CrossMyHeart Page 2

  “You tell your little bird that I’d be happy to help. Just give Pete the information and we’ll get you some publicity on this, Bea.”

  She transferred Bea back to her producer and eyed the flashing light on number three before she picked it up. “Who gets phone privileges in juvie lock-up at three in the morning, Jubal?”

  “Depends on who you know. What are you wearing?” he asked in a rush, the asthmatic wheeze in his voice making her wince.

  “Gold lamé gown and rhinestone tiara—you know, standard Goddess uniform,” she answered, smoothing her jade-green sweater over her worn jeans.

  “You’re going to hell for being a nonbeliever. You know that don’t you? Women like you need to be dealt with.” She heard a muffled struggle and then Jubal screaming, “Get off me, you son of a bitch!” before the line went dead.

  “Yes, Jubal, but until we go back to the dark ages it looks as if you’re not going to get your wish anytime soon,” she told the little vandal who’d broken in and spray painted a sort of post-modern Madonna on her living room wall three months earlier.

  The evening progressed with Bea calling back with more information about her group, Wylde Women of Kansas City, after Tessa Miles, another regular, called in with a lecture about the dangers of cults who preached fornication for the masses. Since Bea had been a paid fornicator in her day, Tessa felt she was stoning material.

  Afterward, Pete spent the next couple of hours fielding calls from people wanting more information about how they could support Bea’s efforts to fund the safe house for the victims of abuse, whom the courts seemed powerless to help.

  Tessa marshaled her forces and the debate was still raging when Valentine was ready to sign off. Pete held up a hand-lettered sign informing her that a men’s shelter had made room for Corbett and Jubal had called back but he wasn’t putting him through.

  By the time Valentine had signed off with her signature, “It’s not a perfect world but if there’s anything I can do to help, I will. Cross my heart,” and hung up her earphones she was too tired to do anything but negotiate the ice-slicked streets home. She ordinarily used the twenty minutes to listen to something jazzy and upbeat to unwind but it took twice that time tonight and all of her concentration to negotiate the nearly deserted streets. She was half-past bone-tired by the time she attempted the uphill incline of the skating rink that doubled as her street.

  Applying steady pressure to the accelerator she listened and groaned as the wheels of her rusty Ford Escort spun. She tried two more times and each time ended up sliding back down the same few inches she managed to negotiate. Damn.

  The curtains parted at her neighbor’s house across the street. Mrs. Hennessey could apparently sleep through ambulances delivering to K.U. Med a few blocks over but let Val so much as open her own front door at six in the morning and the binoculars came out along with the three cats that lived with her on a permanent basis. They all lined up as mesmerized as if she were the latest television reality show. The rest of “senior citizen’s street” remained blissfully unconcerned.

  She gave up and angled her wheels, tapped the gas and inched into the snowbanked curb at the bottom of the hill before setting the parking brake. Winter in Kansas City was always an adventure but tonight’s storm had added an extra layer of ice to the three feet of snow they’d already gotten.

  She slipped her purse over her shoulder and swept her spiky red hair under a pink stocking cap. Her boots slid when she swung her legs out of the car and tried to stand so she dug the black stiletto heels into the ice and used them as picks to get to the semi-shoveled sidewalk. She was halfway up the hill when she recognized Jack Sutton’s empty brown Ford pickup parked in front of her house.

  Valentine went hot and cold at the same time and could have sworn her heart skipped a beat. What the hell was he doing here?

  Maybe he’d come to return his key. He could have mailed it six months ago.

  Maybe he missed the sludge she called coffee. She was out of milk so he was out of luck because it was the only way he’d drink it.

  Maybe he was through issuing ultimatums about getting married.

  He hadn’t wanted to take no for an answer and had scoffed at her fear that one day he’d resent the fact that he was losing promotions because of something she had done or said or both.

  Then again, maybe she’d missed the memo about hell freezing over because for the past six months she’d figured that’s what would need to happen to get him to walk back through her door again.

  He’d spread ice-melt on the steps and her concrete slab front porch. He had to have brought it with him because he’d instinctively known that she probably didn’t have enough on hand. It wouldn’t start working until it got a little warmer but that was Jack, still looking out for her as if she were helpless. Once upon a time that might have made her angry. Today, it reminded her of how well he knew her and all of the little considerate things he’d done when they’d been together.

  Right before he’d turned into a macho jackass.

  She could hear him stomping to the door before she reached it. She closed her eyes and heard the door swing open.

  “Who have you pissed off this time?” he growled in a voice so deep its rough promise curled inside of her like a dark vine trying to take root. She shivered and opened her eyes.

  Slavic cheekbones a woman would sell her soul to possess were shadowed by dark stubble. He was dressed in his basic uniform of a dark tee shirt and jeans. It was winter so he was wearing boots instead of leather lace-up tennis shoes. Even scowling, he was handsome—if you liked wiry junkyard dogs with a double dose of bad-boy attitude.

  “I piss off a lot of people. It’s hard to say.” She fought to keep her voice even, to keep from reaching for him. “Why are you in my house?”

  Chapter Two

  Because my boss is throwing my ass to the wolves.

  Valentine sounded more tired than angry. That wasn’t going to last long as soon as she found out he wasn’t leaving.

  “My name is still on the lease and the officer who answered the call let me know you’d had a break-in,” he said as he stepped aside so she could wipe her feet on the rug he’d placed at the door. Not that a few more footprints were going to matter.

  The crime-scene boys had already collected their evidence by the time they’d called him. They’d taken pictures of the spray-painted messages—Fucking. Cunt. Bitch. And the rest of the damage.

  She was shaking her head as he followed her into the small living room. Thankfully there wasn’t that much wall space. But there was a new recliner. They’d been looking for one to replace his ratty old thrift-store treasure before he’d left.

  He usually didn’t care what furniture looked like as long as it was comfortable and he could put his feet on it but he had to admit the orange looked stranger against the chair’s dark red leather than it did the small gray couch.

  Her gaze lingered on the recliner for a few moments before she clenched her jaw and walked through the arch and into the dining room where the drapes and small oak table had taken the brunt of the damage. The spiral notebooks, where she insisted on keeping her sensitive information, were scattered over the table and mirrored, on a smaller scale, the same message as the walls.

  “Anything missing?” he asked when she bent to pick up a notebook that had fallen on the floor.

  “These are old files that I was cleaning out. All of these women have moved on. There’s nothing worth a second glance.”

  “You know all you’d have to do is hit the delete key if you kept all this on your laptop.”

  “You process your way, I’ll process mine. Besides, every time I’m updated I feel as if someone’s had their sticky fingers in my underwear drawer.”

  And you don’t want any angry exes hacking into information about where their wives or girlfriends are hiding.

  Valentine shivered when the breeze blew in from the adjoining kitchen and he followed her gaze as she glanced over at his
handiwork and frowned.

  “I couldn’t find any plywood,” he explained, “so duct tape and trash bags are going to have to do until we can get to a Home Depot and buy a new door.”

  “I’ll call the landlord,” she said, raising an eyebrow and stepping away from him.

  He didn’t kid himself. It was his use of we that had gotten him the raised brow. Tough. “Yeah, he’s going to be real thrilled about fixing this door again, which incidentally needs to be replaced. I mentioned that the last time. Hate to break it to you but your safety doesn’t seem to be his first concern.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” she bit off.

  He sighed and silently counted to ten. “Are you going to strap a door to the roof of the Escort? It can’t make it up the hill,” he scoffed. “We’ll take the truck. We can stop and pick up some cat food while we’re out.”

  “I don’t have a cat,” she deadpanned. “Well, not really. The cat was here? Little gray striped thing—no tail to speak of?”

  He nodded at the cat prints tracked through a spritz of orange paint. “How do you not really have a cat?”

  Valentine screwed up her face and he thought, Here it comes. “She started coming around when the weather turned frigid. I’d open a can of tuna or give her some scraps at the back door. The last couple of weeks I think she’s divided her time between me and Mrs. Hennessey. Sometimes she sleeps under the stove when I’m at work but I couldn’t find her last night so I just assumed…”

  He looked under the old-fashioned gas stove that sat at least a foot off the floor and he knew was rarely used and sure enough there was a tattered rag rug. He decided not to mention that it might be a fire hazard—just pulled it out and laid it along the bottom of the door to plug the draft.

  “When did you start adopting animals?” he asked.

  “She just needed me to get through a bad patch,” she said but the catch in her voice told another story and made him want to punch whoever had done this.

  “Now that I know she wasn’t inside I think maybe she took advantage of the open door and was headed for her regular place and he tried to get her,” he said, nodding at the burst of fluorescent orange at the bottom of the stove.

  “Who the hell spray paints a cat?” Val sputtered.

  “My first guess was maybe one of Jubal’s friends. He might not be as antisocial as we once thought, plus I heard he called tonight.”

  “Great, an adolescent feral artist with a posse. Who could ask for more?”

  “Or it’s someone taking advantage of Jubal’s set-up. Think about it. Jubal broke a window to get in and all he did was spray paint a Madonna on your living room wall. This guy busted down a door—we’re talking knocked it off its hinges. I’m betting he’s pissed about something.”

  And that’s what scared him.

  He’d already called Daniels about looking into possible leads. With any luck at all they’d figure out who trashed her house before he had to tell her about the Evie Masterson investigation.

  And she showed him the door. Yeah, he could use some luck.

  * * * * *

  Their first stop had been the Home Depot. She’d charged the new door to her credit card and he’d loaded it in the back of his truck. Afterward she’d managed to fall asleep and he was parking in front of the house before she woke up and zeroed in on the transparent bag of groceries and the box of kitty litter that he’d stopped for while she slept.

  She shrugged, almost to herself. “I’ve been calling her Minnie the Moocher because I imagine she’ll answer to anything if there’s food attached,” she commented wryly. “But she does spend more time at Mrs. Hennessy’s. I don’t know what she calls her.”

  “Maybe she likes cat food instead of canned tuna. Maybe that’s why she keeps visiting Mrs. H.”

  “That’s her choice,” she said, shooting him a tired grimace. “At my place, she gets canned tuna.”

  Because buying cat food would mean you expected her to stay. Then you’d have to pretend that it didn’t bother you if she left.

  He frowned. “We can discuss what that means later. I need to get this door on before your pipes freeze or we croak from carbon monoxide poisoning because the pilot light on the stove blows out.”

  “There you go with that ‘we’ again.”

  “Don’t give me grief over this, Cross. This is the second time that your house has been trashed. Now, can you think of anyone you’ve pissed off lately?”

  “I’m going with the Jubal’s-posse theory.”

  “Yeah, Daniels seems to agree. He’s supposed to call me back,” he said, and slid out of the truck cab before she could protest so he could get down to the business of unloading the door and trying to figure out how he was going to convince her she needed to let him stick around at least until he figured out what was going on. Because there was something about that busted door that made the back of his neck crawl.

  Of course he could always be an underhanded, devious bastard and use sex to convince her. It wasn’t as if it hadn’t worked before. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been trying to think of a way to convince her that whether or not she married him, he didn’t want to be anywhere but with her.

  So why haven’t you made a move before now? Stupid goddamn macho bullshit. He’d wanted her to make the first move.

  He didn’t protest when she came around and lifted one end of the door. Her stubborn gaze dared him but he was smart enough to say “Thank you” and let her.

  “What happened to the job in Tucson?” he asked because not even Pete would tell him why she hadn’t jumped on the cable gig she’d been offered right before they’d broken up.

  “Pete offered me more money to stay,” she said, and her voice was as flat as her expression.

  Sure he did. Pete treated the station’s money as if it were his own and the man would rather part with a limb than an extra dollar. Valentine seemed way too relieved that he didn’t call her on the obvious lie.

  The sun had triggered the ice-melt but they were still careful getting the heavy door up the steps and into the house. He actually had more grief trying to get it to hang right. The damn thing was so solid it nearly ripped the doorjamb away from the wall.

  She was making herself pretty scarce and he figured she’d either fallen asleep on her feet or was quietly planning how she was going to get rid of him. The hair on the back of his neck stood straight up and it wasn’t because of the breeze coming in under the door he hadn’t finished sealing.

  He turned around and nearly dropped his hammer. She’d fluffed out her hair and it flipped around her pale heart-shaped face in little weed-whacked, red-gold wisps. She’d scrubbed her face and he could just make out the freckles across the bridge of her nose but she’d left on her mascara. She’d sworn she hadn’t removed it since she was fourteen and he almost chuckled at the memory. A pair of loose gray sweats, old enough to be comfortable and thin enough to cling to her plump breasts and peaked nipples, made his mouth water. When she crossed her arms over her chest, he knew he’d been caught staring.

  “You think that door will keep him out?” she asked, doing the familiar, skeptical eyebrow thing he’d missed.

  He shrugged. “After I’m finished, the door will keep out the wind. If he’s determined all he has to do is punch a hole in the wall next to it.”

  “Lucky for me I decided to take a self-defense class after Jubal broke in,” she said wryly.

  He dropped the hammer and rushed her, pinning her against the wall and snugging both arms behind her back. He swore he could feel her nipples through his tee shirt but this wasn’t about sex. Except that he’d been hard since she’d walked through the door and now she could feel his erection through his jeans.

  “Do you know what your first mistake was?” he whispered raggedly.

  “That I didn’t knee you in the balls when I had the chance?” she rasped, struggling against him, sliding against his denim-covered cock.

  “You never had that chance,” he said and
shook his head. “You didn’t scream. I’ll never understand why women don’t scream.”

  The corner of her mouth, which had been crooking into a tentative smirk, flattened. “I knew you wouldn’t hurt me.”

  “Do you know how many women are raped or worse by people they think would never hurt them?” He was shaking now and he didn’t care if she knew how scared he was. “You should have screamed, Valentine.” He closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against hers, loosened his grip as he lowered her arms.

  He flinched when she tunneled her cold fingers beneath his tee shirt but grabbed her hands before she could pull them back. Pressed them against the heated flesh of his stomach and opened his eyes.

  She didn’t pull away when he lowered his head and he waited a fraction of an instant for her to rise up on her toes and open her mouth.

  Six months ago they would have had wall-banging make-up sex that bordered on angry because neither would admit to anything except that they couldn’t keep their hands off one another.

  His sigh was harsh, as if he’d been holding his breath, and his hands were shaking. This wasn’t the Jack Sutton that she knew, the macho take-charge cop who always managed to make her feel as if she couldn’t take care of herself.

  “Did you lose your place?” she asked, afraid that he’d start remembering all of the reasons that this was a bad idea.

  “About six months ago but I’m taking it back now,” he whispered right before she wrapped her arms around his neck and drew his head down. His lips were chapped, rough against her own as he slid them across her mouth. His tentative kiss a tender, bittersweet reminder of what had been—of what they’d lost. And for one brief moment she could have sworn she tasted regret.

  This was the part they always got right and she wanted every soul-shaking minute of it back. They could figure out the rest of it later.

  He was here now and that was all that mattered. When he lifted her, she smiled and wrapped her legs around him and was surprised when instead of taking her right there against the wall, he walked them into the bedroom.