She’d never been with a man who’d left her standing on her porch, staring after him and wishing he’d come back and give her a little more right then and there. No man had ever turned down her invitation for coffee.
As the Jeep pulled away, Lucy opened her door and entered the house. She locked the dead bolt behind her and flipped on the ceiling light in the living room. Well, she thought as she moved across the room and sank onto her burgundy silk couch, she didn’t have to wonder if he’d asked her out for sex. “I want more,” he’d said. To most men, sex was more.
She tossed her purse on her antique Chinese coffee table and stared at the brick fireplace to her left. He wasn’t married, and he’d just proved he wasn’t out for a quickie. He wanted more, but was that what she wanted?
Jumping into a relationship seemed a little precipitous. Rash. Crazy. She hadn’t known him long enough. She didn’t have time for a man. Especially a man who could be looking to replace his wife. All of those things spelled heartache for Lucy, but deep down inside, none of those very rational reasons mattered.
She wanted to see more of him. There was something about Quinn, some thing that made her smile and her stomach flutter a little. He intrigued her and made her want to slide her hands all over him. Yeah, she definitely wanted to see what he meant by “more.”
But there was just one small problem. For any sort of relationship to survive, it had to be built on the truth. She had to be honest with him.
No more lies.
Chapter 7
Down2basix: Seeks Nontalker…
The last rays of the setting sun painted the valley in blue and pink as Quinn finished testifying in the Raymond Deluca case. He pushed open the glass doors of the Ada County Court House and pulled a breath of fresh air into his lungs. Outside, a chopped Nissan added its high-pitched whine to the traffic speeding past on Myrtle Street. A cool April breeze tugged at his red tie and the lapels of his navy wool blazer as he headed across the brick sidewalk toward the parking lot.
Raymond Deluca’s defense lawyer had gone after Quinn as he’d expected, attacking the time line and questioning the forensic evidence, trying to make it appear as if Quinn hadn’t done his job. After sixteen years of experience, Quinn had been ready for everything the lawyer had thrown at him. In the end, there had been no way the lawyer could discredit that gasoline transaction at 2:35 a.m.
Quinn moved across the parking lot and unlocked the door to his white unmarked car. Mr. Deluca was up for capital murder and would probably get the death penalty. Quinn supposed he should feel bad at the prospect. He supposed it was the compassionate, human way to feel, but he’d been at the autopsy of Mrs. Deluca and her three children. He’d seen what the fire had done to them, and he was fresh out of compassion for anyone but the victims.
He fired up his car and headed across town. He turned on Grove Street and drove past the Grove Hotel, with its infamous river sculpture on the exterior wall.
The sculpture was supposed to represent the Boise River, but it resembled quake damage more than anything else. It wasn’t uncommon to see tourists standing in front of the multicolored crack, their brows scrunched as they wondered what the hell they were supposed to be looking at. To confuse them further, the crack sometimes wafted steam, which was supposed to resemble fog. It didn’t.
Quinn was the first to admit that he knew zero to nothing about art. There were really cool sculptures and paintings around the city; the crack in the Grove Hotel just wasn’t one of them.
He pulled to a stop at a red light and reached for his sunglasses. With the Deluca case behind him, his thoughts turned to Lucy. He was a cop, trained to pay attention to detail and have near-perfect recall, but he didn’t need any tricks of the trade to recall every second of the night before when he’d stood on her front porch kissing her. He’d held her face in his hands with her smooth hair tangled in his fingers. Her mouth had tasted like warm woman, and she’d melted into him. He’d reminded himself he’d just been doing his job. That the woman running her hands up and down his chest and making him hard enough to pound nails was a murder suspect. He’d kept his hands on her face to keep them from traveling south to more interesting places. He might have given into his urge to touch her waist and hips and breasts. To drive her as crazy as she was him, but she’d slid her hands to his back, and he’d grabbed her wrists a split second before she’d discovered the recorder taped to his back.
He would have loved to have taken her up on her first and second invitation for coffee. He would have loved to have followed her inside and checked out her bra right before he’d have buried his face in her cleavage. He would have damn sure loved to have stripped her naked and do the hot sweaty deed, but he couldn’t have followed her inside and jumped on her. Breathless did her work in the victim’s bed, not her own. Sure, he probably should have followed Lucy inside and maybe gotten more information out of her, but he just wasn’t into prolonged torture.
The traffic light turned green, and by the time he got to the office it was the end of his shift. He filled Sergeant Mitchell in on what had taken place in court that day. They talked about the latest developments in the Breathless case. He had a date that night with a new suspect, Carol Rey, aka sugarbaby. Carol was an Internet dater, an employee of Hastings Books and Music, and she loved animals. Once again, Quinn would buy a woman coffee and set the bait to see if he could hook a serial killer.
By the time Quinn returned home after his date that evening, he was exhausted but knew it would be hours before he slept. Hopped up on coffee and conversation, his mind went over every detail of the past several hours.
Carol had been a nice-looking woman. She’d seemed normal enough-until she’d started talking about her ex-husband. She’d torn into the man, ripping him apart for his job performance in and out of bed. That kind of resentment produced a lot of hatred, and Kurt would e-mail her in the morning and set up a second date.
Quinn grabbed his laptop and files off the counter in the kitchen and moved down the hall to his office. He flipped on the light and walked to his desk in the corner. Across the room he’d set up a treadmill and weight bench. Detectives ate on the go, in greasy spoons, or at their desks. At the age of thirty-six, Quinn had to work out five days a week to stay in shape and stave off the love handles that plagued a lot of cops.
He sank into his office chair and set the laptop and files on his desk. He booted the computer and scratched Millie’s head as he waited for the program to appear.
Even after two months of online dating, Quinn was still taken aback at the things women confessed to virtual strangers on a first date. If they were telling him about past husbands and lovers, he was sure they were telling everyone else they dated, too. Sometimes it got so bad that he had to fight the urge not to lean across the table and say, “Honey, I don’t want to hear about your former husband’s foot odor, and I sure as hell don’t want to know he had to take Viagra, Cialis, or Enzyte. Some shit you just keep to yourself.”
Lucy was the only woman he’d dated that he’d actually had to ask about former boyfriends. Of course, Lucy had a bad habit of lying her ass off, so whether she’d managed the truth was open to speculation.
He reached for the phone on his desk and glanced at his watch. It was 9:30 p.m., and he flipped open his notebook and wrote down the time. On the fifth ring, she picked up.