All A Man Can Ask

“Fine.”

She searched his eyes. “I mean it.”

“Don’t worry about it. You’re not my type.”

She raised her chin. “Really.”

“Yeah.” He grinned crookedly. “So you can relax.”

“I am relaxed. Or I will be, as soon as you leave.”

He jerked his head toward the broken line of cars. “I’m parked here.”

She looked. He drove a TransAm: low-slung, high-geared, dark and dangerous looking. Unsafe at any speed, she thought, and shivered.

“Then you won’t need a ride,” she said.

He uncrossed his arms. “Careful, cream puff. You might hurt my feelings.”

“I’m not worried. I’m not your type, remember?”

“No, but you are tasty.”

Three months ago she would have known how to answer him. She was still searching for a response when he pushed off from her car and strolled over to his.

“See you at home,” he called. The TransAm started with a testosterone-spewing roar.

Faye yanked on her car door. “Not if I see you first,” she muttered.

Which wasn’t at all the kind of I’m-in-charge-class comeback she was looking for, but she was out of practice.

Faye stepped back and surveyed her morning’s effort. She had hoped maybe this time she had something special: a moody blend of light and dark, a study in atmosphere. Her photos spread sharp and bright across the table. Her open sketchbook captured the creamy hull and coral sky reflected in the shifting surface of the lake at dawn. But when she looked at her painting, she saw only a flattened boat on overworked water. Murky. Muddy. Muddled.

Crud.

It wouldn’t even make good sofa art.

Let your work express your feelings, she used to lecture her students. The gnawing dissatisfaction of the past few months developed new teeth. Maybe her feelings were the problem. Maybe instead of letting herself be stalled by her painting and stumped by Detective You-Don’t-Want-to-Know Denko and just generally frustrated, she should pick up the phone and check on Jamal.

Faye winced and rubbed her wrist. She’d been holding a brush too long.

Or maybe she’d simply had it with this particular piece of work.

She needed…inspiration. She stretched once to get the kinks out, slapped shut her sketchbook and shoved it into her bag. She would take a walk down by the lake and clear her head.

“You know, for an artist, you don’t seem to spend a lot of time painting,” Aleksy said.

Below him on the bank, knee deep in the green brush, Faye Harper froze like Bambi’s mother about to get shot. Her head turned slowly.

And then she spotted him, propped against a tree trunk with his fishing pole and field pack. Her wide brown eyes narrowed in annoyance. “For a detective, you don’t seem to spend a lot of time investigating.”

Ouch. Bambi’s mom was packing heat.

Despite his frustration, Aleksy grinned. “I hit a snag.”

She picked her way over roots and rocks toward him. “Fish not biting?”

“I didn’t expect them to. No self-respecting striper’s going to feed in the middle of the day.”

“Then what are you doing out here?”

“Surveillance,” he said briefly.

“What are you looking for?”

He shook his head. “You don’t—”

“—want to know,” she finished for him. “Thank you. Is it safe for me to sit down next to you?”

His grin broadened. “Be my guest.”

Her skirt billowed and collapsed around her. She wore sandals on her narrow feet and a scoop-necked T-shirt that revealed the slight upper slope of her chest. Her face was pink and moist and she smelled like heat and spring flowers.

Tasty, he thought.

But not on the menu. He wasn’t on vacation, whatever his lieutenant said. And a cream puff art teacher with baby-fine skin didn’t fit into his plans or his future.

“Did you want something?” he asked.

“Yes. No.” She rested her arms on her knees and her neckline gaped, revealing the white line of her bra. Oh, man. He had definitely been sleeping in his car too long, if a glimpse of ladies’ underwear made him hard.

“I hit a snag, too,” she said.

“What kind of snag?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

Probably not. He didn’t know squat about painting. But her automatic dismissal rankled.

“Try me,” he said, surprising them both.

He didn’t do intimacy. No way was he discussing art with a woman he wasn’t even trying to talk into bed.

“I’m not—I seem to be putting in a lot of effort without a lot of result,” Faye said.

Well, hey, okay. “I can relate there.”

She turned her head and looked at him. “Have you found…whatever it is you’re looking for yet?”

“Nope.”

“But you’re going to keep looking,” she guessed.

“Yep.”

“Why?”

Because he owed it to Karen. He owed it to himself.

“That’s my job,” he said.

“Shouldn’t you have help? I don’t know, but—a partner or something?”

His former partner was dead. Murdered. His current partner, Kenny Stivak, thought he ought to let the big boys handle the case. And Aleksy’s boss told him if he didn’t back off, he’d be busted down to directing Sunday traffic in the St. Wenceslaus parking lot.

“I don’t need help,” he said.

She sniffed. “That’s what my students say. Usually the ones who are most in danger of quitting. Or failing.”

“Well, I’m not going to quit and I can’t afford to fail, so you can save the lecture. Teacher.”

She flushed. She really had the damnedest skin, as fine and delicate as one of the teacups in his mother’s china cabinet. “I haven’t actually decided whether I’ll return to teaching next year.”

Now there was a surprise. “At Lincoln?”

She took a deep breath. “At all.”

Against his will, he felt the drag of interest. It wasn’t just that she was cute and he was bored. Faye Harper had…something, he decided. Smarts, maybe. Or guts.

Which made her comment about leaving teaching puzzling.

“How come?” he asked, figuring she’d say something about teacher burnout or the lousy pay or the school board cutting arts funding again.

“The principal and I didn’t see eye to eye on my handling of a student.”

“Parents?” Sometimes it helped in juvenile cases to get a kid’s family involved. Although, at Lincoln, where families struggled simply to survive, lots of parents no longer had the energy to care.

“The mother wouldn’t speak with me. The stepfather was more…forceful in his opinions.”

“He disagreed with you.”

Faye stared out over the water. “He broke my wrist.”

Aleksy was startled into bobbling his line. He made a grab for the pole. She was a tiny thing. No threat to anyone. What kind of man would raise a hand to her? Anger burned his gut. “You press charges?”

“No. It was an accident,” she explained. “He was trying to make me leave the apartment, and I—fell—down the stairs.”

“He pushed you, you mean. That’s aggravated assault.”

“It was an accident. At least…” Her left hand moved unconsciously to cover the wrist on her knee. The gesture made sense now. “The principal advised me it would be better to treat the incident as an accident.”

“Better for who?”

“For Jamal. My student.”

Aleksy was disgusted. “The one who caused the problem in the first place.”

She shook her head. “No. No, Jamal was never a problem. He was an excellent student.”

“Then, why—”

“He was an excellent student,” she repeated. “Talented in math. Brilliant in art. I pulled every string I had to get him accepted as a scholarship student at the Art Institute school.”

“So, what was the trouble?”

“Jamal’s parents—his stepfather—wanted him to go to a regular college and get a degree in business.”

Aleksy shrugged. “Sounds reasonable to me.”

“Yes. It sounded reasonable to everyone,” Faye said bleakly. “And heaven help Jamal if what was reasonable in this case wasn’t right for him.”

“So, what did you do?”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

It mattered, he thought. To her, if to no one else. Even if she hadn’t confessed she might ditch her job, he could see for himself the stress that haunted her eyes and compressed her mouth.

“Come on. What did you do?”

She stood, close enough that her skirt brushed his arm. His body reacted to her warmth and the scent that fell from her skirt. He hardly had to move his hand and he’d be touching her smooth calf, her warm thigh. He grinned a little at his own fantasy. He could reach right under all that flowery material and—

“I learned I had no business butting in where I wasn’t welcome,” Faye said.

Aleksy’s grin sharpened. She might feel down, but she definitely wasn’t out. “With that kind of attitude, you’d make a lousy cop.”

Her eyes met his, direct and sad, and his amusement cut off like a spigot.

“I made a very bad teacher,” she said. “Excuse me.”

He watched as she scrambled down the bank and back toward the cottage. Her pale legs flashed along the water’s edge.

He was losing his objectivity, damn it. She was just a convenience. And he was a cop. It was time he started thinking like one.

In his experience, only the very innocent and the very guilty ran from questioning. He wondered if anyone could be as innocent as Faye Harper seemed.

Or what she had to hide.

She was running away. Again. And it was beginning to tick her off.

Faye’s sandals slipped on shale and stone. She didn’t used to be such a loser.

She could have kept her mouth shut. She grabbed at a sapling for balance. Instead she’d let herself be lured by Aleksy’s hot dark eyes and easy grin. She’d allowed herself to be seduced by the promise of his understanding. She’d opened her big fat mouth and fallen in, and it wasn’t even his fault. Her hand came away sticky and smelling of tar.

Sure it was.

He was a detective. He probably knew all kinds of ways to get people—to get women—to talk to him. And she had. All it had taken were a few quick questions and a brief show of indignation, and she was right back where she didn’t want to be, revisiting a topic she’d promised herself was over and done with.

With relief, she saw her aunt’s cottage up ahead. Its weathered gray shingles and shabby trim shone in the sun. Ducks dozed in the shadow of the dock. All quiet. Peaceful. And hers, at least for the next few months.

Only now its peace had been disturbed. By Alex Denko.

She could have excused him for polluting the atmosphere with high level pheromones.

She couldn’t blame him for listening when she’d been willing to talk. Faye frowned. Anxious to talk.

But she could not forgive him for forcing her to see that, deep down, she still cared desperately about her job. About Jamal. And she must not care. Her health and her sanity depended on it.

She climbed the steps to the deck, one hand already digging in her bag for her keys. Sunglasses, sketchbook, wallet… There they were. She pulled them out and froze with the keys clutched in her hand.

The door was already open.

Not all the way, which explained why she hadn’t noticed it before. But there was a two-inch crack between the sliding panel and the aluminum frame, where she was sure—almost sure—she had pulled the door shut and locked it behind her.

Which meant… Which meant… Oh, dear. Her stomach hollowed.

Heart pounding, she took a deep breath, as if she could force oxygen to her brain to get it working. This wasn’t Chicago, she reminded herself. She wasn’t going to be assaulted in her aunt Eileen’s living room by some twitchy kid or strung out junkie desperate enough to follow her home.

But her door was undeniably open.

She peered through the dark glass at the shadowed interior. And there was no way she was going inside alone.

Slowly, she backed down the steps. When she felt the soft ground under her feet, she turned and started to run.

She didn’t have far to go.

The noise of her panicked passage must have traveled ahead of her. Faye was barely under the cover of trees when she saw Aleksy Denko prowling through the brush like a K-9 dog on high alert, head high, face grim. Despite the pole he still carried, no one in their right mind would mistake him for a casual middle-of-the-week fisherman.

She almost sank with relief. She waved instead.

He strode toward her and caught her elbows in both hands, steadying and supporting her. “You all right?”

“Yes. I’m—” spooked “—fine.”

His expression didn’t change. “What happened?”

“I don’t know. I got back to the cottage and—” She swallowed. Was she overreacting? “Well, the door was open.”

“Did you lock it? When you left?”

“I think so.”

“Did you go inside?”

She felt like an idiot. “No.”

“Smart girl. Stay here.” He dropped her arms and loped away.

“Hey!” she yelled weakly. “Shouldn’t you call your brother?”

He ignored her. Or maybe he didn’t hear. Or maybe he figured he was saving her embarrassment, not calling in Officer Cowlick when there was nothing wrong except she was a neurotic nuisance who hadn’t latched her door properly.

But she had. She was almost sure of it.

Aleksy reached the tree line. Beyond him she could see a patch of sunlit grass and her aunt’s gray cottage. He slid out of his pack, laid down his fishing pole and pulled his gun from the small of his back.

Her breath caught in her chest. Oh, dear God.

She hurried forward. At the edge of the trees, she stopped. Stay here, he had ordered, and she didn’t have any better ideas.

It was like watching a movie, she thought. Aleksy disappeared along the side of the house, moving fast and low. Faye waited, her stomach churning, until she saw him come round the opposite corner.

He sort of flowed up the steps to the wooden deck and flattened himself against the wall, out of sight of anyone who might still be inside. He knocked on the weathered shingles.

“Police!”

No response. At least, none that Faye could hear.

He repeated the knock. “Police!”

He shoved the door back along its track and vanished inside. Faye waited with her heart in her throat and her hands pressed to her mouth. A minute crawled by. Two minutes.

Aleksy strolled out onto the deck. “You want to come tell me if you think anything’s missing?” he called.

She started to breathe again. She could do that, she thought, crossing the grass. Unless the thief had rifled through her aunt’s drawers…

She looked up into Aleksy’s expressionless face. “Is it bad?”

He jerked his head toward the open door. “See for yourself.”

She stepped over the aluminum threshold, giving her eyes a moment to adjust to the change in light. She frowned in confusion.

Not bad at all. In fact—

“You still got your TV and VCR.” Aleksy’s voice behind her made her jump. “So your intruder wasn’t interested in fencing electronics. You might want to check your bedroom for jewelry.”

She hurried down the short, dark hallway, very aware of him stalking her. Her room looked the way she had left it, the comforter pulled up carelessly over the bright print sheets, her bottles and lotions arranged haphazardly on the dresser, her underwear spilling out of a drawer…

She flushed and scooped a pair of panties off the floor. “Sorry it’s such a mess.”

Aleksy propped his shoulder against the door. “Was it a mess when you left this morning?”

“Yes,” she confessed.

He smiled. “Anything missing?”

“I—” She did a quick survey of her dressertop, jerked open the drawer that held her jewelry. She stared at the tangle of silver chains and colored stones and dangly earrings, all of it pretty and none of it very valuable. “I don’t think so.”

“Too bad.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’d feel better if you got ripped off.”

She stiffened with outrage and embarrassment. “I’m sorry if you feel I wasted your time.”

His mouth compressed. “You didn’t waste my time, cream puff. You definitely had an intruder. I looked at your frame. The door was forced. But if you didn’t get robbed, we have to assume whoever broke in was looking for something.”

“Like what?”

He shrugged. “Like me. Maybe somebody was checking for ID.”

She did not want to be involved. “Why would someone do that?”

“Could be somebody around here isn’t comfortable with strangers. Could be they made me as a cop.”

“That would explain why you were on my deck with your gun drawn shouting, ‘Police,’” she said dryly.

Chagrin drew his brows together. “Yeah, well, let’s hope they missed that. Your bad guys were probably off the premises by then.”

“I still don’t understand why they would search my cottage if they were looking for you.”

“They might have hoped to find my star or my gun. But I’m carrying those. Or they could’ve been after some sign that I’m really living here with you.”

“But you’re not,” she protested.

His eyes met hers, dark and direct. “Then we’ve got a problem, don’t we?”

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