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He’s not my type. Nicole sensed it the instant Whitney fluidly handed off her dance partner and Nicole found herself in the strong circle of the man’s arms.
He was tall and lean, his straight, shaggy hair as black as the suit he wore. He had a handsome, rugged face with high cheekbones and a strong sweep of jaw. It was a combination that drew a woman’s gaze. He had certainly drawn hers while he’d stood alone at the bar, nursing a drink. The sight of him had brought to mind a sleek, dark panther, coiled to spring. The closed look in his eyes had not encouraged company.
It was those eyes that now had an alarm clanging in her head. They were the color of rich, aged whiskey, and she could only think that she could blissfully get lost in them…the same way she had a long time ago when another dark gaze had turned her system just as jittery.
The memory of that disaster had her struggling to clear her thoughts.
“I’m Nicole Taylor,” she said as he guided her over the floor with smooth steps. “Bill’s sister.”
“Jake Ford.”
“Whitney’s partner, right?”
“Right.”
Nicole followed his lead, moving to the music’s slow, sensuous beat. She told herself to relax, that their dance was just a casual social gesture that would last only a matter of minutes. Still, his body was so close, so firm.
She tilted her head. “I’ve heard about you.”
“Then why are you still dancing with me?” he asked, his gaze locked with hers.
When she’d spied him from a distance, she had decided he was compelling. Up close, his dark looks and strong features had a devastating effect. As did the warm, musky scent of his aftershave that curled into her lungs.
“I’m still dancing with you because I love to dance,” she answered. She knew the dim light and the piano’s soft notes were meant to soothe, yet that hadn’t stopped the nerves at the base of her neck from knotting. “Sebastian says dancing is good for the circulation. Helps your capillaries oxygenate.”
Jake’s forehead furrowed. “Whatever.”
She let out a measured breath. The man was definitely not big on conversation. Good thing she was.
“Anyway,” she continued lightly, “Whitney has only good things to say about you.”
“I pay her well.”
Inching her head back, Nicole stared up, studying his face. She found no glint of humor in those dark eyes. “If you didn’t pay her to say good things,” she began slowly, “what would Whitney have told me about you?”
“To stay away.”
Against all reason, his gruff words quickened Nicole’s pulse. She was suddenly aware of the firm presence of his hand against her waist. Cognizant that only a thin barrier of silk lay between his palm and her flesh.
“Why would your partner tell me to stay away from you?”
His gaze remained steady on hers. “Long story.”
Without conscious thought, Nicole splayed her fingers over his shoulder, then tightened them. She felt something beyond the ripcord of hard muscle. Stress. Strain. Jake Ford was as tense as wire.
“Are you on duty, Sergeant Ford?”
“Jake. No. Why?”
“You’re in cop mode.”
He blinked. “Cop mode?”
“Expression hard. Noncommittal.” Her fingers kneaded his shoulder. “Unyielding.”
“What do you know about cop mode?”
She smiled. “Oh, I’ve matched a few police officers.”
His eyes narrowed. “Matched?”
“Making matches is my business—”
“Matches, as in ‘close cover before striking’?”
God, he was so intense…and handsome. “Matches, as in relationships. I have a high success rate. I can just sense when two people belong together—it’s a gift.” Having found her opening, she plucked a business card from the evening bag that dangled on a slim chain from her shoulder.
“Here you go.”
Jake moved his hand from her waist to accept the card. “‘Meet Your Match,”’ he read, then moved his gaze back to hers. “You work there?”
“Yes. I also own the company.”
He looked back at the card, arched a dark brow. “You’re a romance engineer?”
“That’s right.” She was proud of the title, of her company’s success and the knowledge that she offered people the potential for a lifetime of happiness. “I engineer relationships. Quite successfully, if I say so myself. I’m working on franchising.”
As if mulling that over, he remained silent. Around them, muted conversations hung in the air as couples drifted past, swaying to the soft music.
“In other words, people pay you to fix them up on blind dates,” he finally commented.
“Not ‘blind dates.’ When we sign on a client, we conduct background checks and do an intense interview. The person actually knows a lot about their date, including what they look like, before they even meet.”
She gave a subtle glance at the firm left hand that cupped her right. Interest—a purely business one, she told herself—stirred when she saw he wasn’t wearing a wedding band. “So, Sergeant Jake Ford, is there a special woman in your life?”
The slow song ended, another began. Without missing a step, he continued moving in the same smooth rhythm.
“No.”
“Maybe you’d like to check out our services?”
He handed her card back. “No.”
This time, his hand settled against her back where silk gave way to bare skin. His touch was light, but potent enough to widen her eyes as an unexpected flash of need took her by surprise. Air clogged her lungs. She stiffened her spine beneath his palm and willed her feet to keep moving while she kept her gaze on his.
He was watching her with seeming ease, but she could see the shimmering intensity in his dark eyes.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Fine.” She needed oxygen. She wasn’t into self-deception. Just like another man in her past, Jake Ford’s looks, his demeanor…his touch were tempting. Too tempting. Already, her hormones were surging in a direction where the fine edge of reason began to blur.
Now that she’d felt the heat of his flesh against hers, she wanted his touch to continue. Deepen.
Not going to happen, she told herself, putting mental skids on her thoughts. She would never again approach a relationship with her emotions calling the shots. She’d been down that road with her ex, and found it was full of potholes. Now she was smarter. Wiser. And she had learned how to face a problem head-on. The thing to do in this instance was to take control and go on the defensive.
She would feel a whole lot better—safer—if Jake Ford were off-limits. And she was the perfect person to make that happen.
“I have a client who might be perfect for you,” she said as she began tucking the card into the breast pocket of his suit coat. “She’s a doctor. A medical doctor, intelligent and gorgeous. Let me know if you change your—”
Her words slid back down her throat when he snagged her wrist. His hand was steady, his fingers unyielding as steel.
His dark eyes narrowed. “Not interested. And I won’t change my mind.”
The image of those firm, controlled hands exploring every inch of her body clicked into her brain, sending heat surging into her cheeks.
A shadow flickered across his eyes, then disappeared. He released her wrist. “No offense.”
“None taken.” Pursing her lips, Nicole dropped the rejected card back in her purse while regarding him. “Has anyone ever mentioned that your biorhythms might be in the negative range?”
He missed a step, picked the beat back up again. “My what?”
“Biorhythms. You strike me as being overly tense, so yours might be in a negative cycle. Sebastian says if a person’s biorhythms are negative, it’s hard to do well in certain areas.”
“Who the hell is Sebastian?”
“Sebastian Peck, my personal trainer at Sebastian’s.”
Jake’s mouth curved into a sardonic arch. “The prissy gym on the northwest side of town,” he commented.
“Actually, it’s a health club.”
“Bet it’s got piped-in music and a juice bar.”
“That’s right.”
“Not my kind of place. I work out at the police gym.”
Nicole’s left hand slid down to settle on his biceps. The well-formed muscle evidenced a strenuous workout regime.
“Sebastian isn’t taking new clients now, but he owes me a favor,” she said, undaunted. “I can set up an appointment to get your biorhythms charted. It doesn’t take long.” By then, she might have figured out how to convince Jake to agree to a date with the gorgeous doctor.
“My biorhythms are fine.”
“Just think about it. I’m in the book—call me if you change your mind.”
His eyes narrowed at the same instant the music faded. From the opposite side of the dance floor, an uncle of the bride’s announced that the wedding couple was getting ready to leave the reception.
“We should wish them well,” Nicole said.
“You give Whit and Bill my best,” Jake stated evenly. “I’ve stayed too long as it is.” His hand was a light presence on her elbow as they walked to the edge of the dance floor.
Squaring her shoulders, Nicole turned to face him, offered her hand. “It was nice to meet you, Jake. Give me a call if you decide you want to try out my services.”
He hesitated for a brief instant, then cupped her hand in his while he flashed a careless grin. “Your services?”
Her throat tightened. Even as her brain told her that retreat would be wise, she allowed her hand to remain in his. Only one other time in her life had a man had such an immediate, stunning effect on her. Then, she’d gone with emotion, listened to her heart instead of her head, and she’d wound up betrayed and hurt. Desperately hurt.
Now all of her senses screamed at her to do an about-face and run for the hills. For some incomprehensible reason, she stayed put.
“My company’s services, of course,” she amended, keeping her voice light. “You might wake up some morning and decide you want to meet the doctor after all.”
He kept his eyes locked with hers while his thumb stroked the inside of her wrist. Her pulse stuttered, then her stomach dropped to her toes.
“I won’t.”
Even as he turned and walked away she took a step backward. Then another.
Feeling the aftershock of his touch in every pore, she curled her fingers over her palms. She remained unmoving, her gaze tracking his progress toward the door while she waited for her pulse to settle. It didn’t.
Hours later, her nerves still thrumming, Nicole lay in her bed, thinking about Jake Ford. About his dark eyes and ruthless good looks. About the way the attraction she’d felt for him had hit her like a freight train and hadn’t abated.
Even for a woman who knew he wasn’t the type of man she wanted, those thoughts made him dangerous.
Too dangerous.
Stifling a groan, she dragged a pillow over her head and breathed deeply of the soft scent of vanilla that drifted from the linen pillowcase. At least Jake wasn’t part of her brother’s new family, she reasoned. He was Whitney’s partner; there was no reason she and the cop with the whiskey-colored eyes would ever cross paths again.
And that, all of her instincts told her, was a very good thing.
Chapter 2
He shouldn’t have danced with her. Shouldn’t have touched her, shouldn’t have stroked his thumb across her wrist.
Jake scrubbed a hand across his face. Over a week had dragged by since Bill and Whitney’s wedding. Over a week. He had lost track of how many times he’d berated himself on the subject of Nicole Taylor. Even now, his mind kept wandering out of the parked detective cruiser in which he sat and back to the hotel’s glittering ballroom. To the heady feel of her in his arms. To her tempting scent.
To her.
“Dammit!” Setting his jaw, he pushed away the maddening thoughts and focused his mind. He stared out the windshield at the decrepit brick apartment building that looked like a hulking mammoth on the dark, weed-infested lawn. A bare bulb glowed above the building’s crumbling cement porch, sending weak rays into the moonless night. His most reliable snitch had sworn that the girlfriend of Ramon Cárdenas, primary suspect in the drive-by homicide of seven-year-old Enrique Quintero, planned to show up at the apartment building sometime tonight.
Jake had been on the stakeout since sundown. So far, no girlfriend.
He had the cruiser’s windows open; the heat of late September hung heavy in the still night air. In the distance, traffic rumbled along the interstate that cut a swath through downtown. Several houses away, a dog broke into a flurry of barks, ending when a gruff male shout splintered the air. The police radio in the cruiser’s dash crackled softly, the dispatcher sounding as if he were speaking a foreign language.
As if on automatic pilot, Jake’s brain processed the garbled information, which included a female patrol officer notifying dispatch of a Signal 7 at Stonebridge, a swanky gated housing community in the far northwest part of the city. A Signal 7 meant a dead body. One of the Holy Grails of police work was that an unexplained death got treated as a murder right from the start. If his name had headed Homicide’s list to take the next call, Jake would have responded. He glanced at the luminous dial of his watch, knowing that the team of detectives pulling night shift this month would head to the scene in a matter of minutes.
Settling down in his seat, he swallowed the last dregs of his convenience-store coffee, then tossed the foam cup over his shoulder. He gave an unconcerned glance at the back seat, littered with the wadded sacks and empty cups from that week’s take-out meals. He had a few days before Whitney got back from her honeymoon—he would shovel out the cruiser before then.
With the bitter taste of coffee still on his tongue, his hand automatically went to the pocket of his chambray shirt, found it empty. He scowled. Dammit, he hadn’t smoked in two months, five days and seven hours. When the hell was he going to stop reaching for the pack of cigarettes that wasn’t there?
