Twin Temptation

“In the morning, I’ll have Dino see what he can dig up on this club. And I want to get to Eva Ware Designs before anyone else does, including the police. I’m still thinking that I saw the spider logo somewhere when we were there today. I’ll also fill Stanton in. He’s going to be questioning everyone at the store tomorrow. He might as well ask if any of them have been to the Golden Spider.” Jase smiled slowly. “That may just stir something up.”

Maddie narrowed her eyes. “You want to stir something up, don’t you?”

Jase’s smile faded. “You bet I do.”

He pressed down hard on the anger that had been simmering inside him ever since he’d seen that car in his peripheral vision. “I want to get my hands on the bastard who nearly ran us down and who killed your mother.”

Just saying the words had an image he’d been battling against for hours running through his head—Maddie lying in that street, bleeding. Lifeless.

Ruthlessly he blanked it out, but beneath his rage something else—determination—iced.

“Me too. Got any ideas?”

“Not yet.” That was the hell of it. “I’m drawing a blank. Not even the spiderweb makes sense—yet. But it will. Investigative work is a matter of gathering pieces that don’t seem to fit and then finally seeing the whole picture.”

His cell phone rang and he fished it out of his pocket. The caller ID told him it was Stanton; he tilted the phone so that Maddie could hear too. “Yeah?”

“Mixed news. I’ve gotten nowhere with Michelle Tan, and Cho Li has yet to appear at his apartment.”

“Could something have happened to him?” Maddie asked.

“I doubt it. One of the uniforms watching the building chatted up the doorman. The guy claims Cho stays out all night two or three times a week.”

“Maybe he has a lady friend,” Jase said.

“That’s my first guess. I’ll have my men bring him in as soon as he shows up. We’re having better luck with Eva Ware’s car. It was parked in her garage. The dent on the hood and the fabric we found on the undercarriage suggest that it was used to run her down. I hope to have lab results confirming that tomorrow. There’s no garage attendant on duty. The gate can only be opened with an electronic key card. You find anything like that in her effects?”

“No. No spare car keys either,” Jase said.

“So someone close to her could have seized an opportunity to lift both,” Stanton mused. “There’s a surveillance camera that takes pictures of anyone leaving or entering the garage. I’m hoping to have the tapes early tomorrow, and we may get lucky. Anything new on your end?”

“Have you ever heard of a night club called the Golden Spider?”

“Can’t say that I have.”

“Eva referred to it a few times in her appointment calendar, and I’m going to have Dino check it out in the morning.”

“I’ve got a friend over in Vice. I’ll see what I can find out.”

Jase repocketed his cell, then turned to Maddie. “My gut instinct tells me that things are going to start to move quickly tomorrow. That’s one of the reasons I want to arrive at Eva Ware Designs before anyone else does. I always found when going into an op, it paid to get there early.”

“How can I help?”

“Depending on how the morning goes, we may have to improvise on the spot.” He thought of what she’d done with Michelle, playing the sympathetic cop. “Think you can follow my lead?”

She met his eyes, lifted her chin. “You haven’t lost me yet, have you?”

“No.” He leaned down and kissed her mouth softly. He meant to keep it short, sweet, but he couldn’t resist lingering, luring. I nearly lost her. When he felt himself sinking, he reluctantly drew away.

“Let’s try a different tack.” He pushed aside the notes he’d jotted down and handed her a blank piece of hotel stationary. “How good are you at sketching faces?”

She stared at him. “Sketching faces?”

“Yeah. I want you to draw likenesses of the people who may have had access to the security codes at Eva Ware Designs.”

Maddie began with a quick drawing of her cousin Adam. Jase passed her a second sheet and she attacked Cho.

As he watched her pen fly across the page, he marveled at how good she was. She was biting down on her lower lip, concentrating hard. He’d seen Jordan do the same thing sitting at her computer.

“I have photos of everyone in the files that Jordan prepared for me.”

“That would spoil the experiment. You’re like your mother. You think while you draw.”

“Oh.”

Her hand paused for a moment, then continued to fly across page after page. The sketches were clever and insightful caricatures. She managed to accurately capture Adam’s ego, Arnold Bartlett’s pomposity, Cho’s serenity and Michelle’s eagerness and seeming innocence.

“Where did you learn to do this?” he asked.

She glanced at him. “In high school, I worked on the school newspaper.”

“Try Carleton and Dorothy.”

At her raised eyebrow, he elaborated, “If Adam had access to the security codes, theoretically so did they.”

When she’d finished, he lined the sketches up in two lines. “If Michelle, Cho, or Arnold robbed the store and Eva suspected one of them, their jobs would be at stake and there would have been a scandal that would have made the front pages of the newspapers.”

“But if family was behind it—” Maddie lined up Adam, Dorothy and Carleton next to the others “—then the scandal would go even deeper. Eva might have been afraid that the store or the business would have been hurt.”

For a few moments, silence stretched between them as they studied the two columns they’d fashioned out of the drawings.

“It all comes back to the same old suspects—someone in the family or someone employed by Eva Ware Designs.”

“The question is, who has the most at stake?” Jase said.

“And if Eva’s murder is related to the robbery, who stood to gain from both?”

Jase gave her shoulders a squeeze, then gathered up her sketches and stacked them into a pile. “Enough for tonight. Sometimes I find the best way to shine new light on a problem is to sleep on it.” He rose, drawing her to her feet with him. “Let’s go to bed.”

14

TAKING her hand, Jase drew Maddie with him into the bedroom. When they reached the bed, he said, “I haven’t let you sleep much.”

Maddie smiled at him. “I think that I made my contribution to the no-sleep agenda.”When she reached for him, he took her hands and raised them to his lips. “Something’s happening between us, Maddie. Something I don’t quite understand.” But he thought he did understand. He was very much afraid that he was falling in love with Maddie Farrell. And it had him feeling jittery.

It gave him some satisfaction when he saw the change in her eyes. Perhaps he wasn’t the only one feeling a bit out of his depth.

“You feel it too,” he said.

“Yes. A little. I’ve given it some thought, and I think it would be wrong to make too much of it. We’ve been on a roller-coaster ride, emotionally, physically.”

Impatience flared but he tamped it down.

“We’re smart. We’re adults.”

Her fingers had tensed in his.

“What we’re feeling right now—”

“Is real,” he insisted.

“Perhaps. But it could fade when the crisis is over.”

Knowing the value of keeping an opponent off balance, Jase raised their joined hands and kissed her fingers. “You may be right. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

But he was pretty sure his feelings weren’t going to fade. He’d just have to convince her that hers weren’t going to either. “We have an early morning. I think we should go to bed.”

“I thought you’d never ask.” Her hands were already busy, gripping the hem of his T-shirt and pulling it up and over his head. But he intended to keep the pace slow. Even when they tumbled onto the bed and began to strip off the rest of their clothes, he kept nibbling her mouth, tasting, teasing. He wanted, no, he needed to savor her—something he hadn’t allowed himself to do before.

Her taste was familiar now, sweet, potent, drugging. And yet each time their mouths clung, separated, then fused again, there was something new.

Her hands moved faster than his and he felt the energy in her, heard her moan his name and sensed the imminence of the all-consuming fire. Still, he fought to keep it at bay.

“You don’t have to seduce me,” she whispered.

But he did. He wasn’t sure if it was for her or him. But he did.

She framed his face with her hands and whispered against his mouth, “I want you.”

The three words took his breath away as surely as a sucker punch to the gut. He felt his head spin, his heartbeat quicken. He levered himself up far enough that he could see her. In the moonlight pouring through the window, her skin was pale, delicate. Her hair the color of spun gold. He took out the pins and threaded his fingers through it.

“Jase…”

“I just want to look and touch.” With one finger, he traced her forehead, her cheekbones, then moved along her jawline to her throat where her pulse beat hard and fast. He continued to touch her—breasts, stomach, thighs—and then he took his mouth on the same journey. Desire stabbed through him when the hands on his shoulders went lax and she began to tremble. Little by little he lost himself in the sound of her breath catching, then releasing on the whisper of his name.