The Wharf (6 page)

She waved her hand to indicate his imposing form. “Little hard for someone like you to blend in.”

“I have my ways.”

She added a tip to the bill and scribbled her signature. As she tucked the receipt in the side pocket of her purse, she said, “As long as you stay out of sight. I don’t want you spoiling my meeting.”

“How about saving your life?” He pushed back from the table and stepped around it to pull her chair out for her. “Is that okay with you?”

She nodded as silly schoolgirl butterflies took flight in her belly.

This was exactly the effect Daniel Walker wanted to have on her—wrap her around his little finger, tell her sweet little lies.

What could Ryan Brody’s motive possibly be? To make sure she wrote a favorable book about his father? She’d already told him she planned to do so. Did he doubt her?

She’d have to watch herself with this man, in more ways than one. Because she couldn’t let a sexy grin and a pair of strong arms deter her from exacting her revenge on his father.

Her mom deserved justice.

Chapter Four

Ryan slung the towel over his shoulder, his gaze riveted on the pool area where three teenagers roughhoused in the water. They had to be the same ones from the night before.

He pushed through the glass door separating the weight room and the swimming area, and the humidity of the pool deck seeped into his flesh. The soles of his running shoes squished the wet tiles as he crossed to the edge of the pool. He squatted beside it and called out, “Hey.”

Three faces turned toward him, a sullen look already forming around the mouth of one of them.

He was the one who answered. “Yeah?”

“Were you guys in here last night? In the hot tub?”

The three of them exchanged quick glances, and another teen spoke up, an earnest look on his face. “Yes, sir. We were in the hot tub late last night.”

“Did you happen to see a woman out here?”

“Yeah, she went into the pool.”

“She was smokin’ hot for a cougar.” The first boy to have spoken up stuck his tongue out of his mouth and flicked it up and down.

Ryan’s hands, resting on his knees, curled into fists.

“Shut up, man.” The Boy Scout punched his friend in the shoulder, then turned his attention back to Ryan. “Why are you asking? Did something happen?”

Flexing his fingers, Ryan dropped one knee to the deck. “Someone played a trick on her in the sauna.”

The sullen one lost the attitude and the smirk and said, “She was still in the pool when we left.”

The other two teens nodded in agreement. “She was swimming laps when we bolted.”

“Did you see anyone else out here? In the gym?” Ryan pushed to his feet.

“No, sir.”

“All right. Thanks.” Ryan exited the pool area, mopping his face with the towel.

He believed them. According to the security guard, those boys were probably messing around in the business center at the time Kacie was in the sauna. Besides, would they play a trick like that on a smokin’-hot cougar?

They got half of that right. Kacie was smokin’ hot, but she was no cougar—at least not for him.

He filled up his water bottle from the gym’s dispenser and then tossed his towel in the bin. She’d shot him down when he asked her to join him for dinner that night, but they planned to get together before her meeting with DB to give him another crack at finding the guy in the law-enforcement database.

As far as he could tell, Kacie had spent the afternoon holed up in her hotel room—working, she said. He smacked the elevator button with the flat of his palm. That woman ran hot, very hot, and cold.

Women. He sure loved ’em, but he couldn’t even pretend to understand ’em.

He’d spent his afternoon dropping that doll off at the local precinct, touching base with his brother’s fellow officers and then tracking down his younger brother.

He knew Judd was going to be out of town again, but he’d managed to catch him for about an hour before he headed to the airport, this time to work for the Saudi royal family. His P.I. brother had been getting higher-end gigs lately, a step up from spying on errant spouses.

Ryan shook his head as he slipped his key card into his door. He’d barely recognized Judd with his suit sleeves covering his tattooed arms, his long hair slicked back.

Once again, Judd had offered up his apartment to Ryan, but Ryan had passed. Judd was careless with his business and his women. Ryan didn’t want any surprises in the form of irate females dropping in—either ones Judd had spied on for their husbands or ones he’d loved and left.

That was the excuse he had given Judd, anyway. If he took his brother up on his offer, he’d have to check out of this hotel. And Kacie Manning was in this hotel, one floor below him. He wasn’t going anywhere.

He showered, changed and ate a burger at the restaurant in the lobby. Then he showed up at Kacie’s door, five minutes early.

She’d stacked the remnants of her own room-service meal on the credenza. Papers and notebooks littered the desk around her laptop. She’d swapped her business attire for a pair of black jeans and a dark green top that accented the copper highlights in her hair and an expanse of soft, creamy skin above the neckline.

Wedging her fist on one curvy hip, she tapped the toes of her bare foot. “You’re early—again.”

“Am I?” Had he betrayed his eagerness to see her?

“I was just going to clean up.” She flicked her fingers toward the abandoned dishes.

“Let me.” He hoisted the tray and carried it toward the door.

She scooted around him to pull the door open and then leaned against it while he pushed the tray against the wall in the hallway.

He rose, dusting his hands together. “I ran into those teenagers at the pool today.”

“Really?” She let the door slam. “Did they fess up to anything?”

“Just that they thought you were smokin’ hot.” He would leave out the cougar part.

Color rushed into her cheeks, and she snorted. “Must’ve been all that steam from the hot tub obscuring their vision. So, they didn’t see anyone else out there?”

“No.” He tilted his head and hitched his thumbs in his pockets. Was she fishing for a compliment or did she really not understand the impact of that body on a red-blooded American male?

She ducked her head and fussed with the laptop, her hair creating a veil over her face.

Nope. She didn’t get it. Self-confident about everything except her looks. He knew the type.

“I couldn’t get back to that system you were using.”

“I’ll find it.” He sidled next to her at the desk by the window and brushed her arm with his fingers as he reached for the keyboard.

Standing shoulder to shoulder with her, he felt her body quiver. Must be the excitement of discovering the identity of her contact. Couldn’t have been because of their close proximity, since she’d been shoving him away from her with both hands ever since he’d carried her bikini-clad body from the sauna.

He pointed to her screen background, a middle-aged couple with a spaniel between them. “Your parents?”

“And their faithful dog. They’ve had him for fifteen years.”

He studied the pair, a sleek blonde with straight chin-length hair and a balding man who looked fit for his age. Kacie must have taken after her dad because she didn’t resemble her mom at all.

He entered a URL and typed in his username, password and number from his token. The system whirred to life and he let out a breath. “It’s up.”

Kacie stepped away from him and planted a chair between them. “Have a seat. I’ll give you what I know.”

He settled on the edge of the chair, his hands hovering above the computer as he waited for it to connect. When the search bar appeared, he turned his head to look at her. “Date of incarceration?”

“Can you enter a range of dates?” She leaned over him and her fragrant hair tickled his cheek.

He swallowed. “Yeah.”

“Maybe twenty or twenty-five years ago.”

He typed in the date range. “Location?”

“Let’s go with Washington State.” She jabbed her finger at the display, and the side of her breast skimmed his upper arm. She pulled back.

He got rock hard. He squeezed his eyes shut and gritted his teeth. “Washington. Crime?”

“Murder.”

He entered the man’s heinous crime, but even that couldn’t tame the heat surging through his body. He’d need a cold shower for that.

“I can’t exactly enter his initials, but I can enter
B
followed by an asterisk and that should give us everyone with a last name starting with that letter—unless he’s lying to you.”

“An ex-con lying? Say it ain’t so.” She knelt down beside his chair.

“Then this is it.” He entered the initials in the name fields and clicked the search button.

A little hourglass blinked in the center of the display.

“Uh-oh. This could take a while.”

“We have time.” She rose from her seated position and tapped at the clock in the lower right corner of the screen. Then she settled back on the floor. “Did you have a good afternoon?”

Leaning back in the chair, he stretched his legs out to the side. “I took that doll to the SFPD.”

“You didn’t have to do that. There’s no crime.”

“Doesn’t matter. They know me there from my brother Sean, and besides, it’s professional courtesy.”

“Did you give them any details?”

“They didn’t ask, and I didn’t tell.”

“Well, thank you.” She folded her hands in her lap. “Did you get a chance to visit some old haunts in the city?”

“I dropped in on my brother.”

“I thought he was on extended leave.”

“My other brother—Judd.”

“He’s the youngest, right?”

“Youngest and wildest.”

“He’s a P.I.”

That wasn’t really a question. She seemed to know his family history as well as he did. “Yep.”

“Why didn’t you just stay with him?”

“He was on his way out of town, too. He’s been doing some bodyguarding, and this time I think he’s guarding a suitcase full of jewels instead of a person.” Ryan’s gaze dropped to the top of her head. Besides, all the excitement he needed was right here at this hotel in Fisherman’s Wharf.

“Wow, I bet he has some stories to tell.”

“If he does, he keeps them to himself.” He jiggled the mouse to wake up the display. “Just last month he was working as a bodyguard for some pop princess on tour in Hawaii.”

She snapped her fingers. “Oh, oh, I know who that is, but her name escapes me now. Aren’t you just a little bit envious?”

Right now, working with Kacie and enjoying the way her quick mind picked up on his next thought and their easy back-and-forth banter, he didn’t envy anyone. “Naw. That’s Judd’s thing. He’s kind of rootless. I like my small town.”

“Of course, you did have an opportunity tonight to party with that attractive hostess.” She threw up her hands. “Don’t let me get in your way of a good time. If you want to check it out after we meet my informant tonight, go for it.”

He drew in his eyebrows. Was she trying to push him into that hostess’s arms? “Ah, not interested.”

“Not a party kind of guy?”

He would prefer a party of two in that king-size bed across the room. Leveling a gaze at her, he said in almost an undertone, “I like certain kinds of parties.”

She jumped to her feet and brushed off the seat of her snug jeans as she wandered to the window.

His voice must’ve betrayed his meaning, and it sure did fluster her. Either she wanted nothing to do with him, or he was growing on her.

“If you change your mind, I’m sure she’d welcome you with open arms.”

The beep of the computer saved him from trying to analyze her obsession with sending him away with some other woman.

He hunched forward and scrolled through the entries. “There are quite a few here, but it won’t be an impossible task to comb through them.”

“Too bad we can’t split them up.”

“We can’t.” He rose from his chair and dragged the other one next to his and patted the seat. “So you might as well sit down next to me.”

She moved the chair a few inches away from his and sat on one corner, ready to take flight if necessary. “Okay, what do you do, just click on the entry?”

“That’s it.”

They spent the next fifteen minutes selecting the cons, and Kacie’s shoulders began to get sore from holding them stiffly so she wouldn’t accidentally brush against Ryan again.

When she’d accidentally mushed her breast against his biceps, she had nearly melted into a puddle. Of course, her chest had done a bunch of mushing against his when he’d carried her out of the sauna, and she’d been wearing a lot less then, but she’d been half out of it and hadn’t yet formed this powerful attraction to him.

She rubbed the back of her neck as Ryan clicked on another possible suspect.

He swung his head toward her. “Are you tired?”

“My neck and shoulders are tight. I already put in a few hours of computer time this afternoon.”

“Why don’t you go stretch out on the bed? If anything looks promising, I’ll call you over.”

Her gaze darted to the bed and back to the computer. What would be worse, lying on a bed in the same room as Ryan or continuing to sit inches away from his hard body, inhaling his fresh, masculine scent?

She pushed back from the desk so fast her chair tipped back.

“Whoa.” Ryan caught it and righted it.

She scurried to the bed, dragged the pillows from beneath the bedspread and punched them into position. Then she hopped onto the bed, her head sinking against the pile of pillows.

“Let me know if you find anything, and help yourself to the mini-bar.”

He hunched over the laptop and continued tapping and clicking.

Good move.
Her head began clearing once she was out of the Ryan realm. Without all his manliness parked next to her and invading her senses, her muscles relaxed and her breathing deepened. The sounds from the computer became hypnotic and she closed her eyes.

Rough fingertips dabbled against her cheek and she burrowed into the pillows, a smile curving her lips.

“Kacie?”

“Mmm.” Warmth spread through her body and she felt safe, like the first time her foster parents brought her home.