The Baby Chase

He dropped the washcloth and angled her face toward the sink light to study the welt again. Finally, it looked clean, but the ugly gash marring that soft, cream white skin made him furious. At her.

The punch-in-the-gut response to touching that soft, cream white skin made him even more furious. At himself.

When a man was standing between a woman’s thighs, an arousal was a natural, unavoidable biological reaction. Gabe understood perfectly well why he was harder than a hammer. And one day out of 365, a guy was entitled to feel unreasonable for a couple of minutes.

But he was mad at her for that, too.

When he stepped back, Rebecca mistakenly seemed to assume she was free and promptly leaned forward. “If you get off that counter, you die,” he informed her. “You need a bandage on that.”

“Sheesh. It’s just a little lump. It can’t be worth all this trouble.”

“If it isn’t taped right, you’ll get a scar.”

“My brother’s in jail on a murder one charge. Who the patooties could care about a stupid little scar? We’ve wasted enough time on this thing.”

“One more minute and this’ll be done.” He stepped between her thighs again. He had to. He didn’t trust Rebecca not to fly off the counter and start playing sleuth. He’d found the makings of a butterfly bandage in the antiquated first aid box. Leaning this close to her, Geronimo naturally stood at attention again, as stiff as a warrior’s lance.

Like his namesake, Geronimo should have figured out by now that a guy couldn’t win every time. Gabe ignored that problem. He wished he could ignore her.

She was relatively cleaned up now. Technically, no one was supposed to remove anything from the estate until all the legal tangles surrounding Monica Malone’s death were settled. Those legal complications meant that the cupboards and drawers and closets in the house were still jammed with stuff. Gabe had had no trouble finding a towel, washcloth, the first aid supplies and some clothes. He’d also caught sight of some thirty-year-old Scotch in the top kitchen cupboard.

He was considering leveling it.

“You done?” she said hopefully.

“Yeah, I’m done.”

“Gabe…thanks. I really couldn’t see the cut myself, not at the angle it was. I didn’t mean to be a pistol. I appreciate the help.”

“No sweat.” A total lie, Gabe thought. Everything about her was a sweat.

Rebecca wasn’t vain or spoiled, he gave her that—and she sure as hell could have been both, given the enormous wealth and affluence of the Fortune family. It wasn’t her fault that she’d never been outside a protected environment. Her background just made her inescapable trouble. She was a hopeless idealist, plenty bright, but no street smarts, no practical life experience. She’d never run across the seamier, more realistic side of life. She’d never been near it. She was a believer in love, in white knights and honor, and as far as Gabe could tell, she didn’t have a clue that there were predators out there who could hurt her.

Worse yet, she fancied herself a Nancy Drew, just because she’d written a few mystery novels. The complications she could cause, “helping” with this investigation regarding her brother, were enough to give Gabe an ulcer.

So was she.

As she slid off the counter, his eyes homed on the view of a lace-trimmed bra and the shadow of cleavage. More shadow than cleavage. There’d been no way he could talk her into peeling off the muddy, soaking-wet sweatshirt until he found something else for her to put on—he’d yanked the V-necked black sweater from a drawer upstairs, and he assumed it had belonged to Monica Malone. The late Monica, like so many of the Hollywood glamour stars of her era, had been built like a battleship on the upstairs deck.

The V neck gaped on Rebecca as if she were an orphan waif playing dress-up. Her black jeans were finally dry, and snug enough to outline long, lean legs and a nonexistent tush. Since she couldn’t sit without squirming, he strongly suspected she’d bruised that bitsy tush, but for damn sure she’d never admit it to him. There was far more pride than sense in those soft green eyes, and that about summed up the rest of her appearance, too.

The face was valentine-shaped, the skin too white, the eyes too dark, a mouth that looked dangerously butter-soft, and a nose with an impertinent tip. He guessed her height at around five-five. A respectable height—except next to him—but it was hard to resist calling her “shorty” when the least teasing got such a rise out of her.

Her hair was dark cinnamon, and at the moment layered to her shoulders in a snarled tangle of curls. She’d obviously had no chance or time to brush it, but he’d spent time with her before this, and he knew her hair always looked like she’d just climbed out of a man’s bed after a long, acrobatic night. Since she was a Fortune, there was no question that she had the money for a decent haircut, so apparently she just didn’t think about it. Maybe a haircut wouldn’t help. Give her a butch cut and drape her in iron—she was still going to look skinny, sexy, half put together and, dammit, vulnerable.

Gabe had never been attracted to vulnerable-looking females, so he had no idea why she so revved his engines—and he didn’t want to know. If and when a man was inclined to make a mistake, Gabe generally theorized, he might as well get his money’s worth and do it right. But, hell, not with her. He’d tangled with his share of women, and at thirty-eight he certainly knew when a risk was worth taking. He liked risk and he wasn’t short on guts—but no way was he a suicidal kamikaze pilot.

“Rebecca…” He swiped a hand over his face again. As fast as she’d sprung down from the counter—as he should have known—she was galloping toward the door. “Where are you going?”

“Anywhere. Everywhere. I thought I’d check out the scene of the murder first—it was in the living room, wasn’t it? Then see what I could pry and poke up in Ms. Malone’s bedroom.”

“If you’re headed for the living room, better aim right instead of left. Unless you have some interest in the pantry and butler’s quarters. And listen, Nancy D. You leave stuff as you find it. You don’t take anything. I’d rather you didn’t even touch anything without telling me—”

“Sheesh, Gabe. I’ve read a dozen books on police procedure. If I find anything remotely related to evidence, I sure as Pete know enough not to mess it up.”

“Somehow your reading those books doesn’t reassure me too much.”

For a vulnerable woman, she had the unholiest grin. “I know, cutie. You really can’t seem to help being a take-charge, overbearing, overprotective pain. Especially with women. God, thinking about you being a father just boggles the mind. You’d drive a daughter nuts, sweetie pie.”

“Since I don’t plan to be a father, the problem is moot. Babies are the last thing on my mind.”

“Yet another core difference between us—no surprise. If it weren’t for this immediate problem with my brother, babies’d be front-line priority for me. You should see all the research material I’ve been collecting on sperm banks.”

“Sperm banks? You can’t be serious.”

“On the subject of babies, I couldn’t be more serious.” But she grinned again. “However, the only reason I mentioned sperm banks was because I couldn’t resist—I just knew you’d get that look on your face, darlin’. But right now, time’s wasting…and babies just have no place on this night’s agenda.”

No, Gabe thought darkly, murder was apparently front-line on the lady’s agenda now. And only Rebecca could bounce from sperm banks to murder in a single breath.

Well, he wasn’t going to follow her around. He had an investigative job he was being paid to do, and his salary didn’t extend to baby-sitting imaginative, recalcitrant redheads—even if she was kin to his boss.

He headed for the office—and yeah, he knew the mansion had one, because he’d been here before. The wallpaper was textured silk, the windows were hung with poofy, powder-puff-looking curtains, and the desk had a brocade chair. It was about the sissiest office he’d ever been in, and he doubted Monica Malone had ever paid a bill on her own, least of all in here. Either the cops or the lawyers had absconded with every record or financial statement in the file cabinets, as Gabe already knew. Still, he flicked on the fancy offset lighting and started yanking out drawers.

Someone could have missed something. Someone always did. As much evidence as had emerged in the case, there were still huge holes and gaps in information. He carefully, meticulously tore the place apart…for about twenty minutes.

About then he realized how silent it was in the rest of the house. Dead silent. Ideal for concentrating, except that it nagged at him like a bee sting that he couldn’t hear Rebecca. Her labeling him overbearing still rankled. He wasn’t remotely overbearing. He simply had ample previous experience with Rebecca—enough to know she was impulsively, unwittingly capable of causing no end of trouble. When a man was in the same house with a nuclear reactor, he was perfectly justified in worrying.

He found her in the long, sweeping living room, huddled in a chair, staring at the marble fireplace. Damn woman. She looked up at him with huge dark eyes. “I’m just trying to picture it. I know she was killed here….”

“Yes.”

“We know Jake was here. And that he was drunk. We know they argued, physically argued. Jake said Monica scratched him and came at him with a letter opener, and he had a stab wound in the shoulder to prove it. He admitted that he pushed her, that she fell against that marble fireplace and hit her head.”

“Monica and your brother’s fingerprints were all over the scene.” Gabe didn’t add that no one else’s identifiable fingerprints had surfaced. Rebecca already seemed to have a pretty good picture of the compelling evidence against her brother. She couldn’t seem to stop wringing those slim white hands.

“But he said Monica was alive when he left her. Natalie, his daughter, saw him later. We talked to him. It wasn’t like a fight, not on his part. He only pushed her because she was attacking him with that letter opener, and he had no reason to lie about her still being alive. He could have claimed self-defense if she’d died accidentally in a struggle like that. I’m telling you, someone else was either already in the house or came in after Jake left. My brother did not kill her, Gabe.”

Gabe crossed the room to the art deco bar. Nothing back there was quite as good as the thirty-year-old Scotch he’d found in the kitchen, but at the moment he’d have settled for Kentucky moonshine. Not for him. Being around Rebecca predictably inspired him to drink, but the immediate problem was the damn heartsick look in her eyes.

He splashed some whiskey in a cut-crystal shot glass and carried it over to her.

She took the glass and sniffed it. “Yuck,” she said.

“Shut up and level it, shorty.”

“If you call me ‘shorty’ one more time…” she began, but then her voice trailed off. It was truly a landmark occasion—she actually didn’t bristle up and argue with him. Instead, she lifted the shot glass and chugged the brew in an impressive three gulps. Once she finished coughing, she wiped her eyes with a shudder. “Personally, I’m with Mary Poppins. If you have to take medicine, you should be able to add a spoonful of sugar to it.”

Imagining the taste of whiskey and sugar was enough to make him shudder, but he could see that the liquid courage did its job. Color shot back into her cheeks. She quit trying to knit those hands into a sweater. Gabe figured if there was ever going to be a two-second window when she could handle a dose of realism, it had to be now. “No other suspects have surfaced, Rebecca—not a single name, much less a clear fingerprint. All the physical evidence points to Jake…and he had motive.”