Under the Surface (15 page)

Goddammit, those signs don't apply to me!
trembled on the tip of his tongue as his brain jerked into overdrive, trying to find an explanation that wouldn't blow his cover.

“Explain yourself!” she demanded.

A shadow darkened the glass in the kitchen window, then
POP! POP POP!
The tinkle of glass shards splintering into the kitchen sink shattered the supercharged moment.

Instinct and training took over. He tackled her, slamming her to the floor behind the breakfast bar separating the kitchen from the living room while someone emptied half a clip into the apartment, taking out the sound dock in a shower of sparks and plastic. She cried out when her shoulder rammed into the bar stool neatly lined up under the counter. The gun was now in his right hand, so he used his left to cover her head and hunkered down beside her.

“Stay down!” he hissed.

No questions, no screaming. She rolled flat on her belly and covered her head with her arms. A scuffling noise on the landing, then more gunshots shattered the glass in the bedroom window. The clearest threat was outside, not in the bar, so he yanked Eve to a stumbling crouch and shoved her toward the windowless bathroom. “Lie flat in the tub and cover your head.” When she obeyed, he spun and sprinted for the apartment door.

Too late. Before he was halfway down the stairs the sound of feet pounded toward the far end of the parking lot, a car door slammed, then tires squealed on a vehicle he'd bet didn't have plates. Cursing steadily under his breath, he trotted back into the apartment and took up position in the bathroom doorway between the black-leather-clad, chalk-white woman huddled in the far corner of the bathtub and whoever just tried to kill them both.

Gunfire changed everything. He dialed dispatch from his department-issued cell phone and blew his cover straight to hell.

“Dispatch, three Nova eighteen. Shots fired. 1497 East Monroe, corner of Lexington, second floor apartment accessed from the alley behind the bar. Repeat, shots fired. Unknown assailant. Request immediate backup.”

“Copy three Nova eighteen.” The voice on the other end of the line stayed calm, but the pitch jumped a notch or two as the dispatcher parroted back his call sign and the address. A cop under fire and asking for backup would trigger an immediate and formidable response.

“Who are you?” Eve asked, bewildered.

“Three Nova eighteen, advise responding units U/C on scene, repeat U/C on scene,” Matt said, his gaze flickering from the apartment door to the office door to Eve's face. Best-case scenario, he'd hand her the phone to maintain contact with dispatch while he did any number of useful, situation-appropriate things, like search the apartment, the alley, or the bar. One look at Eve nixed that idea. She was putting together gun and questions, Lyle and radio jargon, and based on the twist to her mouth, the answer tasted like raw sewage.

In the distance he heard the faint wail of an approaching siren, then a second one, the rhythm slightly off from the first. Sorenson was monitoring the radio; she'd be racing for her car, right behind the first responders, along with Lieutenant Hawthorn.

“Tell me who you are,” Eve said, but this time her voice was a cold and flat demand.

“Three Nova eighteen, responding units request your exact location.”

Not getting shot by an adrenaline-jacked responding officer took priority over confessing to Eve, so he relayed his position. Then he tucked the phone away from his mouth and looked at her.

“Detective Matt Dorchester, LPD.”

Her eyes narrowed. If looks could kill, he'd drop dead right there in the doorway, carotid artery sliced open by her ice-green gaze.

“Detective Dorchester,” she said, and the acid dripping from the words seared right through his rib cage, into his heart, “you're fired.”

*   *   *

He was an undercover cop. He'd been undercover in her bar. He wasn't a bartender. He was a cop.

At some functioning level Eve knew her thoughts circled in a truly dimwitted fashion, but she forgave herself for being a little on the slow side. One moment she's dropping through arousal to hot need and seconds later she's manhandled into her bathtub while someone shoots out her windows.

Then her bartender calls 911 and transforms before her eyes into a cop. A detective, no less.

When she felt straps encircling his calf and the distinctive shape of a gun under the leg of his jeans, all the heat froze into an icy fear. In her experience, only two groups of people carried concealed weapons: criminals and cops. Both appalling possibilities warred in her brain for the split second she had before she heard the popping noises, then found herself flattened between about two hundred pounds of muscle and bone and the equally unyielding floor.

Under a cop. An undercover cop. She'd been a breath and a heartbeat away from going to bed with an undercover cop. She felt his eyes on her but refused to look at him. Matt. Not Chad. Matt Dorchester. Matt sounded a little like Chad, but …

“I guess that explains why you look at me so strangely when I call you Chad.”

All activity in the room halted as two detectives, a lieutenant, three uniformed members of the Lancaster Police Department, and the CSI team stared at her. Had the words actually come out of her mouth? Oh God, she hoped only the last sentence and not her entire bewildered train of thought had been audible.

He said nothing.

Moments after she fired her newest bartender uniformed police officers had arrived in a flurry of shouting, the calls of “Clear! Clear!” creating a dizzying montage of television medical and police dramas. Chad … Detective Dorchester stayed in the middle of the doorway, blocking most of the curious glances as he directed the new arrivals to do a complete search. They'd stomped through every nook and cranny of her apartment, the bar, and the alley before Chad …
he
let her get out of her bathtub and go into the bedroom to change. Now dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, iPhone in hand like a security blanket, Eve huddled on the love seat in the middle of all the commotion. The sound dock was a total loss. The iPod looked okay, but she didn't trust her knees to hold her if she got up to check. Without glass in the windows the ninety-degree, humid outside air rapidly heated her apartment, but she couldn't stop shaking.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Dorchester murmur in Sorenson's ear. The blonde detective crossed the room to crouch down by Eve. “Do you want a sweater, Ms. Webber?” she asked gently.

“Yes, please,” Eve responded automatically.

Dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and a tailored blazer, her gun and badge clipped to her waistband, Sorenson disappeared into the bedroom and returned with a cashmere V-neck in a deep green. Eve tugged it over her head and wrapped her arms around her torso. The shaking stopped, replaced with hot fury.

And all the while,
he
watched her. He had a low, terse conversation with Lieutenant Hawthorn. He conferred with Sorenson. He watched her with a frighteningly alert, focused gaze. She stared back, not bothering to hide her rage. The Lancaster Police Department had been lying to her, which, to be honest, she'd somewhat expected. Ian Hawthorn trusted no one but his tightly knit circle, and she wasn't in it. But she'd never expected Chad … Matt … to lie to her the way he had. With his body.

With hers.

Raised voices, scuffling outside on her landing, then Detective Sorenson quashed the commotion with a quiet “Let him in.”

Caleb pushed his way through the crowd and into her apartment. He wore jeans and a loose button-down, his unruly black hair tousled from sleep. He shouldered aside a flat-footed uniformed officer, sat beside her on the love seat and pulled her into the circle of his arm. “My God, Eve. Are you okay?”

“I'm pissed as hell,” she snapped. “Someone tried to kill me!”

Caleb's gaze sharpened, and he scanned the room. Apparently Dorchester's Eye Candy T-shirt hadn't registered with her brother. She'd woken him out of a sound sleep, and even with an adrenaline rush spurred by her shaky words, it would take Caleb a few minutes to put all the pieces together. Eve dreaded the explosion coming when Caleb's excellent brain became fully functional. For the moment, ignorance was bliss.

“Ian, what the actual fuck?” Caleb said to Hawthorn, going for the only familiar face in the room.

“We need to talk,” Ian said, voice even. Eve was once again reminded of how different Ian was from the boy she'd passed in the halls in high school. His expression was wary when it wasn't entirely closed off.

Caleb looked around at the uniforms and the CSI team. “Somewhere quiet.”

“Use my office,” Eve said, and eased up out of the love seat she would sell at the earliest opportunity. She shoved through the officers and waited while Caleb, Sorenson, Hawthorn, and Detective Matt Dorchester, LPD, filed into the room after her. Caleb stood across from her, his eyes flickering between her and the police officers. Dorchester leaned against the back wall, as far away from her as he could get. No one else sat down, so Eve stayed on her feet too. Sorenson closed the door on the activity in the apartment, and for a minute, everyone looked at everyone else.

She felt Detective Dorchester's eyes boring into her. He stood with his back to the wall, arms crossed over his chest. The gun, that damn gun, was back in his ankle holster. Knowing it was there made the Eye Candy T-shirt look ridiculous on him. No wonder he had such physical presence. How could she have mistaken him for a bartender?

Because he was an undercover cop.

Oh dear God. She'd offered to help him get a job.

A dark flush of humiliation crawled into her cheeks, blending with the anger simmering in the middle of her chest. She brushed her hair back out of her face and focused.

“Goddammit, someone start talking!” Caleb snapped.

“Lyle Murphy asked me to launder money for him,” Eve said, too angry to care about what the cops wanted kept quiet. “I told him I would, then went to the cops. They asked me to be an informant. Ian is my contact.” She looked at Detective Dorchester as she spoke, the implication clear.
And who the fuck are you?

The cops looked at each other, engaging in some kind of unspoken communication. Still unusually silent, Caleb also waited, but Eve could see his shoulders tense as the puzzle pieces clicked together in his head.

Caleb knew Eye Candy well because he acted as Eve's attorney. Sorenson and Hawthorn were in street clothes.

Detective Dorchester wore the Eye Candy T-shirt reserved for bartenders.

He'd been in her apartment when the shots came through the windows.

At two thirty in the morning.

Caleb leapt to the worst possible conclusion in a split second. His gaze went dull agate green. “You son of a bitch,” he said and surged toward Matt.

“Caleb, for God's sake,” Eve said resignedly.

Lieutenant Hawthorn interceded, muscles bulging in his arms as he held Caleb in place. “Settle down, Caleb.”

Dorchester didn't move, didn't step into the scuffle or back away. Nothing in his expression or stance changed as Caleb shook off Hawthorn but held his ground.

Sorenson, the shortest, slightest person in the room, stepped up. “Settle down, Counselor,” she said, using the same words Hawthorn had, but in a much quieter, much less confrontational tone. Caleb looked at her for a long moment, then favored all three LPD officers with a venomous look, but stepped away, hands on hips.

Dorchester remained unmoving through the entire altercation, but Eve knew it wasn't from fear. Even across the room, even without looking at him she felt energy seething under his skin, his muscles tensed in restraint. All that tightly leashed sexual energy would mix combustibly with adrenaline from the gunfire. Fear and shock eddied across her back, roiled in her gut, but deep underneath those reactions something inherently female inside her responded to Dorchester's energy.

What would happen when the fear and shock wore off, and the desire surged to the surface again?

Caleb didn't miss a beat. “How the fuck long has this been going on?”

“A couple of months,” Eve said.

“You didn't tell me.”

“He said not to tell anyone,” she said, nodding at Ian.

He swung to face Ian. “You put my sister in danger? Did you not trust her to finish what she started? Or is this some fucked-up idea of police protection? Either way, the lawsuit's going to be spectacular. Lengthy. Public.”

“Caleb,” she said resignedly. “I'm not suing anyone. That won't help. The point is to
help
.”

“They're helping themselves, Eve. It's what cops do.” The words, fueled by Caleb's short, bitter experience with criminal law, were directed at Hawthorn. “Jesus fucking Christ, Ian! What kinds of games are you playing with Eve's life?”

“No games, Caleb. There's a hit out on her life.”

“Why didn't you tell her? Or me?”

Hawthorn lifted one eyebrow, taking in Eye Candy, reminding without words of Eve's impulsive reputation, Caleb's temper. “Because I knew her. And you.”

“Mother
fucker
,” Caleb spat. “No way is all of this effort for a chickenshit East Side drug ring. Hooked yourself a bigger fish?”

Eve looked around. The cops had all gone suspiciously blank.

“Tell them,” Dorchester said quietly.

“We're not just after Murphy for the East Side,” Ian said. “The FBI and the DEA hope he'll roll on the people above him. If he does, we'll take out an entire distribution arm for one of the worst gangs in the country.”

“We have a winner,” Caleb said, and pointed at Hawthorn. Eve saw him run through all the shit he could sling at Ian—son of the former chief of police, brother to a Navy SEAL, looking to make his mark in his little corner of the world—then think better of it. Eve breathed a silent sigh of relief. One of these days Caleb's mouth would get him into trouble his brains and fists couldn't get him out of. “You didn't want to run the risk that she'd screw up your precious operation,” Caleb spit. His finger swung to Dorchester. “He's using any means possible to keep an eye on your best witness.
Any means possible,
right?”