Night Whispers (3 page)

Having failed to evoke a response from her, he spun on his heel, but as he stepped away, he fired one more insulting remark over his shoulder. "Try not to mess up anything while we're gone, Reynolds."

This time, his taunt embarrassed and irritated her because several people who were walking by heard what he said and because Caruso smirked at her. She waited until they were a few paces away; then she called out cheerfully, "Try the chili! Everyone says it's great." She remembered what Sara had said about the challenge of hot chili to men, and although Sara's notion had seemed completely inane at the time, Sara was an unquestioned authority on men and male behavior. "You'd better stay away from it if you can't handle jalapeño peppers, though!" she added, raising her voice a little to reach them.

The two men turned long enough to give her identical smirks of confident male superiority; then they headed directly for Pete Salinas's chili stand.

Sloan bent her head to hide her smile and began straightening up the stacks of brochures on neighborhood-watch groups, civil service employment opportunities, and on the new self-defense classes for women being taught at city hall.

Beside her, Jess Jessup watched Ingersoll and Caruso until they vanished into the crowd. "What a perfect pair. Ingersoll's an egotist and Caruso is a sycophant."

Privately Sloan agreed with him, but she automatically chose to soothe a difficult situation rather than make it more inflammatory. "Ingersoll's a good cop, though. You have to give him credit for that."

"You're a damned good cop and he doesn't give
you
any credit," Jess countered.

"He doesn't give
anyone
any credit," Sloan pointed out, refusing to let the discussion threaten the relaxed mood of the balmy afternoon.

"Unless he happens to like them," Jess argued irritably.

Sloan shot him an irrepressible grin. "Who does he like?"

Jess thought for a moment; then he chuckled. "No one," he admitted. "He doesn't like anyone."

They lapsed into comfortable silence, watching the crowd, returning friendly nods and smiles from people they knew or who knew them or who simply walked by. It began to amuse Sloan that several women had walked by more than once and that their smiles were becoming increasingly blatant and aimed directly at Jess.

It amused her, but it didn't surprise her. Jess Jessup had that effect on women no matter what he was wearing, but when he was in uniform, he looked as if he belonged in a
Hollywood film, playing the part of the handsome, tough, charismatic cop. He had curly black hair, a flashing smile, a scar above his eyebrow that gave him a dangerous, rakish look, and a thoroughly incongruous dimple in one cheek that could soften his features to boyishness.

He'd come to Bell Harbor a year ago, after spending seven years in Miami with the Dade County Police Department. Fed up with big city crime and big city traffic, he'd tossed a sleeping bag and change of clothes into his Jeep one weekend and driven north from
Miami. With no particular destination in mind except a pretty stretch of beach, he found himself in
Bell
Harbor
. After two days, he'd decided the little city was truly "home."

He applied for a position on
Bell
Harbor
's police force and unhesitatingly left
Miami behind, along with the seniority and pension he'd earned while he was there. Competent, witty, and energetic, he was nearly as popular with his colleagues on
Bell
Harbor
's police force as he was with the city's female population.

Everyone at the department teased him about the increased number of emergency calls from "damsels in distress" that inevitably came in from his particular patrol area. The duty roster changed every three months, and wherever Jess's new assignment placed him, it was inevitable that the calls from ladies would begin to increase.

Everyone, from the secretaries to the desk sergeants, teased him about his attractiveness to women, and to his credit, he showed neither annoyance nor vanity. If it hadn't been for the fact that the women Jess dated were all tall, willowy, and beautiful, Sloan would have believed he was oblivious to looks, his own or anyone else's.

At the moment, a redhead and two of her friends had concluded a brief huddle and were now heading straight toward their table. Sloan saw them and so did Jess. "Your fan club approaches," she joked. "They've worked out a plan."

To her amusement, Jess actually tried to deter them by turning his head away from them and toward Sara's tent. "It looks like Sara has a customer," he said with unnecessary intensity, peering at that tent. "Isn't that Mrs. Peale with her? I should probably go over there and say hello."

"Nice try," Sloan teased. "But if you stand up and leave, they'll either follow you or wait for you. They have that glazed, determined look that women get when you're around."

"You don't," he said irritably, startling Sloan and then making her laugh.

All three women were in their late twenties, attractive, with sleek, tanned bodies that were so perfect and voluptuous that Sloan was struck with admiration. The redhead was the spokesperson for the group, and her first words made it obvious they already knew Jess. "Hi, Jess. We decided you looked lonely over here."

"Really?" he said with a noncommittal smile.

At closer range, it was apparent that they were all wearing a lot of makeup, and Sloan mentally adjusted their ages to early thirties.

"Really," the redhead said brightly, giving him a long, intense look that would have made Sloan blush if she'd tried it. When he didn't seem to react to the invitation in her gaze, she tried a more practical tack. "It's such a relief to know you're the one on patrol in our neighborhood now."

"Why is that?" he asked with a smiling perversity that Sloan had seen him use to discourage women before.

All three women looked startled but undiscouraged. "There's a crazy man on the loose," one of them reminded him unnecessarily, referring to the wave of burglaries that had left several elderly women savagely beaten and near death in their homes.

"Women in this town are terrified, particularly single women!" the redhead put in. "And especially at night," she added, increasing the wattage of her gaze.

Jess smiled suddenly, acknowledging the message she was sending. "I can solve that for you," he said, his tone heavy with promise.

"You can?"

"I can." He turned abruptly to Sloan, forcing her from her comfortable position of amused observer to unwilling participant "Would you hand me that clipboard and three of those brochures?" he said. Sloan did as he asked, and he gave a brochure to each of the three women; then he handed the redhead the clipboard. "Just put your names on that list."

They were all so willing to do anything he asked that they wrote their names and phone numbers on the list without question.

"What did I sign up for?" the redhead asked, handing the clipboard back to him.

"Self-defense classes," he said with a wicked grin. "We're giving four of them at city hall, and the first one is tomorrow afternoon," he added, carefully omitting the information that Sloan was teaching most of the class, and that he would only be present to help her demonstrate some physical moves women could use to fend off an attacker.

"We'll be there," the brunette promised, breaking her silence.

"Don't let me down," he said warmly.

"We won't," they promised before they walked away.

They looked like
Las Vegas chorus girls, Sloan decided, noting the choreographed movements of tight derrieres, long legs, and high-heeled sandals. A slight smile hovered at the corner of her mouth as she tried to imagine herself in the role of uninhibited femme fatale. "Let's hear it," Jess said wryly.

"Hear what?" she said, startled to discover that instead of watching the three women, he'd turned in his chair and was staring intently at her.

"What were you thinking?"

"I was thinking they looked like
Las Vegas chorus girls," Sloan said, bewildered and uneasy beneath his unwavering stare. Several times in the past, she'd caught him looking at her in that piercing, thoughtful way, and for some inexplicable reason, she had never wanted to ask for an explanation. At the department, Jess was renowned for his ability to extract confessions from suspects, simply by asking a question, then sitting across from them and staring at them until they began to answer. This gaze was less intimidating than that, but it was disconcerting nonetheless. "Honestly, that's what I was thinking," she insisted a little desperately.

"That's not all of it," he persisted smoothly. "Not with that smile…"

"Oh, the smile—" Sloan said, inexplicably relieved. "I was also trying to imagine myself in those heels and tight, skimpy shorts, strolling around in the park."

"I'd like to see you do that," he said, and before Sloan could even form a reaction to that remark, he stood up, shoved his hands in his pockets, and said something that left her gaping at him. "While you're at it, could you also slap on a half inch of makeup to hide that glowing skin. Dump some dye on that honey-blond hair, too, and get rid of those sun streaks."

"What?" she said on a choked laugh.

He gazed down at her, his expression bemused. "Just do something so you stop reminding me of ice cream cones and strawberry shortcake."

Her laughter bubbled to the surface, dancing in her eyes and trembling in her voice. "Food? I remind you of food?"

"You remind me of the way I felt when I was thirteen."

"What were you like at thirteen?" she asked, swallowing back a laugh.

"I was an altar boy."

"You weren't!"

"Yes, I was. However, during mass, my attention constantly wandered to a girl I liked who always sat in the third pew at ten o'clock mass. It made me feel like a letch."

"How did you handle that?"

"First, I tried to impress her by genuflecting deeper and appearing more skillful and adept than any of the other servers."

"Did it work?"

"Not the way I wanted it to work. I was so good I had to serve two masses instead of one all that year, but Mary Sue Bonner continued to ignore me."

"It's hard to imagine a girl ignoring you, even then."

"I found it a little unsettling, myself."

"Oh, well, win some, lose some, you know."

"No, I didn't know. All I knew was that I wanted Mary Sue Bonner."

He almost never talked about his past, and Sloan was intrigued by this unprecedented glimpse of him as an uncertain adolescent.

He lifted his brows. "Since piety and religious fervor didn't impress her, I caught up with her after ten o'clock mass and persuaded her to go to Sander's ice cream shop with me. She had a chocolate ice cream cone. I had strawberry shortcake…"

He was waiting for her to ask what happened after that, and Sloan was helpless to resist the temptation to hazard a guess. "And then I suppose you had Mary Sue?"

"No, actually, I didn't. I tried for the next two years, but she was immune to me. Just like you."

He was so damned handsome and so uncharacteristically disgruntled that Sloan felt a little flattered without knowing why.

"Speaking of you," he said abruptly, "I don't suppose you'd consider going to Pete's party with me tomorrow night?"

"I'm on duty, but I plan to go there later."

"And if you weren't on duty, would you go with me?"

"No," said Sloan with a jaunty smile to take the sting out of her answer, though she doubted he was stung at all. "In the first place, as I already explained, we work together."

He chuckled. "Don't you watch television? Cops are supposed to become romantically involved."

"In the second place," she finished lightly, ignoring that, "as I also told you before, I have a rule that I do not go out with any man who is a hundred times more attractive than I am. It's just too hard on my fragile ego." He accepted her refusal with the same unaffected good humor he had before, thus proving he didn't really care one way or the other.

"In that case," he said, "I might as well go and have lunch."

"This time, don't let the girls fight over who gets to buy it for you," Sloan teased as she began tidying up the table. "It's a terrible thing to watch."

"Speaking of admirers," he said, "Sara has evidently acquired a new one. He was hanging around, talking to her earlier; then she brought him by here and introduced him to me. His name's Jonathan. Poor bastard," Jess added. "If he doesn't have a few million dollars in the bank, he's wasting his time. Sara's a flirt." He stepped over the ropes that secured the tent to the stakes in the ground. "I think I'll give some of that chili you recommended a try."

"I wouldn't do that," Sloan warned, breaking into a mischievous grin.

"Why not?"

"Because I heard that it's so bad that the first aid trailer is dispensing prescriptions for a number of unpleasant stomach ailments."

"Are you serious?"

She slowly nodded, her smile widening. "Completely serious."