“Charmaine Delacroix, Lieutenant Dallas. Charmaine’s an interior designer I’ve worked with on a number of projects. Including the dojo.”
“Wonderfully minimalistic,” Charmaine said, “yet far from rigid or Spartan.”
Roarke subtly angled himself between her and Eve. “Do you have everything you need?”
“Absolutely. I can’t wait to get started. I’ll have some options for you by next week. Wonderful to meet you,” she said to Eve. “I know the way out.”
Eve gave her five seconds to beat feet, then rounded on Roarke. “You let somebody prowl around my office.”
“I had a designer come in, get a feel for it, measure, and would have been in here with her the entire time—though she’s perfectly trustworthy—but there was a call I had to take.”
“Why does some designer have to get a feel for my office? It’s my office, isn’t it? And where’s my goddamn murder board?”
“I put it away, as you wouldn’t want anyone not involved to see it. And if you hadn’t come home unexpectedly, it would’ve been back in place.”
Outrage wanted to blow the top of her skull through the ceiling. “So it’s okay if I don’t know the difference? It’s okay if I go into your office, take things and put them somewhere else, tell somebody to come right on in, as long as you don’t know about it?”
“If you had a reason to, as I did.”
“What possible reason did you have for moving my murder board, for letting some humming woman into my space?”
“‘Humming’?”
“She was humming. For Christ’s sake.”
“I suppose she has a cheerful disposition. The reason was to surprise you with some ideas for redoing your space.”
Another round of outrage wanted to blow flames out of her ears.
“Why do I need ideas for redoing it? It’s fine. It was just fine for you, too, when you put it together so I’d move in here. What, now it’s not good enough? Not fancy enough?”
His eyes chilled to blue ice. “If you’re going to deliberately be an ass, if you insist on raving over something this simple, we can talk about it when you’re not.”
“I’m an ass? You start messing with my space, and I’m an ass?”
“People change, Eve. They change their minds, their attitudes, their look, and often the look of their spaces. I thought, after this amount of time, you might be ready for a change here, in this space, to have it reflect what’s now rather than the past. Obviously, you’re not. But that’s not why you’re an ass. You’re an ass for being so pathetically insecure you’d react as if you’d walked in on the two of us naked and banging each other on your precious desk.
“I still have work.”
She set her teeth as he walked back toward his office. “If I’d walked in on that, you better believe I’d have used my weapon. On both of you.”
“That’s something, I suppose,” he said, and shut his office door.
9
Oh, she hated when he did that. Hated when she was primed for a good, bloody fight and he just iced over and walked away from it.
And he knew she hated it.
Her instinct was to bang right through that door and battle on, but . . . He’d probably like that, wouldn’t he? She paced and prowled around her office. Her space! He’d just love it if she went barging in, raging on, while he sat there with his scary Roarke iced calm.
She knew how to get through the ice, oh yeah, she did. She knew which buttons to push to bring on the heat. But he’d probably like that, too. He’d just love being able to think he’d been reasonable while she barged and raged and bitched.
She wouldn’t give him the fucking satisfaction.
Screw it. She’d come home to take an hour to clear her head, she’d take the damn hour.
She stalked out of her office, snarled all the way to the bedroom, where the cat’s full, pudgy length was sprawled across the center of the bed.