His Wicked Ways (11 page)

“Sorry. I need answers and I’m not of a mind to move until I get them.”

Her silence was deliberate, pointed, but blessedly brief. After her moments of utter quiet, she started tugging off her bug-blaster outfit, too.

“Look, I’ve never shared jack about my past with anyone because I don’t think it’s anybody’s business, but in the interest of a smooth partnership today, I’m going to make an exception for you.” She threw the protective gear in her back seat on top of his and shifted in her seat to face him.

He waited. Hoped he hadn’t made a mistake in pushing her.

“I grew up in the South Bronx. It’s a little piece of me I’ll never fully escape.” She dragged in a long breath. “But my sister was shot in a drive-by on 172nd Street just before I graduated college and I’ve never forgiven the local police, or my long-ago neighbors, for basically doing nothing about it.”

She held her head high, her gaze clear and focused, but Alec couldn’t mistake the pain in her voice. The regret. Anger.

He curled his fingers around hers, at a loss how to comfort a woman who seemed utterly self-sufficient. Defensive.

“I’m so damn sorry, Vanessa.” The words seemed like precious little to offer a woman who’d obviously confronted her share of hardship. They were all he had at the moment, however.

“She’s okay.” Vanessa turned her gaze out the wind-shield, staring out over the waterfront now that one of the delivery trucks pulled out of view in a wake of diesel smoke. “It took a long time to recover the use of her leg, but she fought her way through therapy and she managed pretty well with a cane. She’s so strong—so stubborn—she wouldn’t let anyone help her through the rough times.”

“Did they ever catch who did it?” He asked even though he suspected the answer. Instinct told him Vanessa harbored plenty of anger about the incident.

“No.” Her brows slashed downward in a forbidding frown as she stared out the window. “The only person who came forward with evidence changed his testimony after a local gang got ahold of him. And apparently anybody else who might have seen anything that day knew better than to speak up. Drive-bys used to be a way of life back then, but if I hadn’t been preoccupied…”

“Don’t tell me you blame yourself.” As a cop, she should know better than most people how random that kind of violence could be. “Nobody can be prepared for something like that.”

“You don’t understand. I wasn’t just unprepared. I was
oblivious.
It was the end of the school year and I was caught up in some new guy I was dating and excited to tell my sister about a new internship available with a high-profile financial adviser…” She trailed off, her voice as far away as her eyes. “Having grown up in that kind of neighborhood, I knew better than to let my guard slip. And I sure as hell know better than to toss my guard to the four winds to indulge my own wants.”

“But she’s okay now.” He needed to repeat it to remind himself of the fact. To remind Vanessa. “Does she still hold it against you?”

“Gena has never blamed me for a second.”

A good thing. Alec would have had to pay her a visit if she did. Vanessa obviously carried around enough guilt for both of them.

“You said your sister is an attorney now. Is she a fearless crime fighter, too?” He wondered if this sibling was as kick-butt cool as Vanessa. Still, he hated to think Vanessa had honed all that strength of hers because she’d watched her sister fall from a gangster’s bullet.

No wonder the carjacking had thrown her for such a loop. It must have been like reliving a nightmare for her.

“She’s actually a public defender.” A wry smile spread over her lips, reminding him how long it had been since he’d tasted her. Touched her.

“Can you imagine? I changed my whole focus in life so I could go after the creeps who shot her down and she takes a position protecting the rights of the city’s worst offenders. Go figure.”

Alec let the words sink in, needing an extra minute to process what he thought he heard as late-afternoon gridlock a few streets over erupted into a steady blast of blowing horns. “You mean you didn’t always want to be a cop?”

“I was almost done with my MBA when Gena…I got the degree even though I didn’t attend the last couple weeks of classes, but my whole life view changed once I started spending every day holding her hand in the intensive care unit.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s hard to give a rip about some fat corporate bottom line when your sister’s struggling for her life.”

“You wanted to go into high finance? Consulting?” He got a quick mental image of Vanessa in a power suit with a short skirt. Very un-PC but still sexy as hell.

“Does it matter?” Shaking her head, she traced the H-shaped pattern on the stick shift. “I was young and naive and I wanted to take on the world with a few good grades and a lot of ambition, but you don’t see me tooling around the world in a private jet while I conduct business with the Japanese markets, do you?”

“I see you succeeding.” Hell, didn’t she get that same visual in her head? She could knock him on his ass with a sweep of her strong legs or even a breathy sigh, and he didn’t fall for many women. For that matter, he didn’t hit the mat in his self-defense class for anyone, yet she’d taken him down by surprising him. “Do you ever wish you were on the corporate jet?”

If his life were different now, if he hadn’t spent the past six months in hiding, he’d whisk her away fast enough to have her sipping champagne before supper. The thought made him more determined than ever to pull the carpet out from under the greedy bastards he called partners.

“No,” she answered a little too quickly as she straightened in her seat. “I’ve found my purpose.”

“It’s more than a lot of people have.” His uncle came to mind. What was Sergio’s purpose? To break kneecaps so he could drive a Cadillac? “What you do is noble. Important.”

“Thank you.” She tightened the band around her braid, her gaze skittering back to the view outside the car where seagulls fought over the heaping refuse in a trash can outside a nearby fish market.

“But that doesn’t count for a whole hell of a lot if you’re not happy.”

“Who says I’m not happy?”

“You don’t have to be a detective to figure that one out.” What did she take him for? He had eyes. He could see she wasn’t exactly falling all over herself with spontaneous joy.

“Look. You wanted to know what the deal was with me and my reticence to cavort around the Bronx. Now you know.”

“And you think I’m satisfied? Hell, Vanessa, I wanted to know so I could help you, not because of some stupid intellectual curiosity.” He reached for her, skimmed a hand down her cheek since his every other attempt to connect with her seemed to have failed. But this—the physical thing between them—it kicked in right on cue, igniting a flame that neither of them could ignore. He could see her response in her eyes, feel the subtle change in the rhythm of her breath.

“You can’t help me.”

“Only if you don’t let me.” His fingers slid down the length of her neck, dipping into the collar of her shirt to touch the smooth skin of her shoulder. The satin of one slender bra strap.

“The shooting happened a long time ago. My sister is over it. I don’t know why I can’t seem to lay the whole thing to rest.” She wrapped her fingers around his wrist.

To hold him there? Or to make sure his touch didn’t stray any lower?

Not that he had any intention of undressing her here, on the outskirts of East Harlem in her car, for crying out loud.

“I’m don’t mean to minimize what your sister went through, but she had the grueling demands of physical therapy to work through. A tangible way to sweat out her anger and pain. And on the other side of her effort was healing. Recovery.” He saw her shaking her head, already rejecting his words. He plowed on anyway, determined to give her something. At least prove he was listening and not looking for ways to peel off her clothes. “You didn’t have that. You got to see her whole ordeal up close and personal, with no outlet for the pain, no healing for the guilt.”

She didn’t say anything for a long moment, her expression frozen somehow until she blinked fast. Made a little yelping noise deep with her throat.

Ah, damn.

He’d wanted to help her. Connect with her. But he didn’t think he could forgive himself if he’d made this strong, independent woman cry.

Reaching across the console, he opened his arms to her, knowing their trip to the Raven Club would have to wait. Vanessa had become more important to him than any half-baked vengeance plot he might have in mind for whoever was trying to frame him. Right now, nothing seemed more important to him than holding her.

She settled for leaning halfway into his embrace, resting her head on the comforting strength of his bicep, instead of hurling herself into his arms. If Alec thought her hesitance was odd, he didn’t say anything about it. He kissed the top of her head and curled his arm around her shoulders to stray down her arm and rub her back.

He held her that way until she found her voice. Swallowed back tears she resented. Damn it, but she needed to pull herself together. She’d give herself another minute here, a few more moments to accept his comfort and then she’d find the strength to put this behind her again.

“Gena told me once she doesn’t even remember what happened that day. The shots. The tire squeals. The shouting. None of it.” She’d envied her sister the forgetting, and then felt guilty for envying a woman who’d been through more pain than Vanessa could fathom. “I remember every minute detail, every gulping breath my sister took after the bullet penetrated her skin, every retreating footstep as all the people around us ran for cover and left us there alone with some dumb-ass talk-radio station blaring from a window nearby. But despite all the damn clarity, I could never remember the single most important piece of information the cops wanted to know.”

“No license plate.” He muttered the words into her hair, the scent of his aftershave attracting her for a deeper sniff.

“No license plate. I had a vague sense of a big, black SUV roaring away but I couldn’t ID the make and model.” She’d beat herself up about it for weeks. Months. Hypnosis hadn’t helped, either, since the hypnotist swore she simply hadn’t been watching the vehicle. Vanessa’s eyes had been focused on her sister. “I told myself that I would never make that mistake again as a cop, and I signed on for the NYPD a few weeks after the shooting.”

The first couple of months on the job had been a blur, but she’d pulled herself out of it quickly enough in deference to her sister and the hardships she’d endured in ICU and later during rehabilitation.

“You never looked back on your abrupt career change?” His hand paused in its gentle massage of her shoulders. “Do you foresee a time when you’ll say that you’ve atoned for those ten seconds when you looked down at your sister instead of at a speeding car?”

Sitting up straight, she realized she’d indulged in the comfort of Alec’s touch for too long if he was asking her questions like that. Still, she couldn’t deny she would have sat there forever as long as his hands remained on her. Stroking.

“It’s not a matter of atoning for anything. As a detective, I’m right where I need to be to make a difference and that’s a hell of a lot more important to me these days than how much money I can make.”

“No regrets about bypassing the business world after putting in all those hours for a degree?”

“I think it makes more sense to look forward than to stare back at the past, don’t you?” She shifted in her seat, focusing her attention back to the street and all the things they needed to accomplish today.

Rehashing old wounds wouldn’t solve anything, especially not with Alec looking on, witnessing her weaknesses. She had enough trouble forgiving herself for the past. Why share her failings with a man who already knew way too much about her?

“I think it’s tough to move forward when the past has you in a choke hold, but that’s just me.”

She felt his gaze from the other side of the car, his scrutiny not letting her slough off the conversation as quickly as she would have preferred. Damn it.

“Choke hold or not, we’d better get to the Raven Club before it gets any later. Once the bar starts filling up, no one is going to talk to us.”

“I’m not dragging you through the most lawless beer joint on the south side just so we can find out who jumped us last night.” He shook his head, making no move to start the car. “I had no business asking you to skirt the rules and help me figure out who’s trying to frame me in the first place.”

“You can’t back out now just because I’ve made a few mistakes in the past.” She never would have told him a damn thing about herself if she’d known he’d try to pull some macho protector crap. “I can take care of myself, Alec, and I’m going to the Raven whether you want to join me or not.”

“You know how many drive-bys have happened on that very block, Vanessa?” He leaned into her space, his voice lowered.

“Not a clue. But I know if I can put away those guys who jumped us last night, maybe I can prevent a few more.” Even if it scared her to set foot in there. Only an idiot wouldn’t feel a few qualms about entering such a notoriously dangerous place.

“Shit.” Alec reached forward to start the car although he clearly wasn’t happy about it. “We go in there, get our answers and go home.
Together
.”

“I’ve got my car and we’re almost positive no one’s following us now that your uncle is in jail.” To spend more time with Alec meant falling into bed. The sexual attraction was so thick, so elemental, she’d be naive to think they could be around each other alone for ten minutes and not wind up touching. “I can go back to my place tonight. We can figure out how to keep you safe from your partners tomorrow.”

“You haven’t even looked at the disks we risked our necks to retrieve.”

“Then make me some copies, and I’ll look at them tonight.” When she was alone. When her brain engaged again after a day of relentless sex thoughts.

“For now, you trust me.” He seemed satisfied at the thought as he put the car in reverse. “That’s a good thing. But about us parting company tonight? Not gonna happen.”