“Three Nova eighteen, responding units request your exact location.”
Not getting shot by an adrenaline-jacked responding officer took priority over confessing to Eve, so he relayed his position. Then he tucked the phone away from his mouth and looked at her.
“Detective Matt Dorchester, LPD.”
Her eyes narrowed. If looks could kill, he’d drop dead right there in the doorway, carotid artery sliced open by her ice-green gaze.
“Detective Dorchester,” she said, and the acid dripping from the words seared right through his rib cage, into his heart, “you’re fired.”
*
He was an undercover cop. He’d been undercover in her bar. He wasn’t a bartender. He was a cop.
At some functioning level Eve knew her thoughts circled in a truly dimwitted fashion, but she forgave herself for being a little on the slow side. One moment she’s dropping through arousal to hot need and seconds later she’s manhandled into her bathtub while someone shoots out her windows.
Then her bartender calls 911 and transforms before her eyes into a cop. A detective, no less.
When she felt straps encircling his calf and the distinctive shape of a gun under the leg of his jeans, all the heat froze into an icy fear. In her experience, only two groups of people carried concealed weapons: criminals and cops. Both appalling possibilities warred in her brain for the split second she had before she heard the popping noises, then found herself flattened between about two hundred pounds of muscle and bone and the equally unyielding floor.
Under a cop. An undercover cop. She’d been a breath and a heartbeat away from going to bed with an undercover cop. She felt his eyes on her but refused to look at him. Matt. Not Chad. Matt Dorchester. Matt sounded a little like Chad, but …
“I guess that explains why you look at me so strangely when I call you Chad.”
All activity in the room halted as two detectives, a lieutenant, three uniformed members of the Lancaster Police Department, and the CSI team stared at her. Had the words actually come out of her mouth? Oh God, she hoped only the last sentence and not her entire bewildered train of thought had been audible.
He said nothing.
Moments after she fired her newest bartender uniformed police officers had arrived in a flurry of shouting, the calls of “Clear! Clear!” creating a dizzying montage of television medical and police dramas. Chad … Detective Dorchester stayed in the middle of the doorway, blocking most of the curious glances as he directed the new arrivals to do a complete search. They’d stomped through every nook and cranny of her apartment, the bar, and the alley before Chad … he let her get out of her bathtub and go into the bedroom to change. Now dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, iPhone in hand like a security blanket, Eve huddled on the love seat in the middle of all the commotion. The sound dock was a total loss. The iPod looked okay, but she didn’t trust her knees to hold her if she got up to check. Without glass in the windows the ninety-degree, humid outside air rapidly heated her apartment, but she couldn’t stop shaking.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Dorchester murmur in Sorenson’s ear. The blonde detective crossed the room to crouch down by Eve. “Do you want a sweater, Ms. Webber?” she asked gently.
“Yes, please,” Eve responded automatically.
Dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and a tailored blazer, her gun and badge clipped to her waistband, Sorenson disappeared into the bedroom and returned with a cashmere V-neck in a deep green. Eve tugged it over her head and wrapped her arms around her torso. The shaking stopped, replaced with hot fury.
And all the while, he watched her. He had a low, terse conversation with Lieutenant Hawthorn. He conferred with Sorenson. He watched her with a frighteningly alert, focused gaze. She stared back, not bothering to hide her rage. The Lancaster Police Department had been lying to her, which, to be honest, she’d somewhat expected. Ian Hawthorn trusted no one but his tightly knit circle, and she wasn’t in it. But she’d never expected Chad … Matt … to lie to her the way he had. With his body.
With hers.
Raised voices, scuffling outside on her landing, then Detective Sorenson quashed the commotion with a quiet “Let him in.”
Caleb pushed his way through the crowd and into her apartment. He wore jeans and a loose button-down, his unruly black hair tousled from sleep. He shouldered aside a flat-footed uniformed officer, sat beside her on the love seat and pulled her into the circle of his arm. “My God, Eve. Are you okay?”
“I’m pissed as hell,” she snapped. “Someone tried to kill me!”