“I’ll let him know you’re keeping your options open,” Travis said, then tossed back the rest of his drink. “All your options.”
After he left, Eve snatched up the money and the accounts list, then called Lieutenant Hawthorn. No answer. She left a message for him to call her back as soon as possible, then went upstairs to get dressed for the night. After a quick stop in the office to stow the drug money and accounts in the safe, she hurried through the door to her apartment and stood in front of her tiny closet. Trying to pick out an appropriate outfit for the night wasn’t easy, but she had to look and act completely normal. What she really wanted was to make sure Chad couldn’t keep his eyes off her during the night, and his hands off her after close.
Black leather caught her eye. She shoved hangers aside, then smiled. Perfect.
*
The alarm on Matt’s personal cell yanked him from REM sleep to full alert so quickly there was no time for his brain to layer identities. Shards of reality crashed into his consciousness in a huge, clattering jumble: Eve, cop, music, Luke, the prices of various AC units, and a recipe for a Soul Kiss an extremely persistent blonde had insisted on teaching him the night before. Her number was on a napkin in his tip jar at the end of the night.
Eve. Green-eyed, smiling, sexy Eve, who made the blonde look as appealing as a blowup doll.
The phone vibrated persistently on the bed beside him. He shut off the alarm. Eyes still closed, he fought free of the sheet then lay on his back and tried to piece identities together. No luck. The white napkin held an imprint of a reddish lipstick, not puckered in a kiss but in the stretched lips of a blowjob, with a phone number and a ridiculous, incongruous smiley face in the center. But Chad Henderson was falling for his boss, so he didn’t want mindless, impersonal sex with the blonde.
Matt Dorchester didn’t want to fuck her either, because for the last week, he’d continued to show up early, help with prep, talked to Eve every night.
The talking sucked.
When he could keep it purely physical, pretend it was just attraction and the lure of the forbidden, he’d hide behind his body’s response to Eve, which started out sizzling and after a week of slow was on a steady boil. He treated her like a girl he was getting to know, a girl he liked, so he still got the smiles, the looks from under her sliding, gleaming hair. Every time he touched her, his brain stopped working for a second.
He swung his feet over the side of the bed and rubbed grit from his eyes before running his hands through his hair. It still surprised him every time he touched it, the length and wiry curl a distant memory from childhood, before his father took him for his first high and tight when he was seven. The hair went a long way toward masking cop/ex-military, and so did Eve’s first choice of conversational topics.
Sometimes she talked about the Riverside Business Park but mostly she talked about music. Bands they’d heard live, bands they wanted to hear live, concert venues, their perfect concert lineup, tours they’d missed. He held up his end of the conversation there. Based on their conversations, she’d put together an ever-changing selection of music to liven up the repetitive prep work. He’d heard more music in the last week than he had in the last decade, and it was damned good music too—singer/songwriters who could articulate everything he felt but never found words for. Eve had an equally potent knack for stringing together playlists, and his stomach turned over at the thought of her sitting down in the early morning hours or early afternoon, drinking her coffee, poring over iTunes to find new music she thought he might like.
The serious cognitive dissonance between what his heart felt and what his brain knew meant two-hour workouts at three in the morning were now the norm. His body ached, so he needed extra time to pull on jeans and a polo, flexing his hands before buttoning his fly, stretching gingerly to see what popped, cracked, or flat-out broke. So far so good, but he needed coffee before operating a motor vehicle.
Half a pot of coffee steamed in the kitchen. He got down a travel mug and filled it, drained it black, poured out the rest of the old coffee, then measured out grounds and water for a second pot, and sat down at the dining room table next to his brother. Without a word Luke adjusted his ultra-lightweight wheelchair to give Matt some leg space under the table, then went back to clicking and tapping at his laptop.
“You look like shit warmed over,” Luke said a few minutes later.
Matt grunted. “I’ll take your word for it,” he said. “Looking in the mirror this morning seemed like a bad idea.”
“I heard you working out,” Luke said. “You’ve been at it pretty hard this week.”
“I’ve been busy,” Matt said. “Sorry to keep you up.”