“Please.” He pulled off his sunglasses and stuck them in his breast pocket. He had shadows beneath his brown eyes.
“Long night?” She moved past him, resisting the urge to touch him.
“Yeah.” He laughed without humor and followed close behind her into the kitchen. The heels of his boots sounded unusually loud against the tile floor.
Lucy reached into a cupboard and pulled out a mug. “I worked until about three this morning.” It was such a relief not to have to lie any longer. “I do that sometimes,” she explained. She’d had boyfriends in the past who’d hated the often erratic hours of a writer. Now that everything was out in the open, she wanted to be up front with Quinn. “Sometimes I work for days without much sleep. One time,” she confessed as she poured coffee into a mug and handed it to him, “I forgot to shave my legs for over a month. I looked like a Clydesdale.” Okay, maybe she should have kept that one to herself.
“Thanks.” The corner of his mouth curved up as he blew into his coffee. “Sorry about what happened last night,” he said before he took a drink. She looked at her slippers and fought the blush creeping up her neck. She wondered exactly which part of the night he was sorry for. That he’d had to run out? That they’d gotten to know each other better in his hall or that they hadn’t finished? She was really sorry about the latter. “Something came up and we need to talk about it.”
Okay, that didn’t sound good. “All right.” She moved to the small table in her kitchen and took a seat. Quinn sat across from her, and the light pouring in through the windows picked out strands of his dark hair. It lit his white shirt from behind and accentuated his wide shoulders.
“Remember when you confessed to me that you’re not a nurse?”
Was he mad about that after all? She hadn’t figured it was still an issue. “Yeah.”
“I have a confession to make, too.” His dark eyes stared into hers, tired but as intense as ever. “I’m not a plumber.”
She leaned forward in her chair. “What?”
“I’m a cop.” He reached for something hooked to the side of his belt and slid it across the table at her. It was a police shield. Yep, he was a cop. A detective. He’d lied to her. “Why did you lie?” And why hadn’t he confessed the same night she had?
“Because when I met you, I was dating on the Internet undercover.” When she didn’t say anything, he explained further. “I was posing as a plumber to catch Breathless.”
“Who?”
“Breathless. That’s the name the police have given the woman who’s killing men around town. We think she’s meeting them online.”
Lucy took a drink of her coffee and let the information sink in. “So the police are working undercover online to catch the woman we’ve been hearing about on the news?”
“Yes.”
Okay, so far she understood, although it seemed bizarre.
“Last night, she killed her fourth victim.”
“Oh, no.”
“While you were at my house, she was at a motel on Chinden suffocating Robert D. Patterson. That’s why I hustled you out so fast.”
That name sounded familiar. She sat back in her chair and thought of all the men who’d e-mailed her in the past few months. “Throbbinbob?”
“Did you know him?”
“Not really. He e-mailed me a few times.” He’d kind of been a pest, but he hadn’t deserved to die, for goodness’ sake. “Did you catch this Breathless last night?”
He shook his head and leaned back in his chair. “No, but we got some good leads.”
“So, you’re a homicide detective,” she said, testing it out loud. Now that she thought it over, it made more sense than his being a plumber. It explained his intense gaze and his attention to detail.
“Yes.”
She guessed she understood why he’d lied. She didn’t like it but couldn’t exactly get mad about it. That would make her a hypocrite. She watched him take a drink from his mug and took a moment to process what he’d just told her. So, he’d met her while he’d been working undercover. In a sense, she’d been working undercover too. It might not have been the best way to start a relationship, but it wasn’t something that was insurmountable. They could work on it. Maybe even laugh about it sometime in the future. “So, you met me at Starbucks to see if I could be a serial killer?”
He stared into her eyes and gave an abbreviated nod of his dark head.
Okay, so their meeting had been unconventional. People met under unusual circumstances all the time. Who cared about
He set the mug on the table. “A little longer than a minute or two.”
Something was wrong. Something she wasn’t seeing. She felt as if she was looking at the wrong side of a picture and not seeing what was in front of her face. Then everything shifted and turned and became really clear. “Wait.” She held up a hand like a traffic cop. “You thought I could be Breathless?”
“Yes.”
Good Lord. The guy she’d fallen in love with had thought she was a serial killer. “But you figured out right away that was ridiculous. Right?”
He shook his head slowly. “Not right away.”
“Not right away? How could you possibly think I was a serial killer for one second? Do I look like a serial killer?” Before he could answer, she said, “No, I do not!”
He sighed, and his hands moved to massage the back of his neck. “You know as well as I do that serial killers look just like anyone else.”
“Yeah, but you’re a trained detective. Aren’t you supposed to have an instinct about these things? Some sort of cop sense? Aren’t you supposed-Wait. How long before you realized that I wasn’t a serial killer?” He just looked at her, and she had to repeat her question. “How long?”
“Lucy, you have to understand-”
“How long, Quinn?” she interrupted him.
He dropped his hand to his side. “Last night.”
She sucked a shocked breath into her lungs, and her brows rose up to her hairline. “Before or after?…” His silence was her answer, and her head spun. She heard herself sputtering like an idiot, but she couldn’t stop. “You…me…I…what…the hell?” She stopped to take a few calming breaths, and when she was capable of speech again, she pointed across the table and asked, “Are you shitting me?” Not exactly brilliant, but an improvement over sputtering. “Don’t tell me the whole time we’ve dated that you thought I was a serial killer? Until last night?”
“No, I’m not shitting you. And yes to your second and third questions.”
The reality of what he was telling her hit her between the eyes. “And you took off my shirt and and and-” She tried for another calming breath as thoughts spun in her head. “You wanted to have sex with me even though you thought I’d kill you? You would have had sex with a serial killer?”
“No. We didn’t exactly have sex.”
She sucked in a hurt breath. Suddenly something that had felt pretty darn good now felt dirty.
“It’s complicated.”
Oh Lord. Oh Lord. That hit-he’d-given-her-between-the-eyes feeling was working its way south toward her throat. “What? Were you trying to get me to kill you?”
He frowned. “Something like that.”
She swallowed hard as the pain hit her chest. “So the whole time you were kissing me and undressing me last night, you were only doing it because you thought I was going to try and kill you?”
“I thought there was a chance.” He scrubbed his face with his hands. “Lucy, you have to understand something. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I never wanted to hurt anyone, but I had a job to do.”
Lucy didn’t think there was anything left that he could say that would hurt her more. She was wrong.
“I was just doing my job,” he said, adding insult to her injured heart.
