“Hello.”
“Lucy, it’s Quinn.” He leaned back in his chair and moved his head from side to side to work out the kinks in his neck. “I’m just calling to make sure we’re still on for tomorrow night.”
“Hang on.” There was a pause like she put the phone down. A few drawers opened and closed, then she picked up again. “Okay. Yeah, but I was thinking you should come in for a drink first. Or we could just stay here and order takeout.”
Breathless never killed and moved the body, and she probably never invited a suspect to her home. “Sounds good.” The phone made a soft thud, as if she’d dropped it.
“Sorry,” she said and confirmed his suspicion. “I dropped the phone.”
He tapped the pen on his desk and asked, “What are you doing?”
“Right now?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m standing here in my underwear getting ready to put on my pajamas.”
The pen stopped. “I’ll let you go,” he said as a vision of her wearing licorice candy pants flashed into his head.
“It’s okay. I’m going to kick my feet up and watch a little television before bed. What are you doing?”
“Nothing. Just sitting around.” In his mind, he had her dressed up in an edible bra too. He wondered if she got kinky. Not the kind of kinky that killed a man, but the kind that let him eat off her undies. Quinn hadn’t worked undercover in over four years now, but he still knew how it was done. When to push and how far. He set down his pen and told himself he was just doing his job. “Are they edible?” But he knew his curiosity was more than just work.
There was a pause, during which he half-expected her to tell him to go to hell. “My feet?”
“Your panties.”
Another pause and then, “No. They’re white satin.”
He swallowed, the chair swiveled, and the arm bumped Millie’s face. She looked at him like he’d done it on purpose and left the room. He didn’t want to talk dirty in front of his dog and watched her go before asking, “Any lace?”
“No.”
Damn, he liked lace on a woman.
She added just above a whisper. “But there’s pink ribbon.”
Damn. “Tell me more about the ribbon.”
“It’s woven around the tops of my thighs, and there’s little bows.”
He closed his eyes and imagined it. Imagined that pink ribbon warmed by the heat between her legs. Those panties suddenly sounded edible to him. “Are you wearing a bra?”
Her breath whispered across the line, and he could picture her pink lips. “Yes.”
“Does it match your panties?”
“Yes.”
He sucked a breath deep into his lungs and pressed his palm against his erection. “Where’s the ribbon?”
“Woven down the front.”
He could imagine that, too. “Are your nipples hard?”
Instead of answering, she asked, “Are you hard, Quinn?”
“Yes.”
“Are you in the habit of talking dirty on the phone?” Her voice was seductive as hell.
“No.” He pictured her standing right in front of him, her hair spilling across her shoulders like the sun, her feet slightly apart as he ran his hands up the backs of her thighs while he put his mouth on her flat belly. “But I’m willing to give it a try if you are, Sunshine.”
Her quiet laughter reached him across the phone line. “See you tomorrow night, Quinn,” she said and disconnected.
He opened his eyes and half expected to see her standing in front of him. Instead his gaze focused on the work laid out on his desk. On the mounds of folders, notes, laptop, and the photographs of Mary and Donny’s kids.
The silence in the room pressed in on him. The weight of it sat on his chest and forced him to feel the loneliness deep in the black pit of his soul. For several seconds, it was stronger than him and threatened to close his throat. Then he beat it back and shoved it down once again.
He reached for a stereo remote sitting on his desk and pushed Play. The Black Crowes filled the silence with bluesy Southern rock. Chris Robinson sang about good lovin’ and being hard to handle.
He was fine with his life just the way it was.
The next evening Lucy took a fortifying drink of her red wine, then set the glass on the coffee table. She didn’t want to risk catching a buzz before she told Quinn the reason she’d wanted him to come over to her house instead of going out. It was time to tell him the truth, especially after the conversation they’d had on the telephone last night. She could hardly look at Quinn without her cheeks catching fire, while he didn’t seem embarrassed at all.
Out of the corners of her eyes, she glanced across her shoulder at Quinn as he took a long drink of Becks. He gazed down the bottle at Mr. Snookums, who was kneading his thigh. Lucy was all too familiar with Snookums’s modus operandi. If Quinn didn’t return the cat’s affection, he’d move his loving attention a few inches north.
“Get down, Snookie,” she said and removed the heavy cat from between them on the couch.
“What did you call him?”
“Snookie. It’s short for Mr. Snookums,” she explained.
“Uh-huh.” Quinn’s eyes got kind of squinty, like his head hurt.
Lucy took a deep breath and forced herself to confess on an expelled breath. “I’ve been lying to you.” She said it so quick that she had to wonder if he’d understood her. She hoped so, because she didn’t want to have to say it again. Her stomach felt as if she’d swallowed too much air, and her mouth was dry. She was suddenly too nervous to feel any lingering embarrassment over the phone call. If he couldn’t understand why she’d lied and decided he didn’t want to see her anymore, then the relationship wasn’t meant to last. At least that’s what she’d been telling herself. But that had been before he’d walked into her living room looking good in a pair of Levi’s worn in interesting places and before he’d sat so close to her on the couch that she could smell the cologne on his skin and scent of laundry soap in his clothes.
“About what?”
“I’m not a nurse.”
Quinn set the green bottle on his thigh, and his dark gaze stared into hers. One brow lifted in surprise. “You’re not?”
She shook her head and turned her body toward him. “No. It’s this whole Internet dating thing. I just didn’t want to let the world know everything about me.” She pulled her knee on the couch and tucked her foot under her other leg. She picked at the seam of her khaki pants with her fingernail. “I wanted to keep some things back. Just in case.” She decided not to tell him that the only reason she’d agreed to meet him that first time had been for research. That would only bring up questions about the other men she’d met and killed off. She didn’t want to talk about those other men. Not tonight.
“In case what?”
“In case you were a loser or a stalker or just really insane.” She pushed her hair behind her ears, then placed her hands in her lap. She lowered her gaze to the middle of his chest. His blue hooded sweatshirt was so old that the logo on the front had faded to nothing. “That night at Starbucks, I thought for sure you’d realize that I didn’t have any medical training.” After a few long moments filled with silence, she lifted her gaze to his face. “I guess you didn’t notice that I don’t know the Heimlich.”
“I noticed.” One corner of his mouth slid up, and a little comma creased the corner. “I just figured you sucked at being a nurse.”
She let out a pent-up breath, and her nerves settled a bit. “But you asked me out again anyway?”
With his free hand, he picked up hers and brushed his thumb across the backs of her knuckles. “I figured since you’re so fine, you had to be really good at other things.”
Little tingles spread up her wrist to the inside of her elbow. “What things?”
“Girl things.”
“Girl things?” She tried for outrage and blew it by laughing. She tried to pull her hand back, but he brought it up to his mouth. “What girl things?”