.
well.”
“I’m not an officer. I’m a detective. Big difference.”
“I beg your pardon.”
Raphael smiled graciously. “Bottom line, honey, you’re stuck with me if you want to see justice served.”
Kate nodded thoughtfully.
She should have been fighting it a bit more, he thought. This victory was feeling a little too easy.
“Okay,” she said finally. “Go take your shower. I’ll make us some breakfast. Then I’ll let you come to the diner with me so you can play watchdog.”
“Damn it—”
“Stop swearing.”
“Get used to it.”
“I will not.”
“You’re not getting it here! I need to look for this guy! I can’t do that from a diner!”
“You just said he was going to come to me.”
“He will. He’ll try. I want to nail him first! I can’t do that if I’m baby-sitting you!”
“That’s your job!”
“It’s my assignment. I can do it my own damned way. And my way is to keep an eye on you while I try to unravel this mess.”
“Not without my consent.”
He was going to kill her, Raphael thought. End of problem.
He’s going to kill me, Kate thought. She saw his hands clench at his sides, and he did have that gun tucked behind him somewhere. She took a judicious step backward until her spine came in contact with the refrigerator.
She did not want to die. She most definitely did want someone good watching her back until this was over. But that only made it doubly important that they set some ground rules here.
“Look,” they said simultaneously.
Kate waved a hand. “Go ahead. You first. You will anyway.”
“We need a plan here,” Raphael replied.
This time her brows positively arched. “A plan? You want to make a plan?”
“Right.”
“Such as?”
“If I had one, we wouldn’t need one.”
“Unless, of course, it was diametrically opposed to my own.” His eyes went to slits. Kate held a hand up, palm out. “Okay, okay. Go ahead. You were saying?”
“Call in to the diner for one morning until we can figure out how we’re going to do this.”
She hated, positively hated to admit it, but it made sense.
“They’ll understand!” he argued at her silence. “A man dropped dead into your dinner plate last night!”
“Actually, it was a salad plate.”
“What the hell difference does it make?” he shouted.
Kate flinched. “One morning?”
“And then we’ll take it from there.”
Kate knew, somehow, that it was the best she was going to get. Besides, she saw an advantage to letting him win this one. It was a matter of give and take, she reasoned. Dinner For Two had an engagement this evening. Talking him into letting her do both seemed like something of a long shot. She’d give in on the less important of the two issues. The dinner engagement was something they could get into later.
“Okay.” She put the milk down and reached for the phone. But she didn’t punch in the number right away. She watched him turn away and head for the hall, still shirtless. She took in those broad, bare shoulders. They moved nicely with his stride, with that grace that was all male. She contemplated the movement of muscle beneath skin that looked like pale bronze. Kate put the phone down again quickly and rubbed her palms on her khakis to dry them.
He paused at the door to the hall. “You wouldn’t want to have kept that milk anyway.”
“Why not?” she asked, startled.
“Because I drank right out of the carton.”
He heard her make that strangling sound again. Raphael went on toward the bathroom, imagining her expression, grinning to himself. Regardless of the fact that he didn’t want the prize, winning felt damned good, he decided.
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