Keeping his gaze focused on the people filing past, he popped the knuckles on his left hand. “If it’s not you, then we need to figure out who it is.”
She pressed her hand to her stomach. “You don’t believe me.”
He turned to face her. Where last night there had been a warmth in his chocolate brown eyes, now there only remained a dull lukewarm flatness. “I don’t believe most of what people tell me.”
It was like he was a rule-book-following, just-the-facts vampire—except at sunset he turned into a human being instead of a bloodsucker. The realization set her heart hammering against her ribs as the fury she’d been craving from him rushed through her veins. The asshole. She hadn’t done a damn thing wrong, and sitting on the bench, acting like her judge and jury, had obviously given him a butt full of splinters.
“Who peed on your cornflakes?”
Not even a flicker of emotion crossed his face. “It doesn’t matter.”
Her hand was on the door latch before she realized what she was doing. The metal latch felt cool against her overheated skin. All she wanted to do was break free from the oppressive atmosphere in the car, but it wasn’t the right move. She could feel it in her gut as sure as she knew the moment she’d started dancing with Carlos at Feeny’s that he wasn’t just an ordinary guy. The stakes were beyond higher now. The people she loved needed her—and she needed him to figure out who was behind the attacks. Total jerkface or not, she needed him to solve this case before more of her friends got hurt—or worse. No one knew better than her that blood didn’t wash away easily from responsible hands.
She released the latch, one finger at a time. “So what now?”
“Where did you get the material for the vestments?”
“Durning Imports.”
“You know them well?” he asked.
“I worked for them as an in-house designer before I branched out on my own. I’d design the fabric and it would be manufactured outside of the U.S. and shipped in. They still give me the employee discount, so I get most of my material from there.” She paused, remembering the detective sliding the paper showing the pitiful financial picture of her life. “Money’s tight.”
Carlos looked at her, really looked at her, and censure snapped in his eyes. “Why is that?”
“You ever started a business? It’s not cheap.” Not when measured in blood, sweat, tears, and money. She’d put everything she had into starting her own textile design studio, plus a lot that she didn’t in the form of credit cards. That was a year ago. Money was finally rolling back into the business. It wasn’t a flood, but it wasn’t a constant drain anymore, either.
The pop-pop-pop of Carlos snapping his way toward knuckle arthritis broke the silence in the car before he turned the key in the ignition and the motor purred to life. “Let’s go chat up the good people at Durning Imports before the cops do. Where’s it at?”
“Not far. Fifty-eighth and Alexander.”
He pulled out of the bank parking lot and took a right onto Fifty-eighth street. It was a sixteen-block drive, but traffic was streaming along. After a few blocks, they went from a mix of residential and commercial to the solely commercial fashion district with its large industrial buildings that had been divided up decades ago and refurbished into sewing rooms, design studios, and import business headquarters. Durning Imports was in a ten-story brick building a few blocks down.
“Tell me about them.”
“It’s a family business run by a father-and-son team, Horace and Roger Durning. They’ve been in business forever.” She tried to picture the cue-ball-bald Horace and harmlessly preppy Roger as evil drug lords. The image would have made her giggle if she hadn’t been stuck in the car with the one man in the world who was so damned determined to think the worst of her at every turn. “There’s nothing hinky about them at all.”
They passed by the brick building with the Durning Imports sign and he maneuvered the car into a tight parallel spot half a block away. “What about the employees?”
“They’re all long-term people. I was the first person to quit in, like, fifteen years.”
“What are they, a cult?”
She snorted, offended on the Durnings’ behalf. “No, they’re good people, which maybe you’d see if you didn’t just look for the negative in everything.”
“We’ll see.”
He reached across the car to the passenger side, leaning so close to her that she couldn’t help but inhale his warm, inviting s
cent, and popped open the glove box. While she tried to rein in all the hormones that had woken up and decided that assholes made the best lovers, he fished out a small case the size of a slim deck of cards, seemingly unaffected by being near her. It wasn’t until he leaned back against his own seat and slipped the case in his pocket that his words penetrated.
“What do you mean, ‘we’ll see’?”
“You keep father and son busy; I’m going to take a look around, see what I can find.”
The Durnings had hired her straight out of fashion school. They’d given her a chance. Snooping around their office seemed a lot like betrayal. If there was any other choice…
“This is ridiculous.”