“You never showed me your badge,” Tara said defiantly, hoping the stranger didn’t notice how badly she was shaking. “I want to know what I’m dealing with here.”

He reached into the pocket of his jacket and withdrew a little leather case. He flipped it open, but he moved his body as he did, edging in on her space, trapping her against the wall.

Tara couldn’t quite get her breath. Her head filled with his scent, something sharp yet smooth that stroked her nerve endings. She fought the urge to squirm, and concentrated on the badge he was holding in front of her nose.

Tara looked at his eyes in the thin moonlight. They were sharp, watchful eyes, totally at odds with that slow Southern drawl of his. Her teeth started chattering, with a chill she wasn’t aware of feeling.

Oh, she was in so very much trouble….

Dear Reader,

Welcome to another month of hot—in every sense of the word—reading, books just made to match the weather. I hardly even have to mention Suzanne Brockmann and her TALL, DARK & DANGEROUS miniseries, because you all know that this author and these books are utterly irresistible. Taylor’s Temptation features the latest of her to-die-for Navy SEALs, so rush right down to your bookstore and pick up your own copy, because this book is going to be flying off shelves everywhere.

To add to the excitement this month, we’re introducing a new six-book continuity called FIRSTBORN SONS. Award-winning writer Paula Detmer Riggs kicks things off with Born a Hero. Learn how these six heroes share a legacy of protecting the weak and standing up for what’s right—and watch as all six find women who belong in their arms and their lives.

Don’t miss the rest of our wonderful books, either: The Seduction of Goody Two-Shoes, by award-winning Kathleen Creighton; Out of Nowhere, by one of our launch authors, Beverly Bird; Protector with a Past, by Harper Allen; and Twice Upon a Time, by Jennifer Wagner.

Finally, check out the back pages for information on our “Silhouette Makes You A Star” contest. Someone’s going to win—why not you?

Enjoy!

Leslie J. Wainger

Executive Senior Editor

Out of Nowhere
Beverly Bird

MILLS & BOON

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For Don Hurley—for the title and the inspiration

BEVERLY BIRD

has lived in several places in the United States, but she is currently back where her roots began on an island in New Jersey. Her time is devoted to her family and her writing. She is the author of numerous romance novels, both contemporary and historical. Beverly loves to hear from readers. You can write to her at P.O. Box 350, Brigantine, NJ 08203.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Prologue

It’s not easy being an angel.

Of course, Belle’s particular angel problems were always compounded by the fact that she was a dog and her charges were human. They didn’t speak her language. But in Belle’s estimation, that didn’t matter. No one could ever tell humans anything anyway. They were born with agendas. They had as many preconceived notions about each other as she’d once had fleas on a rather ignominious assignment in Mexico.

The problem with humans was that they never followed their instincts—which just went to show what superior intelligence could do for a species. Pheromones, Belle thought. Now there was the answer. Humans always overlooked the pure power of scents, but dogs caught them, cats sniffed them and—voila. Magic—a pal for life.

Which was why humans occasionally needed an angel to nudge them together—and when that failed, to cause a total ruckus to get their attention. This was Belle’s specialty. Well, the nudging part was in her job description. The ruckus business was something she’d thought up purely on her own.

She waited in front of the Cathedral Basilica on Eighteenth Street in Philadelphia’s first snowfall of the season for the humans she’d been assigned to this time. Then she saw him rounding the corner from Race Street, the man she’d been sent to find.

C. Fox Whittington wore a black leather bomber jacket and his hands were deep in his pockets. Black jeans topped his cowboy boots. Belle hoped the boots were for effect. Nowhere in Fox Whittington’s bio had it said anything about horses. She did not like horses, having been kicked soundly by one a hundred years or so ago.

Snowflakes landed on Whittington’s dark hair and promptly melted. As Belle watched, he grinned at some private thought. His white teeth flashed. He probably didn’t need pheromones, she decided. The females of his species would no doubt take one look at that handsome face and fall right at his feet.

Belle hoped this might make her job a little easier. Human males were rarely captivated by the females at their feet. They always wanted the ones they couldn’t quite catch—and Tara Cole would be hard to catch.

Belle wagged her tail once, sharply, as the woman appeared farther down on Eighteenth Street with a cell phone pressed to her ear. Tara had places to go and lots of things to do when she got there, Belle thought. Her hair was a shade darker than Whittington’s. Belle couldn’t tell exactly how long it was because it was tucked into her collar, but it seemed like there might be a lot of it. Her eyes were dark. She was very beautiful. She wouldn’t have much use for pheromones either, Belle decided. This was definitely the type of female that men chased for miles.

She took the phone from her ear and dropped it smartly into her pocket as though glad to be rid of it. This was going to be interesting, Belle thought as Tara drew closer to Whittington. She wasn’t watching where she was going, was still looking down at her pocket where the cell phone was. Maybe they’d walk right into each other. Then some sparks would fly.

But Tara turned left onto Race Street without even looking at Whittington. And Whittington began heading the other way, toward Logan Circle. Stop! Wait! Didn’t they smell each other? Didn’t they sense anything?

Within moments, they were ten, fifteen, twenty feet apart, still moving in opposite directions. Belle sighed. Stupid agendas, she thought. Humans always thought they knew exactly what kind of mate they needed. Disgusted, she left the Cathedral, trotting north now.

Any decent angel had more than one arrow in her quiver.

Chapter 1

Planning was the key to success. Tara had always believed that with all her heart. In fact, she had framed her life around the premise. Unfortunately, her stepbrother had always been a tougher lock than most.

She grabbed her cell phone from her coat pocket as she made her way down Eighteenth Street, heading home from her attorney’s office. It would be a long walk but her nerves were jumping and she needed the exercise. She punched Stephen’s number into the phone with her thumb.

“We need to talk about this,” she said when he answered.

Stephen Carmen laughed. “Should I fax you over a copy of the court’s Memorandum of Decision? Maybe you didn’t get yours.”

She hated him with an intensity that made her stomach feel awash in oil. “It’s a piece of paper. I’m talking principle. Ethics. Honor.”

“And I’m talking money.”

“I know.” The very idea of Stephen selling the Rose hurt Tara all the way down to her bones. But, of course, she’d considered the possibility—the probability. There was little Stephen craved more than the image and the lifestyle that money could buy. That was why she had planned a worst-case solution to this nightmare.

“Give it up, Tara,” Stephen said. “The Blood of the Rose is mine. Every last carat. Your mother gave it to me.”

She wouldn’t. That truth had never left Tara’s soul once in the nearly four years she and Stephen had been battling over the heirloom. He had possession of a will that said Letitia Cole Carmen had bequeathed the ruby to him, her stepson. Hours ago, the courts had ruled that the will Stephen had produced took precedence over Tara’s own.

But her mother would never have given Stephen the Blood of the Rose. Letitia would only have handed it on to Tara because that was part of its legend—and its curse. Her great-grandmother, Tzigane, a notorious Gypsy, had decried that her gem would never leave the hands of her descendants.

“I don’t know how you managed such a clever forgery on that will,” Tara muttered aloud.

Stephen laughed again. “It’s your mother’s signature. You had enough experts trying to prove otherwise. And my witnesses are squeaky clean.”

It was true—they were both topnotch, successful businessmen. The investigators she’d hired hadn’t been able to dig up any dirt on them at all. Tara took a breath. “I’ll buy it back from you.”

That kept Stephen quiet for a moment. “You’d spend money to get it back?”

“It’s mine,” she said simply. “I know you’re going to sell it to someone. Why not me?”

Stephen’s pause was ripe with calculation. “How much?”

“Four and a half million.” Let the games begin, she thought bitterly.

“Six,” Stephen countered.

“It won’t appraise for that.”

“I don’t give a damn what it’s worth on the market. What’s it worth to you?”

He had her there. “Meet with me tonight. I’ll see if I can scrape up some more money between now and then.”

This time the weight of his hesitation was different. “Where are you scraping it from?”

“An investor.”

“What kind of investor?”

“One who respects the stone’s legacy.”

“Your Uncle Charlie.” Stephen said the name like an epithet.

Tara didn’t answer, which was an answer in itself. The admittedly eccentric Charlie Branigan wasn’t her uncle by blood. He’d courted Tara’s mother for six wild and exciting months before Letitia had tossed him over for the staid and steady Scott Carmen. Tara was sure that her mother had broken Charlie’s heart because he’d never married anyone else. But he’d been there for both of them anyway through all the years that had passed since then, at least when he could be found. Charlie had a propensity for popping off suddenly and without warning. The last time they’d lost track of him, he’d turned up snorkeling with sharks off the Great Barrier Reef—at the age of seventy-two.

He was also the money and the power behind Philadelphia’s Hoyt Museum. When Charlie snapped his fingers, the entire board of directors jumped. He felt—and Tara agreed—that there was no harm in putting the gem on display once they got it back. They’d decided that Tzigane would have no objection to sharing its beauty, its fame, with the world, just as long as Tara owned at least a part of it.

Charlie’s identity would come out sooner or later anyway, Tara reasoned, and letting it out sooner might even be to her advantage. She and Charlie weren’t trying to strike a business deal. They were motivated by their hearts. Stephen would understand that he was unlikely to get as much for the ruby from the average investor. And he knew she didn’t have enough money to pull the deal off by herself. She’d inherited her mother’s share of Stephen’s father’s estate, but she had spent a hefty chunk of it on lawyers and experts, fighting with Stephen over Letitia’s will.

“All right,” he said finally, thoughtfully. “Come by at seven. We’ll talk.”

“I’ll be there.” Tara lowered the phone from her ear without saying goodbye.

She dropped it into her coat pocket as though something of Stephen’s greed and cruelty had rubbed off on it. This was not her mother’s doing, she thought again. Letitia had not knowingly signed that will. Tara would go to her own grave believing that and Uncle Charlie agreed with her. Somehow, Stephen Carmen had tricked Letitia. Or perhaps he had blackmailed her somehow. Letitia had seemed so edgy those last weeks of her life. Had she possessed a secret so awful that she’d even kept it from her own daughter? Tara had been over and over it in her mind and the path always led back to nowhere. She simply didn’t know.

The bottom line was that the Blood of the Rose was now Stephen’s. Her Rose, the stone she had sat with at her mother’s bedroom hearth as a child, her heart pounding at its fire, at the red tears in its depths. We have to put it away now, baby. But someday it will be yours.

Tara curled her fist against her mouth and coughed over something hard that lodged in her throat. She turned the corner onto Race Street.

She’d get the gem back. She would.

C. Fox Whittington arrived in the door of Remmick’s—his favorite pub—just shy of seven o’clock. He waded through the crowd to the bar, feeling the tension of the day peel off layer by layer. Fox had been looking forward to this for hours since the last nail had been pounded home into a complex matter involving a six-month-old murder, a well-faded beauty queen and a slice of lemon pie.

The case had consumed him for weeks now and if the law of averages held, he could count on an easy month or two before another humdinger passed his particular desk. But first, he thought, he would enjoy a night of soft music, fine bourbon whiskey and maybe a good steak, medium rare.

A gaggle of pretty women clustered near the bar to his right. Ordinarily, the type of women who came to bars on their own didn’t appeal to him, but the blonde on the stool closest to him left her friends’ conversation long enough to catch his eye and smile shyly. Fox felt his heart shift a little.

She wasn’t Adelia. There would never be another Adelia. But she had a similar way of cocking her head to the side, a way of sweeping her gaze demurely downward after that brief touch of their eyes. Fox smiled back at her.

Maybe, he thought. Maybe this was the one.

Tara’s cab drew up in front of Stephen’s home at six minutes past seven.

The house was three ostentatious floors of diamond light trickling out the windows, making the afternoon’s snow sparkle on the lawn. She had grown up here after her mother had married Stephen’s father but Letitia had legitimately bequeathed the house to Stephen—even Tara’s will said that. It had been his father’s, and his grandfather’s before him. It was rightfully his, just as the Rose was rightfully hers.

Tara stared at it long enough that the driver cleared his throat. “Oh, thanks. Sorry.” She checked the meter and shoved a generous handful of bills at him.

“You want me to wait?” He frowned at all the money.

“No. Keep the change.” She had a feeling that it was going to take a while for her to seal this deal.

She got out of the taxi and stood on the sidewalk. An errant clump of snow fell from one of the telephone wires overhead and hit her squarely on the shoulder. Tara let out a startled sound that showed how tense she was. She heard the cab’s wheels crunch over ice as the car rolled again, then she started up the walk.

The sound of the car had receded before her nerves eased enough that she realized Stephen’s front door was open. On a December night? He was arrogant, yes, and showy about his wealth. He was also stingy. He wouldn’t throw handfuls of money at the utility companies if he could help it. Tara went to the door.

“Hello?” she called.

There was no answer from within the house. But, she noticed again, there was a great deal of light. She stepped into the entry, then through a second, inner door into the main hall.

Her gaze barely glanced off the curving central staircase but she shivered a little anyway and found herself remembering the time Stephen had pushed her down those steps. She’d broken her arm. He’d told their parents that she’d tripped. He’d explained it with wide-eyed amazement and they’d believed him. He’d always been an excellent liar.

“Hello?” Tara called again. “Stephen, what on earth are you doing? Heating Philadelphia? Did you suddenly decide to give something to charity?”

Still, there was no answer. Tara strode purposefully down the hall. She was annoyed. He was up to something but, as usual, she couldn’t even begin to fathom what it might be. Stephen always kept a few cards hidden up his sleeve.

Tara kept calling his name as she went down the hallway. She turned into the library, Stephen’s favorite room, then she stopped cold. “What on earth?”

It was dark in here, though light spilled in from the hallway and the windows. She could see just enough to make out the details of the room. For some bizarre reason, Stephen was lying on the floor. She crossed to him slowly.

“Stephen, this is ridiculous.” She nudged his beefy shoulder with her toe. “Get up.” She wanted to say, Get up or I’m leaving. But, of course, she wouldn’t do that, not without the Rose, and they both knew it.

Stephen didn’t move.

Exasperated, Tara knelt beside him. Then she frowned. The fireplace poker was beside him, hidden on his far side.

It had blood on it.

Her body reacted to what she was seeing before her mind even registered it. Her heart began jackhammering. Her gorge rose. She felt suddenly chilled; her skin had gone dewy and damp.

“No, no, no,” she whispered, not aware she did it aloud. “Stephen?” She touched his wrist. There was no pulse.

He was dead.

The realization went through her like a shot of electricity. She couldn’t feel grief, not for him, a man who had perpetrated cruelty after cruelty on her for too many years to count. But shock rolled through her body, somehow cold and hot all at once. And she knew that somehow, even in death, he would still manage to hurt her.

Call an ambulance, she thought first. But he wasn’t just dead. He’d been killed and she had found him. The press had followed every detail of their court battle. She had told the cab driver—emphatically—not to wait. And she’d given him a huge tip, mostly because she’d been too nervous and too impatient to worry about taking change back.

Real fear began to beat in her blood. She could make an anonymous call to 911, she realized, but then she should just leave.

Tara shot to her feet and spun for Stephen’s desk and the phone there. She grabbed it and it dropped from her nerveless fingers. She cried out instinctively at the clatter it made on the desk then she picked it up again and managed to punch in the correct numbers.

“I—yes,” she babbled to the voice that answered. “There’s a body. Somebody’s dead here. You should—” Tara broke off and pressed a trembling hand to her temple as something else occurred to her. The Rose! Had Stephen been killed for the Rose? “The ruby!”

She slammed down the phone. Her gaze swung wildly to Stephen’s safe. It was open. She took a quick step that way but then her foot came down on something vaguely round and hard, something that pressed into the rug beneath her weight and made her ankle roll. Tara gasped at the pain and looked down.

The Rose. On the floor?

She bent and grabbed it. She had the wild thought that heat pulsed from it, that the ruby somehow knew who she was and that it welcomed her touch. Then she heard a sound. Somewhere…over there, she thought, near the window.

The killer was still in the room with her.

Every instinct told her to be still but Tara was trembling hard enough now that her teeth snicked together. Then she heard it again, a warning…vibration. A growl? She moved back to the wall and inched along it cautiously. Then there was a high-pitched yip and Tara jumped inside her skin.

It was a dog. Apparently, Stephen had acquired a pet.

“I don’t believe this,” she whispered aloud. And then she saw it. It walked into the milky spill of white from the streetlight outside the window. It was a…

…a Chihuahua?

She’d been expecting a watchdog if anything, a Shepherd or Doberman, something he might have used to guard the stone. But this dog was tiny with a long, crooked muzzle and too-big dark eyes. Its ears stood straight out from the sides of its head and they were easily half the size of the rest of it. She could have sworn it was grinning at her.

She’d called 911. The cops would be here any minute. She had to get out of here.

Tara bolted from the room. The dog let out a cacophony of barking and chased after her. Tara made it only as far as the door to the hallway before she felt sharp little teeth slide down the back of her right calf. She choked on a scream and braced herself against the doorjamb to shake her leg. The nasty little dog wrapped itself around her calf and held on, bouncing up and down.

“No!” She swatted at it with the hand that held the Rose. “Stop it! Let go!” Then she let out a low, agonized cry as she lost her grip on the stone.

It sailed off somewhere into the shadows gathered in the corners of the library near the window. There was a soft thud as it hit the wall. Then, only then, did the dog let go of her leg.

Tara heard a steady thumping sound. The Chihuahua was wagging its tail! From the front of the house, she heard a sharp male voice.

“Hello? Police!”

Tara knew she could talk her way out of this. She could talk her way out of anything. It was her gift. But she knew better than to try when the stakes were this appalling, this high. This, she realized, feeling sick, was one of those situations where the less that was said, the better—at least until she called her lawyer.

So she ran.

Out in the foyer, at the very front of the house, she heard the steady tap of heels. Tara sprinted fast and silently through the shadows gathered in the hallway. She hit the swinging door to the kitchen just as she heard the officer call out again. She was running out of time. She’d never get out of here free and clear. She would have to hide.

The pantry! Tara dove for the white-painted door just beside the stove. Behind it was a trapdoor and a small space that one of her nannies had once shown her. As a child, it had been her special hideout from Stephen. If he had never discovered it in all the years since then, if he hadn’t boarded it up…

Tara dropped to her knees and crawled beneath the lowest shelf. She pushed hard against the rear wall with a trembling hand.

It creaked and opened.

The bartender had just brought a second round of drinks when Fox spotted Raphael Montiel over the blonde’s right shoulder. He put his drink down without tasting it.

If Rafe had come looking for him here, then it was purely bad news. They were partners with the Philadelphia Police Department’s elite Robbery-Homicide unit. They never worked at night—unless someone had the audacity to get killed or to steal something noteworthy after regular business hours. Fox pushed back from the bar and waved Rafe down. They met halfway to the door.

“How’s it going?” Raphael asked dryly as his gaze fell on the blonde.

“She has potential.”

“Don’t look now, but I think your Georgia’s showing again.”

“Leave my Georgia alone.”

Fox was transplanted from Savannah. Northern women tended to have an aggressive edge that he had never quite gotten used to…with the single exception of Adelia. She’d been sweet and soft, demure and fragile. Too fragile. He’d lost her to leukemia six weeks before they were to be married.

The grief had ebbed and flowed through him sporadically for ten long years, then it had finally settled into something distant and bearable. Now Fox was determined. It was time to start over. Somewhere in Philadelphia, he thought, there was another gentle, quiet woman meant to be his wife.

“We’ve got to go,” Rafe said. “We’ve caught a stiff up in Chestnut Hill. A nice, fat rich one. There are officers there now, waiting for us. Seems a ruby the size of Mount Rushmore has disappeared as well.”

Translation, Fox thought—his night was over.

He returned to the bar and paid the tab, then he snagged his jacket from the back of his stool. On impulse, he caught the blonde’s hand and kissed it, a gentle touch that was gone before it started. Her eyes widened and she sighed. When he straightened, he saw Rafe roll his eyes.

Five minutes later, they were in Fox’s vintage Mustang, a 1968 Shelby convertible, heading north. Raphael filled him in on what he knew so far.

“We got an anonymous 911 call. A female. The call was traced to the home. She seemed to indicate that Carmen—that’s Stephen Carmen—was killed for a gem he had in his possession, but I haven’t heard the tape yet. Officers arrived and yeah, there was a body in the library but no apparent jewels lying about. The missing stone is a Burmese ruby, uncut, twenty-four carats. It’s called the Blood of the Rose.”

Fox frowned. The name tickled his memory. “I’ve heard of it.”

“If you’ve read the papers lately, you’d have to. Stephen Carmen and his stepsister—name of Tara Cole—have been tying up the probate courts over this baby for something like four years now. The ruby belonged to Cole’s mother, Letitia Cole Carmen, who apparently willed it to her stepson.” He paused for effect. “The court returned a ruling today—Carmen’s will was up to snuff. They gave him the gem.”

“So let’s find the lady and have someone take her down to headquarters.” Fox reached automatically for the radio handset on his dashboard.

“Not likely. I already put the word out for some officers to pay a visit to Ms. Cole. She doesn’t appear to be home.”

They pulled up in front of a house awash with lights. Brilliance glittered from three floors’ worth of windows. The front door was wide open. Fox cut the engine.

“So do you want to take care of the body or do the scene this time?” Rafe asked.

“I’ll handle the scene. You wouldn’t know a gem if you fell over it. You can’t tell rock salt from diamonds.”

Raphael frowned. “I was distracted during that case.”

“Yeah? How’s Kate?” He’d been distracted, Fox remembered, because he’d met his wife on that one.

“Pregnant,” Rafe reminded him.

“Read cranky between the lines.” Fox had four sisters back in Savannah. During his visits home, he’d noticed the trend. “Fear not, pal. It gets worse before it gets better.”

Raphael looked at him sharply. “You’re just busting my chops because I pulled you away from Bambi.”

“Her name was Candy.”

“Whatever. Aren’t you? Busting my chops?”

“Nope.” It was Fox’s turn to grin.

They got out of the car. Fox moved up the sidewalk at a stroll, a few steps behind Rafe’s more rapid pace. An officer stepped into the door as they reached it. Fox read his name tag when he joined them. “Hey, McGee, what’s the story?”

McGee thrust a thumb over his shoulder. “The vic’s in the library. Through those doors there and down a bit to your right.”

Fox stepped into a marble-floored vestibule. There were French doors at the back. Odd architectural touch, he thought. That was a Yankee for you. In his humble opinion, they weren’t long on welcoming hospitality. This effect made it look as though they were trying to keep guests out.

One of the inner doors was ajar as well. Fox turned sideways to pass through it without touching anything and Rafe followed him. They headed down a wide center hall.

Stephen Carmen lay in the middle of his library floor. Fox automatically stooped to take his pulse. In one memorable case, the vic had been only unconscious and he’d learned right then and there to be thorough, not to make any assumptions. When that “murdered” woman had sat up, he’d nearly dropped dead. That had been in his rookie year.

Carmen, however, was definitely deceased. His skin wasn’t quite cold yet but both his lips and his nail beds were going blue. He’d been dead less than three hours.

The dome of Carmen’s forehead shined in the library lights. He had a receding hairline and pudgy features, with the kind of petulant mouth that always made Fox’s skin crawl a little when he saw it on a man. He dropped the man’s wrist. “Sorry, pal. Rough way to end it even if I wouldn’t have wanted to shake your hand while you were alive.” He straightened away from the corpse, leaving it to Rafe.

Everything in the library was good quality, from the rich indigo of the Persian rug to the teak desk. Fox peered behind the drapes, into the fireplace, around and behind a tiny tea table with two ornate chairs bracketing it. He moved the chairs by nudging the legs with his toe.

Nothing underneath.

Fox went to the open safe and sifted through its contents. He found a wad of legal documents but nothing valuable. He scanned the papers. They chronicled the court battle between Carmen and Tara Cole.

He really wanted to meet this lady.

In the meantime, he studied row upon row of books on shelves that lined two walls. None of them looked as though they’d ever been cracked open. What a waste, Fox thought. Some of them were classics. He took a pair of gloves from the first of the crime scene techs to arrive and he removed the tomes one by one.

Finally, he was satisfied. There was no ruby in this room, especially not a twenty-four-carat-size one.

“I’ll just check out the rest of the house,” Fox said, and Rafe nodded.

It took him nearly an hour to go through the remainder of the place. There was a lot of it but nothing else seemed to have been disturbed. By the time Fox got to the kitchen, he knew nothing else was going to be. This whole scene had clearly gone down in the library.

He reached for the pantry door and peeked inside. Nothing but canned goods and darkness. Then he heard Rafe call to him from down the hall. He closed the door again with a quiet snick and went to rejoin his partner in the library. The body-catchers had arrived from the morgue and Rafe had released Carmen to them. The crime scene techs were leaving fingerprint dust in their wake wherever they passed.

“Okay, here’s my play on it,” Rafe said. “Ms. Cole got word from the court today that she’d lost her fight. She came over here in a nice temper, walloped Carmen with the poker, maybe in a rage, or maybe she planned to.”

Fox frowned. “That’s cold.”

“Yeah, well, either way, she did us the courtesy of calling 911. Then she grabbed the ruby and took off. It fits.”

“Don’t it though,” Fox drawled. Too neatly, to his way of thinking. “Nobody’s found her yet?”

“No. She’s either traveling on foot or by public transportation. She could be anywhere. She doesn’t keep a car—she lives in a high rise on Poplar—so we can’t put anything out on the vehicle.”

Fox nodded. If he hadn’t had a love affair with the ’68 Shelby since he was a boy, he wouldn’t have bothered to own a car in the city, either.

“We’ve got officers at her building waiting for her to come home,” Rafe continued. “If she doesn’t turn up by morning, there’s our cause to put out an APB on her.”

At which point, Fox thought, she could be in Duluth. “Let’s nudge it some,” he suggested. “Give her until midnight to appear, then hit the airwaves with her description.”

“That would be my inclination,” Rafe agreed, but they both knew the score. “Plattsmier will balk. You know how he gets when there’s any money or clout involved and something tells me these folks have some income.” Their captain was more politician than cop, more worried about lawsuits than justice. He’d started his career with enough integrity but the title had done him in.

Plattsmier and Rafe did not get along. Luckily, Fox could charm a snake. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll deal with him myself.”

He left the library again. He went down the hall and finally stepped outside into the backyard. He circled the house once, then twice, without finding anything interesting there, either. Rafe caught up with him in a winter-dead garden in the backyard.

“The techs are on their way out,” Rafe said.

“Go ahead and catch a ride with one of them.”

“You’re going to stay for a while?”

Fox nodded. They had worked together for eight years now. It was Fox’s strong opinion that no case ever got solved by jumping to conclusions. He took things slowly. Rafe, on the other hand, tended to crash right in, angry and righteous in his pursuit of justice. They balanced each other well.

Fox watched his partner leave then he cleared snow from a stone bench. Several aspects of this crime bothered him. He sat down to dwell on them.

Chapter 2

Behind the pantry closet, crunched down into a too-small wedge of space, Tara listened to the new quiet. She didn’t remember this cubbyhole being so cramped. Then again, the last time she’d used it, she’d been maybe eleven years old. Now, even moving her hand to wipe at an errant tear required clever effort.

Stephen was dead. No, she couldn’t mourn him, but everything inside her still shook with the horror of it.

Tara listened to the silence as she tried to steady herself, then she wriggled into the pantry again. The cops were finally gone. She was sure of that. She squeezed beneath the shelf once more and pushed the door open gently, just a crack.

The kitchen was dark as pitch. The house stayed quiet. Tara crawled out and stood. She thought she heard her bones crack. She went back to the hall, keeping close to the wall.

There might still be gaping neighbors out front, she thought. And somewhere, presumably, there was that damned dog, unless the cops had taken it away. If they hadn’t, it might still be near the library and she didn’t care to encounter it again. Carefully, quietly, Tara headed for the back door.

She eased it open and turned sideways to pass through the crack. Then she pulled it gently shut again and felt everything wash out of her until her bones felt like they would bend.

The Rose was gone. She hadn’t gone back to the library to look for it, didn’t have to. She’d heard the commotion of all the cops there. Someone would have picked it up from the floor.

Maybe, eventually, she could buy it back from Stephen’s estate. But for now she didn’t even know for sure where it was. Tara leaned her forehead against the door and fought the urge to cry.

Sometimes, Fox thought, taking things slowly really paid dividends. He sat up suddenly and straight to watch her.

The woman was a shadow moving within a shadow. Everything about her was darkness, from the midnight hair that spilled down her back to the leggings and jacket she wore. She used both hands to pull on the knob and shut the door silently. Then she rested her forehead against the wood. The gesture was so edged with defeat that Fox felt an instinctive stir of sympathy.

He frowned as he let his gaze move up over her bulky socks and running shoes. Yards of legs topped them. This, he thought, was a long, tall drink of water. He felt a certain quickening deep inside himself that was pure appreciation and had very little to do with watching this case unfold before his eyes.

His instincts told him that the woman hadn’t seen him yet. After a moment, he knew he was right. She finally left the door and moved quietly to the corner of the property. Fox stood from the bench and followed her. He didn’t make a sound until he was a foot behind her.

“Excuse me, ma’am.”

Tara spun, her heart exploding. She was running before she even finished her turn.

Fox reached up instinctively to catch her and she ran straight into his arms. They stumbled backward together and went down in the snow.

Fox moved fast. He could move quickly when he had to. He caught both her wrists with one hand just as she would have sprung to her feet again. He kept with her until he was on top of her, pinning her to the cold, wet ground.

“Now then,” he drawled. “What’s all this about?”

The woman drew in her breath to scream.

Fox clapped a hand over her mouth. “Stop fighting me. I’m a—” He never finished. Her teeth sank down into the soft pad of skin between his thumb and his forefinger. She’d bitten him! And while his mind grappled with that, she managed to twist out from beneath him.

Under other circumstances, Fox would have admired her agility. As it was, she flew toward the rear of the property and he was damned if he was going to be bested by her no matter how striking her perfect face had seemed in that moment he’d gotten a good look at her. Besides, he had a strong hunch that this was the elusive Tara Cole.

He grabbed for her and his hand came back holding air. She was halfway over a stone wall at the back of the property when he lunged again and caught her hips. He tugged backward and they sprawled again into the snow.

“I’m a police officer!” he shouted.

She was breathing hard, but then she went utterly still. “No, you’re not.”

Fox actually felt his blood pressure rise. “Yes. I am.”

“You said excuse me, when you came up behind me. You said excuse me, ma’am. What kind of cop says excuse me? A real cop would have said something like, hold it right there, you’re under arrest!”

“You’re not under arrest.” He fought a little for his own breath after their struggle. “Yet.”

“Show me your badge.”

He started to do it. But if he let her go long enough to reach for it, she’d be over the wall in a heartbeat and they both knew it. “Nice try. Where’s the ruby?”

“What ruby?”

“The one you lifted from Carmen’s safe after you killed him.”

“I don’t have a ruby. Where do you think I’d hide a ruby?”

Fox angled his head to look down at her. Where indeed? Whatever she was wearing under her jacket wasn’t just leggings as he’d first thought. It was one piece. It clung to every inch of her from neck to ankles. The fabric was like a breath against her skin, no more substantial than that. It was outrageously provocative.

Only in Philadelphia, he thought. Then he caught her scent. Something spicy. Something hot, seductive, teasing. For the space of a moment, Fox found himself reasonably glad that the North had won the war.

“You have the right to remain silent,” he said. “Anything—”

“Oh, swallow it. What are you arresting me for?”

“Assault on a police officer! Grand theft! Murder one!”

“We still haven’t even determined that you’re a cop!”

His grip on her tightened in frustration and she gave a small cry of discomfort. In that moment, Fox realized the full effect she was having on him. She might as well have taken his manners in her teeth instead of his skin. She was crazy.

Fox came to his feet. He pulled her with him. “You have the right—”

“I didn’t know you were a cop when I bit you,” she interrupted. “You never identified yourself. As for the other—”

He was going to get this out if it killed him. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything—”

“I want a lawyer.”

Fox stopped cold.

The headache she’d given him was starting to pump heat behind his eyes. He was ready to drag her back to his car and take her in for questioning but he was thinking with his temper, not his good sense. Hadn’t the woman been haggling with Carmen over twenty-four walloping carats’ worth of Burmese ruby? She’d start hollering for an attorney the minute she crossed the threshold of headquarters, and the money he presumed she had would buy a lot of legal punch.

Fox made a decision. He decided to follow his gut.

In a relaxed atmosphere, with her guard down, he just might get something worth knowing out of her before she hid behind counsel. Something deeper than the obvious was going on here. He kept seeing the way she’d leaned her head against the door when she had closed it. She’d seemed beaten. Overwhelmed.

Not murderous.

If it turned out he was wrong, there was nothing saying he couldn’t bring her in later. Fox tugged on her arm. “Let’s go.”

Fear finally ripped past Tara’s bravado and took off with her pulse, unbridled. “You’re arresting me?”

“I haven’t decided yet. Tell you what. We’ll trade answers. Ladies always go first. What were you doing in Stephen Carmen’s home?”

“Who said I was?”

“I saw you leave with my own eyes!”

“Well, I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may incriminate me.”

“You can’t pull the Fifth! This isn’t court!”

“That’s just a technicality.” She waved a hand dismissively and hoped he didn’t notice how badly it shook.

He wasn’t actually committing himself to arresting her on the spot, she realized. Maybe she could get out of this. She knew how to be brazen, how to baffle her opponent with the outrageous. It had almost always worked with Stephen. Remembering his body on the library floor, Tara’s heart spasmed. She put the image from her mind.

“Let’s get back to basics,” she said. “You never showed me your badge. I want to know who I’m dealing with here.”

This time he did it. They stopped beside the house and he reached into the pocket of his jacket and withdrew a little leather case. He flipped it open but he moved his body as he did, edging in on her space, trapping her against the wall.

Tara couldn’t quite get her breath. Her head filled with his scent, something sharp yet smooth. It stroked her nerve endings and made things gather alertly all through her body. She fought the urge to squirm and concentrated on the badge he held in front of her nose.

Robbery-Homicide. That was the first thing she saw. He was one of those people who used initials—that was the second. His name was C. Fox Whittington. Tara took another quick, shallow breath. “What’s the C for?”

“What difference does it make?” He nearly snarled it.

“I’m curious. I like to be on a first name basis with anyone who arrests me.”

“Maybe you ought to put your mind to the trouble you’re in instead.”

Oh, she was in so very much trouble! Tara looked at his eyes in the thin moonlight. They were sharp, watchful eyes, totally at odds with that Southern drawl he had. Her teeth started chattering with a chill she wasn’t aware of feeling.

“M-my lawyer is Calvin Mazzeone. Take me to a telephone and I’ll c-call him.” Mentioning an attorney had stalled him once.

“Shut up and let me think about this.” Suddenly, she was shaking like a leaf, Fox realized. The hint of vulnerability—a shadow of how she had looked coming out of the house—touched him all over again. “We’re going to your house,” he decided. “We’ll talk there.”

“Isn’t that a little unconventional?”

“You want conventional? I’ve got cuffs in my car.”

“I wouldn’t want to put you to the trouble.”

She was right back on her game, he thought, his temper spiking again. Fox finished steering her around the house, maneuvering her toward the Shelby. He unlocked the passenger door and nudged her inside. “Here’s the way I see it. You must have left prints all over that house.”

“Stephen’s my stepbrother. I visit him all the time.”

He closed the door and went around to the other side of the car. “Stephen’s dead.” He slipped behind the wheel.

“He is?”

“Please try to control yourself. I can’t deal with all this grief while I’m driving.”

“Are you always this sarcastic?”

“No. You bring out the worst in me.” Somewhere in Savannah, Fox heard his whole family tree rolling over in their graves at his behavior.

“Then just drop me here at the curb,” she said. “I’ll find my own way home.”

Fox took his eyes off the road for a moment to look at her. “You came out of his house, damn it.” His gaze snapped forward again. “What’s your address, Ms. Cole?”

Of course, he’d guess who she was. Tara felt herself beginning to rattle apart again. “1222 Poplar Drive.”

“For real?”

“Why would I lie?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because you just killed your brother?”

“Stepbrother.” She hissed it, the first real emotion he’d heard in her tone so far.

“So why did you kill him?”

“I refuse to answer—”

“Where’s the ruby?”

“I don’t have it.”

“Where’d you put it?”

“The—” Tara snapped her mouth shut again. He was hurling questions at her too quickly. She’d almost answered him and mentioned the dog.

She still didn’t know what that animal had been doing there in the first place and admitting that she knew it was there was as good as admitting that she’d been snooping around Stephen’s library tonight. It was probably not the best place to concede that she’d been until she managed to talk to her lawyer, Tara thought. Besides, he had the Rose, this…this cop with his gentle Southern drawl. His questions to the contrary were purely a smoke screen, intended to throw her off. The cops had to have found it. The ruby had landed right there on the library floor.

Whittington drove into the underground garage of her building. He showed his badge to the security guard and cruised on, looking for a place to park.

“Just pull over and let me out.” Tara crossed her arms over her chest. “You’re not staying.”

“Put coffee on. This could be a long one.”

“I don’t have to let you in.”

“Then I’d have something solid to charge you with. Obstruction of justice should keep you in a cell overnight.”

“That’s ridiculous. Cal could have me out on my own recognizance.”

“Do you want to take the chance?”

She didn’t. Tara got out of the car when he parked it and slammed the door hard.

He followed her into the garage elevator and they rode it silently to the seventh floor. Tara kept her lips pressed together as she strode down the hall with him at her heels. She unlocked the door and tried to shut it again before he got inside. He blocked it with his foot and pushed into the apartment behind her.

Fox looked around. There was magnificent view of the Schuylkill River from a long line of windows at the back of the living room. The boathouses there were trimmed with lights, looking like something out of a fairy tale. He liked that. Then his gaze came back to his immediate surroundings.

There was glass. There was cold white leather. The carpet was black. The prints on the walls were painfully, jarringly modern. The apartment was as sharp as her tongue and her cunning little mind.

He was damned if she was going to slip through his fingers, Fox thought. Even if she hadn’t actually killed anyone—and that was a big if, with nothing but his gut to hitch it on—something was going on here. She’d been inside that house.

He moved to the sofa and sat. “Where were we?”

“You were just leaving.”

“Let’s go over what I do know first.” He began ticking items off on his fingers as she stood in the center of the room, watching him. “Stephen Carmen is dead. And lo and behold, an hour or so after the dust settles, you come tiptoeing out his back door.”

She said nothing.

“It’ll take the lab a few hours to match your prints, but by tomorrow afternoon, I’ll have you on that, too.”

“I told you—”

“Ah. I forgot that part. You and the victim are related. You visited his library regularly. Your prints would logically be…well, everywhere.”

“Yes,” she conceded cautiously.

“Do you think a grand jury will believe you when you tell them that you habitually fondled Carmen’s fireplace poker?”

“Fondled?” She nearly choked. And in spite of every sane thing she knew about brazening out the hard spots in life, Tara’s gaze fell to his hands.

Her mind emptied of every plan of attack she might have had. His hands were a dichotomy, she realized. Though they were a gentleman’s hands with buffed, trimmed nails, they had a girth and a width to them that would be strong and persuasive. She could very easily imagine them…well, fondling.

Why was she thinking this?

“On top of all that,” he continued, “you resisted arrest.” He watched her mouth open in outrage, then snap shut again. He gave her a point for self-control. “And you committed assault upon my person.”

Her eyes narrowed dangerously as though she was contemplating more.

“I think even Cal Mazzeone is going to have his hands full with this one.” Fox sat back against the sofa, pleased with himself.

“Let’s try him.” She went for the sleek, ultramodern phone on a chrome-and-glass table by one wall.

Fox came to his feet. “Put it down.”

“Or what? You’ll shoot me?”

“Don’t tempt me.”

“Then charge me with something! Either you have cause or you don’t.”

Neither of them was getting an upper hand here, Fox realized. He did not intend to call this night a draw.

The silence between them drew out. Then he shrugged—a lazy gesture that brought to mind humid summer heat, Tara thought. He walked toward her. There was a lazy sense about the way he moved. He did it with more grace than a man should lay claim to. Tara eased back to give him plenty of room.

She let him take the phone from her hand. Even as he punched in a number, he watched her in a way that made her stomach do a slow roll. Like he was the devil himself and she was something he’d wanted for a very long time.

“Don’t worry about the stepsister,” he said suddenly to someone on the other end of the line. “I guess you could say that I have that situation…in hand.” He eyed her once more, another slow cruise of his gaze. “She doesn’t have the ruby. It’s not anywhere on her person. Trust me, I can be sure.”

Tara’s heart chugged. He was talking to whoever it was like they had no idea where the Rose was. Was it possible?

She opened her mouth to tell him that the stone was somewhere on the library floor, in the far corner, near the window. She caught herself just in time as he put the phone down. “Maybe Stephen…dropped it,” she offered. “You know, in the scuffle.”

“Who said there was a scuffle?”

“You did. You were the one who mentioned the fireplace poker. Or did he just stand there and let himself be conked with it?”

She was quick. It went with all her sharp edges, he thought. “Trust me. That rock is nowhere in the house.”

Then he saw her face change. Stark horror, a raw kind of distress, passed over her expression like a cloud over the sun. He felt another visceral tug of something that wanted to soften toward her, but he’d never met a woman who needed pity less or who irritated him more.

He left her and headed for the door. “You won’t want to leave the city for the time being, you hear?” Then he opened the door and stepped into the hall, closing it quietly again behind him.

Tara stared after him then she ran to throw the locks. She caught herself just in time and peered out through the peephole. He was still standing there, no doubt waiting for the sound of metal rolling. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

He’d quit. He’d given up. He was gone. She couldn’t believe her good fortune! But where was the Rose?

Tara turned slowly and leaned her back against the door. After a moment, she heard him move off outside and her breath rushed out of her. Then her gaze fell on her telephone table and her heart kicked all over again.

She ran to the table. It was glass—there was no way to misplace anything on it or beneath it. She dropped to her knees anyway and ran a frantic hand over the carpet. She gave a cry of outrage.

Her date book was gone.

Chapter 3

The lady was well and truly miffed.

Fox allowed himself to grin as the echo of Tara’s infuriated howl rolled down the hallway on his heels. It gave him his first sense of satisfaction in hours. He stepped into the elevator and took the date book from his pocket. It was going to be interesting reading, he thought, flipping through it. Then his cell phone rang.

“You’ve got it in hand?” Rafe demanded when Fox answered. “What does that mean? Where are you?”

“I’m at 1222 Poplar Drive.” As the elevator began its descent, Fox glanced down to make sure his jacket showed no signs of his earlier scuffle. “Where are you?”

“Headquarters. I—” Rafe broke off. “That’s the stepsister’s address.”

“Yes.” Fox stepped into Tara Cole’s elegant lobby and looked around at the top-notch Persian rugs and the marble reception desk. He knew that if he laid his palm against it, he would feel a chill.

It suited her. She was one cool customer.

“So where was she tonight?” Rafe asked.

“She was in the dead gentleman’s home.”

“What?”

There would be time enough later to explain why he didn’t have Tara Cole in custody at this very moment. In fact, Fox knew that he would have to explain—to Plattsmier if no one else. “I don’t want to pull her in yet.” He stepped outside onto Poplar Drive and crossed the street against traffic. At least one car honked its horn at his leisurely pace. “She didn’t kill him. I’ve got a hunch.”

“A hunch,” Rafe echoed. They generally respected each other’s gut instincts. “So is she involved at all?”

“I think so. I just don’t know how yet.”

Snow banked prettily in the common area across from her building. The public lanterns there made it sparkle. Fox looked around appreciatively as he settled onto a park bench. He gazed up at the seventh floor windows of 1222 and counted to ascertain which belonged to her apartment. He saw her pass in front of her living room windows. It appeared to Fox that she was talking on the phone. That made sense. He’d put money on Cal Mazzeone’s line being busy at the moment.

“Here’s what I’ve decided to do,” he continued finally. “We’ll need four officers here around the clock. One on the seventh floor—that’s where she lives. We’ll want one in the lobby, one here in the park across the street, and the last one over on Girard to keep an eye on the back of her building. The first two guys will be stationary, the other two will be tails, moving with her wherever she goes.”

“That’s a lot of manpower for a woman who didn’t do it.”

“She’s slippery as an eel and she has a tongue like a viper,” Fox explained. “I want to know every move she makes, every sigh she sighs, the caloric value of every bite of food she puts in her mouth, starting now. It’s the only way we’ll learn what she was up to tonight.” In the lighted window seven floors above him, he watched her drag a hand through all that long, wild, dark hair.

He’d always preferred blondes. Adelia had been elfin, pale, petite. Tara Cole couldn’t have been more her opposite. So what was it with this jerking sensation in the area of his chest at the way her hair fell down her back again when she moved her hand and let it go?

Still framed in the window, Tara put the telephone down hard. The room plunged into darkness as she left it. Then the next window lit up. Her bedroom. She came to the glass and lifted her arm, pausing just long enough that Fox wondered if she’d guessed he was out here. Then the blinds came down like a quick, hard slap.

Unfortunately, they did nothing to obliterate the shadowy hint of her movements. Fox thought it was entirely possible that she was peeling out of…whatever that thing was that she had been wearing tonight. His mouth went vaguely dry. His pulse started moving like the hands of an aborigine drummer.

“Huh?” he said into the cell phone.

Rafe had been talking, but now there was a spell of dead silence. “Did you just say huh? You? Mr. Smooth?”

“The connection’s bad.” Fox changed the subject quickly. “I’ll wait in the park across the street until I see surveillance take their places. As soon as she moves I want them to report in to us.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

On the seventh floor, her lights finally, blessedly went out.

“This one is going to be a challenge. The resort is twenty-three miles from Maine’s premiere coastal tourist area. Our job is to find out if those tourists can be persuaded to spend their vacation away from the beach.” Tara looked around at the people who had gathered at her conference room table for a meeting with her marketing firm. And though she’d managed to concentrate on the matter at hand so far, suddenly her train of thought derailed.

The Rose was in Stephen’s library—somewhere. If Whittington didn’t have it, then the cops had just missed it. But how was she supposed to get that…that detective with the blue eyes and the devil’s own grin to look for it against the far wall? How to do that without admitting that it had flown there when she’d knocked away the dog?

Come to think of it, Whittington hadn’t once mentioned the dog, she realized. Why not? For some reason, that disturbed her. A new band of tension tightened across Tara’s forehead and she rubbed at it.

She’d handled him perfectly Monday night. Perfectly. Sure, he’d swiped her date book, but he wasn’t going to find anything earth-shaking in it. In the end, he’d left her alone with that vague warning not to leave town. Which, of course, she was going to do first thing Monday morning. She had to fly to Maine on this project. She’d worked far too hard establishing the reputation of her marketing firm to let some guy with an initial-type name undermine it now.

Besides, she thought, he really had no right to hold her here. Cal Mazzeone had pointed out that Whittington couldn’t possibly have anything significant to tie her to the crime because she’d slept in her own bed these last two nights and Cal wasn’t scrambling for her expeditious arraignment. It was Wednesday and Whittington had made no further move, so Tara had to believe that Cal was right.

All that was well and good, but where was the Rose?

“Huh?” she said suddenly, realizing that her assistant in charge of research had said something to her. The people at the table exchanged frowns.

“Did you just say huh?” Eric, the assistant, asked.

“Of course not.”

Kim Koby, who ran the graphics department, cleared her throat. “Speaking as your friend and not your employee, maybe you should take a few days off.”

“Why would I want to do that?” They all knew how she’d felt about Stephen. None of them would expect her to grieve to the point of being unable to work.

“At least stay out tomorrow,” Debbie, her secretary said. “For the funeral.”

“The funeral will only take two hours in the afternoon.” She would go, Tara thought, for her stepfather’s sake, out of respect for Scott Carmen’s memory. And because she was the only family member left standing. But she wouldn’t—couldn’t—cry for him and she wouldn’t pretend.

They all knew that. An unsettled sensation began to shift in Tara’s stomach.

Debbie rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Laying low for a while might keep our competitors’ tongues from wagging,” she said. “We’ve had a cop watching our building entrance for two days now. If you’re home, maybe he’ll stand there.”

Tara frowned at her. It took two or three heartbeats for her words to sink in.

She ran into the hall and jogged back to her own office. She looked down out of her fourth floor window. There was no cop down there, but there was a guy in khakis loitering next to the mailbox. Tara waited three minutes, four, then five. The man didn’t leave.

She went slowly back to the conference room.

“How do you know he’s a cop?” she asked Debbie. Maybe he was a reporter lying in wait for her. The phones had been ringing off the hook with interview requests, all of which Cal had advised her to decline. The less she said at the moment, the better.

Debbie gnawed on her lip. “I don’t. But he’s armed.”

Tara felt her pulse speed off. “Armed?”

“I saw a gun in one of those under-the-arm holsters when his coat flapped open.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?” she demanded.

“I figured you were under enough strain.”

Tara fisted her hands to keep them from shaking.

Four years ago when her mother had died, she had been left with two things precious enough to keep her going. She’d had the Rose, a piece of her mother, a piece of her own past, a promise for the future. And she’d had this firm. She’d built it painstakingly. It was her baby, born of her expertise and her guts and her talent. In large measure, her employees were her family.

Stephen had swiped the Rose but she’d still had Concepts. Now, at one of the shakiest times of her life, her own staff was shielding her, closing her out.

“Don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself,” she said quietly, then she waved a hand. “We’re done here. I’m going back to my office.”

Suck it up, she ordered herself, heading down the hall again. Get a grip. Damn it, she could deal with this on her own. She knew her way through the dark.

In her office, she inched up to the window again. She kept her eyes closed, then, with her palms pressed against the cool glass, she deliberately opened them again. And she looked down.

The khaki guy was still there.

At least it wasn’t Whittington, she thought helplessly. This guy wore a plain white button-down shirt under the ill-fitting raincoat that Debbie had mentioned. Absurdly, Tara found herself remembering how Whittington had been dressed Monday night, in that soft-as-butter leather jacket. She knew its texture because she’d had fistfuls of it when he’d first taken her down. The man definitely had a sense of style.

And why was she thinking about that when the Rose was missing, when Whittington felt strongly enough about her involvement in Stephen’s death to have put a cop on her? She was losing her mind. Maybe the horrors of the last few days were getting to her, even more than she realized.

Tara pressed a fist against her mouth while panic tried to fold her knees, both for what he was doing and for the effect he was having on her. Then she went back to her desk and forced herself to concentrate on the Maine proposal.

Fox sat at his desk in the Robbery-Homicide den on the eleventh floor of headquarters. The cop standing in front of him spoke earnestly.

“I talked to her doorman. He was pretty emphatic about her schedule,” Vince Migliaccio reported. “She always walks to and from her office, except on Wednesdays.”

“This is Wednesday,” Fox responded.

“Yeah. So she’ll be cabbing it tonight. It’s her dry-cleaning day. He says she always takes her clothes with her and comes home in a taxi. Maybe the cleaners is too far away for her to walk.”

“You’re sure about this?”

Migliaccio flushed and Fox felt sorry for him, but his caution was not misplaced. Migliaccio had had an outstanding opportunity to move up in the ranks last summer when he’d been assigned to back up Fox while Rafe had been out on suspension. He’d blown that job. Now—at least for the time being—he was back on patrol.

Fox knew that Rafe had hand-picked Migliaccio for this assignment to give the kid another chance. Fox thought that was a good idea but he sincerely hoped the young man had learned to keep a wall up between himself and the females involved in a crime.

Like he was doing? A sudden image of yards of black hair hit Fox’s mind hard. He saw it spilling over his hands the way it had when he’d struggled with Tara Cole in Carmen’s garden. He saw her tight, agile body encased in that black second skin.

“Huh?” he said to Migliaccio.

The officer looked at him strangely. “Are you all right?”

“Of course I’m all right.” Fox deliberately cleared his mind.

“She usually orders lunch in. That’s what the guy at the deli around the corner says.”

“What’s the name of the place?”

“It’s called Ernie and Vin’s and it’s on the corner of Brown and Twenty-fourth.”

Fox filed that away for future use. “Okay, good. Presuming she doesn’t leave the office earlier, I’ll take the watch over from Currey at five o’clock.” Phil Currey was the guy currently standing in front of her office building.

“Sure. I’ll tell him.” Migliaccio left.

Fox opened the lady’s date book again. Tara Cole was dining with a friend named Charlie at the Four Seasons tonight. She would be attending a black-tie event at a local gallery tomorrow night at nine. Fox decided he was looking forward to that one. He enjoyed art.

At twenty minutes past six, Tara stood up from her desk. Her nerves had been coiled like a child’s slinky toy all day, ever since she’d found out about the cop. She pressed the heel of one hand into each eye, then she turned to the window again and peered down.

The khaki guy was gone. She blinked to be sure but when she opened her eyes again, there was no one down there. Tara spun back to her desk. She slammed her palm down on the mouse, frantically trying to turn her computer off, then she spun for the closet in one corner of her office. She shrugged into her coat while groping for her bag of dry cleaning stashed on the floor.

“Eric!” she shouted. When she stepped out into the hall, her assistant popped his head out of his own office. “Lock up for me! I’ve got to go now, right now!”

“Well…sure.”

Tara ran down the hall and leaned hard on the elevator button. “Come on, come on, come on.” She wasn’t foolish enough to believe that Whittington wouldn’t send someone else to watch her. This would be the changing of the guard, that was all. She was pretty sure he had more than one officer spying on her. She’d noticed someone suspicious in the deli earlier.

Whittington’s cop brigade would catch up with her again at home, but that wasn’t the point. Eluding him for a while was merely payback for what he had done with her date book Monday night.

She had to let him know that he didn’t hold all the cards.

There was an available cab idling right at the curb when she reached the sidewalk downstairs. Tara switched her dry-cleaning bag to her left hand and reached for the door handle with her right.

“Allow me,” said a voice she recognized.

Tara shrieked. She jerked around blindly and her hands came up as though to ward off a blow. The laundry bag dropped at her feet. “You!”

“Northern women have such a hard time accepting hospitality.” Fox stepped around her and opened the cab door himself. “Ladies first.”

“No!”

“I won’t think less of you if you have a gracious moment.”

She felt helpless temper fill her head. Tara looked down while she tried to get her breath and her equilibrium back, while she got it under control. He wore really fine alligatorskin boots, she noticed. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d met a man who wore alligator boots. Why did he always have to look so damned good?

“Isn’t that an endangered species or something?” she muttered.

Amazingly, he followed her train of thought and looked down as well. “I’ve never met an alligator who didn’t deserve to be worn. Which may be more than I can say for that fur coat you’re wearing.”

Tara’s head snapped up and her gaze narrowed on him. “It’s faux.”

He grinned. “If that’s what gets your conscience through the night.” Then he ran a finger along her sleeve as though to be sure.

Tara felt the jolt of his touch clear through her coat. His eyes caught hers and held on in something that felt like a challenge…and she didn’t think it had much to do with her fake fur. Her breath caught all over again. He really was the devil incarnate, but for a crazy moment she found herself tempted to lose her soul to him.

The thought nearly stole her voice. “Go away,” she said hoarsely. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“Fine. You take this cab and I’ll take the next one. But, ma’am, we surely do need to talk.”

“Why? I told you everything I could possibly tell you Monday night.”

“You told me nothing Monday night.”

“Because there’s nothing to tell!”

“Well, see, I’ve had awhile to think about that now and I’ve decided you’re wrong.” He paused. “You were in Carmen’s home. Can we at least agree on that much?”

“I refuse to answer on the grounds that—”

“You can’t take the Fifth yet!”

“Why not?” she demanded. “You’re the law, I’m a citizen—”

“You’re a suspect!”

Her air punched right out of her, but she rallied. “That being the case, I refuse to answer—”

“Shut up!”

“You’re very rude.”

His blood pressure spiked. But what she had said was amazingly close to the truth, at least when he was in her company. “I’ve never had anyone try to trot the Fifth out at my most innocent question!”

“There’s nothing innocent about you, nothing at all.”

It was out before she knew she was going to say it. Tara turned away quickly before he could see the heat stain her face. He wouldn’t miss her blush, of that she was sure.

He caught her elbow and her pulse beat harder. “Talk to me,” he said, “if only to save your own pretty hide.”

She fell back on everything she knew about holding her own. She gave him a provocative smile as she looked back at him. “You like my hide?” Then the cabbie blared his horn and she jumped.

Fox bent to peer into the car. “Sit tight, pal.” He finally let go of her when he straightened. “Get in.”

“Give me my book back first.”

“I haven’t finished reading it. I’m finding it very entertaining.”

“Then you need a life, Blue Eyes.”

Fox opened his mouth to answer and found that he simply couldn’t. Anything that passed his lips right now would be angry, frustrated, and yes, rude. He thought of the life he might have been having right now if this woman hadn’t decided to secrete herself in her stepbrother’s home for some reason known only to her. He thought of the inviting blonde he’d left behind at Remmick’s on Monday to investigate this mess.

Tara moved quickly, sliding into the rear seat of the cab while he seemed preoccupied. She pulled the door shut fast and leaned forward in the seat. “Go!” she shouted at the driver.

“I been trying to,” the man complained.

Tara shot a glance backward as the car vaulted into traffic. Detective Whittington with the initialed name looked quite irate.

Tara laughed aloud, then the sound tried to strangle her. Her dry-cleaning bag was still sitting on the pavement next to Whittington’s slick, handsome boots. She watched him pick up the bag and get into the cab behind her.

Something told her she hadn’t seen the last of him.

Fox decided to keep the laundry, at least for the time being. He took it back to his own apartment, not far from hers on the north side of Girard College. He used his cell phone in the cab and touched base with both Rafe and Migliaccio. He sent Migliaccio to stand in front of Tara’s high-rise. As for his partner, the man was fretting over the virtues of pistachio ice cream and pregnant women.

“Don’t give it to her,” Fox advised.

“Don’t? I’d want to make sure where that meat cleaver of hers is first before I break the news.” Rafe’s wife, Kate, was a chef.

“Trust me on this one,” Fox said. “What goes down green comes up green.”

“No.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Ah, man.”

“Have a good night.”

“You’ve got everything under control? You don’t need me right now?”

Fox guessed by his partner’s tone that only a portion of his mind was on the case—and it was a small, tidy portion at that. “I’ve put snipers on top of every building near hers. If she moves, she’s gone.”

“Good. That’s great.”

Fox sighed. Life was different, he thought, when you had a woman.

He disconnected and glanced at the bag on the seat beside him, and the aborigine started drumming behind his eyes again. Correction, he thought. Life was different when you had the right woman. Some could purely drive you to a coronary.

The cab let him out in front of his condominium. The Shelby convertible was in his driveway. He ran a loving hand over her curves and angles as he passed it. He didn’t always take her out. Parking was hell in the city and she was the kind of animal who was built for speed rather than a slow prowl. Sort of like a certain brunette who was the key to this crime.

Damn it, he preferred blondes.

Fox went inside and dropped the dry-cleaning bag on his kitchen table. He grabbed a Guinness from the refrigerator. After a fortifying swallow, he pulled back a corner of the bag and peered inside. Peach-colored satin. With lace. He hooked a finger in and brought out a slim strap that was attached to a camisole.

The lady dry-cleaned her lingerie.

Fox dropped the strap and crumpled the top of the bag together tightly and fast. He swallowed deeply from his beer again. She wasn’t his type. She was dark and sultry, polished as glass and too quick on her feet. She had more sharp points than a porcupine. She wouldn’t know good manners if one jumped up and bit her on the nose, no matter that she had grown up in the lap of luxury. Some people like that thought it gave them the right to set their own rules.

At the bottom of it all, there was still another irrefutable fact, the biggest reason she shouldn’t appeal to him: she was the key to this crime. But all the same…he couldn’t get her off his mind.

Fox went to the telephone and made another call. He decided to take over tonight’s surveillance as well. Five minutes later, he showered then he spent an inordinate amount of time dressing so he could go loiter around the Four Seasons. At seven-thirty exactly, he fired up the Mustang, and headed back toward center city.

He was whistling Dixie.

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