hard time actually believing it was the tough-looking butler speaking that way. “Come on, come here.”
The sound of clothes rustling drifted through the door, followed by a shuddering sigh.
Jesus, Cooper thought, this house saw a lot of action.
“I dreamed of you holding me like this,” Shelly whispered. “But in my dream it was because you wanted to, not because you were trying to quiet the wigged-out chef.”
“Maybe I do want to be holding you like this.”
“But you haven’t.”
“You’ve only worked here a few months.”
“Long enough.”
“Shelly.” Dante’s voice was rough, gravelly. “I open the front door for a living.”
“So?”
“So you came from a small town. You grew up with money. Hell, you went to that fancy cooking college—”
“What does that matter?”
“Goddammit, I grew up in Watts.”
“I don’t care.”
“I was in a gang. I’ve done things—You know it.”
“You said you left that behind you years ago, when you were still a teenager.”
“I’m still ghetto.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Shelly.” Dante let out a disparaging sigh. “You have people who care about you deeply. I have no one who gives a shit, no one—”
“You have us here. All of us. We all give a . . . shit.”
“You said shit,” Dante said, sounding both shocked and amused.
“I’ll say it again with a bull in front of it if you tell me that our different social backgrounds is what’s holding you back from being with me.”
Dante stopped laughing. “That’s what I’m telling you.”
“Then you are a very stupid man, Dante. And not because you open doors for a living.”
“Shelly—”
“Maybe I’m not who you think I am,” she whispered. “You ever think of that? Maybe I’m less.”
“Or more.”
“Well you won’t know unless you look deeper.”
“But—”
“No. Dante, listen to me. I like you. I like you a lot, and idealistic as it sounds, that should be all that matters!”
“It is idealistic.”
“And here I thought you were so brave—”
Her words were suddenly cut off, and if Cooper wasn’t mistaken, they were cut off by Dante’s mouth—that is, if the slurping, kissing noises coming through the door meant anything.
Cooper resisted thunking his head against the wall, though he knew exactly how Dante felt, as if he’d just been handed a winning lotto ticket. He knew because he’d felt that way last night when Breanne had flung herself into his bed and his arms, and had stayed there all night. He knew because he’d felt it again this morning, and in the library, so he really hated to interrupt. But there was a dead guy downstairs who hadn’t died of natural causes and couldn’t ask his own questions, and Cooper felt honor bound to get those answers for him.
“Oh, my God,” Shelly gasped, not sounding like she was crying anymore, but breathless for another reason entirely. “Oh, Dante.”
Dante murmured something back to her in his South American native tongue, and Shelly sighed dreamily. “That sounds so sexy,” she whispered. “Say it again.”
Dante obliged her, then let out a rough groan. “No, don’t—” He swore lavishly in Spanish. “Stop.”
“Stop?” Shelly asked incredulously.
“Not in a closet.” Dante sounded tortured. “Not with you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re different.”
“Different good?”
Dante’s laugh was low. Baffled. “Yeah, different good. Jesus, Shelly.”
“So we’re going to be together?” she asked with so much hope in her voice that it almost hurt.
Did hurt. Cooper wondered if he’d ever been so hopeful. If so, his job, his world, had stomped it out of him long ago.
“We’re going to be together,” Dante said, sounding both fierce and shaky.
“Now, then.”
“No.” Dante let out another laughing groan. “Soon as we can get back to my place. In town.”
“That might be days!”
“Shelly—”
“Come to me tonight. Please.”
“Shelly—”
“Please.”
They were never going to come out of there, Cooper thought. He’d lifted his hand to knock again when Dante said, “Where’s the guest?”
“Which one?”
“The cop.”
Again, Cooper lowered his hand.
“I don’t know,” Shelly answered. “But he seemed . . . intense.” Her voice hitched. “Didn’t he?”
“Cops get that way over dead bodies.”
A long silence followed, and Cooper’s unease grew. What did they know that they weren’t saying?
And would they tell him now if they thought he’d been eavesdropping?
Swearing to himself, he left them to their closet and went to find Lariana or Patrick. He just hoped they weren’t in another closet somewhere knocking it out, because all this lusting in the house was getting to him.
As was one tough, soft, sweet-yet-hot Breanne Mooreland. She was really getting to him, but that in itself had just gotten complicated, very complicated.
Fifteen
You can’t date a man and not plan on being disappointed. It comes with the territory.
—Breanne Mooreland’s journal entry
The house was quiet, almost eerily so as Cooper moved through it, looking for Lariana and/or Patrick. In the main hallway, he stopped.
A huge, round saw blade, about three feet in diameter, hung on the wall outside the great room. On it was a beautiful, incredibly pleasing-to-the-eye landscape of the house and the woods around it, so clearly, amazingly painted, right down to the ripples on the lake, that Cooper would have sworn that it was somehow lit from within.
Curious about who would hang something now, today of all days, he headed down the hall toward the sound of running water, and found Lariana scrubbing the already spotless floor of the bathroom off the foyer. She had a brush in one hand, a bottle of cleaner in the other, and was virtually attacking the tile just below the sink with a vengeance that spoke volumes about pent-up emotions.
As Cooper had already noticed about her, Lariana didn’t look much like a maid. Even while scrubbing as if her life depended on it, she maintained some inexplicable sophistication and elegance. Oddly enough, she wore a different outfit than she had earlier, black jeans so tight they looked like barely dried, spray-on paint and a silver, long-sleeved top with slits in the sleeves, revealing her toned arms. Bent over as she was, with her jeans sliding south, he got a good look at a tattoo low on her spine.
TROUBLE, it read in cursive.
Trouble? He could believe it. “Spill something?” he asked.
With a startled scream, the brush went flying. Whirling around, she put a hand to her chest and stared at him, chest rising and falling with hummingbird-rapid breathing.
He nodded to what she’d been doing. “Scrubbing pretty hard there.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Maybe you have nerves of steel, Superman, but the rest of us don’t.”
Leaning back against the doorway, he crossed his arms over his chest. “Meaning?”
“Meaning that after this morning’s little surprise, I needed to keep my hands busy.” Indeed, they shook as she retrieved the brush. “That’s not a crime.”
“Are you frightened, Lariana?”
“Only an idiot wouldn’t be. If someone killed Edward—”
“If.”
She nodded once. “If. Then it’s one of us. Or one of you. Either way, we’re all stuck here together. Not exactly comforting.” She said this while continuing to scrub with a vengeance. “It’s not like we often find dead bodies.”
He noticed the more upset she was, the heavier her a
ccent. “Why are you cleaning this particular bathroom?”
Her eyes narrowed and she sat back on her heels, swiping her arm over her forehead. “Just because you’re a cop somewhere else, in another life, you don’t get to ask questions as if I’m guilty of something.” She went back to her frenetic cleaning, but when he just stood there, she once again sat back and glared at him. “Dios mio. Just do it. Ask. Ask me whatever you want.”
“What do you think I want?”
“To know if I have an alibi.”
“Okay,” he said. “What were you doing between last night and this morning?”
“Sleeping.”
Not exactly the truth, he knew. She hadn’t been sleeping, she’d been doing Patrick. “When was the last time you saw Edward?”
“When he was screaming his lungs out at Shelly yesterday before either you or Breanne arrived.”
“Why was he doing that?”
Lariana already looked as if she was sorry she’d said it. “I do not know.”
“What was Shelly doing?”
She shrugged.
Cooper sighed. “Fine.”
“Really? Because you don’t seem like it’s fine.”
“Lariana, we have a dead man in the cellar. I just want to know everything there is to know.”
“I suppose you cannot help yourself.”
“I suppose not,” he said with a ghost of a smile. It was true, he couldn’t. Questioning, investigating, was just a part of him. Always had been. As a kid he’d sought to find the hidden mysteries in things. As an adult he’d gone into criminal science with a head for ferreting out the scum of the earth. He’d ended up in vice and had stayed there, even as it had slowly sucked the soul right out of him. The last case, a drug traffic ring, had taken him six months to crack, and at the end, in a fateful shootout he’d never forget, he’d had to decide which of two perps to shoot. The one he hadn’t gone for had spun around and killed another cop.
That had been when he’d walked away before going under.
And yet, even now, he had no idea how to stay out of things. “Where’s Patrick?”
Lariana’s expression didn’t noticeably change, though she got up and turned her back to Cooper, rinsing her brush out in the sink. Watching her, he hoped to hell she wasn’t washing away evidence.
“There’s too many people in this house for Patrick,” Lariana said. “He’s off somewhere alone.”
“But it’s only you and the other staff, and two guests.”
“Which for Patrick, the king of the unsociables, is five too many.”
“Six.”
She blinked. “Excuse me?”
“It’s six. You, Dante, Shelly, Breanne, myself. And Edward.”
Lariana said nothing, and he eyed the way her knuckles had gone white on the brush. “You said he yelled at Shelly,” he pressed. “Did he yell at you, too?”
She went back to rinsing.
“I’m trying to help,” he said quietly. “Tell me about him.”
She shrugged. “He hired us. He was the direct contact to the owner.”
“Go on.”
“He dealt with the guests and the Web site, and handled all the public relations and advertising.”
“And?”
She turned off the water and shook her hands dry. “And . . . what?”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
She put her hands on her hips. “That he was a horrible, crotchety old man universally hated by all of us. There. Is that what you wanted to know?”
“No. I want to know who killed him.”
Cooper found Breanne right where he’d left her, in front of the fire. Curled up on the couch, she was entering something into her Palm Pilot while nibbling on her lower lip, a lip he happened to know was most excellent to nibble on.
It was insane how just seeing her made something within him leap. Definitely a physical reaction, but unsettlingly, it was more than that, a phenomenon that hadn’t happened to him in a long time.
His job hadn’t made it easy to meet women, much less keep one. There’d been Annie, and she’d been soft and sweet and giving—and had hated his job with a passion that had made it personal. From her, from countless others before her, he’d learned to hold a big part of himself back. He didn’t want to do that anymore.
But he couldn’t deny that just standing there, looking at Breanne, made him want to try again.
Hearing him enter, she lifted her head, eyes wide until she focused on him, not relaxing but no longer showing fear.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey back.” She hugged her Palm Pilot to her chest. “Did you just hear that? A moment ago?”
“Hear what?”
Her shoulders sagged. “Nothing. I’m hearing things again. I wish I could say I’m also just seeing things, but I’m pretty sure there is really a dead body downstairs.”
“Yeah,” he said regretfully.
Behind him, the fire crackled loudly, and Breanne jumped as if she’d been shot, dropping her digital unit.
Scooping it up for her, he glanced at the screen. Last will and testament.
“You planning on needing a will?” he asked.
Snatching it out of his hand, she shoved it in her bag, her movements jerky.
“You’re not going to die, Breanne.”
“Yeah? Tell that to Edward.”
She was breathing shallowly again, her pupils dilated to large black marbles. He locked his eyes on hers. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”