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Summerset raised one steel gray eyebrow. “Well, that seems to cover it.”
“Good, saves time.” She started up the stairs. “Is he back?”
“Just.”
A little annoyed she’d given him no opportunity to criticize, he frowned after her. He’d have to be quicker next time.
When she was sure he’d evaporated to wherever he’d appeared from, Eve paused at one of the house screens. “Where’s Roarke?”
GOOD EVENING, DARLING EVE. ROARKE IS IN HIS OFFICE.
“Figures.” Business dinner followup. She gave one blissful thought to detouring to the bedroom, jumping headlong into the shower. But guilt had her heading to his office.
The door was open. She could hear his voice.
She supposed he was refining the details of some deal he had going, most likely the one that had involved tonight’s dinner. But she didn’t care about the words.
His voice was poetry, seductive in itself even to a woman who’d never understood the heart of a poet. Wisps of Ireland trailed through it, adding music to what she assumed were dry facts and figures.
It suited his face, one that bore all that wild Celtic beauty in its strong, sharp bones, deep blue eyes, in the full, firm mouth that might have been sculpted by some canny god on a particularly good day.
She stepped to the doorway, saw that he stood at one of the windows, looking out while he dictated his memo. He’d pulled his hair back, she noted, all that thick black silk he usually wore loose so that it streamed nearly to his shoulders.
He still wore his dinner suit, black and sleek, over his long, rangy form. You could look and see the elegant businessman, madly successful, perfectly civilized. He’d polished himself, Eve thought, but that dangerous Celt was still, always, just beneath the surface.
It still, always, allured her.
She caught a glimpse of it now as he turned, though she hadn’t made a sound, and his eyes met hers.
“Sign Roarke,” he said, “and transmit. File copy Hagerman-Ross. Hello, Lieutenant.”
“Hi. Sorry about dinner.”
“No, you’re not.”
She tucked her hands in her pockets. It was ridiculous, really, the way they continually itched to take hold of him. “I’m sort of sorry about dinner.”
He grinned, that lightning bolt of charm and humor. “You wouldn’t have been as bored as you think.”
“You’re probably right. If I’d been as bored as I thought, I’d have slipped into a coma. But I am sorry I let you down.”
“You don’t let me down.” He crossed to her, tapped her chin up with his finger and kissed her lightly. “It adds considerably to my cache when I apologize for my wife, who’s been called to duty on a case. Murder always makes lively dinner conversation. Who’s dead?”
“Couple of guys downtown. Small-time chem dealer whaled on his neighbor with a ball bat, then went after a woman and a cop. Cop took him out.”
Roarke lifted a brow. More, he thought. There was a deal more trouble in her eyes than her quick rundown warranted. “That doesn’t seem like the sort of wrangle that would keep you on duty so late.”
“The cop was Trueheart.”
“Ah.” He laid his hands on her shoulders, rubbed. “How’s he doing?”
She opened her mouth, then shook her head and paced away. “Shit. Shit, shit, shit.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Kid breaks his cherry it’s tough enough.”
Roarke stroked a hand over the fat cat that sprawled over the console, then gave Galahad a little nudge to move him along. “That’s an interesting way to put it.”
