Detect Me (3 page)

She was standing, seemingly half-caught between Mark himself and door.

He couldn’t understand it. One moment she was interested in the case and being useful, extraordinarily so. She was thinking on her feet and snatching connections out of the air. He saw fire flicker in her eyes when she hit on a right conclusion. Mark knew that look. He saw it in the mirror every day.

And then next moment she was turned around on those heels, heading for the door like she couldn’t get away fast enough. While Mark appreciated the view from the other side, he couldn’t figure her out.

“You haven’t wasted my time,” he said. “Quite the opposite, in fact. You’ve been extremely helpful. I’m grateful to you. So I don’t know why you’re leaving.”

“I told you. I have to go find a
job
,” she said, furrowing her forehead into a frown and looking at him with wide, confused eyes.

Nikki hooked her arms together behind her back and pulled her shoulders straight. Mark thought that she probably didn’t realize she was doing it, but she looked like a warrior putting on armor. He wondered what had made her think she needed armor.

It had been a long time since he’d thought this hard about anyone without a rap sheet.

Mark scrubbed a hand over his face and exhaled. He was getting too invested. He needed to let her walk right out the door. He could figure this case out on his own.

And yet… he’d always had poor impulse control.

“I’d rather you didn’t,” he said. Mark lifted his head to meet Nikki’s soft brown eyes. “You need a job, right? Well, I could use some help. What’s your fee?”

Those intelligent eyes narrowed and Nikki looked at him suspiciously. Mark wondered what the hell he was doing.

“What the hell are you doing?” Nikki asked him. She let her hands drop to her sides and then crossed them over her chest like she didn’t know what to do with them. “I’m not a detective. I don’t know anything about crime. A sniffer dog would be more useful to you than me.”

Mark shook his head and grabbed a sheaf of papers. He crossed the room to Nikki and thrust the papers at her. She grabbed them instinctively and then looked down at them with a deeply suspicious expression, like Mark might have just handed her a trap.

“Unless the sniffer dog has a working knowledge of art history, I don’t think it’s going to help,” Mark said drily. “Look at those files. We’re dealing with an art thief here, and everything I know about art could fit on those trading cards my friend’s son always cons me into buying for his birthday.”

The corners of Nikki’s eyes creased and her mouth wobbled as she fought down a smile. “Some of the illustrations on those cards are quite good, you know.” She started flipping through the pages in her hands.

“Oh good, I can tell my friend I’m contributing to his art education.” Mark watched her lips kick up in a smile.

“You can, but I won’t back you up on it. I need to keep my art cred somehow,” Nikki said absently, dog-earing a paper. The action made Mark wince, but for some reason it didn’t make him roar in outrage and snatch the papers out of her hands. He kept watching her eyes flick across the pages, hoping he’d see realization spark across her face. There was something fascinating about her face that made it hard for Mark to look away.

So he saw it when the smile dropped and Nikki seemed to come back to herself. “Not that I need art cred,” she said slowly. She raised her head, shuffled the papers back together, and shoved them back at Mark.

“Find anything?” he asked, knowing it was useless.

“No. And I don’t need to, either. What I need to do is get a real job. I can’t keep chasing down dumb ideas. I need to focus on - on what’s important. You know, real adult stuff. I need a steady job in an office. Something that will make my life more comfortable. Safe. I need to get my head out of the clouds and stay grounded.” When Mark wouldn’t take the papers, she walked over and set them on his desk. He watched her and felt something tug at his ribcage.

“If you want a ball and chain, I’m sure the world will give it to you,” Mark said quietly. Nikki spun around, hair flying and eyes flashing, like he’d said something rude. “But I don’t think you do.”

She lifted her chin and stared him down like a queen, fierce and untouchable even when Mark knew from her own words that she was lost and alone on the inside. “What do you know about what I want?”

Mark shrugged. “I know what I want,” he said. “I want something that grabs me. Something that makes me think. I want an adventure. I saw your face when you were working with me there, and I thought… maybe you want those things too.”

Some of the haughtiness dropped from Nikki’s face and she stared at him in frank confusion. He wanted to go to her, Mark was horrified to realize. He wanted to cross those couple of steps that was always between them as almost-strangers, and kiss her until all the fear and uncertainty dropped away from them both.

This was bad.

“Why do you care?” Nikki asked, sounding bewildered. She put a hand up and ran it through her hair, mussing it a little. In the dim light of the storm behind his office window, she looked like the silhouette of a glamorous client in a noir film.

“I don’t know exactly,” Mark said honestly. “But I think you can help me, and I think I want to help you.”

Nikki felt scattered, pulled in a thousand directions at once like a star map. She let her hand drop from her hair and bit her lip.

There was no good reason for this man to want to help her. And even if he was lying, even if all he really wanted was her art knowledge, consulting for a few days would do her no good at all in the long run. She needed to focus on a real job in the real world, not a few more days of a fantasy life with an impossibly gorgeous man. Not even if it was the man’s fantasy life that he somehow apparently managed to live, instead of her own quieter one.

And Nikki was pretty sure there was no chance of this man sticking around in some non-work related capacity. She knew his type; she saw the signs. They were there in the intensity of his gaze, the ink-stains on his fingers, the extra clothes hung at the back of the room. More than that, it was in the way that Mark refused to come too close. His eyes slid away from her body instead of lingering, and he either wouldn’t or couldn’t cross that invisible boundary that kept them strangers instead of soon-to-be-lovers.

She’d dated this person before; hell, sometimes she’d been this person. No need for her to go there again.

And yet…

“Look,” Mark said, and her eyes snapped back up to his face. He looked as bewildered by the way things had snowballed as she felt. He scrubbed a hand over his face, pinched his eyebrows together, and exhaled. “Why don’t you just… come in to my office tomorrow morning, okay? You don’t need to commit to a job right this second, just come back tomorrow. We can talk about the case a little more. Maybe figure some things out about it. Maybe figure some things out about you.” His gaze seemed to pierce right through her, leaving her breathless. “Does that sound alright?”

It sounded more than alright. It sounded unbelievable, quite frankly, as in she couldn’t believe a man this handsome would be this interested in her. It didn’t make any sense.

Seeing her hesitation, Mark smiled wryly.

“I’ve been working on this case for six months now,” he said in a gently cajoling voice. “I could really use some help.”

Nikki bit her lip and nodded hesitantly. Her muscles felt achy and unsure. Everything felt like a misstep, but she couldn’t quite bear to say no.

“Alright,” she said quietly. “Tomorrow morning. I’ll be here.”

Mark gave her a lopsided grin. “That’s all I ask,” he said. “For now.”

Water poured down her neck as Nikki let the door fall shut behind her and shot a last glance back at the bored secretary still guarding the front desk.

The rain had picked up again while she was inside, but she didn’t get a cab. It wasn’t that she didn’t have the money, it was just that… well, she didn’t have the money, actually. Which was why she needed to go home and pound out an apology email as fast as her fingers would fly over the keyboard.

Nikki didn’t, though - ever since Mark had asked her to come back in the morning, she’d secretly known that she wouldn’t.

She jiggled the key in the lock until the stubborn thing let her into her tiny apartment. Nikki had a fond hope that if she didn’t complain to her landlord about the lock, it might save her from a lazy burglar someday. Also, the landlord was six foot five and smelled like wet socks. He freaked Nikki out a little.

Once she was finally inside the apartment Nikki kicked off her nice clothes, leaving them to wrinkle on the floor, and headed for the shower. She ran the water as hot as it would go and tried to let the stress of the day stream off her back. But when the scalding heat turned lukewarm, her stomach was still tied in knots.

She stepped out of the bathroom, hair still wet, and didn’t bother with a hair dryer. Nikki stood at the window and let her hair soak damp spots into the back of her shirt. She stared at the city lights glowing down below and wondered what the people down there were doing. Usually she could see individual bodies moving at frantic paces, rushing up and down city streets like lives depended on it. But today the dim gray skies blurred he lines of city life and everything looked like a watercolor.

This was always the worst part of her day, when she came in from schlepping around town and the noise of the door and shower was gone. This was what she did every day, now that Ben was gone - good riddance, but still. The empty silence of the apartment pushed to the corners of the room and threatened to suffocate her.

“Hi, Charm,” Nikki called. There was no response or movement, which wasn’t entirely unexpected. She walked over to the table propped against the far wall and peered down into the glass aquarium. A barely visible green sliver of her pet iguana Charm was peeking out from the log he was hiding under.

“Hello to you too. Dumb lizard,” Nikki muttered, stabbing the voicemail button her phone. Charm had been the result of too many weekends by herself after Ben moved out, and the echoes of his words –
It’s not just me, Nikki. You’ll never be able to keep a relationship with anyone. You don’t even have any friends! You can’t do anything right, can you?
– ringing in her ears.

Those words guaranteed that she never regretted kicking him out, but she sort of regretted moving Charm in. He’d been “too feisty” for the pet store, whatever that meant, and when she’d walked in meaning to get a beta fish she’d walked out with him, holding the glass tank gingerly away from her body. Charm seemed to have accepted his fate too early and had acted pretty much dead ever since. He wasn’t much company.

Nikki’s phone beeped. Sure enough, there were three messages from her mother and two from grad school friends. Nikki’s shoulders slumped. She didn’t know what she’d been hoping for.

She debated calling back her friends, ultimately deciding against it. They were good enough friends to ask how she was doing, but not good enough friends for Nikki to really tell them. No fault of their own; mostly hers in fact. Ben had told Nikki she had trust issues, and maybe he’d been right.

There had been other problems too. Like the fact that Nikki had barely come up for air her whole last year. She had spent the year bent over a canvas, working frantically, trying so hard to piece herself together as an artist that somebody would want. She’d poured herself into her craft and slopped out around the edges. And in the end, instead of coming together, everything had fallen apart.

Out of the corner of her eye, Nikki glimpsed the corner of something bright red and orange peeking out from behind her bookcase. She almost gasped out loud, but didn’t – it would have felt too silly, alone in her apartment like this. Instead she made a strangled sort of noise and walked over to shove the canvas back out of sight. She used her foot rather than her hand and imagined kicking the stupid thing, absolutely wrecking it, but in the end she just gently nudged it away.

While she was staring at the blank wall – not exactly white, more of a cream or beige – her phone rang. Nikki’s heart leapt into her throat. It couldn’t be… She remembered Mark’s smile and her mouth went dry. She hit “receive” without thinking twice.

“Good moooooorning,” a raspy voice trilled on the other end, and Nikki physically winced away from the phone. Her free hand clenched hard enough to hurt.

“Hi Mom,” she said. She had only her own idiocy to blame for this treat. “And it’s not morning. I’ve been up all day, seriously.”

“Sure you have, sweetness. And how’s the sketching going? Got a place in the National Archives yet?” Her mother huffed out a laugh that clawed at Nikki’s stomach.

She breathed in and out. “I’ve told you, I don’t expect… No. Okay? You know that isn’t happening so why do you keep asking?”

“Aw, darlin’, I just like to show an interest; offer my support. Still keeping the lights on, or…?”

“Yes,” Nikki ground out. “I told you, there was more than enough money left over from that prize I won.”

“You were in school, so it seemed a bit like stealing to use it that way,” her mother said, sounding just as mystified as she had every single other time she’d brought it up in the past year. “But you know best, I suppose.”