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The model looked somewhat impatient, but she foraged through her purse and came up with a card. “That’s my agent’s number,” she pointed to it on the card. “He can usually find me.”
Or cover for you. But Natalie forced a smile to her lips as she pocketed the card.
“Thank you for your time,” she murmured, then moved away from the reservation desk. Erikka and her considerable luggage went in the opposite direction.
Matt found he had to lengthen his stride to keep up with Natalie. She always moved fast when she was agitated, he recalled. “You don’t look very happy,” he observed.
Natalie shot him a dirty look. “Why should I be happy? I’ve spent all day questioning people, and all I have is a dead end.”
He’d gotten good at spinning information when it was necessary. “You could think of it as having ruled out several possibilities.”
She stopped walking for a moment and gazed at him. He was looking at this in a far more positive light than she was.
“Since when did you become an optimist?”
Optimist was a lot better label than spin doctor, he mused. “Sometimes, in this line of business, you have to be.”
They were in the lobby of the casino with its ever-present noise and crowds of people. This was where they should just come to a parting of ways. He knew that the right thing to do would be to let her go back to her home or the precinct or wherever it was she was going. But the frustrated disappointment in her eyes got to him.
He was never going to be over her, Matt thought, no matter what he told himself.
“Have you had lunch yet?” he asked.
An odd little smile came and went from her lips. “I haven’t actually had breakfast yet.” She’d heard the call about her sister’s homicide come in just after hitting a fast-food restaurant. Three bites were all she’d had before her stomach rebelled. She’d thrown the rest away.
“We need to remedy that,” Matt told her. “Come with me.”
She began to follow, then stopped. Old habits died hard, but he had no right to take charge like that. “Why would I want to do that?” she challenged.
He took a couple of steps to cross back to her. “Because you’ve been working hard, and you haven’t had anything to eat. You need to keep your strength up if you’re going to play the part of a bulldog,” he said matter-of-factly, then smiled. “Besides, The Janus just landed a first-class world-famous chef, and I’m told he makes a filet mignon that has you believing you’ve died and gone to heaven.”
“I’m not interested in ‘dying and going to heaven.’ Or eating,” she informed him. “What I’m interested in is—”
He finished the sentence for her. “Solving your sister’s murder, yes I know. But you can’t continue functioning indefinitely on an empty stomach,” he insisted. Then he added, “Humor me.”
It was the wrong thing to say. She didn’t want to humor him, she wanted to double up her fists and beat on him. She wanted this damn ache in her chest that came up each time she looked at him to go away. She wanted to have never laid eyes on him in the first place. Humoring him didn’t even make the top one hundred on her list. “Why would I want to do that?”
“Because,” he told her patiently, “if we’re going to be working together, there’s going to have to be some kind of give and take.”
“There already was.” The words spilled out, refusing to be dammed up any longer. “As I recall, I gave, you took—and then you threw it back at me.”
Was that how she remembered it? “That wasn’t the way it played out.”
Her expression darkened, making him think of a thunderstorm over the desert. “Oh, wasn’t it?”
He didn’t want to go into it. Not here, not now. Not ever, actually. But she was forcing him to revisit his actions. “I did what I did for a reason, Natalie.”
“Right. I believe the term is ‘cold feet.’ All the way up to the neck,” she said sarcastically. “You suddenly realized that you were making a commitment, and it scared the hell out of you.”
And why did it still hurt so much, all these years later? Why aren’t I over you, damn it?
Someone jostled him. Matt hardly noticed. His entire attention was focused on the petite spitfire before him. The woman, if the gods had been kinder, who would have been his wife for several years now. Maybe even the mother of his children. “Is that what you think?”
“Yes,” Natalie bit off. “That is exactly what I think.”
He tried to take hold of her arms, but she shrugged him off. “You’re wrong.”
“Then what was your reason?” she challenged. “Why would you leave me that way without so much as a decent explanation?”
The answer was very simple. “Because if I gave you one, you would have tried to talk me out of it.” He knew how she thought. In her place, he would have done the same thing. But he hadn’t been in her place; he’d been in his and the action he took was necessary. “And what I did was for the best.”
“Right. For the best,” she mocked. “Whose best? Yours?”
“No.” Damn it, you little idiot, I did it because I loved you. “Yours.”
Lifting her chin, she tossed her head defiantly. Her short brown hair swayed from the movement. “I don’t believe you. You’re only saying that because you think it makes you out to be noble. Well, you’re not. You’re a coward,” she spat out.
He took a firm hold of her shoulders. This time he didn’t let her shrug him off. People were watching, and he didn’t want this getting back to anyone.
“There’s no point in arguing about it, Natalie. It’s all in the past.”
No, she thought. Not all of it. She only wished from the bottom of her heart that it was. But her feelings were very much alive and in the present. But that was her problem, not his.
“You’re right,” she replied in a monotone voice. “It is.”
Touching her, even so slightly, had awakened so many feelings he was incapable of burying. He found himself not wanting her to leave. “About that lunch,” he prodded.
Natalie stared at him. “How can you possibly think I’d want to break bread with you after—after—” Frustrated, she couldn’t even find the words to finish her sentence.
“Because you need to keep up your strength,” he repeated, “and you’re going to have to eat sometime. Might as well be something good and on the house. C’mon.” He nodded toward his right. “The restaurant is this way.” Then, in case she was going to take offense at his leading again, he added, “I know you don’t exactly know your way around The Janus.”
There was no denying that. Still, she thought of turning on her heel and just walking away. Of letting Matt lead the way only to turn around at the restaurant to find that she had gone.
But in the end, she followed him.
This was business, strictly business, she told herself, and to act on her impulse would have been petulant. She did need Matt as long as her investigation took her into the heart of Montgomery’s casino, and she had a feeling that somehow, some way, Candace’s death was tied to her coming here last night.
The restaurant was only doing a moderate amount of business. It was the lull between lunch and dinner, and the pace was less hectic. The waitress came to take their order barely minutes after the hostess had shown them to a table.
Matt ordered the meal he’d mentioned earlier, then looked at Natalie who was perusing the oversized, velvet-covered menu. He didn’t want to rush her. “Need more time?”
“No, let’s get this over with.” It was a cruel thing to say, but she felt herself sinking fast. Agreeing to eat with him had been a mistake. She could feel it in her bones. Natalie surrendered her menu to the waitress. “I’ll have what he’s having,” she told the young woman.
“This isn’t penance, you know,” he told her, focusing on her first statement.
She looked at him pointedly. “Isn’t it?” And then she raised her hand, as if to erase her words from an invisible chalkboard. “Sorry. I should be more professional than that. I usually am more professional than that. It’s just that I never expected to see you again,” she confessed. “And it’s kind of thrown me.”
That smile she’d always loved curved one half of his mouth. Unsettling her stomach. “Welcome to my world.”
She shook her head. Ignoring him and the effect he had on her was getting to be impossible. But she was determined to go down fighting. “I’ll pass, thanks,” she said.
Several minutes passed. Despite the low level din around them, silence sat like an awkward, uninvited guest at their table, making them both feel uncomfortable.
It had never been like this, Matt thought. Not even from the very start. He took a stab at stereotypical conversation. “So what have you been doing with yourself, besides becoming a police detective?”
“That’s about it,” she said, her tone sealing the doorway that led into her life. “You? Where did life take you after you made your escape?”
“I didn’t escape, Natalie,” he pointed out patiently. “I did it for your own good.”
Second verse, same as the first, she thought. “You broke my heart for my own good,” she mocked. “How do you figure that?”
There was no point in rehashing this. He couldn’t go into specifics. “I don’t want to get into it now.”
“Of course not. Because you’re making it up as you go along, and you’re at a loss where to go next with this. News flash, I’m not buying. Any of it.” Suddenly making up her mind, she stood up. “You know what? I’m not hungry.”
He glanced to the side and saw the waitress approaching with their meals. “Why don’t you stay a while?” he coaxed. “The waitress is coming with the food.”
“You eat it. Or don’t. Take it home in a doggie bag, or leave it here. I really don’t care,” she informed him. And with that, she stormed away.
All she wanted was to get out of the restaurant and the casino. And most of all, she wanted to get away from him.
Chapter 8
Natalie got as far as the other side of the Rainbow Room’s entrance.
That was where Matt, after tossing down several bills on their table to cover the meal they weren’t having, managed to catch up to her. Taking hold of her shoulders, he swung Natalie around to face him. Agitated, trying to deal with a host of jumbled emotions, he hadn’t the faintest idea what he was going to say to her.
As it turned out, he didn’t say anything.
Instead, he acted. Before he knew it, his instincts had taken over and completely overruled even a glimmer of common sense.
Matt brought his mouth down on hers before he could think better of it or try to stop himself.
He didn’t want to stop himself.
Natalie struggled to pull back for less than half a heartbeat. That’s all the time it took for her longing and the hunger that was eating away at her to kick in. It surged through her veins like a runaway wildfire.
A bittersweet feeling of homecoming washed over her. Her mind, all but spinning out of control, just utterly shut down.
She was instantly propelled eight years into the past as a tidal wave of euphoria materialized out of nowhere, sweeping over her. Robbing her of her senses as she clung to him.
God she’d missed him. Missed the feeling that only he could create inside her.
Not that she let anyone else even try. She hadn’t taken any relationship on a test drive since theirs had ended. Hadn’t even allowed herself to become involved in one. It was far too much trouble. She’d become all work, no play. Relationships brought the specter of heartache with them, and her quota had been filled up for a lifetime.
Besides, Candace went out with enough men for both of them. There was no need for her to participate in this madness. So, for the last eight years, she’d been a virtual nun.
She wasn’t acting like a nun now.
Deep down in her bones, Natalie knew she shouldn’t be doing this, knew that this momentary aberration had just made her life a hundred percent harder. The amount of backpedaling that was going to be required to balance this out was going to be enormous.
But for this tiny island of time, it didn’t matter to her.
All that mattered was riding this lightning bolt until it disintegrated beneath her feet.
Her arms tightened around his neck as her body sealed itself to his.
How had he managed to survive without this? Without her in his life? How had he managed to wake up each morning without finding her in his bed? Right at this moment, he hadn’t a clue.
All his noble reasons for walking away from her turned to confetti and blew away in the wind like so many tiny squares of colored paper.
The feel of her body against his lit a fire in his veins. If they weren’t out in the open like this, in a public place undoubtedly garnering attention, he would have swept Natalie up in his arms and taken her to his bed—or to any handy flat surface in a pinch. And succumbing to a moment of weakness, undo everything that had cost him so much to do in the first place. Leaving her hadn’t even been the hardest part. Staying away was.
He still loved her.
If he’d harbored any doubts about that, they were gone now. Moreover, he was still in love with her, which was a completely different thing, and even he could understand the basic distinction now.
Lost in a fog, Matt was thinking more clearly than he had these last agonizing eight years. Passion filled him as he deepened the kiss.
Struggling to find the strength that she’d always prided herself on possessing, Natalie finally managed to wedge her hands against his chest and push Matt back.
“I had no idea you’d be that grateful for a doggie bag,” she quipped hoarsely. Clearing her throat, she searched for her bearings as well as her voice. “I have to get going.”
“Natalie—” he began, not really certain what it was that he wanted to say, only that he didn’t want her to leave. Not yet. Not after he’d discovered that the passion between them was just as red-hot as ever. Maybe even more so.
She looked into his eyes and could see what he was thinking. Maybe because the same thoughts had raced across her mind.
“This doesn’t change anything,” she told him. “You still left me. Still hurt me. One kiss, no matter how hot, isn’t going to erase that or mend any of the fences that you broke in your hurry to leave.”
Reluctantly, Matt withdrew his hands from her waist. “I know.”
But you could try, damn it. You could pretend to go through the motions. Tell me you were stupid and wrong. I’ll listen.
Disappointment filled all the crevices that passion had just occupied. Matt had given up much too easily. Pulling herself together, Natalie glanced at her watch. She really did have to go. Her father had said something about wanting her present at the emergency family meeting he was calling. He’d mentioned four o’clock. Even if she drove with her siren on, she was going to be late.
But then, probably so were the others. No one in the Rothchild family was known for punctuality. She was the one who came the closest. Her stepsister, Silver, didn’t even own a watch. But then, Silver was a rock star who moved to her own inner timepiece.
“I’ve got to go,” she repeated, doing her best to sound cool and removed, even though her body temperature was still bordering on feverish, thanks to him. “Call me if you find out anything new that has to do with Candace,” she instructed.
“Can I call you if I don’t?” He hadn’t meant to say that, but then, he hadn’t meant to kiss her, either. An afternoon in her presence and all his control seemed to splinter into useless pieces.
“No.”
The single word hung in the air as she turned on her heel and quickly walked away. Before she broke down and sealed her mouth to his again. He was an addiction. She’d only fooled herself into thinking she’d kicked it. It owned her.
To her surprise, half a beat later, Matt fell into place beside her. Annoyed, Natalie stopped walking. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“With you,” he replied simply. “You said you wanted me to work with you, remember?”
