Veil of Night: A Novel

Chapter Twenty-one

A HARD, WARM ARM SLIPPED AROUND HER, TUGGED HER sideways against a rock-solid shoulder. Half asleep, she sighed and nestled closer, because he was so warm and felt so secure, and she was almost boneless with fatigue. “You’re home,” he murmured, using his other hand to tilt her chin up. He slanted his mouth over hers in a leisurely kiss that slowly deepened until his tongue was in her mouth and sheer heat began to chase away her fatigue.

Yes, she was home, she thought vaguely. Jaclyn sighed again, slipping her hand around his neck and up into his hair. God, he smelled good, man smell mingled with heat and sweat and night air. Skin was skin; why did men smell so different from women? But they did, and his smell made something in her purr like a kitten.

His left hand slid over her breasts, rubbing and finding her nipples through her layers of clothing, catching them between his fingers and lightly pulling so that they tightened and stood out. Pleasure slowly grew, like a tide coming in, washing over her in incrementally higher waves and pushing the fatigue aside but still leaving her boneless. Her body knew his, knew the weight and heat of him, knew how he moved, knew the things that made him groan and the sounds he made when he climaxed. She shouldn’t be kissing him, shouldn’t let him touch her the way he was touching her, but she was tired and she’d almost been killed tonight and she wanted him even more than she had when they’d first met.

But this was exactly what she’d done wrong the first time, leaping before she looked, and that had turned out to be an emotional disaster. Throwing caution to the wind just wasn’t how she operated—at least, how she operated most of the time. Eric jarred her out of her comfort zone, goaded her into saying and doing things that she would normally never say or do. The thing about comfort zones was that they were, well, comfortable, and getting out of them wasn’t.

In the back of her mind, alarm bells began to ring. She had to stop, or the next thing she knew he’d have her skirt up and her underwear off, and there wouldn’t be any stopping. She didn’t want to go there again, didn’t want to set herself up for even more hurt.

Bracing her hand against his shoulder, she tore her mouth free of his and pushed back, turning her face away. “No. I’m sorry. I was half asleep and … no.”

He went very still, then slowly blew out a breath and eased away from her, straightening in the driver’s seat and draping his left arm over the steering wheel. “Okay.” If her refusal angered him, she couldn’t hear it in his voice, but he was good at keeping his emotions hidden.

She should get out of the car and go inside; she was exhausted, and she needed to get some sleep, even if it was just a few hours, before another very busy day began. Sitting here in the dark with him was just asking for trouble, but she’d dozed off on the drive home and he hadn’t asked those questions he’d been so determined to ask and she certainly didn’t want to go inside with him. The car was the best of two bad choices.

“I’m sorry I fell asleep,” she said, making her voice as brisk as she could, given that she felt like a limp rag. “What was it you were so determined to ask? I’ve told you everything I remember, so my answers aren’t going to change unless you want me to make up stuff.”

He was silent a moment, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. She waited, wondering what was so complicated that he couldn’t just spit it out so she could tell him she didn’t know, then go inside and get some sleep. “We got the test results back on your clothes,” he finally said. “No blood residue.”

“Of course there wasn’t,” she replied irritably. “I knew there wouldn’t be.” Maybe it was because she was so tired, but it took a moment for the dime to drop; when it did, anger flared so hotly it blew away the fatigue, made her muscles shake with the effort it took to control herself. She refused to let herself lose it the way she had the night before, which had accomplished nothing except self-humiliation, so she hung on.

“Oh, I get it,” she said, her voice tense. “You get the test results back, proving I didn’t kill Carrie—at least not while wearing those clothes—so now I’m good enough again for you to kiss? You believe me now? No, that’s right: you don’t believe me; you believe your test results. You jerk.” Her hand itched with the impulse to slap him as hard as she could; she curled her fingers tight to resist the impulse, locked her arms by her side. “You know what? You can kiss something, all right. You can kiss my ass.”

“Any time,” he said, his own voice low and angry. “I like your ass. And for the record, I believed you from the beginning. So did Sergeant Garvey.”

“You had a funny way of showing it,” she snapped back. “All you had to do was make one phone call, just tell me that you—Never mind. You didn’t, which speaks for itself.”

“No, what it speaks for is that, until you were cleared, which means cleared by evidential means, not cleared by anything I thought, I had to follow the book. I had to treat you as I would any other suspect. No, I had to be even more objective with you, or I’d have been jerked off the case. We’re shorthanded right now, which is the only reason I was allowed to work this case in the first place, but I wanted it because I was more motivated to dig deeper than maybe one of the other detectives would have been. I didn’t know what we’d find, didn’t know how strong any circumstantial evidence against you would be, but I knew I wanted to be in a position to look harder. I figured I was your best chance at getting cleared.”

“Thank you so much,” she said sarcastically.

“Get over your hurt feelings and listen to me.” His tone was as hard as flint, and so was his expression. His mouth was set in a flat, grim line, the lights from the dash throwing harsh shadows on the rugged lines of his face. “I couldn’t do anything to give the lieutenant or the captain—or the district attorney, come to that—any reason to think I might have compromised the case for you. I couldn’t make any comforting phone calls on the side because that might have come out. For your sake, I had to be completely impartial, and I’ll be damned if I’ll apologize for doing my job.”

“I might have to listen to you, because you’re a cop and I have to cooperate or I could land in trouble, but I’ll be damned if I have to get over anything. You know why? Because if you’d been deep down certain that I hadn’t killed Carrie, you’d have known those test results would come back negative for blood. I understand about following the rules. I’m big on rules myself. But you know what? A single damn phone call wouldn’t have changed the evidence any, and would have made a huge difference to me. You didn’t make the call.”

“So you’re going to be pissy-minded and throw away what could be something good because I did what my job requires me to do?”

“You did,” she pointed out, incensed that he was putting it all back on her. “If that makes me pissy-minded, then I guess you are, too. What it comes down to is you didn’t trust me, and now I don’t trust you. We’re way past picking up where we left off, so keep your hands and your mouth to yourself. As far as I’m concerned, we needn’t see each other ever again.”

“Well now, that’s where you’re wrong,” he said grimly. “In case you’ve forgotten, someone tried to kill you tonight. Peach was right in that it’s too much of a coincidence not to be tied to the Edwards case. The man you saw likely killed Ms. Edwards, and he knows you saw him. But he’s got a solid alibi, so as it stands now I don’t have probable cause to get a search warrant, unless you could identify him, which changes everything.”

“But I can’t identify him,” she said in despair. “I wasn’t paying attention; I couldn’t pick him out of a group of one. He doesn’t know that, though.”

“No. Obviously, he assumes that you can identify him. Probably it took him a while to find out who you are, but the information is a matter of public record. Now we need to figure out how he knew where you’d be tonight.”

Then what he’d said clicked, and Jaclyn stared at him. “You said he has an alibi. You know who it is.”

“I have a good idea. What I don’t have is evidence.”

“Who?”

“I can’t divulge information,” he said with eroding patience. “The case is still being developed.”

“Someone who thinks I can identify him just tried to kill me. Don’t you think I’d be safer if I know who it is? You know … just in case I see him again? Then I could even give you a call, and say, hey, here he is, come pick him up!”

He shook his head. “I can’t tell you who I think it is because I can’t prejudice you in any way. When I show you some photographs, if you can put your finger on him it’ll be because you know you saw him at the reception hall, not because of anything I said.”

Legally, that made sense. On a practical basis, though, it was enraging. “So you’ll risk my life to keep your case pristine.”

“No. I know who he is, which is why I’ll be sticking to you like glue, to keep him from getting to you.” He gave her a grim smile. “And because he knows who you are, he’ll be able to find out where you live, if he hasn’t already. Like it or not, sweetheart, you can’t get rid of me just yet.”

On a practical basis, that meant she couldn’t sleep in her own home, that this hellish night wasn’t over with yet. Eric went inside, thoroughly searched the house before he let her come in, and even then it was just to hastily pack a suitcase. She didn’t argue, because she wasn’t stupid enough to risk her life over where she slept. At the same time, she was completely prepared to put up a kicking and screaming fight if he tried to take her to his home, because no way was she doing that.

He must have known that, because he didn’t even make the suggestion. Instead he drove her to an extended-stay hotel, where she got a two-room suite, a living room/kitchen combo with a separate bedroom. It wasn’t home, but it wasn’t bad. He even took the precaution of checking her in with his credit card, under his name.

“But what about work?” she asked, standing in the middle of the generic living room with anxiety eating at her. “He’ll know where I work, too. Mom and Peach and Diedra are all in danger.”

“This is Saturday,” he said. “You told your mother you’d be better off at work, but did you mean you’d actually be in the office today?”

She was so tired she could barely think, but she focused on the question. “Maybe in and out. We don’t have any appointments with potential clients, because our schedule this week has been so hectic. We do have two weddings today, and a rehearsal, so what I actually meant was that I’d be better off working.”

“Then everyone should be safe enough this weekend. If the case hasn’t broken by Monday, then yeah, maybe you should take some time off.”

Wasn’t it an ironic coincidence that she’d been thinking the same thing, though for a completely different reason? Somehow the idea of taking a vacation wasn’t nearly as attractive when she was doing it to evade a killer. That took some of the shine off the idea of rest and relaxation, made it seem more like going into hiding, which of course it was.

“Is it on your website, which events you personally will be working?” His mind was still working, worrying at the details like a pit bull. He had to be stretched as thin as she was; his eyes were shadowed, his hair was rumpled, and he needed to shave. Nevertheless, even with his sock-less feet shoved into running shoes, wearing wrinkled pants and a snug T-shirt that showed every line of his muscled torso, he was so masculine and sexy he made her toes curl. With a sense of sorrow, she realized she might never meet anyone else who made her react physically the way Eric did, and that hurt so much she had to force herself to concentrate on what he was saying.

“No, we don’t post that information at all. Some—a lot, actually—of our clients put the information on their Facebook pages, but you’d have to know who they are to begin with, and then get on their friend list, so that doesn’t seem feasible.”

“No,” he agreed. “But somehow he found you tonight, and when we can nail down how he did it, that’s the link that’ll connect him.”

Dawn was approaching so fast that neither of them would be able to snatch more than a couple of hours of sleep, Eric even fewer, because he still had to drive home. As soon as he left, Jaclyn locked and chained the door, then stripped off her clothes and tumbled into bed after barely taking the time to hang up her suit. She did remember to set the alarm on her cell phone—and then she curled up between the cool sheets and cried, because when she’d thought she was going to die her last thought had been of Eric, that she wouldn’t get a chance to tell him she loved him.

She didn’t know where that thought had come from; she couldn’t possibly love him. She didn’t know him well enough to love him. The potential had been there, though, and she grieved its loss, with a sharpness that left her hollow and aching.