Dare Me Again (3 page)

Two and a half hours later, as his plane touched down in LA, Simon saw he had a voice mail. When he tapped the icon, he scowled. Caller ID said, SFCGOV.

Simon hit the icon and listened: “Captain West, this is San Francisco Deputy DA Jon Onfario. I’m calling as a courtesy to inform you that Evan Scott has struck a deal with the FBI and will be released sometime this morning.”

Simon’s blood iced in his veins. Fuck, that feeling he’d had before he’d left. It was as if his body had sensed what he couldn’t possibly have known.

Evan Scott was a dangerous bastard. He knew exactly where Scott would go. His plea was bullshit. He wanted one thing and one thing only—revenge.

He dialed the DDA’s number. Cursing when he got Onfario’s voice mail, he left him a message. “Onfario, this is West, why the fuck wasn’t I notified in advance that there was even talk of a deal with Scott? That bastard tried to kill my wife! Now he’s out doing whatever the fuck he pleases. I swear to God, if he comes near my wife, I’m going to put a fucking bullet between his eyes! Call me back, damn it. I want his release time, location, and any conditions he was released under. ”

Simon hung up and called his buddy Jack Thornton, who was FBI and part of the task force that put Scott away.

“That piece of shit motherfucker Scott cut a deal,” Simon said, when Jack answered.

“I just heard,” Jack said. “I was going to call you. Where’s Kat?”

“Home in bed, where I told her to stay.”

“Santa Clara house?”

“Yeah. She wanted to go into the city today to pick up a few things from the apartment. I told her to stay at the house. Damn good thing I did. If Scott just walked out of jail, he’d be breathing the same air.”

“I’ll ask Stevie to go hang out with Kat until you get home.”

“I was going to call in a few units to keep an eye on the house until I get back into town. Stevie there makes me feel a whole lot better. Do you have the details of that piece of shit’s deal?”

“Only that he made one. I’ll get the four-one-one on his conditions and give you a call back.”

“Thanks man. I’m catching the first flight out of here, should be back in San Jose in two hours or less.” Simon hung up and made straight for a booking agent. He needed to get to Kat before Scott did.

Chapter Four

T
aking a cab to the clinic, Kat picked up her car and headed north to San Francisco. Since she hadn’t technically given Simon her word that she wouldn’t go to their apartment in the city, Kat didn’t think twice about going. Her winter wardrobe, one she happened to love, was there and so were Rosie and Elliott, her two best friends. It had been months since she and Simon had been back to her place in the city, and she missed it.

And it wasn’t like driving to the city was dangerous. She wasn’t being careless by any means, but if she gave in to Simon’s every whim, she’d be swathed in bubble wrap and never leave the house. Since she’d told him she was pregnant, he had become an overprotective nervous Nelly. Of course she loved him for it, but his constant worrying about her health became suffocating at times. She was a happy, healthy, pregnant woman who, despite the requisite morning nausea and fatigue, felt fabulous most of the time.

How could she not? She was married to the hottest cop in California. She had a new job she loved, her man had a job he loved, and they loved each other “to the moon and back” as Gracie, Simon’s niece, liked to say when she hugged Kat good-bye. Kat smiled. The closeness that had developed between Kat and Gracie didn’t sit well with Gracie’s mother, Simon’s widowed sister-in-law, who had it bad for him, but Kat hoped she eventually got over it. If not? Oh well.

Simon was hers. Forever. She was never giving him up. Ever.

As she drove into the small parking garage next to her building, her cell phone rang with Simon’s ring tone—“Bad to the Bone.” She reached to answer it, but hesitated. He’d ask where she was and then they’d argue. She decided she’d call him on her way back to their home in Santa Clara, thus proving to him she was safe and sound and he had nothing to worry about.

A minute later her cell chirped that she had a voice mail, followed by a text from him.

Call me, NOW!

His commanding tone got her dander up. Couldn’t he just ask nicely?

As she took the elevator up to the apartment she listened to his voice mail.

“I need you to call me ASAP, Princess. Please. Call me. Now. I love you.”

Sigh. How could she resist?

Just as she was about to call him back, the elevator door opened and Rosie, her best friend and neighbor before she’d moved in with Simon, stood grinning at her like she was the last piece of chocolate on earth. “Hello, doll. How are you?” She grabbed Kat and gave her a huge bear hug. “I saw you coming down the street. I’m so happy you came by!”

Smiling, Kat let her friend whisk her down the hall to her place. “I told Elliot that we needed to have a room set up just for the baby. You know… For when you and Simon want some time together. Just bring that sweet little bundle of love over and we’ll be happy to watch her. I love the name Lucy. Do you?”

Kat grinned. “Simon won’t admit it out loud, but he’s so terrified of having a daughter he has himself completely convinced we’re having a boy, so no to Lucy.” Secretly, Kat wanted a boy first. Then the little girls could come.

“Pfft, all men want a boy first. Elliot did, too, but…Well, God didn’t mean for us to have children. Back in my day there was no in vitro stuff. Not that it was Elliot’s problem, it was mine. My uterus was not conducive to pregnancy. Of course, we could have used a surrogate, but… Oh, well,” she sighed and hugged Kat to her again. “It’s okay. We have you and now we have a baby coming.” She unlocked her door and called. “Elliot, guess who’s home?”

Kat giggled and let them fuss over her. She loved them dearly.

Simon was a cop for a reason. His instincts never steered him wrong. He knew exactly why his wife wasn’t returning his calls or texts. She was in the city and damn, fuck it all to hell, so was Scott! His frustration mounted when he couldn’t get an immediate flight back to the Bay Area.

He made another call.

“Thornton.”

“Kat’s in the city and I’m fucking stuck in LA for another hour. I need you to get to her and hold on to her until I get there.”

“Stevie’s with me, we’ll head over to the apartment right now. And I have some news on Scott’s conditions.”

“What are they?”

“He’s wearing a bracelet. Twenty-four seven monitoring. It’s on until after he testifies, and he’s mandated to stay within city limits. He steps one foot outside of San Fran, he goes back in.”

“Anyone on him?”

“The DA’s office is monitoring but they’re having some issues picking up and holding Scott’s signal.”

“Son of a bitch! Those monitors aren’t foolproof. Scott has somehow disabled it or figured out how to jam the signal. I’m calling SFPD to get over to the apartment.”

“Stevie and I are around the corner. I’ll call you as soon as we get there.”

“Hurry.”

Simon exhaled loudly, then called the DDA and reamed him several more new assholes.

Kat gave Rosie and Elliot kisses and promises to visit with them after the New Year, then headed to her apartment.

As she walked down the hallway, she smiled. There was another reason she had come back here. As much as she loved the comfort of the home she shared with Simon in the south bay, she missed her apartment. She missed the vitality and diversity of the city. But mostly she’d needed to be in the city where she’d fallen in love with Simon. Although, truth be told, she’d fallen in love with him the minute she bumped into him coming out of an elevator at a San Diego hotel. He’d caught her to him to keep her from falling, and well, she’d felt as if she had been hit by a truck. If there was one thing she could thank her ex-lover Evan for, it was his dare that the three of them go back to her room.

Heat washed though her. Embarrassment, too. But she had no regrets, despite the pain that had followed. That night was bittersweet, but had it not happened, she would never have met Simon.

She scowled when she thought of Evan. What a blind fool she had been.

When she opened the apartment door she stood still and inhaled the scent of her perfume, Chanel No. 5. Funny, despite the fact that she loved her fragrance, and never left the house with a dab or two, she’d never realized how intensely it scented the air. It seemed odd that it would still linger as strongly as it did, despite her two-month absence.

Closing the door behind her, she remembered that she needed to call Simon. Feeling more than a little sheepish for not calling him right back, she hit the icon with his picture on it. The call went immediately to his voice mail. “Hey, baby, it’s me calling you back. You sound worried. I hope everything’s okay in LA. Call me back. Love you.” She hit the send icon, walked into the kitchen, and dumped her purse onto the table. Suddenly she was ravenous. She’d skipped breakfast because her stomach wasn’t on board, but now it had settled. Knowing there was no food in the place, she glanced at her watch. One o’clock. She picked up the apartment phone to call Lucca’s, her favorite deli, for a delivery order, but it was dead.

That was odd. She looked at the handset, then at the wall-mounted piece, which appeared undisturbed. She clicked the phone off and on again, but there was still no dial tone. She shrugged, hung up the handset, and scrolled through her cell phone until she found the number she was looking for.

She called and was immediately put on hold. As she made her way to the thermostat in the living room to turn the heat on, she stopped. The scent of her perfume became stronger. She moved toward her bedroom and frowned. The door was closed. She never closed it when she was gone. Hell, she never closed it period. As she placed her hand on the knob to open it, a voice on the other end of the phone said, “Lucca’s, what can I get for you?”

Kat jumped, startled, the hair on the back of her neck spiking. She shook her head and walked back to the kitchen. “Hi, I’d like to place and order for delivery.”

“Shoot,” the guy said.

Kat gave him her order and name. Since she was a regular, they had her address and credit card info on file. After she hung up, she walked back to the bedroom door and stood staring at it. As the heat kicked in, she shivered, but not from the cold.

Her gut told her to leave, but her brain said she was being absurd. The only way into her bedroom was via her door, which had been locked, or the balcony. And one would have to be a monkey to climb the five stories to her balcony.

Had someone managed to slip into the secure building, the Nosey Rosie Patrol would have detected anyone coming off the elevator to their floor. There weren’t any other apartments, just hers and Rosie’s. Simon’s overprotectiveness was making her paranoid. The door was closed because Simon must have shut it when they had left two months prior. She headed for the bedroom and the comfy winter clothes she’d come for.

Chapter Five

J
ust as she reached for the knob, her doorbell rang. Not once, but repeatedly.

Who the heck was that?

Hurrying to the door to stop the incessant ringing, she didn’t bother to look through the peephole and yanked it open. “Okay, okay! I’m here.”

She opened her door to find her husband’s best friend, Jack, and his girlfriend, Stevie, standing there. To say she was surprised was an understatement. Her eyes widened as she took in Stevie’s appearance. Stevie Cavanaugh was one tough cookie, but standing there with her long dark hair unbound, dressed in a pair of skinny jeans, black leather riding boots and a fitted white gauze poet shirt, she looked like a cover model. “Stevie, you look amazing.” Gone from her pretty face was the stress of her job as a homicide detective, and also gone was what Kat, who was curvy, thought had been a too-thin body. Stevie had put on a few strategic pounds. Pounds that nicely filled in her curves.

Kat smiled and stood back, opening the door wider. “Jack, I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but it looks like having an FBI agent boyfriend does a body good.”

Jack laughed, pulled her across the threshold into his embrace, and planted a kiss right on her lips as Stevie strode past her into the apartment.

“I keep telling Stevie she looks like a million bucks,” Jack said, holding Kat firmly in his embrace as Stevie continued through the foyer into the hallway, looking pretty nosy.

“Um, what’s going on?” Kat asked.

“How long have you have been here?” Jack asked.

“In the building about twenty minutes, in the apartment maybe five or so. Why?”

“Pregnancy agrees with you, Doc,” Stevie said over her shoulder as she drew her weapon from the holster nestled at the small of her back. “You look stunning.” As the detective did the stealth cop thing, Jack moved Kat farther into the outside hallway, then gently moved her out of the doorway.

“Do you two always stop by a friend’s house with your guns drawn, nosing around?” Kat asked.

“Sit tight, Doc. We just need to clear your place,” Jack said.

“Of what?”

When Jack didn’t immediately answer, Kat got riled. “Simon sent you to check up on me, didn’t he?”

Jack pursed his lips, but didn’t answer.

“This is Simon totally overreacting and to what, I don’t know!” Kat said, feeling like she was a prisoner in her own life. Really, how many times over the years had she come into her apartment in the middle of the night and was completely safe? She lived in Pac Heights, one of the safest neighborhoods in the city, for Pete’s sake.

Crossing her arms over her chest, Kat waited for Detective Cavanaugh to “clear” her apartment.
Total
absurdity.

Stevie strode from the back of her apartment to the foyer at the same time she holstered her gun.

Given the dread she’d felt standing by the door earlier, Kat sighed with relief. See, it had just been her imagination all along. “Okay, now you can call Simon and tell him he had nothing to—”

“How long did you say you’ve been here?” Stevie interrupted.

Kat frowned. “Five maybe ten minutes.”

“Did you go into your bedroom at all?”

“No, I was about to when you rang the doorbell.”

Stevie gave Jack a look that said, “Houston we have a problem.”

“What?” Kat asked.

Stevie inclined her head toward the back of the apartment. As Jack moved past her to see for himself, Kat moved with him.

“Stay here, Doc,” said Stevie, gently but firmly.

Icy fingers of dread scraped along her spine, making her shiver.

When Jack returned a minute later, he had the same look on his face as Stevie. Kat swept past them both, strode down the hall and into the bedroom, and stopped short at the threshold. Her knees shook and had Jack not come up behind her and slid his arm around her waist for support, she would have collapsed.

Her bedroom was trashed. Cancel that, her
bed
was trashed. The headboard cracked in half, pillows torn to shreds, the sheets pulled off and slashed, and—her cheeks flamed. Her panties were ripped into pieces, littering the floor. The smell of Chanel No. 5 permeated the room. Whoever had done this had taken her perfume and lotion and dumped them all over the place.

The person who’d done this hadn’t been looking for some baubles to steal. He’d been in a rage.

He’d wanted to hurt her, but had to settle for her bed and possessions instead.

Oh God. Her stomach churned. Ten minutes she’d been in here. Had she just missed the person who did this? What if—what if—

She covered her mouth with her hand, feeling sick.

“There doesn’t appear to be any forced entry from the French doors to the balcony. I think whoever did this had a key or knew where to find one,” Stevie said.

“But they would have to get through the lobby door first and you need an electronic key card for that,” Kat explained, her voice shaky; she had difficulty breathing. God, she wished Simon was here.

Stevie shook her head. “They could have waited for someone to come in or out and caught the door before it closed, then taken the stairway to remain undetected. The apartment door is relatively easy to breach.”

The cell phone in Kat’s hand screeched out “Bad to the Bone.”

“Simon,” she gasped after engaging the call.

“Are you okay?” he demanded.

“Someone was here! They destroyed our bed,” she cried as panic overtook her.

“Are you unharmed?!”
he demanded.

“Yes.” She exhaled, trying to get a grip on her fear and racing emotions. “Jack and Stevie are here.”

“Hand the phone to Jack, please.”

“Simon, what’s going on?”

“Hand the phone to Jack, please,” he enunciated in the deadliest tone Kat had ever heard come from him. She handed the phone to Jack. And for the first time since she had met Simon, she understood that while she might not be aware of the day-to-day danger that lurked behind the most innocuous door, her husband was. He was hypervigilant, and she needed to take a page from his awareness book.

“She’s okay, man, just shook up,” Jack started as he strode from the apartment to the vestibule.

Kat trembled, shaking her head. Stevie took her into her arms and rubbed her shoulders. “It’s okay, Doc, whoever did it is gone. You’re in no immediate danger.”

Kat shivered hard, because that might not have been true. For all she knew, there had been someone inside just before she’d come in. If she hadn’t stopped to visit with Rosie and Elliot…

Who hated her enough to do all this? There was only one person she knew of who fit the bill: Evan Scott. But that was impossible. He was in a San Francisco jail awaiting trial for corporate espionage and attempted murder.

Unless he wasn’t in jail anymore.

Jack walked back into the apartment and handed Kat her phone.

“Hey, Princess,” Simon said softly. “I need you to listen to me, no interruptions, okay?”

Shaking, she nodded and said, “Okay.”

Jack guided her to a chair and sat her down.

“I’m on my way to you, about forty minutes out. I want you to pack what you can there, then Jack and Stevie are going to drive you in their car to meet me. Then you’re going to take my Jeep and drive up to the cabin in Truckee.”

“Simon—”

“Evan’s out, baby, and he wants you. He’s in the city and on the move. I want you as far away from there as possible while I track his ass down. Once I do, he’s going back for what he did to the apartment. When he’s back behind bars, I’ll meet you at the cabin.”

Kat’s heart dropped. “Out? How?”

“He struck a deal, they let him go, but he’s wearing a bracelet. The cops had trouble picking up his signal earlier today, but he’s on the grid now. He’s less than a mile from the apartment. Do you understand why I want you out of the city?”

Her hands shook uncontrollably. “Yes, it makes sense, but I don’t want to be separated from you.”

“Stevie will drive up with you while Jack stays back and works this end with me.”

“No—it’s Christmas Eve, it’s supposed to snow, and I don’t want Stevie stuck with me on her and Jack’s first Christmas.”

“She has no issue with driving you up there, neither does Jack.”

“I’m not a kid, Simon, I can drive myself.”

“No arguments on this, baby. Now get packing.”

While she was packing, SFPD showed up, along with a crime scene crew. Nosy Rosie, with Elliot in tow, barged in, demanding to know what the hell was going on. Jack took them aside and explained the situation.

Despite the tense situation, Rosie wolf-whistled when she got a gander at Jack’s admirable backside as he strode back toward Kat’s bedroom where the techs painstakingly went over it. “They never grew cops like that when I was your age.”

“I’m standing right here, Rosalinda,” Elliot said, pouting.

She wagged her eyebrows before morphing into Revenge Rosie.

“Rosie,” Kat cautioned, when her friend started telling the cops how to do their job. “Let the police do what they need to do. And promise me you won’t go looking for Evan and go Tae Bo Ninja on him.”

“I can’t make any promises if I see him, doll. That man has been nothing but trouble from the get-go.”

“They’ll get him.”

Twenty minutes later, Jack, Stevie, and Kat met Simon at the CHP substation on 8th Avenue.