I Got You, Babe (20 page)

He motioned to the bed. “You can sleep here. But I have to lock you back up.”

She let out a weak, regretful sigh. “Please, John. I swear I won’t—”

He pointed. “Sit.”

She came around and sat dutifully on the edge of the bed. He picked up the cuff dangling from the headboard, took her wrist in his hand, and looped the cuff around it. It was such an incongruous sight—that warm, delicate wrist inside the cold metal handcuff. He clicked the cuff shut, reminding himself that she was a prisoner, not a woman he’d invited to spend the night, no matter how attractive she might be. No matter how fresh and pretty she looked. No matter how wonderful she smelled, with fresh scents of soap and shampoo and...

And spearmint toothpaste.

“Damn it, Renee, you did it again, didn’t you?”

“What?”

“Used my toothbrush!”

She looked at him with dumb disbelief. “You really are anal about that, aren’t you?”

“Fine. Consider that one yours. I’ll use my travel toothbrush, which, of course,” he said, grimacing, “you’ve already used, too.”

“I guess this isn’t a good time to tell you I shaved my legs with your razor.”

He glared at her. “Just keep your hands off my stuff!”

He stalked over to his closet, grabbed an old pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt, then went into the bathroom and peeled off his dirty clothes. After a quick shower, he took his dirty clothes out to the utility room, then returned to the bedroom and pulled back the covers on the other side of the bed from where Renee lay.

“Are you sleeping here, too?” she asked.

“It’s the only bed in the house. I have exercise equipment in the other bedroom.”

“So the answer is yes?”

“Do you have a problem with that?”

She shrugged. “No. No problem.”

“It isn’t as if we haven’t occupied the same bed before.”

“I know.”

“We’re just sleeping, Renee,” he said sharply. “Nothing else.”

“I think you made the ‘nothing else’ quite clear already today.”

“There’s not going to be any repeat of what happened out there in the woods. Do you understand?”

“Yes, John,” she said, a note of exasperation in her voice. “I get the picture. This is a no-sex zone. I wouldn’t think of violating it.”

“See that you don’t.”

She stared at him a long time, then raised a single eyebrow with a look that seemed to say,
Who are you trying to convince, John? Me or you?

For a moment, John felt positively transparent, as if she could read every thought he had. He crawled beneath the covers with his back to her, then turned out the lamp and settled his head against the pillow, acutely aware that she lay beneath the covers only a foot away—half-naked, blond, and beautiful.

Less than six hours ago, she’d been willing to have hot, steamy, down-in-the-dirt sex if he hadn’t called a halt to it. Was that why she’d asked where he was sleeping? Because she wanted to do something more than sleep?

No, dammit. Get that out of your mind. Where Renee is concerned, it’s hands off. Period.

Several minutes passed. John was hovering on the edge of sleep when he heard Renee’s voice.

“John?”

He sighed drowsily. “What do you want?”

A long silence passed between them. Then she shifted a bit and he heard her voice again, floating tentatively to him across the darkness.

“Why didn’t you take me to jail?”

That was a really good question. Why was she sleeping here instead of on a cot in the county jail? Why had he brought her to his
house,
for God’s sake? Why was he risking his career for a woman he didn’t even know who just might be guilty after all?

He would have liked to have given her some cop-like answer to shield himself, something like, The evidence is inconclusive, or It's my professional prerogative to get to the truth in any way I see fit, or even Just consider yourself lucky and shut up.

But he couldn’t.

He turned to face her. And that was a big, big mistake. With only the light from the streetlamp outside filtering through the blinds, he couldn’t make out the color of her eyes, but their luminescent quality was apparent nonetheless. Had a criminal ever been born who had eyes like that?

The late hour, the darkness, the way she’d whispered the question as if she were terrified of the answer—all those things seemed to make it impossible for him to speak anything but the truth.

“You’re here because I have some doubts about your guilt.”

“Then you believe I didn’t do it?”

“I never said that. I said I have doubts. That’s all.”

“Enough doubt that you’re risking your job?”

“Make no mistake, Renee. If it ever comes down to you or my job, you’re going to jail.”

He turned his back to her and pulled the covers up over his shoulder in a gesture of dismissal. He didn’t need to be looking at her anymore. He was having a hard enough time maintaining his tough-guy demeanor when he wasn’t completely sure she deserved it.

She’d told him nothing conclusive to lead him to believe she might be innocent, but he still couldn’t get over the feeling that there was something more to this than an open-and-shut case. Could she be the victim of a random drop of the weapon and the cash from the robbery? Possibly. But what about the eyewitness who’d picked her out of a lineup? What were the odds of refuting that testimony?

Despite the overwhelming evidence against her, doubt still lingered in his mind. And he knew the only way to get rid of that doubt was to do a little investigating of his own.

Chapter 10

T
he first thing Renee saw when she woke the next morning was bright sunlight streaming through the blinds. The second thing was sunlight glinting off the metal bracelet she wore.

Bracelet?

She blinked, trying to focus. No. Not bracelet.

Handcuffs.

She squeezed her eyes closed, and for a moment she couldn’t breathe as the events of the past twenty-four hours whipped through her mind. She really was handcuffed to a bed. John’s bed. Which she was sharing with John.

She turned over, expecting to find him there. He wasn’t.

She glanced at the clock. Ten forty-five. She’d slept until ten forty-five?

No wonder. She’d been so tired after all that had happened, it was amazing she hadn’t slept around the clock.

She sat up slowly, looking around. John wasn’t in the bedroom, and she didn’t hear him in the bathroom. Finally she called out to him tentatively.

No response.

Louder.

Nothing.

She lay back down and closed her eyes, her arm shielding her eyes from the bright sunlight. His absence worried her. Where could he possibly have gone?

“Oh, my
God
!”

The voice out of nowhere made Renee’s heart leap right into her throat. She jerked her arm away from her eyes to see a woman standing at the bedroom door.

With a strangled scream, she yanked herself up and scooted against the headboard, hauling the covers up over her with her free hand, her heart beating frantically. Who was this woman, and what was she doing in John’s house?

The answer was obvious. Girlfriend.

She looked the part. Tall, long-legged, and amply endowed, with a headful of dark hair pulled into a ponytail at the crown of her head. She wore a pair of jeans, a purple crop top, and flip-flops. Her half-baffled, half-astonished expression was asking a whole lot more questions than Renee was prepared to answer.

“Wh-who are you?” Renee asked.

“Sandy DeMarco,” the woman said, her eyes still big as golf balls. “John’s sister.”

His sister? Was that better than a girlfriend, or worse? It was
weirder,
that was for sure.

No.
It was better. A baffled sister was definitely better than an irate girlfriend.

Sandy continued to stare at her with dumb disbelief. “And you’re...?”

Embarrassed as hell? At a total loss to explain this? Going to kill John for leaving me handcuffed? All of the above?

“I’m Alice. I’m a...a friend of John’s.”

Sandy zeroed in on Renee’s handcuffed wrist, looking perplexed, and in that instant Renee knew she couldn’t explain this scenario if her life depended on it. Except, of course, to say that she was a fugitive John just happened to have hanging around. What was she going to do now?

Then it occurred to her. There
was
one other way to explain it, but...good Lord. Could she actually say it out loud?

“John’s a cop, you know,” Renee said, her voice shaky. “The handcuffs. I guess it’s k-kind of...well, you know...kind of a...” She exhaled. “A turn on.”

Sandy blinked with disbelief. “What?”

Oh, no.
Did she have “liar” scrolling across her forehead like stock-market figures?

“You’re telling me my brother, Mr. Conservative, goes in for the kinky stuff?”

“Uh...yeah. I guess he does.”

Sandy’s perplexed expression slowly gave way to a smile of pure delight. “Well, I’ll be damned. There’s hope for him yet.”

Renee felt a rush of relief. Not only had Sandy bought the idea that her brother was having wild, deviant sex, she applauded it, which meant she probably wasn’t going to be calling the Depravity Squad.

“I guess this means he’s back early,” Sandy asked. “So where is he now?”

“Uh...I’m not sure.”

Sandy planted her fists on her hips. “You mean he left you handcuffed here and took off?”

“He probably didn’t want to wake me.”

“Why didn’t he take them off last night?”

Good question.
With only one answer Renee could think of. “He fell asleep.”

Sandy rolled her eyes. “Then you should have given him a swift kick to wake him up!” She strode over to the bed. “Where’s the key? I’ll get those things off you, and then I’ll kill him for you when he gets home.”

The key.

Hope gushed through Renee like water through a broken dam. If the key was here, this woman could find it. She could unlock the handcuffs. And then Renee could get the hell out of here. Where she’d go, she didn’t know. First she had to get free; then she’d think about how to disappear.

“I don’t know where it is,” Renee said. “Do you suppose you could look around a bit?”

“Sure.” Sandy started poking around the bedroom. When it didn’t appear to be lying around there, Renee suggested she look in the rest of the house, but after a few minutes of searching, Sandy came up empty-handed. Renee slumped with disappointment. Her best chance for escape was undoubtedly sitting in John’s pocket right now.

“I can’t believe this,” Sandy said with disgust. “He must have the key with him. Do you have any idea where he went?”

“I don’t know. To get a newspaper, maybe?”

“He’s got you in his bed, and he goes out for a paper?” She made a scoffing noise. “And I thought there was hope for him. I hope you kill him for this, Alice. Or the offer’s still open for me to be the hit woman. It’ll be no problem proving justifiable homicide, believe me.”

Renee would have settled for proving she was innocent of armed robbery.

“Now, don’t you worry. I’ll keep you company until he gets back. Being handcuffed to a bed all by yourself would have to be a real bore.”

Uh-oh.
This was bad. She pictured the look that would be on John’s face the moment he saw her sitting here talking to his sister, and it wasn’t a pretty sight.

“No,” she said quickly, forcing a smile. “It’s okay. I’ll be fine by myself. Surely you’ve got better things to do than hang around here.”

“And what if he’s gone for another hour or two? I’m not leaving you handcuffed here. What if there’s a fire or something? No. I’m staying right here until he gets back.” She sat down on the comer of the bed and gave Renee a woman-to-woman look. “I know this sounds kind of weird, but I’m really glad this happened. I don’t get to meet many of the women John dates.”

This was getting stranger by the minute. Here she was handcuffed to John’s bed in the apparent aftermath of a really hot bondage scene, yet Sandy was acting as if they’d just run into each other at the mall. Somehow she would have thought any relative of John’s would have been quite a bit more...well, appalled.

“Of course, he has to actually ask a woman out before I can meet her,” Sandy went on, talking away as if they were chatting over a cup of coffee. “Most of the time he eats, sleeps, and works. That’s about it.”

“Uh...yeah. He seems to take his job pretty seriously.”

“Too seriously.” Sandy pulled her legs up onto the bed and crossed them, resting her elbow on her knee, her chin in her hand. “So. How long have you two been seeing each other?”

Ever since he almost arrested me two nights ago.

“Not long,” Renee said.

“Tell me about yourself,” Sandy said. “What do you do for a living?”

Well, if your brother would let me go, I'd have a promising career as a professional fugitive.

“I work at a restaurant. Assistant manager.”

“Perfect! John loves to eat. You’re a match made in heaven.”

Renee had the feeling that if she’d mentioned she was an undertaker, Sandy would have said John liked dead bodies.

“How about you?” Renee said, thinking maybe she should hold up her end of the conversation. “What do you do?”

“I own a flower shop. I think it’s a backlash against all that testosterone I was around growing up. One father, three brothers, no mother.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. What happened to your mother?”

“Cancer. I don’t suppose John got around to telling you any of the details of his personal life yet.”

Renee knew precisely nothing about John’s personal life. But given Sandy’s inclination to talk, she was learning more every minute.

“No,” Renee said. “He hasn’t. His mother’s death must have hit him hard.”

“Yeah, well, it hit
me
harder. Try dealing with three younger brothers who fought like gladiators and had to be threatened with their lives to pick up their underwear or take a plate to the kitchen once in a while. Even now...” Sandy ran her fingertip along the nightstand and held up a finger full of dust. “Look at this, will you? And that fridge of John’s. Alexander Fleming might have discovered penicillin years earlier if he’d had access to that.” She made a face of disgust, then brushed her finger off on the leg of her jeans. “That’s why I dropped by today. I thought he was still out of town. See, if I don’t clean up for him occasionally, any woman he brings around is going to throw up and leave, and when will that workaholic brother of mine
ever
get married?”