licked her suddenly dry lips, a gesture that had his eyes darkening and a very rough, very male sound coming from deep in his throat. He leaned in even closer, but just before their mouths touched, the elevator jerked and began its upward motion again.
Kylie let out a shaky breath and stepped back from Joe. “I told you this was a bad idea!”
“Yeah, that was close,” he said. “You almost kissed me again.”
“I meant getting on the elevator!” She glared at him. “And you kissed me that last time!”
“You were going on about a kiss being nice. But there was nothing nice about that kiss you planted on me in the alley. It was raw and sexy and dirty in the best possible way. You needed to be reminded of that.”
She covered her face. “Oh my God.”
“God had nothing to do with it,” he said smugly. “Kylie, you kissing me like that was hot as hell and . . .”
She dropped her hands and stared at him. “And . . . ?”
He held her gaze prisoner. “The thought of you not remembering it the same way made me crazy.”
Oh, she remembered it the exact same way. The memories of it were imprinted on her brain much as the Polaroids she’d been receiving. First having drinks with her friends, and then at some point realizing that most of them were paired up and in love, and she’d felt . . . alone. Needing air, she’d stepped outside into the courtyard.
Joe had been there looking dark and dangerously alluring. She’d tossed some change into the fountain like a tourist and he’d laughed with her, making her feel . . . well, less alone.
Then she’d done something wild, at least for her. She’d taken him by the hand and pulled him into the alley. And the rest was history. “I’m not going to do that again,” she said. “Kiss you.”
“Okay, how about I kiss you again then?”
He was infuriating. And way too sexy. She stormed off the elevator. Joe followed, still smiling, the ass. He knocked on an apartment door.
“I forgot to ask,” she whispered. “Which one of the apprentices is this?”
Joe didn’t have time to answer before the apartment door opened, revealing a man who looked older than time itself. He was ninety if he was a day, hunched over a cane.
“Mr. Gonzales,” Joe said respectfully.
“Eh?” Mr. Gonzales asked. “Speak up, boy!”
Kylie recognized him from years ago when he’d worked at her grandpa’s shop after a late-in-life career change from carpenter to furniture maker. She waved at him. “Hi, Mr. Gonzales. Remember me? You were my dad’s first apprentice. I was just a kid, maybe five years old?”
“I remember you.” He blinked at her through his spectacles. “You were a runny-nosed, whiny little thing who rode her bike through the shop and knocked my work over.”
And he’d been a grumpy, curmudgeonly old man even back then, but she kept that to herself.
“Never saw you after your grandfather died.” His voice softened. “It was awful what happened, to the both of you.”
She felt Joe look at her, but she kept her face averted from his, heart feeling tight.
“We’re wondering if you’re still doing any woodworking,” Joe said.
Mr. Gonzales laughed so hard he would’ve toppled over if Joe hadn’t steadied him. “Haven’t left this apartment in several years. The only woodworking I do is picking my teeth with a toothpick. Can’t even take a shit in peace anymore.” He gestured to a bag attached to him at the hip.
Joe winced and nodded. “Thank you for your time, sir.”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever. If you show up again, bring me some of that greasy fried food from the deli on the corner.”
“Done,” Joe said.
Mr. Gonzales slammed the door on their noses.
Joe looked at her. “What did he mean, sorry for what happened to the both of you? You said you weren’t hurt in the fire.”
Kylie didn’t want to go there with him. Not now, not ever. Just thinking about the horrific warehouse fire gave her nightmares, even all these years later. “I wasn’t.” She started walking. “I’m sure he just meant he was sorry for my loss. I told you that there was an elderly apprentice and he didn’t need to be investigated.”
Joe was unapologetic. “I like to cover all the bases myself.”
She shook her head. “And clearly, you’d already looked into him. “You knew he was two hundred million years old when you said I could come up with you.”
“To be fair, I never said you could come up,” he reminded her. “I said I wouldn’t stop you.”
“Whatever!” she exclaimed, tossing up her hands. So he’d only pretended to trust that she could take care of herself. She should have known. Shaking her head at the both of them, she headed straight to the stairwell. No way in hell was she taking the elevator back down.
“You afraid of getting stuck or afraid you’re going to jump me again?” Joe asked.
She ignored him. Which was, admittedly, getting harder and harder to do.
Chapter 8
#WhereWereGoingWeDontNeedRoads
By six o’clock the next day, Joe was exhausted after fourteen hours on the job. Still, and against his better judgment, he met Kylie at the courtyard as she’d insisted by text.
She had her huge bag over her shoulder and Vinnie in her arms, who snorted in excitement at the sight of him. Kind of how Joe felt like doing at the sight of Kylie. Instead, he ruffled the top of Vinn’s head. “Hey, little man. Whatcha up to?”
“He’s been very busy,” Kylie said. “He ate one of my socks. And in other not so surprising news, he’s constipated.”
As if on cue, Vinnie farted audibly.
“Nice one,” Joe told him on a laugh. “Bet you feel better now.”
“Sorry.” Kylie grimaced and fanned the air with her hand. “I don’t dare leave him at home alone. What’s our plan?”
Joe ignored the “our.” “I’ve a lead on two more of the apprentices. Jayden and Jamal Williams.”
“Yes, they’re brothers,” she said. “They’re the ones I told you left the country. They went to England a few years ago.”
“They’re back and in business together, right here in San Francisco. I’m going to go check out their warehouse.”
She looked surprised, but nodded. “Then let’s go.”
He put a hand on her arm to stop her. “There’s no ‘let’s,’” he said. “I’ll go. You and Vinnie can wait in the comfort of your place and—”
“I’m not good at waiting, Joe. I probably should’ve warned you about that.”
He didn’t bother sighing. Or trying to stop her as she turned to walk through the alleyway, stopping to talk to Old Man Eddie, the homeless man sitting on an upside crate near the Dumpster.
An original hippie, Eddie looked like Doc from Back to the Future. He wore a tie-dyed shirt and board shorts that he’d probably had since the sixties. He’d lived in the alley forever, and in spite of many people’s loving efforts to get him into a place of his own, he’d held firm.
He said he was meant for the great outdoors.
Playing a game on the phone that Spence, his grandson, had forced on him last year, Eddie looked up and winked at Kylie. “Hey, darlin’.”
“How are you? You warm enough out here? The nights have been pretty cool.”
“Well, I sure wouldn’t complain about having the dough to buy a new sweatshirt,” he said wistfully.
Kylie patted Old Man Eddie on the hand, a sweet smile on her face as she reached into her bag. Joe started to open his mouth to stop the cutest pushover he’d ever seen from giving away her own hard-earned cash because one, he knew Spence made sure Eddie had everything he could ever need, and two, Eddie’s usual MO was to con money out of the cute ladies he charmed—and he could charm a snake—and then use the money for the weed he liked to bake into his homemade brownies.
But Kylie surprised both men by saying, “I gave you a twenty last week, which we both know you used to buy pot, so this time
I have something better than cash . . .” She pulled a black hoodie from her backpack. It had a peace sign in the colors of the rainbow on the front. “Got it in your size too.”
Sweet, but not a pushover, Joe revised with a shake of his head, impressed in spite of himself.
Eddie put on the sweatshirt and stood to give Kylie a kiss on the cheek. “Thanks, dudette. Come by later in the week. I’ll have my mistletoe packs on deep discount since the season is over.”
Mistletoe, Joe’s ass. Undoubtedly, it’d be weed.
Kylie started walking before turning back to Joe to give him a what’s keeping you? look.
Yep. Sweet, not a pushover, and . . . also a tyrant.
Once in his truck, she pulled a wig from her apparently bottomless bag and set it on her head so that suddenly she had long, dark brunette waves. “Okay,” she said, tucking in some stragglers. “Ready to do this.”
Joe stared at her as she applied a dark gloss to her lips, which, combined with the wig, had him spinning. “Kylie—”
“Ready,” she said.
Yes, but the question was, ready for what? Shaking his head to clear it, he navigated the roads without speaking again, which he knew drove her nuts. Good. She could join his club because she drove him nuts too. Especially as she used the ride to add horn-rimmed glasses to her ensemble so that now from the neck up she looked like a naughty librarian while from the neck down she was the girl next door. It was like Christmas for his eyes so he forced himself to stop looking at her as he drove into Hunter’s Point, a district by the water and the ballpark in the southeast corner of San Francisco.
“Interesting neighborhood,” she murmured.
He parked, going still when she leaned in to him to look up and down the street. He nodded, speechless, because her breast was pressing into his bicep and killing his concentration as he attempted to keep an eye on their surroundings at the same time.
Usually he multitasked with no problem in his work zone. But Kylie had shot his zone straight to hell. She looked so different in that wig it was startling. Different and damn sexy. Not that she wasn’t always sexy. She was, incredibly so. But it was messing with his head a little—or a lot—to see her looking like herself and yet not.
“So?” she asked. “What’s next?”
Right. What was next—beyond wanting to haul her into his lap so that she could straddle him and grind them both to an earth-shattering finish? He cleared his throat. “Jayden and Jamal work here in Hunter’s Point. I want to get a look at their inventory and see if we find anything resembling the workmanship of that table or bench you’re supposed to authenticate.”
She pushed some of the brunette strands off her face and he told himself to be careful. If the woman had enough skills to hide her identity, she could just as easily hide other things—like his dead body.
Although the truth was that though he did have to be careful around Kylie, it wasn’t his life he was worried about but his damn heart, an organ he’d thought long dead. She was an irresistible dichotomy of sweet charm and heart-stopping sexy, and she threw him off guard with every look, be it a smile or a glare. In fact, he kinda liked when she gave him dirty looks, which meant he was seriously losing his shit. And he never lost his shit.
Never.
Yeah. He was royally screwed and the thing was, even knowing that, he didn’t want to walk away because he enjoyed her so much. How crazy was that?
“I’m going to go try to get a look inside,” he said. “Trust me, I know this area. It’s not good, so you should—”
She held up a finger. “Let me stop you right there. If you’re about to let out your inner caveman and say ‘stay in the truck,’ I’m going to sic Vinnie on you.”
Joe took in the sight of Vinnie snoring and snorting in his sleep from his perch in her lap. “Yeah, you’re right. That five-pound rat is terrifying.”
“I’ll have you know that he’s seven pounds. And fine, I’ll find some other form of payback.”
“Payback away,” he murmured, enjoying the blush that lit up her cheeks. It suitably distracted him from the reason he had a ball of dread low in his gut—that they were, literally, parked in his past, in his old neighborhood, and it was every bit as rough and ugly as he remembered.
Although undoubtedly it was mostly his own memories making it so. Still, Hunter’s Point had always been San Francisco’s radioactive basement. It was dirty and dangerous, and he’d have really liked for Kylie to have stayed as far away as possible.
“I’ve never been here,” she said quietly, as if sensing his mood change. “Have you?”
“Yeah.”
He felt her turn to face him and he met her gaze. “Grew up here,” he said.
He could feel the weight of her concern. But he didn’t want or need it. Instead he concentrated on the night and any trouble that was most certainly lurking in it. The decommissioned naval shipyard up the street was quiet. Still. Too still.
There’d been efforts to clean up the area, including redevelopment projects two decades back. In some areas, such as the former navy shipyard waterfront property, they’d been fairly successful. In others areas, not so much. Drug and gang activity was high, as was the murder rate.
“Not exactly warm and cozy,” Kylie said.
She had no idea. They were parked across and down the street from the warehouse. On the northeast corner in front of them, he’d once been confronted by a few of his friends who’d turned into gangbanger wannabes. In order for them to get into the gang they wanted, they’d been challenged to steal a car—except none of them had known how to hot-wire a car, so they’d tried to get Joe to do it.
When he’d refused, they’d stolen something of his to hold over him and force his hand.
Molly.
They’d held his sister for nearly three full days before he was able to get to her. He’d retaliated by nearly killing the guys who’d kidnapped her. A judge had then forced Joe to decide between jail and the military for his restitution.
He’d chosen the military, and though he’d hated it at the time, with dubious maturity he’d come to see it as the best thing that could’ve happened to him. It’d been a way out of here, a lifeline he hadn’t realized he’d needed. Granted, the army hadn’t been easy. In fact, they’d practically beaten discipline and temper management into him.
But there was no doubt he’d grown up. He was different now, slower to rile for one thing, and yet not so different that he couldn’t remember what it’d felt like to be trapped here in Hunter’s Point, thinking there was no way out.
Kylie slipped her hand in his, bringing him back to the present. Which thankfully was very different than his past. Although he was still armed and dangerous, so maybe not all that different after all.
“Do you have a specific plan of action here?” she asked quietly. “For getting a look inside the warehouse?”
He did. He always did, and had ever since that long-ago day when he’d pulled Molly out of the rat hole they’d held her in. There was a plan A, and a plan B, C, and Z too.
First, he wanted to stake the place out from right here for a little bit, get a feel for the layout and make sure they were really alone. No way was he getting Kylie into something that he wasn’t prepared for. He knew she’d think he was being overprotective, and hell, given the fact that they were seeking a three-inch piece of carved wood—excuse him, a penguin—maybe he was.
But his instincts had saved his life more than a few times and they were screaming now. It felt like the threat to Kylie was escalating and he wasn’t going to ignore that no matter what she thought. This whole thing had gone from a way to amuse himself to something far more serious.
And yeah, maybe his life experiences had jaded him, made him cynical. After all, he spent a lot of time knee-deep in the scum of the earth, seeing the worst humanity had to offer—everything from abusive and cheating spouses, to criminal and civil crimes, to far worse. But he could live with being cynical and jaded. He couldn’t live
with something happening to Kylie because he didn’t take this seriously enough.
“The brothers close up their shop by five or six every night,” he said. “There’re windows in their warehouse. I should be able to keep to the shadows and get a good look inside without any trouble.”
“How?” she asked.
“I grew up here. I know every nook and cranny like the back of