She wasn’t sure she liked that. Or maybe she liked it too much. She gave him a quick peek and sighed. Six foot five of alpha male all wrapped up in black leather.
For a moment, her mind flashed back to that morning when Pete had suggested they date. The thought hadn’t made her go all hot and fluttery like this. Ash was a source of information. That was the important thing. That’s what she had to focus on. She’d never considered using her body to get information, had probably known there wasn’t enough of it to swap for anything useful. She was way too skinny and flat-chested. The idea made her smile.
“What are you smiling at?”
“Nothing,” she said, her tone innocent. She jumped out and led the way to her apartment, letting them in through the front door and dropping her bag on the table.
“Nice,” he said, his gaze wandering around the place.
“No, it isn’t,” she replied. “It’s functional at best. But it does the job.”
She went into the small kitchen, dug the corkscrew out of the drawer, and tossed it to where he stood in the doorway.
Tonight, he wasn’t wearing a coat and no weapons. She took off her own jacket.
“Hey, nice gun,” he murmured.
She’d forgotten about the pistol at her waist. After unbuckling the belt, she dropped the whole thing into a lower drawer and slammed it shut.
“That come with the new job?” he asked. Then held up his hand before she could answer. “Don’t tell me—you’re not allowed to say.”
“So, you’re not carrying today? Have you decided I’m safe?”
He grinned, then reached down and pulled up his pants leg to reveal an ankle holster and a small pistol.
She shook her head; that wasn’t legal whether he had a license or not. But she didn’t pursue the matter. Instead, she grabbed a couple of glasses from the cabinet and led him into the living room. Kicking off her shoes, she sank down onto the sofa with a sigh of relief.
Closing her eyes, she felt when he sat down beside her. He took the glasses from her hand and she heard the cork being released. A few seconds later, he wrapped her fingers around the stem of the glass.
“Thank you.”
When she opened her eyes, he was sitting in the far corner of the sofa, long legs stretched out, sipping his wine and watching her over the rim of the glass, his eyes dark.
“So, without telling me anything about it, how do you feel about the new job?” he asked.
She took a gulp of wine. “Pissed off.”
“Why?”
“I was working on a case. It was important to me.”
An image flashed in her mind. A young girl’s naked body, wounds at her throat and wrists, her inner thighs. She was pale with loss of blood, her eyes wide and terrified. Suddenly, the image was overlaid with an older one. Faith’s mother. And something was behind Faith. Something that shouldn’t be there, something so terrible—
“Faith?”
She jumped as Ash dragged her back to the present.
“You know you could always tell them to go to hell and come work with us,” Ash said.
She’d thought about it on and off through the day. If this transfer was a long-term thing, then she didn’t know how she felt. Her whole life was the force. It was all she had ever wanted to do. But the thought of working day in, day out in that underground vault with a bunch of guys who gave her the creeps—well, it wasn’t a long-term option.
But first, she wanted to find out what they knew. Because while there was no way in a million years they were going to convince her that vampires had killed Julie Foster, she was certain that they had information that would help solve her murder.
Once she had that information, she would consider her future. If she had one.
She decided to ignore Ash’s question and ask one of her own. “How well do you know Rosamund Fairfax?”
He raised a brow at the change of question. “Roz? I know her very well.”
How well?
She didn’t like the reminiscent little smile that hovered on his lips. Her eyes narrowed. “Are you seeing her?”
“Hell, no.” He grinned, then shrugged. “We were close once but that ended a long time ago by mutual agreement.”
“Can’t have been that long. She hardly looks out of her teens.”
He smiled. “She’s older than she appears.”
For some reason that later photo of Christian Roth sprang to mind. Someone else who was older than they looked? Coincidence? As a detective, she didn’t believe in coincidences. CR International owned pharmaceutical companies; maybe they’d discovered some brilliant antiaging drug. She cast a quick glance at Ash and tried to estimate his age—early thirties maybe.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Maybe one day, I’ll tell you.”
“Hmmm? Evasive or what. So Roz works for Christian Roth?”
“Not really. She’s in a relationship with a business colleague of his, and she’s friends with Tara, Christian’s wife.”
She frowned at him. “You’re being very free with information.”
“You haven’t asked me anything I don’t want to answer yet.”
“Except your age. So what does she do—what is she exactly?”