“I lost ten years off my life when you walked up those stairs alone,” he said. His voice was equally low, his eyes focused on the iPhone as Sorenson replayed the conversation. “Do that again and I’ll make ‘forceful’ look like riding the carousel at the zoo.”
Certain he was joking, she stared at his unyielding profile, waiting for the tight line of his jaw to relax. Then he turned to look at her. For a moment of time measurable only by the atomic clock the real Matt Dorchester, the man locked away behind duty and honor and service, inhabited his hazel eyes, and she stopped breathing. He blinked, then disappeared.
Oxygen returned to the room, so she could speak. “I’m sorry,” she said defensively. “It was the best option.”
“The fuck it was. The best fucking option was to tell him that after some lowlife motherfucker nearly fucking killed you your domineering boyfriend won’t let you do anything alone.”
Lyle got stupid when he was angry. Eve got impulsive. Anger brought out Matt Dorchester’s Army vocabulary and a glare that somehow managed to be both ice-cold and white-hot.
She opened her mouth.
“Later.”
Her teeth clicked shut. “Yes,” she said. “Later.” She folded her arms across her chest and leaned against the wall. In the mirror on the back of the door, her jaw and Matt’s looked identical, mulishly set.
Sorenson looked between the two of them as she took the phone from Eve and connected the phone to her computer, then transferred the recording to the laptop. “How did you get away with starting the recorder?” she asked, rummaging through a variety of cables in her bag.
“I said I was posting bachelorette party pictures online. Which I was. Then I started the app.”
“That’s a really tempting offer,” Hawthorn said mildly.
Eve rubbed her forehead. “He’s definitely got the upper hand. It’s bad enough if that building doesn’t come down, but if someone puts up a welding shop or a strip club, it sabotages the whole redevelopment effort.”
“You’re doing great, Eve,” Hawthorn said. “We’ve got accounts, numbers, a history of transactions. We can track the outflows back into the Strykers. Just a little bit longer.”
“I’m fine,” Eve said. “I can do this. I can.”
“And nice job with the voice recording,” Sorenson said. “You were thinking on your feet.”
“It was Matt’s idea,” Eve said without looking at him. “We talked about a variety of scenarios over the weekend.”
Sorenson gestured for Eve to meet her by the door. “How are you holding up?” she asked quietly, her gaze holding Eve’s.
Her voice was too low for either Hawthorn or Matt to hear her words, but she could tell Matt got the gist of the question by the way his jaw tightened.
“Fine,” Eve lied.
“He’s just doing his job,” Sorenson said.
“I know.”
The space between her and Matt seemed as wide as the ocean after Sorenson, Carlucci, and Hawthorn left. She closed her apartment door and turned to find him leaning against the door to her office. There couldn’t have been more than ten feet between them, but the gulf seemed impossible to cross, and in that moment, Eve knew her whole life was crashing down around her ears. Lyle would win. She’d lose Eye Candy, and the East Side would lose support for the redevelopment bid. Worst of all, people were dying, and she …
She was if-you-don’t-say-the-word-love-then-it’s-not-real falling for a man so afraid of emotion he locked away everything he felt, everything he was, behind layers of fictional identity. Ten minutes earlier, for a split second, she’d seen the real Matt, the man suppressed under the bartender, the cop, the brother. The lover.
Now she knew. The sex, the laughter, the teasing banter, none of it was really him.
He leaned against the door, his fists jammed tight in his pockets, probably to keep from shaking her until her teeth rattled in her head, but she would have welcomed that, because it would have been real. Not this artificial, thrumming silence.
“I had to do it. He never would have given away so much if you were in the room. If we’re going to end this anytime soon, we need that evidence.”
“Fuck the evidence. You don’t ever go anywhere alone with him again. Understand?”
She saw red. For the first time in a volatile, impulse-filled life, she actually saw red with anger. “I’m not your partner,” she flung at him. “Or your girlfriend. You don’t have any right to talk to me like that.”