Happy New Year--Baby! Page 7

  A whirling, grinding sound filled the air. The impotent buzz they’d heard in the morning was a thing of the past.

  Like Henry Ford gesturing at the very first automobile as it came off the assembly line, Dennis motioned toward the sink.

  “Ma’am,” he drawled, “I give you your garbage disposal.”

  Nicole looked down at it. Such a little thing, such a huge inconvenience. She was grateful to him.

  She turned her eyes up to Dennis’s face. “I feel guilty about this. I’ve taken up the better part of your Saturday.”

  He liked her choice of words. “It was only the better part because I spent it with you.”

  Nicole shook her head. “Like I said, you have a very low threshold of pleasure.”

  Dennis paused, studying her face for a moment. Her eyes were beautiful, he thought. “Do you really feel guilty?”

  She’d said as much, hadn’t she? “Yes.” Nicole stretched out the word as she wondered where this was leading to.

  Had she been wearing that scent all day? Why had he just noticed it now? And why did it feel as if it were filling him? She was frowning thoughtfully, but she made him think of the sun, trying its damnedest to peer out from behind a cloud.

  “Okay. Do you want to pay me back?”

  Instantly, she braced herself. Here it came. The payoff. What did he expect to get from her? Nicole looked at him warily. “How?”

  “Dinner.” He stooped down and began to clear away the mess he’d left on the floor. Tools clinked as they joined others in the toolbox. He screwed the lid back on the jar of putty, then tucked the old disposal into the box the new one had been packed in.

  Nicole wasn’t certain if it was a question or an answer. She took it as a question and met it with one of her own. “I don’t understand. If you take me out for dinner, how will that be my paying you back?”

  Finished, he rose again. Dennis leaned a hip against the edge of the counter. “I was thinking of you cooking it.”

  “Oh.” Reflexively, she glanced at the refrigerator. She could probably whip up something. “Okay. What would you like?”

  The food didn’t really matter. What mattered was the opportunity to continue talking to her. And if he found that rather pleasant, well, he couldn’t be faulted for liking his work. “Anything that would be easy for you would be fine.”

  Her eyes shifted to the wall phone. “Picking up the telephone and calling for pizza.”

  “Whatever. I’m easy.”

  “Apparently.” The thought of cooking for someone suddenly pleased her. It had been a long time since she had. Whenever Craig was around, they would eat out. “All right, you want a home-cooked meal, you’ll get a home-cooked meal.” She’d kibitzed while he had worked on the disposal, but she didn’t want him looking over her shoulder while she cooked. “Now go home and come back at seven.”

  So far, so good. Dennis crossed to the door. “Best offer I’ve had all day.”

  Nicole looked at the defunct disposal now reposing in the open box. “Yeah, right.” She remembered the chicken breasts she had in the freezer. “How do you feel about chicken?”

  He paused, his hand on the door. “That depends. To eat or as a pet?”

  Nicole stared at him. “For a basically simple man, you say the strangest things, Lincoln.”

  You have no idea. “That’s because I’m trying to get you to smile.”

  Suspicion rubbed elbows with an odd sense of pleasure. “Why?”

  He looked down into her face, smiling himself. “Because I think that it looks good on you.” Before he could stop himself, he cupped her cheek. “Really good.” Dennis felt the muscles in Nicole’s face stiffening. He dropped his hand to his side. “Sorry, I’m a toucher. My sister says that if my hands were tied behind my back, I probably couldn’t express myself at all.” He saw the wariness in her eyes dissipate a little. Maybe he had played this a little too far, but the move had been natural. She had drawn it from him. “Dinner still on?”

  “Why not? The chicken’s already dead.”

  He laughed. “Can’t have it die for nothing. Seven, right?”

  “Seven,” she echoed, closing the door behind him.

  She turned away just as his voice floated in from the other side of the door. “Flip the lock.”

  She’d forgotten. It was his fault. He had rattled her, unsettling her common sense.

  Nicole flipped the lock in slow motion, deliberately elaborating on the sound. “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She could hear the grin in his voice. Odd that it didn’t annoy her.

  With a shake of her head, Nicole went to see if there was anything creative that she could do with the chicken presently residing in her freezer.

  All in all, she had to admit that it wasn’t all that bad, having a “neighborly” neighbor—just as long as the line remained drawn there.

  She wasn’t aware that she had started humming.

  But, listening on the other side of her door, Dennis was. The sound seemed to seep into his being. It was oddly soothing. Something vaguely akin to guilt stirred within him.

  He ignored it as he went to his own apartment.

  Chapter 5

  He arrived promptly at seven, holding a slim-necked light green bottle aloft. “I brought wine for the chicken.”

  “I’m sure the chicken will be very happy with it.” She took it from him. It felt cold to the touch. “You chilled it.”

  She had changed, he noted. She was wearing a soft jade dress that cascaded over her body, almost guarding her secret. Had she been a couple of months less pregnant, he might not have guessed her condition.

  “Seemed like the thing to do with wine.”

  “But I can’t drink it,” she admonished. “It wouldn’t be good for the baby.”

  He was ahead of her. Leaving Winston’s night shift replacement, Dombrowski, on the alert, he had made a quick stop at the store. It had taken some looking on his part. Dennis pointed to the label. “It’s nonalcoholic.”

  She glanced at it. “Oh.” Nicole raised her eyes to his. He looked good tonight. Very good. But then, he’d looked very good this morning as well. Don’t start, she warned herself. “You think of everything.”

  “I try,” he replied glibly. He followed her to the dining room. Nicole set the bottle on the table beside the main course.

  The aroma pervading the small apartment smelled tempting. As did she. Except for her very rounded stomach, Nicole looked exactly the way she did in the photograph he had in his file on the case. Sunshine and sex in a short skirt.

  It was hard to get that image out of his mind.

  Dinner was ready. Anticipating his arrival, she had just set the main course on the table when he had rung the bell. She gestured toward it. “We might as well begin.”

  Nicole felt a nervous little ripple flutter through her, as if she were entertaining someone other than just a neighbor who’d been stubbornly kind enough to come to her aid.

  She dismissed the feeling. The tension that was strumming over her nerves was due to Standish and his ghoulish threat last night, not because of the man who was in her apartment now. So he was sexy in a clean-cut sort of way, so what? She’d had her shots against sexy. And against vulnerable feelings.

  Turning around to face him, Nicole laced her fingers together. “You never told me what I owe you for the disposal.”

  With a practiced eye, Dennis surveyed the table. There was a large, crystal bowl filled with garden salad, another with white rice. In the center was a bowl of a red sauce with chunks of chicken floating in it. The aroma knotted his stomach, reminding him that he really hadn’t eaten very much all day.

  “No,” he agreed, “I never did.”

  She ran her hand along the back of her chair as she looked at him expectantly. “Well?”

  He indicated the dinner. “I’ll take the replacement cost to maintenance. As for labor, consider it paid in full. One garbage disposal installation for one dinner.” T
he sauce looked like marinara, but he could be wrong. Dennis raised a brow as he looked down at her. “So, what was the chicken’s ultimate fate?”

  “Cacciatore.” Determined to cook him a meal he’d remember, she had made the sauce from scratch. As she did with everything she put her hand to, Nicole had taken a few liberties with the recipe, adding a generous dose of mozzarella cheese along with a number of spices and seasonings. She liked putting her own stamp on things. “My own version.”

  “Sounds intriguing.” Dennis helped her with her chair. “A little like its creator.”

  Nicole had grown leery of flattery. She’d learned the hard way that its function was usually to hide the truth from the unsuspecting.

  “Augmentor, not creator. And I’m not intriguing,” she said firmly.

  Dennis turned his attention to the wine. Having brought his own corkscrew, he began to work the tip into the cork.

  “Intrigue is another word for mystery and I have to drag almost everything out of you. I’d say that makes you intriguing.” The cork came out of the bottle with a resounding pop.

  She offered her goblet up to him. Rosy red liquid flowed into the glass. “What I’d say was intriguing was why you want to drag everything out of me in the first place.”

  He poured a little wine into his own goblet, then tapped the cork back into place. “Simple, I like knowing answers.”

  Well, whether he did or not, she wasn’t about to give him any. She didn’t like talking about herself. Or the mistakes she’d made.

  “Sometimes the answers are disappointing.” Nicole toyed with the liquid in her glass for a moment, then set it down beside her plate. “Better to sustain the aura of mystery.”

  He moved toward the salad, picking up the tongs. “In this case, I don’t think so.” Capturing a fair amount of lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers, Dennis deposited them in her salad bowl.

  Nicole took the tongs from him. “You fixed the disposal. This time I’ll serve.”

  “This time,” he repeated, rolling the words over on his tongue. “Does that mean that there’s going to be a next time?”

  She couldn’t decide whether he was as innocent as he seemed, or a very clever operator.

  “I was referring to the last time. Yesterday.” She handed him the bottle of dressing. “You don’t look like the pushy type.”

  Blue cheese poured out of the bottle, slowly covering his serving. “That places the element of surprise in my corner.” He passed the bottle to her. “Seriously, I just like knowing things about my friends.”

  The lie felt heavy on his tongue. She wasn’t a friend, she was someone he was investigating, someone he was subtly pumping for information. It was all part of his job. So why did he feel dirty doing it? Just because she had the bluest eyes he’d ever seen, filled with pain and innocence, shouldn’t have any bearing on the situation.

  But it did.

  She paused, her fork suspended above her salad as she slanted a look at him. She’d never had a man as just a friend. Her relationships before Craig had been instantaneous and intense. Labeled wild by her father years before she graduated high school, she had looked for love and acceptance in all the wrong arms. No one had ever just extended a hand in friendship to her before.

  “We’re friends?”

  His smile was easy. “I spent the morning on my back in your kitchen, I’d say that makes us friends.” Dennis moved his bowl aside. “You don’t do that for just an acquaintance.”

  Nicole watched as he helped himself to a large serving of rice and then the chicken cacciatore. Either his eyes were larger than his stomach, or he had a tapeworm. If he ate like that regularly, she opted for the tapeworm theory.

  “I wouldn’t,” she agreed. Nicole took a small spoonful of rice herself, then covered it with an equal amount of cacciatore. She’d been gaining too much weight lately, even eating for two. “But I think you would.”

  “Maybe,” he conceded. Dennis felt as if they were shadowboxing. The conversation needed substance. It needed to unfold and he had a hunch that she wouldn’t do the honors on her own. “I’ll make it easy on you. I’ll start.”

  Like a rabbit surviving the tail end of hunting season when it heard a gunshot, Nicole was instantly alert. “Start what?”

  The first mouthful slid down his throat, salvos of flavor announcing its passage. He raised his fork a fraction in acknowledgment. “Good.”

  She hardly tasted hers. Her taste buds seemed to be scrambled. “Thank you.”

  “And to answer your question, I’ll start the dialogue going.”

  He savored another forkful before continuing. Dennis noted the pleased look in her eyes as she watched him. Logan probably hadn’t stuck around long enough to appreciate her cooking. Or any of her other finer points, either. The man had been an idiot.

  “You already know that I have a younger sister. Moira.” He smiled as he said his sister’s name. “She’s kind of a free spirit. Moira teaches English Lit at UCLA and keeps a menagerie on the side.” His voice sobered a little as he continued. “My mother, Beatrice, died two years ago.” He’d been on assignment and hadn’t been able to get back in time. He’d left his mother a frail woman in a hospital bed and returned to see her in her casket. He supposed that was when the job had begun turning sour on him.

  “I’m sorry.” The words came automatically. The sympathy a step behind.

  At least he’d had a mother, one who hadn’t walked out on him.

  He nodded. As with the death of his father, he’d gotten accustomed to the loss. But never comfortable with it.

  “Yeah, me too. I miss her a lot.” He thought of Christmas. Though he wasn’t sentimental, somehow it was hardest then. “Especially around the holidays.” He banished the encroaching mood. How had they turned down this corner, anyway? He saw the look in her eyes and realized that inadvertently, he had managed to take a step further with her touching on his own life. “Basically, Moira and I are the only family we have.”

  “Father gone?” The question seemed to flow naturally from her lips. It surprised her. She never pried. Questions begat questions. And she didn’t want to be on the receiving end.

  “Yeah. A long time ago.” He’d been a casualty of the gambling sickness, just like her husband had been. Except that his father had killed himself, shamed by the depth to which he had brought his family. Logan’s death had been orchestrated by a hand other than his own.

  Dennis didn’t think she knew that.

  He took a sip of wine to clear his palate. Nonalcoholic wine wasn’t half bad, he decided. At least it kept his senses clear. He raised his glass toward her. “Your turn.”

  Like the legendary gopher confronted with its shadow, she instantly retreated. Her attention reverted to her plate. “I never said I’d take a turn.”

  “You have to,” he said simply, as if there were no arguing the point. “You’re the only other one here and we’ve already done my background.”

  He was a lawyer all right. But she was familiar with badgering that was far more insistent than his. “Not completely. Why a tax lawyer? Why not a fireman? Or some kind of other lawyer?”

  Though he seemed soft spoken, something about him made her envision Dennis as a criminal lawyer. She could see him standing up before a jury box, calmly swaying the people seated in it.

  Maybe it was time to go into details. Fabricated details. It seemed the only way to get her to trust him and open up. At this point, Dennis wasn’t sure what it was she was hiding, but there definitely was something.

  “That would have to do with my father.”

  She jumped to the first logical conclusion. “He was a tax lawyer, too?”

  That would have certainly simplified matters. For all of them. He thought of the profile he’d written for himself before he’d knocked on her door.

  “No, but he could have used one. A good one.” Dennis retired his fork and leaned back. “My father had his own software company. Built it up from scratch and imagination.
He was one of the ones on the frontier of this whole computer craze.”

  That sounded better than saying his father was a dreamer. A dreamer who always pursued the next turn of the card, the next toss of the dice, confident that it would change his luck. The quest for Lady Luck had taken him from place to place and had ended in an alleyway, outside a casino in Nevada.

  “He was into the creative end of it and not very smart about money.” At least, that much was true. Money never managed to remain in his hands for more than a few days at a time. When he won, he wanted to win more. When he lost, he was always sure that he would win again. It was a deadly cycle.

  He saw sympathy in her eyes and knew he had struck a good chord.

  “It’s an old story, really. His partner managed to embezzle most of the company’s money before my father knew what was happening. Jack disappeared, leaving my father with a mountain of debts and the IRS breathing down his back, demanding back taxes.”

  Dennis’s mouth curved cynically. It wasn’t the IRS but the Syndicate who had wanted payment on the debts his father had run up at the tables. “Suddenly there was a lien on the house and the bank account.”

  Nicole tried to envision herself in his position. How awful that must have been for him. The underpinnings of his world had been pulled out from under him. Just as hers had for her. Empathy flooded through her.

  Dennis shrugged matter-of-factly, reciting the rest of the story. “We downscaled a lot and the debts were paid off. But my father never quite recovered from the shame he felt at failing to provide my mother with the life he had promised her when they got married. He killed himself.”

  He looked across the table at Nicole and saw the sympathy in her eyes. It touched him and stirred his guilt again. He had no idea why, but at that moment, he knew that she knew nothing about Craig Logan’s dealings with the underworld.

  He pressed on with his story. “If he’d had a good tax lawyer at his side, maybe things would have gone differently for him.”

  He loved his father, she thought. She wondered what that felt like. For as long as she could remember, her father was someone she had disliked. There was no warmth, no understanding, no love about James Bailey. Just demanding expectations.