Nat hurried up the stairs and returned without her bag, a stack of bills in hand to distribute among the bartenders’ registers.
Matt backed Eve into the bar, his hand automatically going to her hip while he eyed Natalie as she rounded the corner. “Not bad.”
“Thanks.” Her fingers found his, wove into them. Gripped hard. “I’m glad you’re here. After seeing Lyle today I wouldn’t feel safe doing this with two guys sitting in a car outside the bar.”
He stroked the smooth skin of her cheek with the backs of his fingers. “Stay close. Don’t do anything on impulse. Anyone asks you to step outside, male or female, act like I’m an overbearing asshole and check in with me.”
Fists thudded against the heavy steel door, locked at the beginning of the night for the first time. Over the pounding Matt heard Tom’s voice. “Hey, Hot Stuff! If you want us to work tonight you’d better open this fucking door!”
She gave a shakily relieved laugh. “There’s reality.”
He looked over his shoulder at the shuddering door, tried to ignore that her reality didn’t include him. “Let’s do this, boss.”
*
Less than a week later Eve was going out of her mind.
Saturday afternoon she stood behind the bar, finishing prep with Matt. He’d figured out how to connect her computer to the DJ’s sound system so they had tunes while they worked. The Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris” played in the background, a band she loved, but the melancholy, intense lyrics only heightened her mood. She’d accepted three more deposits from Travis or another of Lyle’s flunkies, but without words exchanged or a visit from Lyle, they had nothing more than Eve’s word connecting him to the money, or the drugs.
They worked in silence for a while. The days had fallen into a fairly predictable routine. Matt had cobbled together a fitness regime, jumping rope on the dance floor, a speed bag in the storeroom. He worked out while she handled the daily business tasks, then worked behind the bar. Eve handled the social networking and publicity shots with the parties booked into the club. Neither one of them bothered to hide the heat simmering under their every interaction from anyone, the bartenders, Natalie, the customers, people they saw on the street when they went to the bank. Woven into it all was a feeling she couldn’t identify, something new, maybe unformed, but always there, just outside her mental and emotional range.
After hours Matt set about calming Eve’s increasingly frayed nerves. Between the music, the crowds, and the constant fear of Lyle surprising her, she was brittle and on edge, and when they closed the club she went wild under him, against him, using teeth and nails like she was in a fight for her life. None of it fazed him. He just met her wildly emotional response with a slightly stronger level of force until the fear and need combusted.
“I hate waiting,” she finally said. “I’m not good at it.”
“Rushing a case means we get an arrest but not a conviction. Solid police work takes time and patience.”
And the ability to push away instant gratification, she mused. After four years in the Army and eight as a cop, he was an expert at it. She wasn’t.
She dropped a box of lemons on the counter with a little more force than she intended.
“You okay?” Matt asked.
Stop asking me that! trembled on the tip of her tongue, but she bit it back. She was not okay. She was in over her head personally and professionally, and with every passing day he seemed to grow calmer and calmer, going through the work at Eye Candy, staying connected to Sorenson and Hawthorn’s street-level investigation, protecting her. His gaze slid over her much like his hand would over the silk wraparound dress she wore, pausing at all the right spots to admire, lingering on her eyes to assess her state of mind. She didn’t like the way those two melded together.
“I’m fine. It slipped. Can you finish up for me? I need to finish the schedule, do some paperwork.”
He nodded. She disconnected her laptop from the sound system and headed upstairs to do exactly what she’d said, plus make a purchase she’d been thinking about for days. The bar had been open for over an hour by the time she’d paid bills and gone downstairs to the storeroom to compile the liquor order for the next week. The rapid beat of a club remix thumped away at her nerves. She dropped the clipboard on a stack of boxes and resisted the urge to rub her tired eyes, instead pressing the heels of her hands into her eye sockets to smudge the makeup as little as possible.
Lady Gaga’s lyrics crystallized when the door opened, went indistinct when it closed. Then the lock clicked shut. “Are you okay?”