Wilde at Heart (3 page)

He made a noncommittal sound and didn’t move. She faced him. “I’m serious. Go before they see you.”

“You think I’m afraid of Cam?” A hint of a smile turned up the corner of his too-serious mouth. “I used to dig up worms in our backyard and chase him around with them until he cried. I’m not afraid of my little brother.”

“Maybe not. But you should be very afraid of my big sister. If Eva finds out what we were doing in there before the fire broke out…”

If she wasn’t mistaken, a flush filled his cheeks underneath the soot. “We’re both consenting adults. And as I sa
id, it’s not happening again.”

“Humph. Tell Eva that. See how well it goes over. I’ll give you a hint: lead balloon.”

“It’ll be fine.”

“Keep looking on the bright side, Starburst. One thing, though. You weren’t planning on ever having children, were you? Because Eva will make sure you don’t.”

He winced.

She patted his shoulder, then on impulse stood on her toes to kiss his cheek. He was just too damn cute. “Do us both a favor and leave. Please. It will make this about a billion times easier for me, okay?”

He stared down into her eyes for a long moment, and she hoped to all things holy he couldn’t read any of her secrets. Because she got the feeling he could, and it chilled her to the bone.

“Please,” she said again on barely a breath of sound and held out his jacket. As grateful as she had been for it during their dash through the smoke, she didn’t want Cam or Eva to see her with it now.

The fire engine’s lights flashed red and yellow against the snow clouds hovering over the city. They were less than a block away at this point, and she feared he was going to be stubborn, but he finally gave a short nod and took the jacket. “We’re going to talk later.”

He left her standing on the sidewalk and climbed into an SUV that was worth way more than she’d ever made in her lifetime. She wished she could hate him for it, but when she tried, the worry she’d seen in his eyes edged out all the negative emotions and filled her with the warm fuzzies.

Ugh. That man was dangerous.

The fire truck screamed to a stop in front of the building, and they wasted no time hooking up their hoses. Streams of water filled the air and within minutes, they had the fire under control.

One of the firefighters came over to her with a blanket. It was just cold enough that the mist from the hoses was already freezing into ice on his helmet and, for the first time, she realized how cold she truly was. And here she thought it was only shock.

He draped the blanket over her shoulders. “Are you okay? Do you need medical attention?”

She shook her head. “I’m fine.”

“What happened here?”

She opened her mouth to tell him how she was preparing the bank deposits before leaving for the night—true—when she noticed smoke and escaped out the side exit—also true—but a car pulled up behind the fire truck, lights flashing in its grill. The fireman glanced over, and then did a double take when Eva and Cam slid out of the vehicle.

“Hey, Detective Cardoso. Someone call homicide?”

“No,” Eva said, and her tone was all
omg-I’m-going-to-lock-Shelby-in-a-plastic-bubble-and-never-let-her-leave.
“Deluca, this is my sister.”

Shelby managed to keep her wince internal. Someday she wanted Eva to say that without looking like she just bit into a lemon.

“Oh.” Deluca’s eyes narrowed as he looked from Eva—tall, thin, dark hair, and olive skin—to Shelby—petite, curvy, turquoise-and-purple-for-now hair and fair complexion—and then back again.

“Half sisters,” Shelby explained helpfully, then regretted drawing attention to herself, because Eva whirled on her.

“What the hell happened?”

Shelby sucked in a breath and gave her sister the story she’d been about to tell Deluca. When she finished, Cam frowned and scrubbed a hand through his dark hair. It was a thoughtful expression, which was so Cam-like she kind of wanted to hug him. Always steady and solid, he was the rock of Gibraltar in his family. She couldn’t wait until he became her brother-in-law.

“Anybody here with you?” he asked.

Oh, shit. Steady, solid, and way too frigging perceptive. “No, not now.”

“On the way in, I thought we passed…” He trailed off, shook his head. “Nah, forget it. Was it arson or an accident?” he asked Deluca.

Deluca shrugged. “Won’t know until the fire’s out and one of our investigators can get inside. But, I gotta tell ya, just between you and me, that broken front window is looking suspicious.”

“How so?”

“Well. If something had exploded inside the building and broke the window, there would be shards of glass on the sidewalk, but there aren’t.”

“Meaning something from outside the building broke the glass,” Cam said. “Something like a Molotov cocktail thrown through the window.”

“You got it.”

Arson? Shelby’s stomach flipped over, and she hugged the blanket tighter around herself. Oh God. If Reece hadn’t been here with her…

Someone wanted her pushing up daisies.

Maybe it shouldn’t surprise her, given the life she’d lived up until a few months ago, but it did. It really did.

Holy batshit, Robin.

“Shit,” Cam muttered, succinctly echoing her own thoughts. “Mind if I take a look?”

“Once the flames are out, sure.” As the two men started toward the fire truck, she heard Deluca add, “We’ll need to contact the owners—”

“I’ll do it!”

They stopped, turned, and Shelby realized she’d sounded far too eager. “I mean, the blow might be softer coming from someone they know. I’ll contact them.”

After a beat, Deluca nodded. “You do that.”

Stupid, she scolded herself as she watched them walk away. Stupid, stupid. Should’ve told the truth. Which, yeah, meant she’d have a lot of ’splaining to do. The kind of explanations she really wasn’t ready to give and some she couldn’t.

Behind her, Eva cleared her throat. “Shelby.”

She glanced over, saw her sister’s arms crossed, boot tapping out an impatient rhythm in the slush on the sidewalk.

“I can tell something’s going on,” Eva said.

“Besides my place of employment burning to the ground as we speak?”

“Besides that. Did you start the fire? It’s okay if it was an accident. You just have to come clean.”

Shelby blew out a breath. Of course Eva thought that. In her sister’s mind, she was a walking jinx. “No, I didn’t start it. You heard the hottie fireman. He thinks it was arson, and Cam seems to agree.”

Eva ran her hands through her loose, bed-tangled hair. Didn’t take a genius to figure out what she and Cam had been up to before they heard about the fire.

Which, of course, made her think of Reece. And the bone-quaking orgasm he’d been on the verge of giving her.

Despite everything, a blossom of lust unfurled low in her belly. The way he’d touched her had been…unrestrained. Sweet, a little clumsy, and uncharacteristically enthusiastic. So not what she’d expected from Reece stick-up-the-ass Wilde.

And, dammit, she wanted more.

Was there a female equivalent of blue balls? Because she had a mean case of it, which the adrenaline rush had only exacerbated.

Eva waved a hand in front of her face. “Planet Earth to Shel, come in.”

Shelby shook her head, dislodging all thoughts of Reece. “Sorry. What?”

Eva frowned, concern etching lines around her eyes. “Are you okay? Maybe we should take you to the hospital.”

“No, you don’t need to do that. I’m exhausted and zoned out for a sec. No biggie. What were you saying?”

“Oh God. Shelby, you scared me, you know?” Eva stepped forward and wrapped her up in a hard hug. “You were here closing by yourself, and when I heard the call come across the scanner…”

Shelby held her just as tightly and breathed in the leathery scent of her sister’s jacket mixed with the clean scent of soap from a recent shower. It did wonders to calm her still-racing heart. “I’m so sorry, Evie. But I’m okay. Honest.”

“Whatever’s going on with you, you know you can tell me, right? I can’t promise I won’t get mad at first, but I’m always here for you, no matter what.”

“I’ve never doubted that.”

“So then what aren’t you telling me?”

Oh, so much. So very much that she didn’t even know where or how to begin.

She clung to her sister and watched the firemen douse the last of the flames. The front end of The Bean Gallery was nothing but a blackened shell now, and tears pricked her eyes. And for a heartbeat, warm and comfortable in her sister’s embrace, she considered spilling everything. All she had to do was open her mouth and start talking.

But then she caught sight of a familiar face in the crowd of bystanders that had begun to gather on the sidewalk, and her heart dropped to her toes.

Shitballs. And here she’d thought this night couldn’t possibly get any worse.

Chapter Three

“W
hat are you doing here?”

Reece glanced up from the spreadsheets on his laptop to see his brother Vaughn lounging in the doorway of his office. It was a tiny room in the back of the Wilde Security building and Vaughn filled the doorframe with his body.

“I could ask the same of you,” Reece said, avoiding the question. “As best man, shouldn’t you be with the groom, making sure he gets to the plane on time tomorrow?”

“Cam’s so goofy in love with Eva, he’s not going to miss that plane for anything.” Vaughn lifted a shoulder. “And I wanted to check some things before we leave.”

“Lark.” Reece didn’t bother making it a question. He knew damn well Vaughn was like a starving pit bull with a bone when he latched on
to something. And he’d latched on to Lark Warren’s disappearance with all his teeth, though nobody could figure out why. As far as Reece knew, Vaughn had only met Lark once at their youngest brother Jude’s wedding last fall, but he was bound and determined to find the woman now. Which was proving more difficult than any of them could have guessed since the real Lark Warren was a sixty-eight-year-old who had died of a heart attack three years ago, shortly before Vaughn’s “Lark” appeared in D.C.

Reece returned his attention to his computer, but the numbers on the screen were starting to blur together. Time to lose the contacts and break out the glasses, he decided, and opened the top drawer of his desk, found his contacts case, solution, and glasses. He stood. “You have to let her go, Vaughn. This obsession isn’t good for your health.”

“Jesus. I’m not a fucking fragile china doll.”

“Never said that.” He stopped in front of Vaughn and waited for his brother to step back, out of the doorway, to let him pass.

Vaughn didn’t move. “You didn’t have to say it.”

At six feet tall, Reece wasn’t a small man by any stretch of the imagination, but he was the shortest in the Wilde family and had to look up to meet his younger brother’s gaze. “You
were
seriously injured less than two months ago. You shouldn’t even be thinking about coming back to work yet, not to mention chasing this woman’s trail across the country.”

“I’m fine.” But even as he said the words, he pushed away from the doorjamb, and his jaw tightened with a suppressed wince.

“Yeah, you look it.” Reece strode past him to the bathroom and started the preparations to remove his contacts at the vanity. Vaughn’s walking cast clomped across the floor, then a chair scraped back and a computer booted up.

“Did you hear about the shit Shelby got into the other night?” Vaughn asked.

He fumbled his contact and it landed somewhere on the floor. “Fuck!”

“What?”

“Nothing. Dropped my contact.” He groped around for his glasses and slid them on, but didn’t bother searching for the lost contact. He returned to the main room where Vaughn was sitting at his desk, typing.

“Should get corrective surgery like Cam did,” Vaughn said without looking up.

He’d considered it several times over the years, but what did it say about him that he hated the idea of losing even a day of work to get his vision fixed? Probably nothing good, so he shoved the idea aside.

“What did you say about Shelby?” Jesus, he hoped he’d managed to keep his voice casual, because his heart was pounding a hole in his ribcage.

Vaughn still didn’t look away from his screen. “Yeah, that girl is a walking disaster. The Bean Gallery burned to the ground during her shift on New Year’s Eve.”

In the faint blue light of the computer screen, he watched Vaughn’s expression closely, trying to decide if he were being baited. But he saw no hint of it. Besides, there was no way Vaughn could know. No. Way. He had to relax before he gave himself away. “Is she all right?”

“Yeah, she’s good. Shaken up, Cam says, but uninjured. They’re calling it arson.”

Arson.

For a second, everything stopped. The sound of Vaughn’s fingers on the keyboard, the hum of the fluorescent overhead lights, Reece’s heart. Everything.

It was arson.

Jesus, he never should have left the scene.

Then something in Vaughn’s tone snapped him back to the here and now and had alarm bells clanging inside his head. “Don’t tell me they think Shelby did it.”

If the authorities believed Shelby started the fire, he’d have to come clean, admit he’d been there with her, and the only fire she’d started was the one in his blood. Which would be uncomfortable for them both, but better than having her accused of a crime.

“No,” Vaughn said. “The evidence is pretty clear that someone threw a Molotov cocktail through the front window. The investigator assigned to the case is a good one, but Cam still wants us to look into it ourselves when we get back from Vegas.”

“All right.”

Vaughn finally gazed up from his computer, his blue eyes narrowed. “That’s it?”

“That’s what?”

“Your only reaction is ‘all right’? No bitching about the expense of taking on a case we won’t get paid for?”

“Eva’s going to be family in two days. By default, that makes Shelby family, too. If it involves her safety, it’s something we need to investigate, expenses be damned.”

Vaughn froze for an instant, then very slowly turned in his seat to stare. “You
look
like Reece, but you can’t possibly be him. Real Reece has conniptions over money issues. So where’s my real brother, and who do I have to kill to get him back?”