Dangerous Liaisons

Smoking was the least of the things he missed, Jake reminded himself, his mood turning as dark as the night around him. He couldn’t quite forget the bite of aged Scotch. Or the heady feel of a woman. A soft woman with stunning blue eyes. A woman who smelled good enough to make a man wonder how it would feel to have her move beneath him in the dark.

A woman like Nicole Taylor.

He exhaled a slow breath. He could still feel the way her pulse had spiked beneath his thumb. After that, it had taken all of his control not to press his mouth to that soft place on her wrist and find out if she tasted as good as she looked.

Doing that would have only compounded the already idiotic move he’d made when he’d slicked his thumb across her flesh. He didn’t want to start something he knew didn’t have a chance in hell of going anywhere. Didn’t want to sample what he couldn’t allow himself to have.

Yet, because he’d given in to the impulse to hold on to her longer than he should have, he couldn’t forget the gratifying stutter his touch had put in her pulse.

That memory wasn’t the only thing giving him trouble.

Until that night, all he’d wanted was to rid himself of the clawing dream that dragged him to that second in time when a bomb ignited and ripped apart his world. The dream had faded the past several nights, just as the police psychologist had assured him it would. Problem was, his subconscious had replaced that dream with one of Nicole. A dream that, in one way, was far more disconcerting because there was no therapy for it. No way to talk the woman out of his head, no logical way of ridding his system of her.

She was there. Inside him. All of his instincts told him he was going to have one hell of a time shaking her presence. But shake her, he would.

He had learned the hard way that what fate tossed out was not always kind. Learned in the most horrific way how fast a person’s life could change. How, in a slash of time, happiness could transform into grief. Numbing, ceaseless grief.

Before he could switch off his thoughts, he saw again the memorial service crowded with relatives, friends and cops, where music drifted and the cloying scent of roses hung in the air. There had been no caskets—there couldn’t be, not when jagged shards of the plane’s fuselage were all that had been left floating in the Gulf of Mexico. He’d bought one cemetery plot, stood alone in grim silence while a granite headstone with the names of his wife and twin daughters was positioned at the head of the empty grave. He hadn’t gone back to the cemetery since that day.

With the memories closing in on him, Jake rubbed the heel of his hand over his heart. Never again. Never again would he leave himself wide open for fate to deliver another staggering blow. For that reason, there was no room in his life for Nicole Taylor, or any other woman.

The sudden ring of his cell phone cut through the still night air, jolting him from his thoughts. Jake clicked the unit on, said his name.

“It’s Ryan.”

“What’s up, boss?”

“Any luck on the surveillance?”

Lifting a brow, Jake propped his elbow in the door’s open window. Lieutenant Michael Ryan didn’t usually call to check on the status of a stakeout. “Negative. I plan on giving it another couple of hours for Cárdenas’s girlfriend to show. Unless you’ve got something else you need me on.”

“That’s why I called. I want you to take the Signal 7 that dispatch put out about ten minutes ago,” Ryan stated, then gave the location that had been broadcast on the radio.

“I heard the uniform call it in.”

With a habit he’d picked up from a veteran street cop when he was a fresh-out-of-the-academy rookie, Jake grabbed a pen off the dash, angled his hand to catch the pale wash of a streetlight, then jotted the address on his left palm. “Any reason you don’t want Gianos and Smith on it?” he asked, referring to the detectives pulling night shift that month.

“It’s not that I don’t want them on it,” Ryan commented. “In fact, Gianos gave me a call from the scene—he and Smith were wrapping up an interview a couple of miles from there when the call came out. After Gianos got ID on the woman who found the guy’s body, he figured he’d better give me a heads-up. He was right. Taking that into consideration, I think it’d be best to put you on this one. Since you’re without a partner while Whitney’s on her honeymoon, Gianos and Smith can give you a hand with follow-up interviews and paperwork if you need help.”

“Okay.” Jake glanced across the street at the apartment building that seemed to breathe neglect. He wouldn’t get a lead on Cárdenas tonight, but he would get the bastard. He’d made that promise to himself and to little Enrique Quintero’s grieving mother. Jake knew too well what it felt like to lose a child.

“So, Lieutenant, who’s the woman who found the body?” he asked as he switched on the cruiser’s ignition.

“Your partner’s new sister-in-law, Nicole Taylor.”

Jake began to swear, slowly, steadily, as he stomped the accelerator and the cruiser shot from the curb.

Fifteen minutes after he’d hung up from talking to his boss, Jake pulled to a stop in a pool of light at the wrought-iron gate that blocked the entrance to the exclusive housing community. To his left sat a tidy security building; to his right, small spotlights hidden in manicured shrubs illuminated a brick wall with Stonebridge in flowing brass script.

He tugged his gold badge off the waistband of his faded jeans. “Sergeant Jake Ford,” he said, flashing the badge at the guard on duty inside the building. While the guard logged him in, Jake noted the nearby panel of buttons where visitors could contact one of the residents to get buzzed through the gate if the guard wasn’t around.

Inching the cruiser forward, Jake waited while the gate drifted open on silent gears. On the far side of the gate sat several sprawling houses, outlined in the glow of gas lamps that lined the street like rows of tiny moons. Even at night, the houses all looked massive. About one hundred times too massive for a cop’s salary, Jake decided as he steered the cruiser through the entrance and along the well-lit street.

After checking the address he’d inked on his palm, he turned a corner. The pulse of a blue-and-red strobe from the scout car parked in a circular driveway had him bearing down on the accelerator.

The house beyond the driveway was brick, and as immense as the others in the neighborhood. Jake figured if the stiff owned the house where his body had wound up, he was a very rich stiff.

Seconds later, Jake inched the cruiser past the medical examiner’s black station wagon. He parked behind the lab’s crime scene van, then climbed out. As he reclipped his badge onto his waistband beside his holstered Glock, the night air settled around him, still and gauzy, full of humidity.

Yellow tape had been strung from the house’s columned front porch to manicured shrubbery, then fanned out to loop around two of the matching gas street lamps. From the back seat of the scout car that sat idling in the driveway, Jake caught the glint of light off golden-blond hair.

Nicole.

While he ducked beneath a stretch of crime scene tape, it registered in his brain that the last thing he expected to feel when he saw her was pleasure. As if sensing his presence, she turned her head, her gaze meeting his through the scout car’s back window. The stress in her eyes tightened Jake’s throat, had him hesitating with an inexplicable need to go to her, to comfort. He set his jaw. She had found a dead body—whether it was a homicide or a natural death, proper procedure was for him to get the facts from those already working on-site, then view the body himself before he talked to any witness. Doing that gave the investigator a better idea of what questions to ask. And an edge on knowing if a witness was lying, which happened a lot during homicide investigations.

“Evening, Sergeant.”

Jake turned, relieved to have his attention pulled from Nicole to the female officer who approached him. She looked on the official side with her blond hair pulled back from her earnest face and a silver clipboard in one hand.

“Evening.” The first time he’d worked with the patrol officer was at a scene a couple of weeks ago, and her name had slipped his mind. He checked the brass tag above the right pocket of her gray uniform shirt: C. O. Jones.

“Jones,” he added. With more than a little effort, he kept his gaze off the scout car where Nicole sat. “You responded to the initial call, right?” he asked, remembering that it had been a female officer who’d called in the Signal 7.

“Affirmative.” The red-blue lights from the scout car winked in rhythm as she jotted his name on the crime scene log.

“Who’s the victim?”

“Man by the name of Phillip Ormiston.”

Jake arched a brow. “Of Ormiston Funeral Home fame?”

“The same. He owns the entire chain.”

“Any idea yet on cause of death?”

“The M.E.’s assistant is inside checking the body, but I haven’t heard anything for sure. To me, it looked like Ormiston just dropped dead in his entry hall. No blood, no sign of trauma that I could see. According to one of the neighbors, Ormiston was into fitness. He jogged around the neighborhood and played racquetball a couple nights a week at a gym called Sebastian’s.”

“Maybe Ormiston’s biorhythms took a dive into a negative zone,” Jake muttered.

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing.” He moved his gaze to the scout car. Nicole’s back was to him now, her gaze glued to the house’s open front door. While he watched her, she raised her left hand and slowly curled her fingers through the metal security screen that kept the person in the back seat separated from the officer in front. For some reason he could not fathom, Jake’s chest tightened at the thought of her being caged inside the black-and-white.

“That’s who found Ormiston’s body,” Jones said, her gaze following his. “Her name’s Taylor. Nicole Taylor.”

“Yeah.” He remet the officer’s gaze. Jones had done things by the book—she’d checked the scene, secured it, then put the person who discovered the body in her scout car while she advised dispatch to contact Homicide.

He also had procedure to follow, Jake reminded himself when he again felt the pull to walk over and open the car’s back door. Right now, it was his job to find out what Nicole had already told the officer on the scene.