Detect Me (2 page)

“I’m not a marketing manager,” he said. “I’m a detective.”

Well, that actually did explain it quite nicely.

“Oh,” Nikki said, pushing away the disappointment that threatened to rise up and choke her. She rose from her seat. “I’m sorry, there’s been some kind of mistake. I’m here for an interview with Ocean’s Marketing Team. Oh – oh no, I must have gone to the wrong suite! Couldn’t you just have told me that you didn’t have an interview scheduled at all? Now I’m going to be too late!” She could have kicked herself. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Was it really too much effort for her to check the letter on the door?

“I see,” Mark said, watching her with curious eyes. Nikki wanted to hate him for distracting her with those eyes so that she didn’t even realize she was in the wrong office.

Her shoulders sagged. That wasn’t fair, though. Deep down, as soon as the door to Mark’s strange black-and-white office swung open and she saw Mark stand up, looking like a movie star in his blue jeans and black sports coat, Nikki had known something wasn’t right. Real people didn’t work at places this interesting; didn’t have bosses with movie star good looks. Although, listening to that list of qualifications Mark had spouted, perhaps there were perks to being a real person - like not having an intimate knowledge of serial killer psychology.

“I’m sorry,” she said, deflating. “I just… I just really needed that job.”

Mark stood up and as she watched, he walked toward her and set a hand gently on her shoulder. She suppressed a shiver from the contact. It was just that her emotions were all over the place, of course - after knowing the man for only a few minutes Nikki couldn’t possibly be that affected by his touch.

“Why don’t you sit down and I’ll get you a cup of coffee,” he said with a kindness that she wouldn’t have suspected in someone with those cool eyes and impossible good looks. In Nikki’s experience, being fantastically attractive usually had an inverse impact on personality. Mark’s gestures seemed too honest. They made her wary.

Still, it was storming outside almost as loud as it was inside her head, so she let the weight of Mark’s hand push her back down into her seat and watched him cross the room to switch on some state-of-the-art coffee machine with about as many buttons as a spaceship.

“Aren’t I wasting your time?” she said into the quiet of the room, only interrupted by the hum of the machine brewing. “Shouldn’t you get back to… I don’t know, analyzing blood samples or something?”

Mark chuckled, a sound as deep and rich as the coffee he handed her a moment later. “You’ve watched too many crime shows. I’m a detective, not a forensics expert.”

Nikki blushed and got annoyed at the same time. “Sorry, not everyone has a - what was it - an intimate knowledge of police procedure. What does a detective do, then?”

“Are you actually interested?” Mark raised an eyebrow and leaned back, settling at the edge of his desk with his legs stretched out near Nikki. The situation felt warm, almost intimate, and completely impossible - was she really sitting here at nine o’clock in the morning in some strange man’s office, telling him her job woes and learning about criminal psychology? It felt like she was in the middle of a black and white Humphrey Bogart movie. Although, of course, this would just be the prologue and an adventure would be about to happen in one of those movies. And that wasn’t going to happen here.

Still, she found herself saying, “Of course I am,” to Mark.

He looked pleased despite himself and leaned back on his hands more comfortably. “Well, I’m a private investigator. So I don’t work for the police. I get called in on private cases by people who don’t have enough evidence for the police, or sometimes they’re just embarrassed - lots of adultery. You’d think people would learn that if they need to hire an investigator, then their spouses are either cheating or they have so many trust issues that they need a professional anyway.”

“That sounds depressing,” Nikki commented.

Mark shrugged, and she followed the easy roll of his shoulders with her eyes. “It’s a living. Besides, that’s not all I do. I get some interesting cases once in awhile. Like right now.” He glanced toward a sheaf of papers waiting on his desk, and Nikki felt a bolt of panic strike her at the thought of his interest shifting away, leaving her to walk out of the building and back to her dreary life.

So she asked hurriedly, “What case do you have right now?”

Those light eyes moved back to her face, and something inside of Nikki settled.
Stupid, stupid,
she chided herself, but she couldn’t quell the elation she felt rising up in her.

“It’s… something of a special case,” Mark said slowly. One of his fingers started to tap along the desk. “There’s an art thief - well, I probably shouldn’t say too much, but if you’ve ever heard of Renoir, they stole - ”

“Oh!” Nikki’s hands flew to her mouth and she gasped. “I read about that in the paper! The Ghost.”

To her surprise, Mark’s eyebrows drew together in a fierce frown.

“The thief isn’t a ghost,” Mark muttered darkly. After a second his face cleared and he snorted, like he’d found an amusing side to it. “They’re a flesh and blood person. That sounds like a ridiculous media name. The newspaper, huh? I didn’t know they were reporting on it.”

“It was in the Arts column,” Nikki said, remembering the indignation she’d felt when she read the small blurb in the newspaper she’d nicked from Mr. Next-Door.

Mark nodded. “That makes sense. It’s not a page I read myself. Ghost, hmm? I suppose I’ll have to get used to it.” His eyes took on a faraway look and Nikki knew that she’d lost him again to this so-called Ghost who walked through museum walls to steal impossibly valuable paintings.

Somehow he was even more fascinating right then, caught up in the throes of passion - because looking at the intensity of his face, Nikki knew without question that solving crimes was his passion.

It made her wonder if he’d ever looked at a woman that way.

Okay, that’s enough.
Nikki shook her head to clear the nonsensical thoughts from it and stood up to leave. This had been a diversion from the monotony of her regular life with its pierced-balloon dreams, but that was all it was. Time to go back to the real world and hope that she could find some other job in time to keep herself from getting kicked out of her apartment.

“Thanks for…”
distracting me
, “listening. And the coffee.”

Mark nodded, obviously barely listening, so Nikki started walking to the door, walking away from the lingering regret that she hadn’t been able to capture his interest like that.

“Hope you catch The Ghost,” Nikki muttered, more to herself than to the oblivious detective. “First it was Monet and now they’ve moved on to Renoir, so it would be a pity to lose Van Gogh.” She reached out and curled her fingers around the doorknob.

“Wait.”

The command reverberated through the air, so powerful that Nikki stopped in her tracks and turned to look at Mark. He was staring back at her, those pale eyes burning into her so that she couldn’t move.

“How do you know which painting is going to be stolen next?”

CHAPTER TWO

“W-what?” Nikki stuttered, held in place by the intensity in Mark’s voice. She couldn’t look away from his eyes.

Mark pushed off his desk and walked deliberately toward Nikki, stopping close enough that she could just feel the edges of the warmth of his body. This close she could smell him, too - he smelled like something that didn’t come out of a bottle. No cologne smelled like spice and rain.

“I said, how do you know what painting is going to be stolen next?” Her gaze drifted down to his hands, but they were hanging by his sides, nowhere close to touching her. Nikki told herself that she wasn’t disappointed.

“Oh. Well, it’s just a guess, but the thief stole a Monet and then a Renoir. That’s the beginning and the end of the Impressionist era in art. The first real master of Post-Impressionism is arguably Van Gogh. So I just thought, if there was going to be another one stolen, it would be one of his…”

As she spoke, Mark’s eyes narrowed in focus and Nikki felt her breath catch in her throat.

Suddenly he turned on his heel and strode away, breaking Nikki free from his inexplicable pull and leaving her feeling slightly dazed. She watched Mark bury his fingers in his dark hair and shake his head.

“It’s about the art. The art. So there’s a pattern to them after all,” he muttered.

Nikki felt slightly miffed that she had been excluded from his circle of thoughts so quickly after handing him the key (well, maybe. Kind of) to the puzzle. She propped her hands on her hips.

“What’s the pattern, then?” she asked, apparently breaking Mark out of his reverie, because he raised his head and blinked at her. Oh, those eyes were breathtaking. That face - it should be illegal to have a face that looked like it was supposed to be an example of near perfection rather than just another man.

He squared his shoulders to her and stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans.

“You tell me,” he said, with the slightest hint of a challenge. “If you were Ghost, what would you have stolen before the Monet?”

“Vermeer,” Nikki replied without even thinking. When she saw Mark’s face light up, she knew it was the right answer.

“Astounding,” Mark said, shaking his head. Not like he was angry, more like he truly was amazed. “That’s exactly right. The first painting stolen was a Vermeer. You wouldn’t have heard about it, because it was stolen from the Rijksmuseum in Iceland.”

Nikki looked at the ground and tried not to let herself feel the warm glow that threatened to sweep over her and burn a blush into her cheeks. It had been so long since anybody had praised her; since anybody had told her she was doing right. She didn’t want to need the validation, but it was so nice to hear Mark’s deep rich voice telling her she was astounding.

“Going all the way to Amsterdam to steal a painting seems like quite a lot of work,” Nikki said offhandedly, barely even really thinking about it. She bit her tongue as soon as the words left her mouth - really, Nikki? Honestly, what did she know about people that chose a life of crime?

Mark raised his eyebrows at her. Nikki braced herself, scrambling to get ready to produce a half-decent comeback.

And then Mark
smiled
.

Nikki didn’t go to med school or anything, but she was pretty sure it was physically impossible for her heart to skip a beat. That didn’t change the fact that she froze in place and was fairly sure her mouth dropped open (sexy, no doubt).

Mark was attractive to begin with; strikingly so. He had dark hair and light eyes, and moved with the strong, agile grace of a large cat. When his eyebrows knotted together into a frown, he looked like some kind of haughty god about to toss a thunderbolt like in one of the old Greek frescos.

But when Mark smiled it transformed his handsome features into something else, something
more
. The storm clouds cleared from his face and made the angles of his chiseled jawline more obvious; smoothed out his forehead so that he looked younger.

It wasn’t his admittedly beautiful face that made the change so remarkable, though. It was those light blue eyes that suddenly crinkled up at the edges and looked like they were smiling at her, just at Nikki. All of the wariness and hostility dropped from them and for a second, Nikki felt like Mark was staring right into her soul and seeing something amazing.

Immediately she wanted more of that feeling. She wanted him to look at her like that again.

Then Mark turned away, whisking off to the other side of the office to grab an instrument Nikki had never even seen before, leaving her with her bewildered thoughts. What had even just happened? she wondered. Nikki felt like she’d been hit by a train. A glorious, sexy train, but still.

“Absolutely true!” the man enthused, picking up a blueprint that Nikki couldn’t hope to interpret into an actual building. “But you see, the renovations in the main building have been dragging on for years. They were supposed to open in 2008, but still haven’t. Therefore it would be quite an easy mark and…” Mark caught a glimpse of her expression - Nikki had no idea what he saw there - and faltered.

“Oh yes, definitely,” Nikki babbled, desperate to distract both herself and Mark from her momentary lapse of sanity. She needed to get out of here and beg for another job interview, not stare at this madman’s gorgeous smile. “That’s a great place to start. Well, I’m glad that I could help you out a bit. I hope you - I hope you catch the thief.”

She half-turned back toward the door.

“Wait, where are you going?” Mark’s deep voice said behind her, sounding puzzled.

Nikki’s fingers stopped, just inches away from the doorknob. She closed her eyes for a second. Drawing it out was just going to make real life seem all the drearier when she went back to it, she knew. This case - this man - had nothing to do with her.

She turned around again.

“I think I’ve taken up enough of your time,” she said, smiling pleasantly. “I should go. Things to do, people to see. Jobs to find.” Dreams to give up on.

Mark furrowed his brow at the woman in front of him.