“Who else do you trust enough to investigate what happened? She also said there’d been a couple of crazies.”
“Most recently? A loony named Esmerelda Crocker.”
“Totally harmless.”
“Are you?” He leaned back in his chair and took her in. Her face was so full of life. Those bright eyes had a whole world going on behind them. And that wide mouth . . . So much he wanted to do with that mouth. So much he wanted that mouth to do to him.
She took too long to look away. He smiled to himself. She wasn’t as detached as she liked to pretend.
She reached for that ratty messenger bag she carried around and pulled out a notebook. “You’ve been in the public eye for years. You have to have gotten your fair share of hate mail.”
“The Stars office still screens my mail. If they’d gotten anything they thought was serious, they’d have let me know.”
“Who do I talk to there?”
“You don’t talk to anybody. And put that notebook away. This was a random attack, and you’re trolling for a job.”
“A job that needs doing.”
“Really? Then why haven’t you brought up the most obvious suspect? My pal, the Prince of Darkness.”
She toyed with the edge of her notebook. “I’m getting there.”
“Very slowly. And I know why.”
She nodded. “Because I feel responsible.”
“You aren’t, but I like your guilt.” He appreciated the way she stepped up to the plate with none of the pretend ignorance so many people hid behind. Pipe was a straight shooter. Except when she chose not to be.
She balled up her napkin. “How was I supposed to know you were going to give Prince Aamuzhir a phony Super Bowl ring? And he’s in London now. Yes, I checked. Not that it means anything. And, yes again, I’m worried. It’s one thing dealing with a disgruntled former employee or a Broncos fan who’s still holding a grudge over that Hail Mary you threw against them on fourth-and-ten. It’s another thing entirely to deal with a foreign dignitary—and I use that word loosely. He could easily have hired that thug.”
“Look, Pipe. I know your heart’s in the right place, but the bottom line is that you’re an investigator without a job, and you’re trying to manufacture one.”
As soon as he’d said it, he wanted to take it back. Her eyes darkened, and her wide mouth collapsed at the corners, if only for a moment. She’d always been impervious, even amused, by the insults he’d enjoyed tossing at her—insults about the way she dressed, her ballsy attitude—but he’d insulted her integrity, and her hurt was painful to watch.
She rose from her chair, back straight. “I gotta go.”
He got up and blocked her way. “Hold on. That didn’t come out the way I meant.”
“I think it came out exactly the way you meant,” she said quietly.
“No, it didn’t.” He cupped her shoulders. She didn’t pull away. Instead, she lifted her head and stared him down, daring him to insult her again.
Her shoulders nestled in his palms. Her personality was so big that he sometimes forgot how small she was compared to him. “Pipe, you love what you do, and all I’m saying is—that could be impairing your judgment.”
She actually seemed to think it over. Finally, she shook her head. “No. But apology accepted.”
He hadn’t really apologized.
“And you’re the one with the impaired judgment. You want to believe the attack was random, so you’ve closed your mind to any other possibility.”
Her motives were pure, if wrongheaded. “I wish I’d had you on my offensive line when I was playing. Nobody would have been able to touch me.”
She smiled—open and genuine. Sulking wasn’t in her nature.
He wasn’t exactly sure when their eyes locked, only that he still had his hands on her shoulders and that his aches and pains seemed to have faded. She lifted her arm, and her fingers brushed his bruised jaw in a caress so gentle he could barely feel it. The breeze blew a strand of dark hair across her cheek. He wasn’t used to looking at anyone like this. Gazing so deeply. Seeing nothing but big eyes and a soft, inviting mouth. Kissing her felt like the most natural thing in the world.
She could have stopped him simply by turning her head, but she didn’t. She opened her lips and slipped her hands under his sweatshirt to touch his bare back.
Their kiss gathered heat, and their bodies melded. A hot rush of blood ripped through him. All he wanted was to be inside her. To satisfy her in a way no one ever had. He wanted to hear her moan. Have her beg him. Want him as much as he wanted her.
She had his sweatshirt off. He pulled her top over her head. She wore a black bra beneath. He drew her toward the big chaise.
The purple cushions were soft, but he landed on his bad side and winced.
She jerked back from him as if she’d burned him. “We can’t. You’re—”
He stopped her words with his mouth and rolled to his good side, taking her with him. He cupped her bottom through her jeans. He had to get them off her. Strip everything away. He heard a buzzing in his head as he slipped his finger under her bra strap. His lips went to her shoulder. The buzzing grew louder. Pushing him on. Louder still. More demanding.
She shoved herself away from him so abruptly he nearly fell off the chaise.
She reached for something.
The buzz . . . it wasn’t coming from inside his sex-obsessed brain. It was coming from above them.
A silver X-shaped drone hovered in the air overhead. He let out a blistering curse. The drone made a small circle just above the garden. Circled again.
And then it exploded.
Shards of fiberglass, plastic, and metal flew everywhere.
Piper stood in the middle of his garden, dressed only in her jeans and a black bra, her arm raised. And in her hand, the hand that had, only moments before, been caressing him, she held a semiautomatic pistol.
One shot. That’s all it had taken for her to bring down the drone. One perfect shot.
He sagged against the brick terrace wall. Nothing like a woman with a gun to spoil the mood.
13
The street below the terrace wall was quiet, with only a dog walker and a female jogger in sight. “You stay here,” Piper ordered as she pulled her T-shirt back over her head and bolted toward the French doors.
“Like hell!”
They spent the next hour scouring the neighborhood together. It would have been more efficient to split up, but Piper wanted to keep him in her sight. No one on the street had seen anyone operating a drone, but all of them wanted to talk to Coop about his career.
On the elevator back up to his condo, he finally got around to the question he’d been waiting to ask. “Are you always packing?”
“Not in the club, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
He had been. The image of Piper turning into a one-woman SWAT team to protect him from whatever she defined as a threat wasn’t anything he cared to contemplate. “No more guns,” he said, after she’d gone to the terrace to bag up the pieces of the drone.
“You grew up on a ranch,” she protested.
“And I can shoot. But that doesn’t mean I want ’em around me in the city.”
She looked up at him and grinned. “Admit it. That was one hell of a shot.”
A shot he doubted he could have made. “Respectable.”
She laughed and picked up her jacket from the kitchen barstool. “Good news. I’ve decided to take that bouncer job you offered me.”
He should have anticipated this. “Forget it. The offer’s off the table.”
“And why’s that?”
“You only want the job now because you’ve decided I need a bodyguard. In my own club!”
“Nonsense. You can take care of yourself.”
She said it with an absolute sincerity that didn’t mean a thing. He was caught in a dilemma. He needed her, wanted her, but on his terms, so he poked his finger toward her forehead. “If I hire you, you’re a
bouncer—only there to take care of the women.”
“Of course.”
“No bodyguard needed. None.”
“Understood. Completely understood.”
“Okay. You can have the job.”
“Great.”
As she walked back into the kitchen, all he could think was—shit, now he had a bodyguard.
She grabbed her jacket and turned back into the Woman of Steel. “There won’t be any more physical contact between us. Not while I’m working for you. Agreed?”
She wasn’t the only one who could dish out crap. He rested his shoulder against the refrigerator door and gave her his laziest drawl. “Now, sweetheart . . . Do you really think you can keep your hands off me?”
Then he kicked her out.
***
Piper fingered the broken wing of the drone. She’d pieced together enough to make out the model and manufacturer, but an online check and a couple of phone calls revealed that the company had sold thousands of these. The creepiest part was knowing this particular model offered live-streaming video. Whoever had sent it up had seen her heavy make-out session with Coop.
She gazed morosely out her office window into the parking lot. What had almost happened between them this morning was, in a way, worse than what had happened at the lighthouse, because she should have been prepared. She knew the effect he had on her, yet she’d been stupid all over again. No more. His body was forbidden. She drove the point home by giving herself a sharp slap on the cheek.
Faiza called, interrupting Piper’s self-flagellation. She was giddy with her newfound freedom, and full of stories that made Piper smile. They’d just ended their call when her phone chimed with a text from Eric.
Get my message? Dinner tonight?
Eric was her sexual savior, and she started thinking about where they’d go to do the deed. She didn’t like the idea of the ever-vigilant Jada seeing a man disappear inside her apartment. But Eric also had a roommate, and Piper was past the age of having sex while a bro played Call of Duty on the other side of the bedroom wall.
She went back to work. A routine online check to see if anything new had shown up about Spiral revealed a recent post on a local club life message board left there by somebody who called himself Homeboy7777.
Spiral is the best place in Chicago to score all kinds of good shit without getting stabbed or shot.
She’d stake her reputation on the fact that nobody was scoring much of anything at Spiral, now that Dell was gone. Registering herself as Wastoid69, she posted an appropriately obscene response, denouncing Homeboy7777 as a troll and Spiral as a “fucking drug wasteland only good for picking up the hottest chicks in the city.”
***
At five on Friday evening, Piper met Jen and Amber at Big Shoulders. It was one of their favorite places, with good coffee, friendly baristas, and Carl Sandburg’s poetry painted on the wall.
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat . . .
Piper hadn’t seen her friends for two weeks, and she’d been looking forward to this all day, but Jen was uncharacteristically glum. “Dumb Ass called me into his office and asked me how I felt about getting a face-lift.”
Amber Kwan smacked the flat of her hand on the table hard enough to rattle her cup of house-blended tea. “Your face is perfect,” she exclaimed. “Ask him how he feels about a sexual discrimination lawsuit!”
Hearing the soft-spoken opera singer speak so vehemently made Piper laugh, and even Jen smiled, but only for a moment. “I’m trapped,” she said. “I don’t want to leave the city, and what other local station is going to hire a forty-two-year-old meteorologist?”
The early October days were getting shorter, and a streetlight came on outside the window. “Maybe you need to remind him how many over-forty women are watching the news,” Piper said. “How does he think they’ll react if they hear about the kind of discrimination you’re facing?”
“Yeah, that’d work, all right,” Jen scoffed. “He’d twist the story against me while he replaced me with someone younger, prettier, and cheaper. After that, I’m sure every male-owned station in town would jump at the opportunity to hire a known whistle-blower.”
She had a point.
Amber distracted Jen with the latest gossip from the Lyric. Without Berni shooting her threatening looks, Amber was funny and relaxed. Piper made up her mind to talk to Berni about her attitude, whether Amber wanted her to or not. Then she dropped the bombshell about what she’d seen in Lincoln Square.
Amber and Jen peppered her with questions, none of which she could answer because, two days ago, she’d let an overweight senior wearing a foam cheesehead get away from her.
Buffy interrupted. It was Coop, and she excused herself to take the call. “What’s up, boss?” Boss, not lover.
“Logan Stray.”
“The teen pop star?”
“He’s not a teen any longer. He’s coming to the club tonight to celebrate his twenty-first birthday, and you’re on guard duty.”
“I’m not a bodyguard, remember?”
“Tonight you are. Nothing’s going to happen to that little putz’s ninety-million-dollar body on my turf.”
“Doesn’t he have his own security?”
“Pop star bodyguards aren’t good at saying ‘no’ to the kid who signs their paychecks. I want someone around who reports to me. The club doesn’t need bad publicity.”
“You’re already getting some.” She filled him in on the message board post she’d uncovered that afternoon.
He wasn’t happy. “Stay on top of it. I don’t want to give Deidre any excuse to walk away from this deal.”
“I understand. The post probably came from somebody who got turned away at the door, but I’ll keep a close eye out.”
“Real close.”
A blender whirred on a few feet away. She stuck her finger in her ear so she could hear the rest of what he was saying. “Wear that blue dress tonight, and try to look sexy. As far as Logan and his crew are concerned, you’re a special hostess.”
“That makes me sound like a hooker.”
“As soon as he sees you, he’ll know you aren’t.”
She couldn’t decide if that was a compliment.
***
Logan Stray and his posse showed up just after midnight. The pop star was barely Piper’s height but looked even smaller next to his hulking bodyguards. His black knit cap revealed a fringe of dirty-blond hair complemented by a scraggly soul patch. His dark-framed sunglasses were unnecessary in the dim light of the VIP lounge, and she stifled a grin as he bumped into a table. He might be cool, but he definitely wasn’t smart.
The three women who clung to his entourage wore tatters of spandex that made Piper’s short, cobalt-blue dress seem demure. The group settled in a gargantuan booth overlooking the main club floor. Piper introduced herself to the closest of his bodyguards as the club’s VIP coordinator because it sounded better than “special hostess.” She greeted Logan, who gave her the once-over.
Before long, the group had ordered a couple of magnums of Armand de Brignac, two liters of Grey Goose, some Gran Patrón Platinum, and lots of Red Bull. Coop took his time coming to greet the pop star. Logan hopped up and gave him a couple of manly slaps on the back. Only a few days had passed since Coop had been attacked, and she noticed his nearly imperceptible wince. But as she stepped forward to intervene, he gave her a back-off glare.
She was growing increasingly frustrated by all the inventive ways Coop kept her from sticking close to him. This was her third night as the club’s sole female bouncer, and her attempts to get the other bouncers to step in had only increased their hostility. They’d disliked her before, but even more now that they’d been informed that Coop had originally hired her as a watchdog. She couldn’t shake her uneasiness about his safety. She’d have felt better if she’d been able to track down Keith and his girlfriend’s new address.
Word had gotten out that Logan Stray was in the c
lub, and the crowd had reached capacity. Coop sat with the group for a while, drinking club soda and hating every minute, although he acted as genial as ever, so maybe she was imagining it. But turning himself into a nightclub impresario didn’t seem to be what Coop should be doing with his life.
Piper stopped him as he excused himself. “You’re hurting,” she whispered. “Take that ridiculous body of yours home and bury your head in one of those books you pretend not to read.”
He repaid her with his calculated heart-melter of a drawl. “You seem to be spending a lot of time thinking about my body. Too bad I haven’t made up my mind whether you’ll get to see any more of it.”
She swallowed. “That’s okay. I’m starting a relationship with . . .” For a fraction of a second she forgot his name. “With Eric. Our cop pal. We’re thinking about taking it to the next level.” And maybe they would, if she ever got around to returning his texts.
Coop seemed to tense up, or maybe not, because he sounded as laid-back as ever. “He’s a player.”
“I know, right? We’re a perfect match.”
He scowled at her and walked away.
Not long after, Jonah approached. If he’d had hair, it would have been bristling. “I heard you were on my boys again, telling them how they’re supposed to do their job.”
She did her best imitation of a reasonable professional. “The club’s packed tonight, and you know Coop got hurt a couple of days ago.” Coop had explained his injuries away as a sparring accident. “I’m sure he’d appreciate you keeping the crowd from bear-hugging him.”
He moved so close she could see his nose hairs. “I’m in charge of the bouncers, and that includes you. Now how about you tuck your balls back between your legs and mind your own business.”
“Stop being a jerk.”
That infuriated him. “Ever since you came here, you’ve been trying to take over. It’s no mystery that you’re the one who got Dell fired.”
She reared back on her ridiculous high heels and craned her neck to look up at him. “Dell was a dishonest turd, but then you probably knew that.”