Jake slid behind the wheel and worked the gearshift. “Vroom, vroom, vroom,” he said.
Amy rolled her eyes and dropped the keys in his lap. She marched around to the passenger side and strapped herself in.
Jake was her employer, her friend, her partner in crime. He was something else. Boyfriend? No, boyfriend implied dating. Lover? Not yet. She didn’t know what to call it, but they were definitely in deep like. There was some sort of special relationship growing between them. Relationships required trust, right?
Jake put the car in gear and slowly backed out of the driveway. Okay, nothing to worry about. She trusted him. He put his foot to the accelerator, the result snapping her head back, pressing her into the back of her seat.
“What pickup,” Jake shouted, rocketing down Wheatstone Drive.
Amy clutched the dashboard. “What are you doing? This isn’t a racecourse. This is a family neighborhood. There are dogs and cats and kids scurrying across this road.”
A hint of scarlet spotted his cheekbones. “Sorry, I got carried away.”
“Men.”
Jake looked at her sideways. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Men are always getting carried away. It must be in their DNA. Too much adrenaline. Not enough vitamin B. Too much testosterone.”
“Ah hah! Now we’re getting somewhere. I assume you’re speaking from personal experience? You know someone with too much testosterone?” Give me his name and address, Jake silently raged. I’ll neuter him.
Amy thought about it for a minute. She’d always accused Jeff of being obsessed with sex. In her mind, it had all been vastly overrated, anyway. She’d never been all that tempted to go the distance. Until Jake.
Jake had an invigorating effect on her hormones. Maybe she should reconsider her ideas about getting carried away. Now that she thought about it, she’d gotten sort of carried away when he kissed her for the first time, and she’d definitely been carried away when she was drunk. And tonight… she’d melted in his arms. “Son of a gun.”
“Would you like to elaborate on that statement?” Jake asked.
“Nope. I don’t want to touch it.”
Lord, how do you tell a man he turns you into farina? Especially a man who gets hungry for steak in the middle of a clinch. No sir, you could never accuse Jake of getting carried away. He was the epitome of self-control. He was a brick. And it was really beginning to annoy her.
Amy squinted into the darkness. “Is this the way to Ridge Road?”
“This is the way to my apartment,” Jake said, pulling into a parking lot. “I need some detective equipment.”
Amy studied the red-brick garden apartments. Boring, she thought. Sterile. Two large brick boxes with mean little windows evenly spaced, and flat, uninviting doorways at regular intervals. Most of the grass lawn had been trampled into rock-hard dirt. She inwardly cringed at the thought of Jake living there.
Jake opened his front door and motioned Amy into a small foyer leading to a narrow flight of stairs. Spot bounded down to greet them.
“Spot is the reason I took this apartment,” Jake explained. “It’s only five minutes from the clinic, it’s the only apartment building within five hundred miles that allows pets, and it backs up to a patch of woods and a pond.”
He vigorously scratched the dog’s ears. “Spot likes to swim.” He pushed Spot up the stairs. “I’ve thought about getting a house of my own, but I can’t seem to find the time.”
Amy stood at the top of the stairs and searched for a polite word. She couldn’t find any. The apartment was small and impossibly cluttered. The furniture looked comfortable but threadbare. An expensive ten-speed bike leaned against one wall. A microwave sat on an end table near the couch. Veterinary journals were stacked on the floor by the microwave. A vacuum cleaner sat in the middle of the living room rug, and a well-worn swimsuit edition of
“It’s a placemat,” Jake said.
Amy believed him… almost.
Jake searched through a mound of clean, unfolded laundry, which had been dumped in an overstuffed easy chair.
“I really need more room. I need some place I can use as an office. And I could use a garage or a basement. I grew up in a small town, in a big old farmhouse. It wasn’t used as a farm anymore, but we had lots of elbow room and a bunch of outbuildings.”
He found a wool sweater that had shrunk to the size of doll clothes. “Guess I shouldn’t have put this in the dryer,” he said, throwing the garment across the room for Spot. “Go fetch,” he shouted.
“I like Fairfax. The people are nice, and I like the activity, but I miss the sense of space and order I had as a kid.”
Jake grinned while he pulled on a black T-shirt. “I guess this apartment is like your yard. Out of control. I’d like to fix it up, but I don’t know where to begin. Your house is nice. It feels like home. It’s peaceful.”
Amy folded a towel. “I like it, too. I have a year’s lease with an option to buy. Now that I’ve lost my job at the TV station, I don’t know whether I’ll be able to secure the mortgage.”
She had a small savings account from a trust fund. She’d intended to use it as a down payment, but if she didn’t get a better-paying job soon, she’d have to start dipping into the account to pay bills. She thought of the expensive red car sitting in the parking lot and pressed her lips together. Hindsight.
Jake took a pair of binoculars and a camera from the hall closet. “The professionals always take these on a stakeout. You don’t always see them, because sometimes they leave them in their cars.”
“Don’t you need a trench coat, too?”
“It’s at the cleaners.”
Chapter Five
“This is an expensive town house,” Amy said, checking the address Jake had written on the notecard with the address in front of her. “I guess station managers do all right for themselves.”
It was a new complex of red-brick Georgian row houses, complete with underground garages and corniced entrances. Several skylights bubbled from the pitched roof and the lined edges of expensive draperies framed long casement windows. A professional arrangement of shrubberies and flowers hugged the house and the small front porch. Light glowed golden in the downstairs front room. The rest of the house was dark.
“He must be home,” Jake said. “I guess that eliminates breaking and entering.”
“What a shame. I had my heart set on it.”
Jake cut the engine, and they sat motionless in the dark car, the silence feeling heavy in the humid Virginia air. Jake stared straight ahead into Turner’s windows, one hand casually draped over the polished wood steering wheel, the other resting on the gearshift, between the black-leather bucket seats.
Amy was more intrigued with the man beside her than the town house windows. She watched his chest rise and fall, studied his calm profile, the strong column of his neck. She wondered why he was doing this. She suspected it was partly play, partly something more. Who knew? Maybe in another life he had been Robin Hood, Zorro… Indiana Jones.
“Now what?”
He kept staring at the house. “I don’t know. I’m new at this. It’s Saturday night. I was counting on him to be out.”
“Why are we doing this? The police are conducting an investigation…”
“The police suspect
Man, love was the pits. It made you crazy. It was painful. Sometimes love was soft and incredibly beautiful. He couldn’t tell her how he felt. She’d think he was nuts. She might be right.
