty.”
He didn’t want to admit that her powers of observation were extraordinary. But she must have picked up on something in his expression. Kate shrugged.
“It’s my job. I keep trying to gauge how things are going, you know, to pick up on any little telltale signs. I still feel a little anxious about all this. Success isn’t all that comfortable to me yet.” Then, for the first time since he had met her, she smiled.
The reflex was crooked, a little self-deprecating. And it changed her face. He realized for the first time that there was usually something hard and determined about her jaw, and that it was part of what had been irritating him from the moment he’d found her perched on Allegra’s back. But when she smiled, everything changed. There was a dimple at the left corner of her mouth—just one, without a matching counterpart. She looked wistful and soft.
He cleared his throat. He didn’t want her to have a dimple. And if she did, then he damned well didn’t want to notice it. “What about the next time you went to the dining room?”
“That would have been to take them their salads. And another bottle of wine.”
“And after that?”
“I went back to get their salad plates. She was gone that time.”
“Gone where?”
“He said to ‘the little girl’s room.”’ Her expression told what she thought of that particular euphemism. “I took her salad—he wanted to keep his. I went back to the kitchen to finish up with the steaks, and…” She trailed off.
The dog, Raphael remembered. Then when she’d finally gone back after that, McGaffney had been dead. “So he was killed between the time you went to pick up the salad plates and the time you took the entrees out.”
Kate was subdued. “Yes.”
“If we could nail down just how many minutes passed—”
“We can. I served the steaks medium to medium rare, at McGaffney’s request. They were two inches thick. Twelve and a half minutes in the broiler for the first set, then the dog did her thing, and it took me twelve and a half minutes to do two more steaks.”
“Twenty-five minutes.” He didn’t know whether to be irritated with her again or amazed.
“Actually, less than that. I do most courses ten minutes apart. So I went to get the salad plates when the first steaks had been in the broiler for two and a half minutes.”
Raphael stared at her, figuring out the time of death. She’d called 911 at eight-eighteen. Therefore, McGaffney had still been alive, by her calculations, at approximately seven fifty-five. Give or take thirty seconds.
She was a very dangerous woman to have left alive.
“Other than that, I was in the kitchen the whole time,” she said. “I try to remain as unobtrusive as possible. So all I can tell you for sure is that the killer didn’t come in through the back door.” She frowned. “Are we done?”
For the first time, Raphael saw violet smudges beneath her eyes. He was reasonably sure they hadn’t been there half an hour ago. “We’re done. For now.”
“Good.” She looked at the mantel clock as she got up and headed for the kitchen. “I have to get up in five hours.”
He didn’t like the sound of that. In fact, it sounded a lot like an alarm was going to go off somewhere in this apartment at roughly six o’clock in the morning. Raphael followed her with his eyes. “What for?”
“I work at the diner from seven to eleven. The breakfast rush.”
“Not tomorrow, you don’t.”
He should have recognized the warning signs by now. The way her shoulder blades shifted. The way she turned to him and stared.
“I can’t call in on a morning shift. They won’t have time to get anyone to replace me.”
Raphael came off the love seat. “What if you were sick?”
“I don’t get sick.”
“What, you’re Superwoman?”
She sniffed again. “No. I’m just reliable.”
“Well, get over it.”
She took a step toward him. “I will not. I have a life!”
“Not for the foreseeable future, you don’t.”
“I work!”
“So do I.” He was getting angry again. “You make fifteen hundred dollars a week! What the hell do you need a diner job for?”
“I don’t make fifteen hundred a week! I told you, there are costs. I’ve got employees to pay!”
That still left her clearing probably eight or nine hundred a week. This was insane.
“And I’ve got an obligation,” she added.
“You work a second job you don’t need because of an obligation?”
“Yes. No. Well, not entirely.”
She made that sound again. It wasn’t a sniff, not exactly. It was more a sharp intake of breath.
“I work two jobs to save money for my restaurant.” And it galled her to say so, to let him in on…well, her dream. But his expression turned thoughtful, and he surprised her.
“Honey, my guess is that you might be better off just doing what you’re doing.”
The thought had occurred to her, too, just recently, since business had picked up so radically. Dinner For Two had been intended as a means to an end. But then, she’d never really expected it to take off the way it had.
She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of agreeing with him.
Kate turned off the light in the kitchen, then went and sat on the sofa near the pile of blankets and pillows she’d put out for him earlier. He sat beside her. Not too close, she noticed with that achy stirring in the area of her chest again. Well, she was used to that.
She looked at him out of the corner of her eye in the thin darkness. His eyes made something curl in the pit of her stomach. He was gazing thoughtfully at nothing, seeming to see only his own thoughts. But they were good eyes, she thought grudgingly, even when they hardened, like now.
Kate pulled her gaze away. “Just tell the press I didn’t see anything. Then it won’t be necessary for you to watch over me. These…these mobsters will read about it in the paper, then you can go on your way and I’ll go mine.”
Raphael laughed. “Sure. That’ll work.”
She drew herself up indignantly. “I fail to see why not. It’s the truth.”
“You think these guys are of a mind to say, well, if the cops say it’s so, then it must be so?”
Put that way, it sounded ridiculous. “I don’t want you here! I don’t want you underfoot. You’re going to…to complicate everything!”
“That’s me, honey, one big complication.” Raphael got to his feet again, feeling absurdly burned, just as he’d begun to feel sorry for her again. “All right, let me tell you how this is going to be. In five hours, you’re going to call the diner. You’re going to tell them you’re not going to be in for a while, days at least. Take an unplanned vacation.”
Kate opened her mouth to argue, then she closed it again prudently.
“Then you’re going to stay figuratively handcuffed to me while I work this case, while I figure this out. Because that’s about the only way you’re going to get your precious life back. At the moment, I’m the only prayer you’ve got.”
It made her stomach roll over queasily. But Kate rallied. “Your job is to watch over me, correct? Isn’t that what Mr. Plattsmier said? That means you follow me. So I suggest you get some sleep so you’ll be on your toes in order to do that. I’m a busy woman.”
Kate stood from the sofa and walked toward the hallway. She tried not to hurry, as if she wanted to escape his reaction. As she passed the sideboard and the little lamp, she reached and flicked it out, plunging him into darkness.
“Good night.” Then she went to her bedroom and slammed the door shut behind her. Purely for the satisfaction of it, she threw the lock just as hard.
Chapter 4
The exclamation of Kate’s bedroom door shot through Raphael’s head like a bullet. His accommodations sent his mood spiraling downward even more.
He bunked down on the sofa to find that there was a popped spring in the middle of her center cushion. In the thin darkness, it took on the proportions of the tire of a truck. The darkness was incomplete because a yellow neon sign pulsed right outside her living room window and wouldn’t let shadows gather. Raphael considered closing the blinds but the August breeze was like the breath of an aging dowager—warm, fitful and without substance. Scant as it was, if he blocked it, he would suffocate.
Kate Mulhern didn’t seem to own an air conditioner. Or if she did, she was hogging it for herself in her ramparted bedroom.
Raphael rolled, putting his back to the window, and punched his fist into the pillow. Then his cell phone rang. He sat up, grabbed it from the coffee table and snarled into it.
“Are we having fun yet?” his partner asked.
“She’s a lunatic!” Raphael considered adding a string of adjectives but his mind went blank. He felt that overwhelmed by his situation.
“And here I’d thought she’d be just your type,” Fox drawled.
“Yeah? What type’s that?”
“Breathing.” It was a low blow. They both knew the reason behind Raphael’s somewhat frenetic dating patterns this past month. “It wasn’t your fault,” Fox said a silent moment later.
Raphael’s tone turned caustic. “You taunt a killer, you can’t expect him to strike back, is that it?”
“You didn’t taunt him. We were closing in on him. Damn it, Rafe, you’re smarter than this. What are you going to do, spend the rest of your life never going out with a lady more than once because some scumbag might decide to make her pay for her association with you?”
That was pretty much exactly what he had decided. There was no doubt in Raphael’s heart that Anna Lombardo’s blood was on his hands. Gregg Miller had targeted her, had chosen her, had strangled that calm, cool light right out of her eyes because of him. To warn him off. But Raphael was damned tired of talking about Anna tonight.
“What did Allegra have to say?” he asked.
Fox sighed, but he changed the subject. “Not a word worth repeating. She saw nothing, heard nothing, smelled nothing. She says she was in the bathroom and when she came back, Phil was dead.”
It was pretty much what Kate had said. Raphael got up from the sofa. His stomach was rumbling. He headed for her kitchen.
“How about why McGaffney opted to dine at home tonight?” he asked finally. “Did Allegra have any insight on that?”
“Sure,” Fox said. “Something about her knickers.”
“That’s a crock.”
“It is. He wanted to ply her for information about what Charlie Eagan’s boys have been up to. We know that. But we’ll never get her to say so.”
Raphael flicked on the kitchen light. He opened Kate’s refrigerator, then stared.
“You still there?” came Fox’s voice.
“She’s got her leftovers labeled.”
He saw a plastic container that said Beef. Raphael grabbed it and pried the lid off. Red and rare. He found bread, then horseradish sauce in a small glass jar that said Horseradish Sauce. He made himself a sandwich. As an afterthought, he grabbed a carton of milk from the refrigerator, as well. He opened a cupboard door. Where the hell were her glasses? He found metal utensils that looked like they could have been used in the Inquisition, but nothing resembling an object that one might drink out of. Disgusted with Kate’s orderliness, he swigged from the carton.
“Did Allegra mention a dog?” he asked, swallowing.
“A what?”
“A dog.”
“No,” Fox said slowly, “I can’t say that she did. Why?”
“There was one there tonight. Seems it wandered in through the back door while the lady was cooking. It stole a steak off one of her plates and beat it.”
“A dog,” Fox repeated.
“Right.”
“You’re thinking that it was some kind of a setup to divert the caterer’s attention?”
“Well, it’s weird, what with the timing and all.”
“We’ve come across some far-fetched things over the years, but I think that’s reaching.”
Fox was probably right. “Damn, this is good.” Raphael swallowed another bite of the sandwich and marveled. Then his voice darkened. “Let’s wrap this thing up, pal. I don’t know how many days of Betty Crocker I can stand.”
“I’ll make the rounds of Eagan’s men in the morning.”
“I’ll take McGaffney’s boys and see what I can find out there.”
“Not to bring up a sore subject, but what about the caterer?”
Raphael licked the last crumb of sandwich from his finger. “She’s coming with me.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“Damned right it is.”
Suddenly, the last of the caffeine rush from her coffee left him and Raphael was bone-tired. “I’ll check in with you at midday,” he said and disconnected.
He hit the light switch in the kitchen and flopped down on the sofa again. He stuck the whisper-thin pillow beneath his backside to provide some minimal padding against the torture spring. He covered his eyes with his forearm to shut out the pulsing yellow light, then, instantly, he slept.
The next thing he heard was her screeching.
Kate had not ever known that a man could snore in such a fashion. Oh, she’d heard it spoken of, joked about. But the constant, deep sound that came from her living room all night was beyond the realm of her wildest imagination.
Sometime just before dawn she got up to stuff an extra blanket against the crack beneath her bedroom door to buffer the sound. It helped a little, but she was still agonizingly aware that he was out there. He was invading her life, her world, her plans. Pervading everything that was precious to her, making her stay home from work. Or at least he was trying to. It remained to be seen who would be the victor in that little battle.
“Damn you, Phillip McGaffney,” she muttered just as the alarm went off.
Kate rolled over and slapped her palm down on top of it. Then she was instantly contrite. Phillip McGaffney was dead. What kind of problems did she have compared to that?
Then a particularly resonant rumbling came from under the blanket beneath her door. At least McGaffney had not been forced to spend the night with Raphael Montiel chainsawing away on his living room sofa, Kate thought sourly. It was just possible the man had gotten the better end of the deal.
At least Montiel had left her alone. He hadn’t—
Hadn’t what? A thin laugh escaped Kate’s throat. He hadn’t been suddenly overwhelmed with lust for the single woman just beyond the locked and blanket-bulkheaded door? Not likely, Kate thought. He’d spent most of their interview the night before watching her with those green eyes squinting ever so slightly. Like she was a bug or a microbe on a slide, something he couldn’t quite identify. He had not once glanced at her with anything resembling a gleam in those eyes.
“It doesn’t matter,” she muttered, getting to her feet, swaying slightly from fatigue.
Kate knew her assets, and she also knew that a man like Montiel would never appreciate any of them. She’d tangled with his type before—a man with that same lazy, confident sense of power—and she had been left almost literally at the altar by him in favor of a flighty, vapid, though admittedly physically perfect exotic dancer. She swiped a hand over her head to smooth her wild curls. Then she went grimly to the closed bedroom door.
The problem was that she knew relatively little about men, she realized. She’d been engaged for those six short months and had come out of that experience even more perplexed by the species than she had been before. She did know, however, that men didn’t have to be particularly swept away by attraction to…well, to…want it. And mornings—well, men often felt particularly amorous in the morning, and it was not so much desire that got them that way but testosterone.
Kate eased back from the bedroom door. Better to be safe than sorry, she decided.
She retreated to her closet, then she went to her dresser, gathering clothing. She was not going to bounce back and forth between the bedroom and the bath with a towel wrapped around her. It was best to set a precedent, she thought, right here, right now. Who knew how much longer this situation would be necessary?
After she showered and had gotten dressed she tiptoed into the living room, past the sofa, then she stopped and stared. He was laying on his back. His right arm was flung over his eyes.
He had taken his shirt off.
“Oh, my,” Kate murmured. The arm heaved over his face was corded and looked strong. She hadn’t realized last night just how…well, muscled he was.
He hadn’t used the sheet she’d given him. He still had his jeans on, and she was very grateful for that. But the snap was open, and the dark golden hair on his chest tapered down, narrowing into a V until it disappeared beneath the denim. Kate took in a deep breath and ran a finger under her collar. She took a step backward from the sofa, then two. Coffee. She needed coffee. Now.
She squared her shoulders and turned for the kitchen. Then she stared at her counter, and a sound of pure distress caught in her throat.
There was a carton of milk sitting out. A whole half gallon. And it was the good stuff, too, not two percent, not skim, but the carton she used in recipes. Her gaze flew around the kitchen. She knew every move he had made by the time she breathed again.
There were rye crumbs on the counter. His cell phone sat beside them. She hurried around the breakfast bar and yanked open the refrigerator door. Within another thirty seconds, she knew that both her roast beef and the horseradish sauce had been decimated.
That didn’t particularly bother her. She cooked for others to enjoy, after all. But the waste infuriated her—a perfectly good half gallon of milk!
“What have you done?”
Her cry went through Raphael’s unconscious like a jet breaking the sound barrier. It boomed his heart into sudden overdrive. He rolled and groped beneath the sofa for the gun he had tucked there after removing it from his waistband last night. When he landed on his feet, he was armed. “What?”
Astonishment—and maybe just a little fear—punched the air right out of Kate’s chest. “Put that away!”
Raphael looked around. There was no one in the apartment but them. “What?” he asked again.
“That…that weapon!”
Raphael looked down at himself. Sleep tried to cling to his mind like a sticky spiderweb, making his thoughts track too slowly. “It’s been called a lot of things but—”
“The gun! Are you crazy? What kind of person are you?”
Raphael finally came fully awake. “Me? What the hell did you scream for?”
“I want a new baby-sitter.” She turned her back on him smartly—he doubted if a trained cadet could pivot quite that cleanly—and went to the kitchen. She grabbed the telephone on the wall.
“Your hair’s sticking straight up from your head.”
Kate gave a cry and dropped the phone. She plastered both hands to her skull. Of course it was. She’d stuck her fingers into it in dismay when she’d seen the mess he’d made of her kitchen.
She smoothed her hair frantically, then was appalled to realize that she even cared what he thought. She dropped her hands.
One wild curl had escaped her effort, he realized. It made him itch to touch it, to see if it would wrap around his finger with a life of its own. He was losing his mind.
“I don’t want you here,” she said.
“Yeah. We’ve been all through that.” He snapped his jeans and tucked the gun into them at his back.
Kate struggled for reason. “I understand that the authorities think I’m in danger, but I want them to send someone else to protect me. Clearly, this isn’t going to work.”
Something vaguely uncomfortable gripped Raphael’s stomach. He told himself it was just the way she talked. It was really starting to get to him. Clearly… Then again, he’d rarely been vetoed by any woman, for any reason on any job.
“Why not?” he heard himself ask.
“You’re…you’re…” Kate crossed her arms over her chest and wished he would put a shirt on. “Chaos,” she finished.
“I’m chaos? You screamed.”
“You wasted a whole half gallon of milk while I slept! And you woke up and pointed a gun at me!”
“I thought you were in danger!”
“Why on earth would you think that?”
“Because you were caterwauling!”
This time he could almost predict what she would do before it happened. That sniff. The immediate hoisting of her shoulders. “I was not caterwauling.”
“You sounded like a cat with its tail trapped in a door.”
Color flooded her cheeks. Raphael watched the phenomenon.
Then, finally, for the first time, he noticed the way she was dressed. She wore khaki slacks, socks and neatly laced sneakers. This was topped by a white turtleneck, albeit a sleeveless one. Except for her arms, every inch of skin from her chin on down was covered, laced, pressed, creased. She looked as though she had been up for hours already.
Raphael glanced at his watch. It was only twenty after six.
He scrubbed his face with his hands. He needed a shower and a shave. Of course, he had nothing with him to shave with, and she definitely didn’t seem the type to keep an extra razor on hand for unexpected male guests. Let her call Plattsmier, he thought. The department was full of by-the-book rookies who would put her milk carton away after they drank from it, and they’d both be a hell of a lot happier if one of them was assigned to her. But Raphael doubted if any of them had ticked off the commissioner just lately, or if they knew a blessed thing about Philadelphia’s organized crime netherworld.
Nope, he thought, he was stuck with her.
“Call in to your diner,” he said. “Tell them you won’t be in. I’m going to take a shower.”
“No.”
He’d already turned away from her. Now he looked back. She was holding the milk carton in front of her in both hands, as though it were a smoking gun.
“We talked about this last night,” she said, drawing herself up again. “I have responsibilities. I intend to meet them.”
Raphael felt his blood pressure creeping upward again and it wasn’t even yet six-thirty in the morning. Then he realized that there was always more than one way to skin a cat.
He thought of her labeled food containers. Of her scheduling diary with the times of calls noted down. “Yeah? Counting the one to your commonwealth?”
Kate frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“You’re one of two prime witnesses in a murder investigation. Seems to me you have a certain responsibility to the good people of Pennsylvania, too.” Unless he badly missed his guess, this was one woman who had never missed a chance to vote. Hell, she probably wrote her comments in the margins of the ballot.
“I fail to see—”
“You’re bait.”
“I’m what?”
“Bait. You’re alive. You might have seen something. In all likelihood, someone is going to come after you in an effort to remedy that problem. When it happens, I’m going to nail his—”
“Spare me the profanity,” she said quickly.
“Backside to the wall.”
“I take it self-confidence is not a problem for you.”
“No. Not when it comes to my work.”
That quelled her. A new flatness had come to his tone. It was unapologetic and brooked no argument. Kate felt like she was somehow losing this discussion. “What does that have to do with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania?”
“The long and short of it is that by cooperating with me, you’ll be helping to take a criminal off the streets.”
She cocked her brows. It irritated the hell out of him. But Raphael was winning here, and he knew it.
“Let me get this straight,” she said. “A killer comes after me, and you’re there beside me so you can nail his—”
“—backside.”
“—to the wall.”
“Right.”
“And no other officer could do this quite so well.”
“I’m not an officer. I’m a detective. Big difference.”
“I beg your pardon.”
Raphael smiled graciously. “Bottom line, honey, you’re stuck with me if you want to see justice served.”
Kate nodded thoughtfully.
She should have been fighting it a bit more, he thought. This victory was feeling a little too easy.
“Okay,” she said finally. “Go take your shower. I’ll make us some breakfast. Then I’ll let you come to the diner with me so you can play watchdog.”
“Damn it—”
“Stop swearing.”
“Get used to it.”
“I will not.”
“You’re not getting it here! I need to look for this guy! I can’t do that from a diner!”
“You just said he was going to come to me.”
“He will. He’ll try. I want to nail him first! I can’t do that if I’m baby-sitting you!”
“That’s your job!”
“It’s my assignment. I can do it my own damned way. And my way is to keep an eye on you while I try to unravel this mess.”
“Not without my consent.”
He was going to kill her, Raphael thought. End of problem.
He’s going to kill me, Kate thought. She saw his hands clench at his sides, and he did have that gun tucked behind him somewhere. She took a judicious step backward until her spine came in contact with the refrigerator.
She did not want to die. She most definitely did want someone good watching her back until this was over. But that only made it doubly important that they set some ground rules here.
“Look,” they said simultaneously.
Kate waved a hand. “Go ahead. You first. You will anyway.”
“We need a plan here,” Raphael replied.
This time her brows positively arched. “A plan? You want to make a plan?”
“Right.”
“Such as?”
“If I had one, we wouldn’t need one.”
“Unless, of course, it was diametrically opposed to my own.” His eyes went to slits. Kate held a hand up, palm out. “Okay, okay. Go ahead. You were saying?”
“Call in to the diner for one morning until we can figure out how we’re going to do this.”
She hated, positively hated to admit it, but it made sense.
“They’ll understand!” he argued at her silence. “A man dropped dead into your dinner plate last night!”
“Actually, it was a salad plate.”
“What the hell difference does it make?” he shouted.
Kate flinched. “One morning?”
“And then we’ll take it from there.”
Kate knew, somehow, that it was the best she was going to get. Besides, she saw an advantage to letting him win this one. It was a matter of give and take, she reasoned. Dinner For Two had an engagement this evening. Talking him into letting her do both seemed like something of a long shot. She’d give in on the less important of the two issues. The dinner engagement was something they could get into later.
“Okay.” She put the milk down and reached for the phone. But she didn’t punch in the number right away. She watched him turn away and head for the hall, still shirtless. She took in those broad, bare shoulders. They moved nicely with his stride, with that grace that was all male. She contemplated the movement of muscle beneath skin that looked like pale bronze. Kate put the phone down again quickly and rubbed her palms on her khakis to dry them.
He paused at the door to the hall. “You wouldn’t want to have kept that milk anyway.”
“Why not?” she asked, startled.
“Because I drank right out of the carton.”
He heard her make that strangling sound again. Raphael went on toward the bathroom, imagining her expression, grinning to himself. Regardless of the fact that he didn’t want the prize, winning felt damned good, he decided.
Chapter 5
Regardless of her many irritating traits, the woman could flat-out cook, Raphael realized half an hour later. He’d come back from his shower to find huevos rancheros waiting for him. He didn’t know how she had managed to do it so quickly, then he thought of her labeled refrigerator containers. Under the circumstances, they didn’t annoy him quite as much.
Raphael dug into breakfast. Spices rolled over his taste buds, caressing them like a lover. There was the bite of the chilies, perfect enough to make him want to groan with pleasure. He almost felt guilty for using, and probably ruining, the razor he’d found in her shower.
He pushed his plate away and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Listen, about that shower I just took—” But he was interrupted by a knock at her door.
The sound galvanized Raphael. It wasn’t a conscious decision to shove his stool back and have his gun in his hand, the safety off, before his next heartbeat. It was fourteen year’s worth of ingrained reaction to trouble. It was the image of Anna Lombardo’s crime scene photos that flashed across his mind’s eye before he took his first step toward the door.
“What are you doing?” Kate cried, horrified.
“Go to the bedroom. Now.”
“I will not!” It was the second time in as many hours that he’d pulled that gun out! At first she’d been merely astonished at his lightning reflexes. But now he was waving the weapon around again like he was some kind of Wild West vigilante, and her heart threatened to stop entirely.
When he turned to her, there was something dangerous about the way he moved. Each motion was contained, violence restrained—not at all like he’d been in Mr. McGaffney’s kitchen last night.
“Go to the bedroom,” he said again, every syllable a warning.
Panic seized Kate by the throat, but she held her ground. “I’ll do no such thing.”
Then, suddenly, she was furious. Kate marched up to him and stuck her face close to his. “Stop this! Stop it right now! You’re running around here like Billy the Kid! It was a knock on the damned door, not a gunshot!”
“Did you just swear?”
Kate reared back. “What?”
“I could have sworn I just heard you swear.”
“So what?”
“What was all that earlier about watching my language? What, underneath all that proper and practical surface you’re really a wild woman? That could make these next few days a lot more interesting.”
It happened instantly, a feeling Kate had never experienced before in her life. It was complex, tangled and frightening. Too many things happened to her simultaneously. Her breath shortened in the same moment something warm swept upward from the very core of her. She felt her skin burn, her heart pump, her adrenaline race.
Was he flirting with her?
Then he turned away. The moment was gone.
“If you won’t leave the room,” he said, “then at least stand over there behind the breakfast bar where you can duck if you have to.”
Kate found herself moving obediently on legs that wobbled. Then she got a grip on herself. “Please. I have friends,” she said weakly, turning back. “I’ve got associates. I have a job tonight. It could be a delivery. You can’t answer the door with that…that thing, ready to shoot somebody.”
He looked at her sharply. “What job tonight?”
Kate bit her tongue. It wasn’t time for that particular battle.
“Hello?” came a female voice through the door. “Katie, are you in there?”
Relief flooded Kate. It was Shawna, her old roommate.
She swept past him, and Raphael put an arm out to stop her. She ducked under it neatly, or maybe he just hadn’t acted quickly enough. He felt a little off balance.
He frowned after her as she rushed to the door. At the sound of the voice from outside, her features went soft with happiness. Her mouth seemed fuller when she smiled. That single dimple came back, winking at him. Raphael realized with a jolt that when she was relaxed, she wasn’t just pretty. She was knee-buckling appealing. He noticed that her turtleneck clung to small but uplifted breasts and her braided belt nipped a waist that his hands could probably span. She’d done something to her hair while he was in the shower, taming it off her forehead with a headband. Near-black curls fell to her shoulders.
He stared at it, wondering if he might like it better wild.
Then she threw the door wide and his heart caromed into his throat. He’d been standing there like a fool, staring at her, feeling as though he was seeing her for the first time. He wasn’t ready for whatever might happen in the instant the caller had access to her apartment. But it was only a woman.
With a dog.
Kate made one of her strangling sounds.
“Good morning,” Shawna said brightly, stepping inside. “Look who I found barking downstairs in the lobby! Isn’t this wild? Belle came home. She’s back!” Then her gaze fell on Raphael, and her eyes widened. “Who are you?”
“Uh…Rafe Monteil. PPD.”
The woman, a beauty with thick blond hair and warm brown eyes, shifted the dog to her left arm so she could hold her right hand out to him. “I’m Shawnalee Marsden.” Raphael shook the woman’s hand, careful not to get too close to the animal. It growled a little and showed its teeth.
“It’s that dog,” Kate said faintly.
“What dog?” Then Raphael understood. “The one from last night?”
Shawna looked at Kate. “You knew Belle was back and you didn’t tell me?”
Kate didn’t answer. She felt faint. Belle? Then Shawna thrust her face up close to hers.
“Do you have makeup on?” Shawna demanded.
“I—”
“You do. You never wear makeup to work.”
Kate flicked a gaze at Raphael and considered dying on the spot. Whatever had possessed her to put on lipstick and blush while he was in the shower? She wasn’t trying to entice him, though that was how Shawna made it sound. But she wasn’t without her share of vanity. She’d just wanted to be…presentable.
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