The In Death Collection Books 26-29 - J.D. Robb [330]
“Hmm. Interesting.”
“And I probably just violated some girl code by saying that, which doesn’t apply to your question anyway.” She pushed her hands through her hair. “I don’t know what I thought of her, exactly, because it was all filtered through that ‘Wait a damn minute, this is Morris’ attitude. Which is embarrassing now that I really think about it.”
“You have a connection. An intimacy. Not all intimacies are sexual. She was an interloper.”
“That’s it.” Eve pointed a finger at him. “That’s exactly it. And she didn’t deserve that from me. She made him happy. Anybody could see it. I’d say, now that I think about it, her apartment didn’t surprise me. The look of it, the neatness of it, because that’s how she struck me. A woman who had things in place, and knew what she liked. Dressed well—not flashy, but well. Sexual. She gave off the sexual and the female more than the cop, but the cop was there. Under it. She took her time, in how she talked, how she moved. That’s a Southern thing, isn’t it? Nothing New York about her. I don’t know.” She shrugged again. “It’s not much.”
“Your instincts on a very brief acquaintance told you she was a woman of subtlety—not flashy. Comfortable with her sexuality, who took her time and who liked order, respected her own tastes, and who was willing to try something new. A new city, a new man. That’s considerable, I’d say. Your instincts and what you’ve learned since confirm that her work was just that to her. Work. It didn’t drive her life. Given that, it’s very possible, isn’t it, that a sexual woman of taste could find herself attracted to a man like Alex Ricker. And he to her. Wouldn’t that relationship, if one developed, have eventually conflicted with her work, or become somewhat problematic?”
“A cop hooking up with a guy with a shady rep?” She arched her eyebrows. “Gee, why should that be a problem?”
He laughed. “We’re different, you and I.” He put his arms around her. “But it’s interesting, isn’t it, to speculate how a similiar situation might go very, very badly.”
“We could’ve taken a turn, ended up—”
He shook his head, touched his lips to hers to stop the words. “No. We were always meant to end up here.” He pressed the release on her weapon harness. “Always meant to find each other. Save each other. Be with each other.”
She laid her hands on his cheeks. “That’s the Irish. But I like the thought of it. Those weird intersects in the past—your father, mine, Ricker. They didn’t stop us from getting here. Roarke.” She lowered her hands, removed her harness. “When Ricker intersected with us again, it screwed us up for a while. I don’t want that to happen again. I don’t want wherever this investigation may lead to cause a rift between us again.”
“I wouldn’t want to see you take this investigation into an area that causes a rift. Same goal,” he said at her frown. “Different angles of approach. Do you want me to promise, Eve, that I won’t get pissed off if you put yourself in Alex Ricker’s sights, as you did with his father? I can’t. The name Ricker makes it personal. There’s no way around that.”
“You have to trust me to do my job, to handle myself.”
“I do. Every day of my life.”
She understood then it was his trust in her, his belief in her that held his fear for her at bay. “Then I’ll promise something. That I’ll try to tell you beforehand whenever I have to deal with Alex Ricker during this investigation.”
“Try?”
“If something comes up, if I can’t take the time, or hell, don’t know ahead of time, then I can’t tell you. I can’t make a promise to you I might have to break.”
“All right. That’s fair enough. I’ll promise to try not to get pissed off.”
She smiled now. “I’ll probably have to do something, and you’ll probably get pissed off.”
“But we’ll have tried.”
“Yeah. So in case trying doesn’t turn out to be enough, let me say this now. I love you.”
The pleasure rose warm in him, circled his heart. Again his arms went around her, again his mouth lowered to hers. “No