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He’d seen hints of the old over-the-top sexiness at the precinct today in the pure silk blouse she’d worn beneath her navy suit. The fire-engine-red lips had been another clue, even if the rest of her face hadn’t been made-up.
But in the safety of her own apartment, she obviously gave her diva leanings more room to play. Her blue-and-yellow lace camisole blouse outlined spectacular cleavage while a fuzzy blue sweater was tied closed with a satin ribbon around her waist. The crocheted sweater was full of so many holes a man could see everything through it, from the spaghetti straps of the blouse to the hummingbird tattoo on her lower back that showed between her low-rise jeans and the camisole.
What man could see a tattoo like that and not fantasize about tasting it?
Exotic perfume clung to her clothes and her skin, a scent that hadn’t been present during her workday. Most women came home and stripped away the material trappings of beauty but apparently Donata cloaked herself in sexy feminine decor the minute she left the police department behind. The thought of her switching roles like that turned him on at a primal level.
“What did you want to discuss?” Her throaty words floated through his consciousness to distract him when all he really wanted to do was close the space between them and see if she felt as good as she looked.
From the satiny blouse and the fuzzy sweater to the sleek silken swish of her hair, everything about Donata was a tactile temptation, begging to be touched.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t in any position to cop a feel.
“I need to know where you’re going with this investigation since our conversation ended prematurely today. You seemed freaked out about Alteri’s possible involvement in the filmmaking scheme, and I’m here to ask you nicely to back off if you think you can’t separate feelings for your ex from the job.”
“How dare you insinuate I can’t keep my personal feelings out of my work?” She lowered her voice to a fierce whisper even though there was no one around to overhear them. “It’s because of me that Alteri is behind bars in the first place.”
“Hey, I couldn’t keep my personal life out of my work, which was why I left the force.” Frustration replaced some of the heat between them and he was grateful for the impetus to back away. He didn’t need attraction to Donata screwing him over now that he was close to finally busting the sleazy video outfit. He needed to know more about the Sara Chapman case to see if her situation coincided with some of the other girls’ experiences of having their video images posted online.
Donata seemed to think over what he said, her arms folded tight while she stared up at a framed photo of herself as a flamboyantly dressed teenager with her arm wrapped around a skinny old guy wearing a Doors T-shirt and a poorly fitting dinner jacket.
Had she started dating ancient men that young?
Alteri had to have been twenty years her senior and this guy looked closer to thirty.
“I respect your need to go after somebody who hurt your sister.” Slowly, Donata turned on him, her eyes wearier and wiser than he remembered. “In turn, you have to respect that I’m going to be all over this investigation. Not just because it’s my job, but because I have a particular axe to grind with men who try to take advantage of innocents. That doesn’t make me sloppy. That makes me driven.”
He barely recognized the woman who delivered the words. Outside, she looked the same with her too-sexy clothes and killer body. But the steely strength that emanated from within—that was all new since the last time they’d crossed paths. This Donata was a woman with a mission and Sean thought any guy would be damn lucky to have her on his side.
Except he didn’t want a professional partner. If she wanted to partner in other ways, however…
“Heard and understood. I appreciate the honesty when we—”
“You ready for some more?”
“What?” He blinked.
“Honesty.” Cool purpose gleamed in her eyes and Sean got a mental picture of her heading up a boardroom instead of a police investigation.
That mental picture lasted about three seconds before being replaced by one of Donata naked and in his bed, his fingers exploring the soft terrain beneath the hummingbird tattoo.
“Su-sure.” He loosened his collar before he remembered he wasn’t wearing a tie. Damned if a Mets batting jersey could strangle a man, but somehow, his managed to do exactly that.
“Focus on this case is important to me and I’m having a hard time finding it with you and me working on it.”
Of all the things he might have expected her to say, this would have been the farthest from his mind. She couldn’t honestly be…flirting with him?
“Are you coming on to me?” He’d gotten rusty at interpreting signals from women in the years since his wife had left him, so chances were good he’d read Donata wrong. But since he’d never had enough finesse to muddle through blindly when asking a direct question could clear up everything in an instant, he figured he had nothing to lose by confronting her.
“Just the opposite.” She fidgeted with the long blue ribbon dangling from the bow where her sweater was tied closed. “I’m asking for your help in keeping our interaction as impersonal as possible given our…unusual history.”
The way she said it made him wonder how much of those hours they’d spent together she remembered. When she had refused to call a lawyer and he had been hell-bent on interrogating her anyway. There had been anger, resentment and undeniable sparks.
“No one at that precinct gives a crap about the past. Cops are only interested in your present and future and what you’re bringing to the table that will help catch crooks.”
“Perhaps I’m less concerned with what my colleagues think than what I think.” She released the ribbon and the satin fabric swung like a delicate pendulum for a moment before coming to rest on the snap of her jeans.
The sight of that sleek fabric pointing the way south on Donata’s voluptuous body would have distracted him under the best of circumstances, but now when he was trying to navigate his way through her cryptic words…his brain seemed to short-circuit.
“I’m not getting it.” The scent of her—darkly sexy and warmed by the heat of her skin—drugged any remaining sense right out of him. “You’re going to have to spell it out for me, Donata, because I’m not following you.”
“Then let me make it clear as crystal.” She swept aside the hem of her loose sweater to cock a hand on one denim-clad hip. “I’m not even sure I like you, Beringer, but there’s something undeniably sexual in the air when we’re in the same room and I want to avoid that at all costs.”
Okay, this he could understand. Something sexual? Yes ma’am. This was finally making sense.
“You don’t mean sexual in the negative sense, right?” He just needed to get this one last point straight because no way, no how, would any woman accuse him of something like harassment again.
Thinking hot thoughts wasn’t a crime. Just so long as he didn’t act on anything without two thumbs up from the woman in question.
“No. I mean sexual in the distracting sense and I’ll tell you right now I’m not going down that path with any man who knew me back in my questionable youth.”
Her eyes were so cool and remote that he couldn’t reconcile her overtly sexy exterior with the uptight words.
“I met you four short years ago. Hardly during your childhood.” Reason clamored through the haze of lust in his brain, urging caution.
“But you saw me in the setting of the criminal underworld.”
“You were working undercover.”
“As an informant, not a paid detective. Big difference in respectability, don’t you think?”
A knock sounded at her door before he could pick apart how ludicrous it was for her to write him off because they met under inauspicious circumstances. But then, he was too rocked by her admission that he distracted her to process anything else with much speed.
“Yes?” Donata answered the door after peering through the peephole.
A middle-aged woman wearing a long caftan waited on the threshold, a mug of something steamy in one hand and a FedEx package in the other.
“Sorry to interrupt.” The woman peered over Donata’s shoulder to take a visual inventory of Sean and for a moment she seemed to forget what she was saying.
Obviously, his charm still worked. Just not on the right woman.
“That’s okay, Charlene. Did you need anything?” Donata’s clipped tones were completely at odds with the sweet words she used to employ around her old boyfriend.
“Oh. Um, yes.” The woman thrust a box through Donata’s doorway. “One of your deliveries came to my door by mistake.”
Thanking her, Donata took the package and closed the door even though the woman clearly had been angling for an invitation inside.
“Do you do this to every woman you meet?” Donata hissed out a breath between her teeth, somehow finding him at fault for her neighbor’s nosiness.
“I’m sure she just wanted to know who you were hanging out with these days.” Although, judging by Donata’s quick squashing of any attraction between them, maybe there wouldn’t be any hanging out involved.
“Yeah, tell me another one.” She squinted at the box and frowned. “The shipping label doesn’t look right.”
He looked over her shoulder but didn’t see anything unusual.
“There’s no bar code. No return address.” She spoke softly to herself as she reached for the pull-tab to open the package while Sean sought a way to get their conversation back on track.
He needed to leverage information from her on this case, convince her to let him proceed applying pressure in non-traditional venues because he couldn’t allow the scumbags who’d hurt his sister to walk away.
“Oh God.”
Donata dropped the manila envelope she’d pulled from the FedEx box.
“What?” Instantly on alert, Sean shifted his attention to her. He bent to retrieve the padded envelope and noticed her hands shook as he set it on her coffee table.
He wasn’t rude enough to look inside the package, but he was curious enough to note the corner of one document stuck out the open end. It appeared to be a photograph or short stack of photos, the size of the corner suggesting they were large and glossy color prints.
“They’re photos of me from when I was with Sergio.” Her voice bore none of the steely determination he’d heard from her earlier. The hitch in her throat and high pitch quavered closer to tears. “The son of a bitch must have kept them for their future blackmail potential.”
That didn’t sound good. And judging by the suddenly chalky pallor of her skin, he’d say the photos weren’t your garden-variety vacation shots.
“Are they…compromising?” He suddenly wondered if this case they were pursuing could possibly be even more personal to Donata than it was to him.
“If you mean are they naked, the answer is yes. Go ahead and have a look, Beringer, and you’ll see just how bad of a girl I once was.”
4
“WAS THERE A LETTER with it?” Using the corner of his T-shirt to prevent any extra fingerprints, Sean picked up the box the envelope had arrived in without looking at photos that obviously embarrassed her. “The package couldn’t have gone through FedEx with no labels. Somebody must have dropped it in front of your neighbor’s place.”
“I didn’t see a note.” Donata shook her head, her pale skin even whiter than usual as she stared at the envelope full of photos. “I didn’t even look at all the pictures.”
And who could blame her? She had to have busted her tail to climb the ranks of the police force the way she did, even with key recommendations from two FBI agents she’d worked with to get the dirt on her old boyfriend. No wonder she wasn’t in any hurry to look through a package of photos that could destroy her career or—at very least—shred her credibility.
“I’ll look through them if you want me to, Donata. But if you’d rather keep them private, I’m going to ask you to scan through everything before we decide what to do next.” He knew he wasn’t the cop here, but she didn’t look ready to take on the lead investigator role right now.
This had to suck big-time for her.
What the hell kind of partner did she have to leave her hanging on a huge case like this? He knew of Mick Juarez’s reputation on the police force, but the guy sure didn’t seem to be living up to it today. But Sean prayed she didn’t want him to take a peek because he didn’t know how well he’d handle seeing naked pictures of this woman. And she definitely didn’t need a P.I. with a hard-on trying to straighten out this mess.
She nodded. Blinked.
“I’ll do it.” With shaking fingers, she reached into the envelope and withdrew the stack of photos, keeping the backs of the prints to him. About ten in all. “I don’t see any—Wait.”
Sean set the box by the front door as a reminder to her to bring it into the lab guys tomorrow so she could have it run for prints. The incident might not have anything to do with her investigation, but she’d want to follow up on it anyhow.
“You got something?”
“Yeah. It says, ‘I have a few photos that will make nice wall art for the 10th precinct. Leave the filmmaker case alone and I’ll keep the pictures our secret.’ There’s no signature.”
The note made him wonder how explicit the photos might be but he didn’t think he could handle that discussion right now with his thoughts running wild. His imagination was too damn vivid when it came to supplying possibilities.
“Your friends at the FBI would be interested in this. Even without being processed through FedEx, using their packaging might make a case that this was a federal crime.” The selfish half of him didn’t want the feds swarming around any more than he wanted city cops treading over his terrain.
But if Sergio had his people coming after Donata personally, Sean could see the benefit to creating a world of trouble for the prick.
“No.” She slid the stack of photos into the envelope and laid the pack on her coffee table. “This is my case and I’m not handing it over to you, or the FBI or anyone else.”
Resolve glittered in her blue eyes.
“I know this is a low blow—”
“It’s more than that.” She paced around the living room and pulled open the front of a wooden cabinet that turned into a minibar, her hand shaking ever so slightly. “This is his way of trying to tear down everything I’ve worked for. My self-respect. My standing in the workplace. My first real career.”
Sean had an inkling how hard it must have been for her to come up through the ranks to get where she was today. Beyond the obvious physical challenges for a woman who was all of five foot four, Donata had to pass the interviews, the character background check that would have grilled her on her relationship with a criminal, and then there would have been the high chance of prejudice within the department. No matter how good her intentions as an informant, her fellow cops couldn’t have appreciated her time spent living with a well-known gangster.
And naked pictures of her on the loose would cause more of an uproar given her history. Not to mention the problems it would cause for her in getting her job done. Her colleagues might have trouble taking her seriously and damn it but he didn’t want anyone else seeing her naked.
“Let me handle this and we can keep it out of the police department. If I need backup, or I think you could be in physical danger, I can call in the FBI instead of the NYPD.” He’d been working on this case for so long he’d accumulated thousands of names of subscribers to the illicit reality porn services. As soon as he had enough proof to arrest a few of the key figures, he’d take down supporters of the industry all over the country. Restricting NYPD’s access to anything that touched the investigation was a win for him and a win for Donata’s career.
She set a bottle of Amaretto on the bar with excessive force, inciting a clink of every glass hanging upside down over the minibar.
“Damn it, Sean, will you wake up and see that this isn’t about what you want anymore?” She hadn’t even poured her drink when she snapped the cabinet closed again and walked. “I understand that you’re pissed off on your sister’s behalf and I don’t blame you. But there are more girls than her getting hurt every day that you wait to break this case.”
“Jesus, Donata. It’s never been about me.” How could she think that when he’d thrown his whole life into turmoil by quitting the force so he could investigate this ring the way he wanted and not the slow way some giant bureaucratic agency wanted it handled? His choices had cost him plenty.
“Come on, Sean. You think I don’t know why you’ve been waiting to blow the whistle on this operation?” She shook her head as she picked up a book of matches and lit a fat candle with four separate wicks. “I know enough about being an outsider to recognize someone else’s need for vindication. But this can’t be the story of ex-cop vigilantism that you want it to be. Too many people are getting hurt along the way.”
“You couldn’t be more wrong.” At least, he wanted her to be wrong because he sure as hell didn’t like the picture of him she painted. “I’m just trying to make sure there’s enough evidence to put this crew away for a long time. You know as well as I do, they’ll be back on the streets abusing kids in no time otherwise.”
“Fine. We’ll make sure we’ve got evidence. I’ll go through the files tomorrow and I’d appreciate it if you’d share what you know so we can move forward. But I can guarantee you, I’m not walking away from this.”
For the first time since he’d become reacquainted with Donata Casale, Sean realized he couldn’t ask her to turn her back on the case.
A fact which left him working with a fiery dynamo of a woman to close an investigation that had become a huge powder keg.
There wasn’t a chance in hell they’d come through this unscathed.
“NO FINGERPRINTS on the box,” Mick reported after hanging up the phone with the lab two days later. “And since Sergio Alteri is in jail, he has an iron-tight alibi on this one. Any ideas where to go now?”
Donata spun in her desk chair, unable to think clearly about the case with Sean an ever-present fixture in her brain. Desks and detectives blurred as she twirled back and forth, searching for ideas and wondering if she’d ever make peace with her past.
She’d confided in Mick about the pictures since she trusted him to be discreet. He hadn’t asked to see the photos, nor had he tried to strong-arm her into entering the pictures for evidence, for which she’d be eternally grateful. Mick was a good friend and damned attractive too. But the chemistry just wasn’t there—not the way it had always been present for her whenever Sean walked in a room.
“The prison log shows a lot of letters going in and out of Ray Brook Correctional Facility, but no visitors for Alteri.” That made the investigation tougher, but the news had pleased Donata on a personal level since she liked to think that his so-called friends had all forsaken him. Even his mistress—the obnoxious Rosie Gillespie—hadn’t bothered to keep in touch.
“We’d better get a list of his correspondents. In the meantime, I’m meeting with Sean today to go over his evidence again since he’s been working on connected cases for a while.” She felt self-conscious bringing Sean up and couldn’t say why, except that she’d been thinking about him far too often. He’d surprised her with his thoughtful handling of the picture episode the other night. “We didn’t come up with any great ideas the first time, but I was still reeling from the appearance of the photos. I think today we’re going to visit some of the more prominent webcam streams and see what happens when we subscribe to the services advertised online.”
And wouldn’t that be interesting to spend time in close quarters with a man who occupied a few too many of her fantasies the past few days?
