It Must Be Love

Chapter Five

The hairs on the back of Gabrielle's neck stood up as she watched Detective Shanahan place a transmitter into the telephone receiver. Then he reached for a screwdriver and put everything back into place.

"Is that it?" she whispered.

An open toolbox lay at his feet, and he dropped the screwdriver inside. "Why are you whispering?"

She cleared her throat and said, "Are you finished, Detective?"

He glanced across his shoulder at her and set the phone back in its cradle. "Call me Joe. I'm your lover, remember?"

She'd spent the night before trying to forget. "Boyfriend."

"Same thing."

Gabrielle tried not to roll her eyes. Tried and failed. "So tell me," she paused and blew out her breath, "Joe. Are you married?"

He turned to face her and rested his weight on one foot. "No."

"Some lucky girl's hunk of burnin' love?"

He crossed his arms over his gray T-shirt. "At the moment, no."

"Recent breakup?"

"Yes."

"How long were you together?"

His gaze lowered to her turquoise nylon shirt with the big green-and-yellow butterflies on each breast. "Why do you care?"

"Just trying to make pleasant conversation."

He slid his gaze up to her face once more. "Two months."

"Really? What took her so long to come to her senses?"

His eyes narrowed, and he leaned toward her. "Are you crazy? Is that your problem? Your butt's in a sling, and I'm the one who can get it out for you. Instead of irritating the hell out of me, you should be trying to get on my good side."

It was barely past nine in the morning, and Gabrielle had already had enough of Detective Joe Shanahan to last her nine years. She'd had enough of him calling her crazy and having him mock her personal beliefs. She was tired of him pushing her around, forcing her to play informant, and putting a bug in her phone. She stared at him, debating whether to provoke him further. Usually she tried to be a nice person, but she didn't feel very nice this morning. She placed her hands on her hips and decided to risk his anger. "You don't have a good side."

His gaze moved slowly over her face, then slid past her. When he looked back, his dark eyes bored into hers, but his voice was low and sexy when he spoke. "That isn't how you felt last night."

Last night? "What are you talking about?" "Getting naked in my bed, rolling in the sheets, you screaming my name and praising God in the same breath." Gabrielle's hands fell to her sides. "Huh?" Before she could even comprehend what he was doing, he placed his palms on the sides of her face and pulled her to him. "Kiss me, baby," he said, his breath whispering across her cheek. "Give me your tongue. "

Kiss me, baby? Stunned beyond speech, Gabrielle could do no more than stand there like a mannequin. The scent of his sandlewood soap assailed her, as he lowered his mouth and pressed it against hers. He placed soft kisses at the corners of her lips, and held her face in his warm hands as his fingers tangled in the hair above her ears. His brown eyes filled her vision, hard and intense, a direct contradiction to his hot, sensual mouth. The tip of his tongue touched the seam of her lips, and her breath caught in her throat. She felt a jolt clear in the soles of her feet, a warm tingling that curled her toes and settled in the pit of her stomach. The kiss was tender, almost sweet, and she fought to keep her eyes open, fought to remind herself that the lips brushing hers, as if he really were her lover, belonged to a hard-nosed cop with a black aura. But at that moment, his aura didn't feel black. It felt red, the sultry hot red of passion, his passion, surrounding them both and urging her to surrender to his persuasive touch.

She lost the fight. Her eyes slid closed and her lips parted. He coaxed her mouth open, and his tongue touched hers, hot and slick and enticing a response. She pressed her mouth against his, deepening the kiss, and gave herself to the sensations surging through her. He smelled good. He tasted better. She leaned into him, but he dropped his hands from her face and ended the kiss.

"He's gone," he said, barely above a whisper.

"Hmm…" Cool air brushed her moist lips, and she opened her eyes. "What?"

"Kevin."

She blinked several times before her mind began to clear. She glanced behind her, but the room was empty except for the two of them. From the front of the store, she heard the cash drawer slide open.

"He was standing in the doorway."

"Oh." She turned back to him but couldn't look him in the eyes. "Yeah, that's what I figured," she muttered and wondered when lying had become so easy for her. But she knew the answer-the minute Detective Shanahan had tackled her in Julia Davis Park. She walked around him to her desk and sat down before her knees gave way.

She felt dazed and a little disoriented, like after the time she'd tried to meditate hanging upside down and had ended up falling out of her gravity boots. "I'm meeting with the Silver Winds rep today, so I won't be here from noon until probably two. You'll be on your own."

He shrugged. "I can handle it."

"Fantastic!" she said with just a little too much enthusiasm. She reached for the first catalog on top of a stack and opened it to the middle. She had no idea what she was looking at; her mind was too busy replaying the last few humiliating moments. He'd kissed her to shut her up in front of Kevin, and she'd melted like butter beneath his lips. Her hands shook, and she pulled them into her lap.

"Gabrielle."

"Yes?"

"Look at me."

She forced her gaze to his and wasn't surprised to find a scowl on his dark brooding face.

"You're not all bent out of shape over that kiss, are you?" he asked low enough that his voice wouldn't be heard outside the room.

She shook her head and pushed one side of her hair behind her ear. "I knew why you were doing it."

"How? Your back was to him." He bent to pick up the toolbox and drill, then looked at her once again. "Oh, yeah, I forgot. You're psychic."

"No, I'm not."

"Now, there's a relief."

"But my mother is."

His scowl deepened, then he turned toward the door and muttered something under his breath that sounded like "Sweet baby Jesus save me."

As he walked from the room, her gaze traveled from the short comma curls touching the back of his neck, past his wide shoulders, and down the back of the soft gray T-shirt he'd tucked inside the waistband of his Levi's. A wallet bulged the right pocket of his jeans, and the heels of his work boots thudded across the linoleum.

Gabrielle placed her elbows on her desk and rested her face in her hands. She wasn't a huge believer of chakras, but she absolutely believed in a harmonious relationship of body, mind, and spirit. And right now all three were in total chaos. Her mind was appalled at her physical reaction to the detective, and her spirit was just plain confused by the dichotomic division.

"I guess it's safe to come in here now."

Gabrielle dropped her hands and looked at Kevin as he entered the room. "Sorry," she said.

"Why? You didn't know I'd be coming into work early." He set a briefcase on his desk and added unwittingly to her guilt. "Joe's a studly guy, I understand."

Not only had she betrayed her friendship with Kevin but now he had also unwittingly made everything so much worse by excusing her behavior with the man who'd bugged the telephone hoping to discover something incriminating. Kevin, of course, didn't know about the bug, and she couldn't warn him.

"Oh, geez," she sighed and once again rested her cheek in her hand. By the time the police eliminated her and Kevin from their list of suspects, she feared she was going to be as crazy as the detective already accused her of being.

"What's the matter?" Kevin asked as he walked around his desk and reached for the telephone.

"You can't use that right now," she said, stopping him, saving him from the bug.

He pulled his hand back. "Do you need to use it first?"

What was she doing? He wasn't guilty. The police would hear nothing but Kevin's business calls, which were about as exciting as watching paint dry. His calls were so boring that it would serve them right. But… Kevin did have several girlfriends, and sometimes when Gabrielle walked into the office, he'd turn his back and cover the receiver with his hand as if she'd caught him discussing intimate details of his love life. "No, I don't need to use it right now, but just don't…" She paused, wondering how to save him without sounding too vague or getting too specific. How could she save him without telling him that the police were eavesdropping on his calls? "Just don't get too personal," she began again. "If you have something really private to say to a girlfriend, maybe you should wait until you get home."

He looked at her the way Joe looked at her- as if she were demented. "What did you think I was going to do? Make an obscene phone call?"

"No, but I don't think you should talk about private things with your girlfriends. I mean, this is a business."

"Me?" He folded his arms across the front of his suit jacket, and his blue eyes narrowed. "What about you? A few minutes ago, your face was glued to your handyman."

He was angry now, but someday soon he would thank her. "I'm having lunch with the Silver Winds rep this afternoon," she said, purposely changing the subject. "I'll be gone about two hours."

Kevin sat and booted up his computer, but he didn't say anything. He didn't talk to her while she checked shipping receipts, or when- in an effort to appease him-she tidied her side of the room.

The three hours until her lunch appointment seemed to take forever. She filled the porcelain vaporizer with lavender and sage, made some sales, and always kept a covert eye on the detective dismantling the shelves on the wall to her right.

She watched to make sure he didn't plant any more bugs or pull a revolver out of his boot and shoot someone. She watched the strain of his biceps beneath his T-shirt as he removed heavy glass shelving, and she watched his broad, muscular shoulders as he carried it to the back room. He'd slung his tool belt low on his hips like a gunfighter, and his hand slid smoothly into the front pouch, depositing wood screws.

Even when Gabrielle wasn't watching him, she knew when he walked from the room and when he entered it again. She could feel him like the invisible pull of a black hole. When she wasn't helping customers, she busied herself with the never-ending chore of dusting, and she avoided talking to him as much as possible, answering only his direct questions.

By ten o'clock, tension tightened the base of her skull, and at eleven-thirty, she developed a tic in the outside corner of her right eye. Finally, at a quarter to twelve, she grabbed her small leather backpack and walked out of the stress-filled shop into the bright sunshine, feeling like she'd just been granted parole after a ten-year stint.

She met the Silver Winds representative at a restaurant in the heart of downtown, and they sat outside on the balcony and discussed dainty silver necklaces and earrings. A slight breeze fluttered the green umbrellas overhead as traffic passed on the street below. She ordered her favorite chicken stir-fry and a glass of iced tea and waited for the morning's tension to leave her skull.

The tic in her eye went away, but she couldn't seem to completely relax. No matter how she tried, she couldn't find her center or reharmonize her spirit. No matter how she fought it, her mind returned to Joe Shanahan, and the many ways the detective might trick an erroneous confession from Kevin while she was away. She didn't believe there was a subtle bone in Detective Joseph Shanahan's big muscular body, and she half expected to return and find poor Kevin cuffed to a chair.

What greeted her when she reentered her shop two hours later was about the last thing she expected. Laughter. Kevin's laughter mixed with Mara's as they both stood next to a ladder, grinning up at Joe Shanahan as if they were all great buddies.

Her business partner was laughing it up with the cop determined to put him in prison. And Gabrielle knew Kevin would hate prison more than most men. He'd hate the clothes and the haircuts and not having a cellphone.

Her gaze moved from poor Kevin's smiling face to the eight new mounting standards that ran from floor to ceiling on the back wall. Joe stood at the top of the ladder with a drill in one hand, a level in the other, and a tape measure attached to the back of his tool belt.

She hadn't really expected him to know enough about carpentry to do the job right, but the metal shelving system looked straight to her; so he apparently knew more than she'd thought. Mara knelt next to the wall and held the bottom of the last standard. The expression in her big brown eyes was a little too awestruck as she gazed up at the detective. Mara was inexperienced and, Gabrielle supposed, susceptible to the musky pheromones Joe exuded.

The three of them hadn't noticed Gabrielle, or the customer looking at a display of porcelain vases.

"It's not that easy," Kevin said to the detective above him. "You have to have an informed eye and natural instincts to make money dealing in antiques."

Conversation stopped as Joe drilled two screws into the top of the metal standard. "Well, I know next to squat about antiques," he confessed as he climbed down from the ladder. "My mother is a garage sale fanatic, and all that stuff looks the same to me." He knelt beside Mara and drilled two remaining screws. "Thanks for the help," he said before standing once again.

"No problem. What else can I do for you?" Mara asked, looking as if she wanted to take a bite out of crime.

"I'm about finished." He braced his feet and drilled several more screws.

"Some people find antiques at garage sales," Kevin said when it was quiet once more. "But serious dealers usually only go to estate sales and auctions. That's how I met Gabrielle. We were both bidding on the same watercolor. It was a pastoral scene by a local artist."

"I don't know much about art either," Joe confessed and rested his forearm on a ladder rung, the drill still gripped in his hand like a.45 magnum. "If I wanted to buy a painting, I'd have to ask somebody who knows about that sort of thing."

"You'd be real smart to do that, too. Most people don't know what's really valuable and can't tell if their art is legitimate. You'd be surprised at how many fakes hang in prestigious galleries. There was a break-in at…"

"It was mourning art," Gabrielle interrupted before Kevin could incriminate himself further. "We were bidding on mourning pictures."

Kevin shook his head as she walked toward him. "I don't think so. Mourning pictures give me the creeps."

Joe looked at her over his shoulder. His gaze met hers as he said slowly, "Morning as in sunrise?" He wasn't fooled. He knew what she was doing.

"No." She didn't really care what he knew. "Mourning as in pictures made from the hair of the dearly departed. They were popular in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, and there is still a small market for hair art. Not everyone has an aversion to pictures made with great-great-great-grandmother's hair. Some of it is quite beautiful."

"Sounds morbid to me." Joe turned and used the orange cord to lower the drill to the floor.

Mara's nose wrinkled. "I agree with Joe. Morbid and disgusting."

Gabrielle loved hair art. She'd always found it fascinating, and no matter how irrational, Mara's opinion felt like a defection. "You need to help the customer looking at vases," she told her employee, the tone in her voice much harsher than she intended. Confusion furrowed Mara's brow as she walked across the store. The tic in Gabrielle's eye came back, and she pressed her fingers to it. Her life was falling apart, and the reason stood in front of her in tight jeans and a T-shirt, looking like one of those construction workers in a Diet Coke commercial.

"Are you feeling okay?" Kevin asked, his obvious concern making her feel worse.

"No, my head aches a little and my stomach feels queasy."

Joe reached across the short distance that separated them and pushed her hair behind her ear. He touched her as if he had the right, as if he cared about her. But of course he didn't. It was all an act to deceive Kevin.

"What did you eat for lunch?" he asked.

"Lunch didn't make me sick." She stared into his brown eyes and answered truthfully, "It started this morning." The funny little flutter in the pit of her stomach had started with a kiss. A kiss from an emotionally barren cop who disliked her as much as she disliked him. He patted her cheek with his warm palm as if to tell her to toughen up.

"It? Ah, cramps," Kevin deduced as if her behavior suddenly made perfect sense to him. "I thought you concocted an herbal remedy for those mood swings."

The corners of Joe's lips curved into an amused smile, and he lowered his hand and hooked his thumbs in his tool belt.

It was true. She'd created an essential oil that seemed to help her friend Francis with her PMS. But Gabrielle didn't need it. She didn't have PMS and she was always extremely nice to everyone-damnit. "I don't have mood swings." She crossed her arms under her breasts and tried not to glare. "I'm perfectly pleasant all the time. Ask anyone!"

The two men looked at her as if they were afraid to say another word. Kevin had clearly turned traitor on her. He'd defected to the enemy camp-his enemy.

"Maybe you should take the rest of the day off," Kevin suggested, but she couldn't. She had to stay and save him from Joe and from himself. "I used to have a girlfriend who laid around with a heating pad and ate chocolate. She said it was the only thing that seemed to help with those cramps and mood swings."

"I'm not having cramps or mood swings!" Weren't men supposed to hate talking about this sort of thing? Wasn't it supposed to freak them out? But neither man looked embarrassed; in fact, Joe looked as if he was trying not to laugh.

"Maybe you should take some Midol," Joe added through his smile, even though he knew perfectly well that what ailed her couldn't be cured with Midol.

Kevin nodded. Gabrielle's headache moved to her temples, and she no longer cared to save Kevin from Joe Shanahan or from prison. If he ended up as some iron-pumping convict's special buddy, her conscience was clear. Gabrielle raised her hands to the sides of her head as if to keep it from splitting.

"I've never seen her look this mad," Kevin said as if she weren't standing right in front of him.

Joe tilted his head to one side and pretended to study her. "I had a girlfriend who reminded me of a praying mantis once a month. If you said the wrong thing, she'd bite your head off. The rest of the time she was real sweet, though."

Gabrielle curled her nonviolent hands into fists and dropped them to her sides. She wanted to punch someone. Someone solid with dark hair and eyes. He was forcing her to have evil thoughts. Forcing her to create bad karma. "Which girlfriend was that? The one who dumped you after a whole two months?"

"She didn't dump me. I broke up with her." Joe reached for Gabrielle and wrapped his arm around her waist. He hauled her up against his side and caressed her skin through the thin nylon of her shirt. "God, I love it when you're jealous," he whispered in a low, sensual voice just above her ear. "You get all squinty-eyed and sexy."

His breath warmed her scalp, and if she turned her head just a little, his lips would brush her cheek. The wonderful smell of his skin enveloped her head, and she wondered how such an evil man could smell so heavenly. "You look normal," she said, "but you are really a demon from hell." She stuck her elbow in his ribs. Hard. The air whooshed from his lungs and she stepped out of his embrace.

"Guess this means I won't be getting any tonight," Joe groaned as he grabbed his side.

Kevin the defector laughed, as if the detective was a comedian.

"I'm going home," she said and walked from the room without looking back. She'd tried. If Kevin incriminated himself in her absence, her conscience was clear.

Kevin heard the back door slam shut, then he turned his gaze to Gabrielle's boyfriend. "She's really mad at you."

"She'll get over it. She just hates it when I mention old girlfriends." Joe shifted his weight to one foot and crossed his arms over his chest. "She told me that you and she dated once or twice."

Kevin looked for signs of jealousy but didn't see any. He'd seen the possessive way Joe touched Gabrielle, and he'd witnessed them kissing that morning. For as long as he'd known her, she'd gone for tall, skinny men. This guy was different. This guy was all bulky muscles and brute strength. She must be in love. "We went out a few times, but we make better friends," he assured Joe. Actually, he'd been a lot more interested in her than she'd been in him. "You don't have anything to worry about."

"I'm not worried. I just wondered."

Kevin had always admired confidence, and Joe had it in spades. If the man had had a good income besides his good looks, Kevin probably would have hated him on sight. But he was such a loser that Kevin didn't feel at all inadequate. "I think you are probably going to be good for Gabrielle," he said.

"How's that?"

Because he wanted her distracted for the next few days, and Joe seemed to occupy her completely. "Because neither of you expect too much," he answered and turned toward his office. He shook his head as he entered the room and sat at his desk. Gabrielle's boyfriend was a low-expectation loser who was perfectly happy to scrape by.

Not Kevin. He hadn't been born rich like Gabrielle, or good-looking like Joe. Instead, he'd been born number six in a Mormon family of eleven children. With so many kids packed into one small farmhouse, it had been easy to get overooked. Except for slight variation in hair color and obvious differences in gender, the Carter kids all looked alike.

Except for once a year on birthdays, there'd been no special attention given to each individual child. They'd been dealt with as a whole. A clan. Most of his brothers and sisters had loved growing up in such a large family. They'd felt a bond, a special closeness with the other siblings. Not Kevin. He'd just felt invisible. He'd hated that.

All of his life, he'd worked hard. Before school, after school, and all summer long. Nothing had been given to him except hand-me-down clothes and a new pair of shoes every fall. He still worked hard, but now he enjoyed himself a hell of a lot more. And if there were things he wanted but couldn't obtain the money for through legal enterprise, there were other ways. There were always other ways.

Money was power. Absolutely. Without it a man was worse than nothing. He was invisible.