Designed for Murder (Killer Style 4)

He spread his legs, giving her better access. Oh yes, he might be all rules and regulations, but he still liked to break them every once in a while. “How do you pick?”

“Whatever catches my eye in the moment.” She rubbed her foot across the now semi-hard bulge in his jeans, loving the way his breath caught as his gaze darkened with desire. “Welcome to the wild side of impulsive food choices. Next thing you know, you’ll be getting grapefruit juice instead of orange. It’ll be anarchy.”

His hand clamped down on her foot, holding it tight against his cock before he pushed it away and closed his legs as best he could in his condition. “Are you busting my chops?”

“I am.” Mika slid her foot back into her shoe while trying to ignore the dampness in her panties.

Carlos’s hungry gaze dropped to her mouth. “I’ll make you pay for that later.”

/> She shivered in the best way and pressed her thighs together. “Promise?”

Chapter Eight

“Style is primarily a matter of instinct.”

—Bill Blass

Twenty-three minutes later, according to the ridiculous timer at their table, Carlos put his fork down on his empty plate. It was hard to go wrong with bacon, and Pippy’s sure hadn’t.

His phone vibrated in his pocket. “Yeah,” he answered.

“You need to bring her down to the station,” Reggie said, his voice sounding as tired as Carlos suddenly felt.

“What did the lab say?”

Mika perked up at his words, and she shot him a questioning glance.

“You’ll find out when you get here, but don’t let her out of your sight.” Reggie paused. “I don’t have anything solid, but this case just went D-bag.”

Carlos hung up without bothering to say good-bye. If Reggie was using the Maltese Security code words for Diamond Tommy Houston being involved, that meant other ears were probably listening in. Harbor City’s biggest crime boss had a bunch of dirty cops in his pocket—not to mention judges and politicians. If he was involved, Mika wasn’t just running from a random whack job, she was fighting for her life.

Playtime at Pippy’s was over. He grabbed the check and stood up. “Come on, we gotta go.”

The drive to the station with Mika was shrouded in silence punctuated by the satisfying snap as Carlos popped his knuckles. Reggie’s cryptic warning continued to run on a loop in his head while he parked the car in the lot and walked to the front entrance. The station loomed above them, worn gray stone and grimy windows.

Mika jolted to a stop at the doors. Color drained out of her face. Either she was still riding the roller coaster of emotion from talking about her sister’s death or she was an even better actress than Ivy. Even thinking of the two of them in the same sentence made his stomach turn. Mika was nothing like Ivy.

“You okay?” Carlos asked, unable to stop himself from reaching out and tucking a stray hair behind her ear.

“I’ll live.” She shrugged off his touch. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”

After giving their names to the bored officer sitting behind the front desk, they were hustled into a small room and the door was shut behind them. There was a coffee pot, a small sink, and cabinets on one wall along with a corkboard with a sign-up sheet for the police vs. firefighters hockey game. They had obviously decorated to look as little like an interrogation room as possible and had missed the mark by a mile.

A narrow table sat in the middle of the room—two chairs on one side and a single chair with an opening cut into the arm that was the perfect size to slip through the chain on a pair of handcuffs. A two-way mirror took up half of the wall across from the single chair. A small surveillance camera stood sentinel near the ceiling on the wall opposite the two chairs. The green light blinking above the lens testified to its operational capabilities.

This was not going to be a friendly chat.

The door opened and Reggie walked in. He wasn’t smiling.

“Thanks for coming in so quickly, Mika. We appreciate it.” Reggie turned to face Carlos. “Why don’t you wait in the break room? This shouldn’t take long.”

That would totally explain the ice in the air.

Every nerve in Carlos’s body was on full alert. “I think I’ll stay.”

“But I don’t need any information from you,” Reggie said.

The emphasis on from was slight, but it was there. He didn’t need information from Carlos, but he had it for him. Why keep the information off the police department’s computer system if he was going to share it now? Who else was snooping for the same information? There was more going on here than just a strong whiff of Diamond Tommy. Reggie might be alone, but the setup in the interrogation room that wasn’t an interrogation room had Carlos’s skin crawling.