“No particular reason. My dad drilled into me to always put important stuff out of sight when I’m going to be away.” Hence his secret underground room.
It wasn’t anything different than Daniel would probably have done himself, so why hadn’t he expected her to do it?
“I wish I’d been that cautious with my grandmother’s locket, but I always left it hanging from my mirror as sort of a talisman.” Claire bit her lip and went back to buttering the bread, leaving some rather large clumps in one section while barely touching another.
“Don’t beat yourself up,” Daniel said. “It’s not your fault you weren’t raised by a slightly paranoid vet with a penchant for soldiering. Josette has a lot of her dad in her.”
“I am not paranoid.”
Daniel shrugged, and she wanted to slug him. “There’s nothing wrong with being careful,” she told him.
“It’s more than that, and if you’re honest, you’ll admit it. You refuse to have a decent security system, but you practice defensive operative tactics at home.”
“Are you trying to say you can take the soldier out of the battlefield, but you can’t take the training out of the soldier?”
He didn’t smile at her subtle joke like she’d hoped he would. “I’m just saying you’ve got a lot of your dad in you.”
“I’ve never denied that, but I’m not a carbon copy of him.”
His jaw set grimly. “We can’t always control how much of our parents we have in us.”
“Here.” Claire laid a tinfoil-wrapped loaf of garlic bread on the counter, breaking Josie’s eye contact with Daniel. “I’ve spread the butter, but I won’t take responsibility for baking it.”
Josie forced the expected laugh, moving so Claire could get by and put the butter back in the fridge. Her movement put her body into contact with Daniel, and he quickly stepped away, going into the living room without another word. She watched him go, feeling rejected.
Unwilling to focus on Daniel’s confusing behavior when it just led her thoughts into a useless circle, Josie turned to Claire. “Even you can’t get sidetracked and let the bread burn by a computer that isn’t here.”
Claire’s smile faltered, and she sighed. “And isn’t likely to be for a while either.”
“Of course it will. My homeowners’ insurance covers theft. I’ll lend you the money to buy your new laptop until the claim is settled.”
“You really don’t think we’ll get our things back?”
Josie sighed. “No. I don’t. Even when we find the culprits, unless they’re idiots or incredibly cocky, they’ll have destroyed the evidence of the break-in rather than be caught with it.”
Claire didn’t reply, but closed the fridge and scooted around Josie to get out plates for the table.
“Set a place for Hotwire. I’m sure he’ll be here in time for dinner.”
“All right.”
The front door slammed, and Josie’s and Claire’s eyes met.
“What’s the matter with Nitro?” Claire asked.
“I wish I knew.” She hoped it wasn’t that he was preparing to end their newfound intimacy.
She didn’t know what she would do if he expected her to go back to noncontact friendship. Act like the succubus he’d once called her and climb into his bed in the middle of the night with the intent to seduce probably. Wanting him and believing he did not want her but not really knowing what it would mean to have him had been almost bearable.
Wanting him but knowing the addictive and intense emotions she could feel when they were connected physically would be impossible for her to stand. Her sanity would never last staying in the same house with him but not touching.
Not after he’d shown her a kind of pleasure she hadn’t even dreamed about, not to mention a closeness she had never known could exist between two people. When he touched her, they connected on a level far beyond the mere physical.
Didn’t he feel it, too?
The doorbell rang as Josie was pulling her lasagna from the oven.
“I’ll get it,” Claire called from the living room.
Daniel would have told her to wait for him if he didn’t know, with a certainty he could not have explained to someone else, who was on the other side of the door.
“It’s your friend, Hotwire.” Claire’s voice had an odd quality Daniel was in no mood to wonder about at the moment.
He was too busy watching with grim acceptance as Josie quickly set the hot dish down on the counter and ran into the living room to greet the other man. Daniel followed her, arriving in time to see Hotwire wrap Josie up in a hug that required full-body contact.
It lasted several seconds, every one over the first unnecessary excess in Daniel’s opinion.
Claire stood shyly to one side, and Daniel noticed right away that Hotwire didn’t hug her.
“Thank you so much for coming.” Josie smiled up at the blond man as if he’d found the cure for cancer or something.
“It’s no trouble. You’re a friend, Josie.” He turned to Daniel. “Hey, Nitro. I tried to call you last night and early this morning on your cell phone, but I got voice mail. You didn’t call back.”
Daniel hadn’t known his cell phone had almost no signal in the hotel room, so he hadn’t heard it ring. He’d been relieved when he’d listened to the messages after realizing he’d missed two calls because they’d both been from Hotwire. His friend had only wanted to give an ETA for his arrival at PDX and to say he’d had no luck looking for Josie’s dad via the Internet yet.
“I didn’t check until early this afternoon.” When he’d first become aware he’d missed the calls. “By then you were airborne.”
“Why’s that, I wonder?” Hotwire asked, his blue eyes too damn knowing.
“We had a break-in here last night. The whole day has just been crazy,” Josie said, probably thinking she was explaining Daniel’s uncharacteristic behavior.
Hotwire knew better, and his shrewd gaze met Daniel’s. “I was real surprised you didn’t answer last night. You usually sleep with your cell phone beside your bed. And there was no answer when I called Josie’s phone either.”
She sighed. “My cell phone was lost in the fire.”
“I called here. Didn’t any of you hear the phone ring?”
“I was working,” Claire replied, her vague expression giving nothing away of Daniel and Josie’s movements.
She was a discreet roommate, the best kind if you had to have one.
Josie turned an interesting shade of pink, and he waited to see if she would tell Hotwire the truth, but her lips stayed sealed while her moss green eyes assaulted him with mute appeal. Did she want him to explain, or to lie?
He’d never lied to either Wolf or Hotwire, and he wasn’t going to start now. He put his arm around her waist in an unmistakable gesture of possession. “Josie and I weren’t here last night.”
She didn’t pull away, but her body was tenser than that of a member of the NRA at an antiwar rally.
“Where were you?” Hotwire drawled, seemingly endlessly amused by the situation, if the twinkle in his pale eyes was anything to go by.
“We stayed at a hotel.”
“For security reasons?”
“N—”
“Are you hungry?” Josie slotted in before Daniel could even get the word out. “Dinner’s ready.”
She stepped away from him and headed into the kitchen. “You know where everything is, Hotwire. Why don’t you get freshened up while I put the food on the table?”
Josie had known as soon as she stepped away from Daniel that it had been the wrong thing to do. His expression had turned to stone, and he’d been more withdrawn than ever over dinner.
