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He would indulge his in her.
His fifteen minutes had passed five minutes ago when they finally locked up and went downstairs together. Just outside the gate, where her car was parked in his boss’s spot, he slid his arms around her and pulled her near, feeling the bump of her pistol at her waist beneath her shirt. “There it is,” he teased.
“Mmm-hmm. The handcuffs are on the other side.”
“I bet a lot of guys, when they find out you’re a cop, ask you to use the handcuffs on them.”
“Um. But you’d be the first one I might actually say yes to.”
The streetlights were starting to come on, buzzing like giant insects, and foot traffic had picked up on the sidewalks. Music came from the open doors of the bar, a decent rendition of “The Sky is Crying,” competing with something heavy metal across the street. It was a good evening for taking a lazy walk through the Quarter, sitting in a restaurant courtyard over a leisurely meal...or laying down a beautiful woman and exploring every centimeter of her lovely body.
Soon.
Not soon enough. But he’d taken too much time off the past week, all for bad reasons, and would be off the day of Camilla’s funeral this week. Alia was worth waiting for, damn, as long as he had to.
He leaned close to her, nuzzling her neck, smelling the faint fragrance of perfume, the fainter scent of lemon and sugar. “You sampled Evie’s cookies on the way over,” he murmured, his lips barely brushing her skin.
“Murphy gave them to me this morning. It’s nothing less than a miracle that I hadn’t inhaled them by noon.”
With a laugh, he kissed her mouth, quickly, reining in the passion and need. “Thanks for dinner.”
“You’re welcome.” The look she gave him was filled with something far more than the routine gesture the words denoted, something more like a statement of fact. An invitation.
With a reluctance that matched his own, she pulled free and went to her car. Before sliding inside, she gave him a glance, a tiny wave, and murmured, “I’ll see you.”
“Absolutely.” He watched her get in, back up, then drive away down the street before he went inside the bar.
Nothing less than a miracle, she’d said. Simple words applied to a lot of things that, honestly, weren’t the least bit deserving of the designation. But feeling the way he did, after all the ugly emotions in his past...
That really was nothing less than a miracle.
And its name was Alia.
* * *
The ring of the cell phone an hour later jerked Alia out of a lazy, satisfied, full-stomach-glass-of-wine stupor. Drying her hand on a towel, she picked it up from the table next to the tub, glanced at Caller ID, then turned it to speaker. “Hey, Jimmy.”
“I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“If I’d been asleep, I wouldn’t have answered.”
“Liar. Are you busy?”
“No.” She gazed at the few remaining jasmine-scented bubbles dotting the surface of the water. She nudged the faucet with her toe, turning it to full blast to both revive the bubbles and reheat the water.
“Are you taking a bath?” he asked at the sound of the rushing water. “Hell, sweet pea, that’s not fair. How am I supposed to talk business when I’ve got this image of you in my head all naked and wet and soapy?”
She ignored the question and sank a little deeper into the water as it warmed. Her hair was piled on top of her head, but strands of it trailed in the rising water. “What business? I’m off the investigation, remember?”
“Does that mean two old friends can’t talk about their work?”
She was about to point out that they weren’t friends, but the realization that they really were stopped her. How had that come about? She’d loved him, hated him, wished he would disappear off the face of the earth. But, yeah, in their own way, they’d become friends.
“You know I’m supposed to be out of the loop now,” she reminded him.
He snorted. “You know I decide who belongs in my loop. That’s why I never became a big-time fed like you. I live by my own rules.”
He did. He had his own code of honor, and his first priority was doing right by the victims of the crimes he investigated. He broke rules and took shortcuts, but he got the job done, and truth was, if she was ever the victim of a crime, she couldn’t think of a better cop to handle the investigation.
“Did you go with Murphy to interview the Wallace sisters?”
“I did. It was like refereeing a bare-knuckle fight. Older one’s a coldhearted snake, and the younger one acts like a spoiled-rotten teenager having a bad day. They were spitting and hissing at each other the whole damn time. Older one did most of the talking. Younger one did all of the drinking.”
