Red-Hot & Reckless

He watched her slender throat work around a swallow. Alex decided he liked the blond wig. It was short and sassy and showed her neck and shoulders off in a sexily elegant way.

Nicole said, “I can’t help you.”

“Why?”

She slanted a gaze in his direction as if addressing a particularly slow child. “The code.”

“Ah,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “You mean honor among thieves and all that.”

She smiled at him, but there was little or no amusement in the action. “Something like that.”

“And what do you think your fellow thieves would think of you targeting them for theft, then leaving them alone to take the fall?”

Color flushed her cheeks as she cursed under her breath. “You wouldn’t dare.”

At this point, Alex would.

Dark Man had plagued him throughout his eight-year career with the N.Y.P.D. He even suspected that the thief’s first known job at a small folk art museum in SoHo had coincided with Alex’s first day on the job in robbery/homicide.

But it wasn’t just that Dark Man was a thorn in his side, or that Alex wanted to settle a score like you see in those macho “B” movies or dime-store novels.

No. He needed to get him because he was no longer a harmless thief. He was a serial killer who seemed to enjoy taking people’s lives more than the loot.

And no one, nowhere, had a clue as to his real identity.

Oh, sure, the police had worked up a psychological profile on him. Mid-thirties. Loner. Classic passive-aggressive with sociopathic tendencies. But Alex could have told you that just reading the crime reports. The thief taunted his victims before killing them. Goaded them into risking their lives for material objects, then appeared to take great joy in making them pay for such a shallow move.

But the police profiler had also said that Dark Man would be a good-looking man. Popular with the ladies. Perhaps even a man well known in the public sector.

Did Nicole know him?

Alex discovered that during his thought processes he’d placed his hand on her bare knee and was lightly tracing circles on her pale skin with his thumb. If she did know who Dark Man was, he knew straight-out asking her wouldn’t get the intended results.

But forcing her to work with him…well, that was an altogether different tack that he hoped would yield him the man he’d been searching for so long. His determination had little to do with the fact that the insurance company had paid out a great deal of money to cover the items he’d stolen. It had everything to do with his belief that the only room the guy was entitled to inhabit was an eight-by-eight prison cell for the rest of his unnatural life.

Alex raised his eyes to look into Nicole’s, only she was watching his thumb make those lazy circles.

He removed his hand.

She moved her leg out of the way, then reached up to draw the blond wig from her head. Alex watched, fascinated, as she removed one, then two pins and her silky dark hair swept down to frame her pale face, in one blink taking her from icy cold temptress to dangerously sexy seductress.

“How do you think I can help you?”

Risky question, that, he thought as his gaze dropped to where her dark hair teased her nipples through the thin black fabric of her dress. His mouth watered just remembering the tangy taste of her skin. Her instant, uninhibited response.

Had he ever been with a woman so spontaneous? A woman who knew straight off what she wanted, no game-playing, no wondering if it was too soon or if she would look too bad if she revealed she wanted him as badly as he wanted her?

Oh, and Alex definitely wanted Nicole. Just like a sinner who couldn’t help but sin.

He got up from the bed and held out his hand. She instantly dropped the two hairpins into his palm.

“You have the uncanny ability to know when something’s going to happen before it does,” he told her.

The cuffs clanked against the iron headboard as she propped the wig on one of the two iron posts. “How long, exactly, have you been watching me?”

Alex pocketed the pins, then picked up the pajamas and refolded them, thinking of the countless photographs of her that covered the corkboard in his office at work. “Long enough.”

“Mmm.” He watched her recross her legs in a slow, languid way designed to drive any man mad. “And did it make you…hot? You know, watching me when I didn’t know you were?”

Alex couldn’t seem to take his gaze away from her slender thighs, still hearing the sound of skin sliding against skin.

“You know, watching me, but not being able to touch me?”

Alex forced his gaze up to her face. “My surveillance was of a strictly professional nature.”

She considered him for a long moment, then held up the hand bearing the metal shackles. “And I take it this is a new addition to the insurance investigator’s handbook?”

Alex cracked a grin.

She shook her head, appearing to fight her own smile. “You’re a naughty, naughty boy, Alex…”

“Cassavetes,” he offered.

Her eyes narrowed slightly, then she relaxed. “Cassavetes. I should have guessed when you told me Astoria. Greek, right?”

He ran his hand through his hair then sighed. “You couldn’t be more Greek unless you lived in Greece.”

He wasn’t exactly sure why he’d offered up that little bit of information as he placed the folded pajamas next to her again.

His family, immediate and extended, seemed to exist in a sort of isolated cultural vacuum. His parents had moved to New York from the Peloponnese right after he was born, bringing his father’s widowed mother with them. Then five years later, his mother’s two brothers and a female cousin had come over, as well. His grandmother, right up until she had died a couple years ago, had never learned to communicate in English. And almost all of his uncle’s shoe repair business was conducted in Greek.

Of course, he and his younger sister, Athena, were the only ones in the family to dare venture beyond the borough boundaries, Alex to work in a precinct in lower Manhattan, Athena to work in a restaurant in Little Italy, committing the worst of all crimes by not only rejecting her own heritage, but seeming to adopt that of another country.

What went unsaid was that they were already living under the flag of yet another country.

Strangely, though, his family was proud of their Greek-American heritage and dedicatedly displayed both flags outside both their house and at their corner supermarket in Astoria.

Nicole cleared her throat. “You know, I’ve always wondered…how do you say ‘sex’ in Greek?”

He bet she’d always wondered. More likely, she was looking for a way to throw him off track. And it was working. “Sex.”

She laughed. “No. Seriously.”

“I am serious.”

She considered him for a long moment. “Okay, then. Although it’s not much a part of my vocabulary…what about ‘love’?”

“Agapee,” he said automatically.