Jill turned her head and gave him a look.
“Lady,” he finished. “A mouth like a lady.”
“What does that mean?”
“Hell if I know,” he muttered as he turned the ignition. “But it’s better than what I was going to say.”
But Jill wasn’t listening. Her phone was already up to her ear as she called in to their superiors to tell them they were on their way.
Five minutes later, they were pulling up to the curb of a mid-rise apartment building in Spanish Harlem. Jill jumped out of the car, notebook already in hand.
Vin paused a moment, taking in the swarm of cops, the yellow tape—the curious onlookers, the just-now-arriving media.
And then there was Jill.
His eyes sought and found his partner. She was wearing a simple black suit, her hair pulled back in its usual ponytail.
She’d already scooted under the caution tape, deep in conversation with one of the uniforms. Her pen was moving across the page of her notebook as she nodded along to whatever the officer was telling her.
Then she flipped her notebook shut and glanced around until she saw him. Their eyes met, and she held out her hands in a what’s the holdup, get your ass over here, Moretti kind of way.
Vincent couldn’t help it. He smiled.
Yes, there was a dead body inside that building, yes, he’d just had his first unsolved murder go on record, but right now, those didn’t seem to matter as much as the woman in front of him did.
Jill was his.
The only question was…
For how long?
How long until she realized that he needed her light a hell of a lot more than she needed his darkness?
“Dude, Moretti. Get a move on it,” she called. “Even you can’t solve a case by standing in the street.”
Instinct told him he didn’t have much time with her.
And since his instincts were never wrong, he fully intended to make the most of the time he did have.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Jill knew she was gloating. Big-time.
She also knew she didn’t feel even the tiniest bit bad about it. The cork of the cheap champagne finally gave in to all her tugging and twisting and went shooting across the room with a satisfying pop.
She glanced at Vincent, who stood behind the stove stirring some sort of meat sauce that looked amazing. He gave a skeptical look as she poured two glasses of champagne and handed one to him.
“Meat sauce requires red wine.”
“So, when we eat your precious meat sauce, we’ll have a glass of red,” she said, lifting up his hand and then shoving the champagne flute into it. “But first, we toast.”
Jill held up her glass, waiting patiently until he finally rolled his eyes and complied.
“To us,” she said.
His eyes shuttered, and Jill stifled her sigh at how jumpy he was about anything related to them.
“To the best damn homicide detectives in the NYPD,” she clarified, more for his sake than hers.
As expected, the clouds in his brown eyes lifted and he clinked his glass to hers. “That was pretty fucking exceptional today. Even for us.”
“If we can continue to get a confession on the same day that the bodies are found, we’ll restore our reputation in no time,” she said, taking a sip of the wine, loving the way the bubbles matched her mood.
It’s not that she was okay with the fact that they hadn’t found Lenora Birch’s killer. She wasn’t. At all. In fact, she was sure that the lack of closure on the case would continue to haunt both of them for some time.
But that didn’t change the fact that she and Vincent had done damn good work this afternoon.
Granted, it hadn’t exactly been a stumper.
A twenty-one-year-old girl named Maria Salvez, found dead of multiple stab wounds on her blood-soaked mattress…
But wait, twist!
Only half of the blood was hers.
Quick calls to local hospitals and they’d found themselves victim number two. A twenty-four-year-old male with multiple stab wounds, in serious but stable condition.
It had taken Jill about ten minutes of sweet talk before she found out that the guy had been sleeping with his best friend’s girlfriend.
The boyfriend found them in bed and lost his mind, grabbed a knife…
A classic, tragic tale. One that made Jill positively sick to her stomach, and all the more gratified when she and Vin had found Maria’s killer within two hours of discovering the body. The bastard had been skulking at his sister’s house, drinking a beer and eating a corn dog, looking cocky as hell.
It had taken less than five minutes of Jill and Vincent’s trusty good cop/bad cop routine before the guy confessed.
Open.
Shut.
Awesome.
“I’d forgotten how good it feels,” Jill mused, taking a sip of her champagne.
“Sure,” Vin said, tasting the sauce on the stove. “Until the damn lawyers strike some sort of bullshit deal and the guy gets off easy.”
“Uh-uh,” Jill said. “Don’t rain on my parade right now. We did good, Vin. It was a win.”