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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?”
