Her Special Charm (8 page)

“They're pretty much stain resistant,” she told him. “And whatever happens can be taken care of.” She stroked the puppy's head with such affection that it made James's gut tighten. “It'll be well worth it.”

Constance gazed at him, silently wondering about this enigma in jeans and a T-shirt. Why had he done this when good deeds clearly made him ill at ease? She had no answer, she only knew that she was glad he had.

“I don't know how to thank you, James. That's twice now you've done something wonderful for me.”

He didn't want her gratitude. He didn't even know what he was doing here. Maybe there was a full moon out tonight and he was a budding werewolf. That wouldn't have been as out of character for him as bringing a puppy to a woman he barely knew. “No, I—”

Still holding the puppy to herself, she placed one fin
ger against his lips. He felt as if he'd just been branded. “Why is it so hard for you to admit that you're a nice person, James?”

He firmly moved her hand aside, away from himself. “It's not hard. But you're blowing this out of proportion.” It occurred to him that he had already uttered the exact same words this evening. To Eli. “You and Eli have a lot in common.”

“Eli?” The way she said it brought up visions of cotton gins and long, languid summer nights beneath a Carolina moon.

“The owner of the dog who had the litter.” There he was again, he thought in disgust, volunteering more information. For a man normally as closemouthed as he was, it was hard to accept.

He watched in fascination as she pressed her cheek against the top of the puppy's head. “I'd like to meet him sometime.”

He didn't see that happening. “He owns Eli's Deli on Eighth and Fifty-third. Not exactly your neighborhood.”

She glanced at him, detecting a note of superiority in his voice. People from impoverished roots wrapped themselves up in pride like that. “Do you think I'm a snob, James?”

“I think that rich girls don't go to mom-and-pop stores.”

Amusement curved her mouth as she continued to stroke the puppy and hold it to herself. “Where do we ‘rich girls' go?”

“Shopping,” he retorted. “In fancy boutiques with overpriced things.”

Rather than take offense, she merely nodded her head, taking in his words. “Have me pretty well figured out, do you?”

James shrugged in response, wishing he was in a traffic jam on the expressway. Anywhere but here, making a fool of himself for no known earthly reason.

She indicated the shorts and halter. “I bought this outfit at Old Navy the day I took my class on a field trip to show them the value of money, specifically, how to look for bargains.”

He'd forgotten that she was a teacher. The fact that she taught when she could have spent days partying changed things somewhat. “They teach that kind of thing these days?”

“I don't know if ‘they' do, but I do.” She put the puppy down into the box for a moment. “You have to be practical. Life goes by at such a fast pace, you've got be able to jump into it with both feet and keep on running.”

He wished she was still holding the dog. He felt safer with something between them. Something that would keep him from touching her the way he wanted to. “Sounds like a working-class philosophy.”

“Best class there is,” she said with a toss of her head. Bending over to pick up the box, giving him a very pleasant view of her hips and the way they swayed when she moved, she made her way into the living room. Her manner indicated that she wanted him to follow.

He did, never taking his eyes off her hips. His palms itched. Other parts of him grew restless. He should be heading out the door, not deeper into her lair.

She turned to face him. He had to concentrate to look into her eyes rather than at the cameo and what lay directly beneath.

Constance placed the box on the coffee table and took out the puppy again, holding it to herself. “We weren't always well off, James. My daddy got lucky when I was a little girl. But I can remember another life. My mother sitting at the table, cutting out coupons every Sunday, deciding what we could get and what we could do without until the following week. I like all this,” she said, gesturing to her surroundings. “But it's not who I am.”

He heard himself asking, “And who are you?”

“Just a little girl from Virginia. Oh,” she laughed as the puppy began licking her face.

There was nothing little about her. Not her heart and certainly not her attributes. “Here, I'll take her,” he offered, reaching for the dog. But Constance laughed and moved out of reach. She was clearly delighted with her new pet.

“I don't mind a little genuine affection, James.” The dog wiggled against her, trying to use her breast for leverage in an attempt to climb up to her shoulder. For the moment, because she wanted to talk to James, she deposited Felicia back into the box. “I'm going to have to try to figure out where to let you sleep for the night.” She looked at James. “I take it that she's not housebroken?”

He shook his head. “I can take her back,” he offered again.

“Don't you dare,” she cried, her hand immediately going toward the box protectively. “I can train her, I just wanted to know what was on my plate, that's all.”

A hell of a lot more than you probably bargained for if I don't get out of here,
he thought.

“Okay, well, I'd better be going. Stanley's waiting,” he added. The second he said it, he was annoyed with himself. He never offered excuses. That wasn't his way. She was turning him inside out and yet he couldn't point to a single manipulative thing she had done. He was the one behaving strangely.

Rather than try to argue him out of it, she sensed that he needed to leave in order to collect himself. “I'll walk you to the door.”

The woman hooked her arm through his as she made the offer. He brushed against her breast and felt a shaft of heat travel up his arm hot enough to singe his flesh.

“James, since you turned up again like a knight in shining armor, I was wondering if I could ask you for a big favor.”

Alarms sounded in his head. He'd learned a long time ago never to agree to anything without first knowing the terms. Eli was the only exception to his rule. “Depends on what it is.”

“Fair enough. I've got Career Day coming up on Friday. My speaker called just before you rang my bell and canceled on me. Airline pilot,” she added. “I was wondering if you could see your way to filling in.”

“I'm not an airline pilot,” he pointed out dourly.

“I meant as a police detective,” she clarified with a smile that got to him faster than a speeding bullet. “It would only be a ten-minute talk. Shorter if you wanted. They're just fourth graders, so it doesn't have to be anything elaborate, just something that would give them a taste of what you do. I don't think it's ever too early to introduce them to the solid choices they have before them. The more choices they have, the less likely they are to do drugs.”

The sad fact of life was that there were drugs available everywhere, in both the affluent and poorer sections of the city. Suspicion nudged him. “Just where is this school?”

Constance gave him the location—not his first choice for safety. He was more than familiar with the area. “What are you doing, teaching there?”

When she looked at him, he felt something stir inside. He banked it down as she replied, “A good job, I hope.”

I
t took James a moment to draw his eyes away from hers and resume something that resembled clear thinking. “Look, I think you'd better find someone else to address your class.”

The puppy was yipping. She scratched Felicia behind her ears. “I understand,” Constance told him. “You're too busy.”

She made it too easy for him.

So where was this wave of guilt coming from, threatening to drown him? He
was
busy. He and Santini were up to their armpits in restaurant robberies and clues that led nowhere, but had to be followed up nonetheless.

And yet fifteen minutes could be dug up somewhere without hurting anything.

James frowned, trying to ignore this thought. And the woman standing in front of him. He had little luck with either attempt.

“Yeah, I am busy,” he told her tersely. “And besides, I don't know how to relate to kids.” It was true. He felt like he'd never been a kid himself, so there was nothing to draw on there and Dana had been two when Janice, his ex-wife, had taken her away. Not that he'd done all that much interacting with the little girl up to that point, but he had always meant to. Wanted to.

Shifting Felicia around to her other side, Constance looked at him. There was an indulging expression on her face. As if she thought what he was going through was needless.

“You don't have to relate to them, James. They'll relate to you. If you just leave yourself open to the process, the kids'll take it from there,” she assured him. Her smile grew, pulling him in. Taking his breath along with it. “You're an authority figure and they're at an age where they're still in awe of that, even if they don't always admit it outright.”

But he shook his head, needing to stand firm. It wasn't just the kids, it was her. He had to pull back now before things got out of hand. More out of hand, he amended. He'd already gotten in further than he'd ever thought he would.

Served him right. He should have asked Santini to place the ad in the newspaper about the cameo. And he
really shouldn't have come over to her apartment, bearing a dog. It gave her the wrong message. That he was interested. He wasn't interested. He wouldn't allow himself to be.

“I can't do it.” His answer was firm, leaving no room for even a pin to be wedged in to widen the space for a rebuttal.

Constance was disappointed, but she did her best to cover it. Maybe it was for the best. She could feel herself being attracted to him. Her last less-than-stellar venture into the garden of romance still loomed large in her mind.

She paused to brush her cheek against the puppy's soft head. She'd always derived infinite comfort from Whiskey when she'd done that.

“All right, I can do something else that day.”

For just a split second, he was jealous of a dog. He needed his head examined. She was just trying to manipulate him, he thought. Well, he wasn't buying it. “What, there's nobody else you can ask? What about the guy who cooks?”

She tried to make sense of his reference. And then she realized he was talking about Nico. “He was already there last month.”

The wind left his sails. Stumped for another suggestion and wishing himself thirty stories down, in his car, he mumbled, “Well, that's not my problem.”

“No,” she agreed cheerfully. “It's not.”

The wave of guilt grew, resembling a tsunami now. “There's nobody else you can ask?”

She moved her head slowly from side to side. “I've used everybody they might be interested in hearing.”

He sighed, refusing to be taken in by the look in her eyes, the tone of her voice. He had trouble in a monosyllabic conversation, what the hell was he going to do standing up in front of a bunch of fourth graders, delivering a speech? He'd wind up tongue-tied and looking like a fool. Talking to kids was not his thing. If it had been, he would have signed up for the D.A.R.E. program a long time ago.

Enough was enough, he thought. He jerked a thumb at the doorway. “I've got to go.”

Constance nodded, not offering any protest. “Thank you again. I love Felicia.”

Okay, so this was a good deed, nothing more. He could live with that. Right now, he needed to get away because his knees felt funny. “I'll let Eli know.”

“Thank him for me, too.” She raised her voice as he took one step away. “And for the food.”

“Right. Sure.” All he could focus on was putting space between him and her perfume. Between him and a woman with eyes that could have been magnets. But as he attempted to turn his back on his dilemma and her, the puppy caught hold of his sleeve. Clamping down with all her might, Felicia held him fast.

“Hold it!” Constance warned, seeing the problem before he was even aware of it.

He felt as if he were standing in quicksand as he swung around to glare at her. “Now what?”

“You're going to wind up tearing your sleeve,” she
told him. Still holding the cloth right before Felicia's mouth to prevent any further ripping, Constance shifted the puppy back to her other arm. “I don't think Felicia wants you to go.” She didn't bother looking up at him. Instead, she worked away at the material. “Wait a sec, I'll have you freed in a jiffy.”

Jiffy.

Nobody said
jiffy
anymore, he thought. And nobody looked like that, either. Like they'd just stepped out of the pages of some magazine where the flattering photograph was the results of camera angles, lighting and artistic airbrushing.

Her head was bowed right before him as Constance worked the fabric out of the dog's determined teeth. He could smell her hair. Honeysuckle. Like her perfume. It filled his head, disorienting him. Making him think irrationally.

Her fingers brushed against his arm as she got the last bit of cloth out of the dog's teeth. He didn't notice the dog or the shirt. He noticed the warmth that traveled up the length of him, filling in the emptiness. Seeping into the craters that comprised the terrain of his soul.

“There,” she cried triumphantly as she set the dog, now devoid of any material in her teeth, down on the floor. Her triumphant tone melted down to almost a whisper. “You're free.”

They were barely an inch apart from one another. So close that their breaths mixed and became one.

All sorts of things were going on inside of him.
Things he couldn't understand or unravel. Things he felt it best not to examine.

“Not hardly,” he said, more to himself than to her.

Her heart jumped up into her throat and made itself at home there just beneath the oval of the cameo.

And then everything else stopped.

For all she knew, the world had abruptly stopped turning on its axis. Because she felt the room tilting instead.

James placed the crook of his finger beneath her chin and raised her head a fraction. Placing her lips just within reach. Their eyes met and held. Seconds were knitting themselves into eternity.

She wasn't sure who cut the tiny distance between them into nothing. Probably her because, despite the fact that she was raised in an atmosphere where life was supposed to flow slowly, like warm summer breezes through cottonwood trees, there had always been an eagerness within her. An energy that wanted to reach out, seize the moment and create something out of it.

And the electricity she was feeling between them made her want to create wonderful things that touched the sky and would endure forever.

She was creating havoc, or rather, he was. Because he was kissing her. Because his hands had gone around her back and were pressing her to him now. Constance laced her fingers through his hair. She felt his body, hard, rigid and full of desire.

In less than a heartbeat, she forgot all about her promises to herself after Josh had been sent packing.
The promises that were meant to keep her away from situations just like this. To keep her safe. She needed to keep that promise because she was a lousy judge of men.

She gave her trust too easily and that wasn't safe.

Constance wasn't thinking about safe right now. She was thinking about free-falling.

And loving it.

With very little effort on his part, she could become an obsession for him. The woman he was kissing, the one he was desiring, tasted of everything precious and sweet.

And forbidden.

He had no idea what had possessed him to do this. To somehow allow himself to arrange things so that he was here, in this exact place and time, kissing her.

It only made things more difficult. He didn't want this, didn't need the added aggravation. What he needed was space. Preferably a moat between himself and the rest of the world. Specifically this woman.

Too late.

She probably thought he was crazy.

With a jolt, James forced himself to step away from her while everything inside of him lobbied for him to go forward. To at least kiss her longer. Until all of him was rendered totally mindless.

There were worse states to be in, that small, undermining voice whispered.

It took effort for her to catch her breath. When she could speak without a telltale wheeze, she asked, “Was that my consolation prize?”

At first, he just stared at her, not comprehending the question. “Consolation prize?”

She nodded.
Breathe, Constance, breathe.
“For not coming to speak to my class.”

“No.”

He was good with that word, she thought. Like an old-fashioned gunslinger who was quick on the draw, he'd whip that word out, having it explode in the air.

She nodded at his response, accepting it without argument. “It didn't feel like a consolation.” She wanted to kiss him again. And she could see he wanted to leave. She wasn't going to stand in his way. “You're a hard man to figure out, Detective Munro.”

He nodded, more to himself than to her. “I didn't used to be.”

And with that, he left.

 

“You gave her a puppy?” Landing in the chair beside James's desk, Santini looked like a man who had just been struck by lightning.

“It wasn't mine,” James bit off.

He wore the same jeans he'd had on last night. When he'd gone to retrieve his keys out of his pocket, he'd pulled out a dog treat. Not bothering to hide his amusement, Santini had asked him if he was carrying them around for Stanley. Which was when James had made the mistake of saying that they were for the puppy he'd brought to Constance.

He wasn't thinking clearly, but who could blame him? Every which way his mind turned, visions of last
night, of kissing her and the sensations that generated through him, would take his thinking process hostage. He was completely and utterly unaccustomed to that.

Frowning now, he muttered, “Someone I know was trying to get rid of a litter and I took one off his hands. When she came over with dinner the other night, Constance said the dog she'd had died and she missed having a pet.” There, that should take care of it. But it didn't. There was a smirk on Santini's face. “What?” James demanded in a barely controlled voice.

Santini attempted to look like the soul of innocence and failed miserably. The illusion of innocence had eluded him long ago.

“Nothing.” He spread his hands wide, then couldn't resist adding, “Just in some countries, you'd be engaged by now.”

James had no idea if he was kidding or not. Santini was a walking treasure trove of useless and near-useless information. “You've gotta make your wife let you watch something besides the Discovery Channel, Santini. You're putting my feet to sleep.”

Santini eyed him knowingly. “Don't change the subject.”

“There
is
no subject,” he declared with a finality that was enough to jar the other man's teeth. He pushed the files they'd been going through into the middle of his desk and began flipping through them. When he'd left last night, the night-shift task force had been working on them. “Where are we on this case?”

Santini blew out a breath. “Still fishing. I know
somebody in forensic computers who's inputting all the data we've collected. She's going to try to come up with some kind of common thread besides baked goods.”

“Forensic computers?” James liked to think that he kept up on the latest techniques and technology that were being brought into the department, but this was something he'd never heard of. He hated being out of the loop. “What the hell is forensic computers?”

“Just what it sounds,” Santini explained.

James listened in silence. While his partner spoke, his mind was operating on a different plane, trying valiantly once more to connect the dots. Or at least to come up with a new theory about the placement of the dots.

As Santini concluded his mini-edification, something occurred to James. “Hold it. What if the common thread we're looking for is nothing we can get from the restaurant owners' input? What if the common thread is a customer?”

They'd examined employees, past and present, suppliers of every item on the menu as well as what went on the table and the linens. This was something they hadn't looked at. “Come again?”

New, with all the possibilities that entailed, the idea caught fire. “Follow me here. What if it's some guy—or woman—who frequents the place, maybe comes in at the same time every day and watches what goes on. Waiting to see when the perfect opportunity to pull off a lucrative robbery might arise.”

“And just how do we find this ‘common' customer?”
Santini asked. “There are no fingerprints to go on. In most cases, everything has been washed a hundred times over since the robbery took place. And most of these places don't use surveillance tapes.”

“The old-fashioned way, Santini.” James was already rising to his feet, ready to roll. “We talk to the waiters and waitresses to see if they noticed anyone.”

“
Which
waiters and waitresses?” Santini asked.

“Which do you think?” James checked his weapon in his holster before slipping on his jacket, which felt as if it weighed a thousand pounds in this heat. “All of them.”