Take a Chance on Me (87 page)

They were quiet on the ride home, and Emma let Leelee be in control of what they talked about. Emma never guessed that Becca was that far gone, but Leelee said there'd been at least a couple men each week.

She hadn't known. She hadn't known!

She'd been in Philadelphia in vet school and Becca was in Los Angeles runing her baby girl's life!

"It's nice to have Beckett, though," Leelee finally said, smiling.

Emma felt drained, her joints loose, and near tears again. But she managed to smile back. "He loves you just for being you—the same way he's always loved me. You know that, don't you?"

She nodded shyly. "Yeah. I think he's pretty cool, too, but…"

"But he's not your dad."

Leelee nodded.

They came within sight of the barn, and Vesta began to fidget. Emma was concentrating so hard on calming her that she almost didn't hear Leelee speaking.

"… so I'd like to get to know him."

Emma looked over and brought the horse to a stop. "What, honey? I didn't hear you."

Leelee rolled her eyes heavenward and groaned. "I said, I know you're not like my mom when it comes to guys. I know you haven't had any kind of, you know, relations with a man since you sent Aaron packing.

And I know Thomas the Tongue—whoops, just Thomas—must be special. So what I said was"—Leelee nervously brought her gaze to Emma's face—"that I'd like to meet him. Get to know him. Junk like that."

« ^ »

E mma had never done anything like this in her life, and as she watched Thomas slice through the yellow police tape across the apartment door, her stomach flipped in anticipation and dread.

This was the home of a murder victim. She was going to see where Scott Slick's body was found. And she was going to try to help solve a crime.

At long last, she was going to get to be Miss Marple.

Thomas closed his penknife and stack it in his pocket as he looked down at her quizzically. Emma cringed. He'd obviously seen her excitement and now must think she was some kind of real sicko to be smiling at a time like this.

"After you, Miss Marple," he said. Then he winked at her.

Chills went up her spine as she stepped inside the living room, and Emma wasn't sure if it was because of where she was or the man she was with. Both scared her a little.

"The evidence techs have been over the place several times, but please try not to touch anything."

"Sure. I underst—" Emma stopped in her tracks. Well, duh! Of course there would be blood on the floor.

Slick got hit in the temple with a blender and it cracked his skull, and head wounds bleed like the devil. But still. The blood had dried in a sickening spread of brownish red, like red dust.

She tried to picture a person ruined enough inside to take a human life. The shudder rolled up from her feet to the tips of her ears in one quick wave, and it felt like a forewarning to her, cold and mean and close.

Thomas's hand settled between her shoulder blades and, like magic, the trembling stopped. In its place she felt a warmth begin to spread—entirely too much warmth, in fact—and she suddenly felt overheated, over-aware of how close he stood to her, how crisp he smelled, how handsome he was in his charcoal-gray power suit.

"You okay, Emma?"

She looked up into his face. This was too weird. Thomas was gazing down at her with his eyes so hot, his mouth so sexual, his body pulsing with life and heat and the unmistakable energy of a creature who needed to mate.

And all the while they stood there in the cold, empty place of death.

She started to sweat.

"I'm fine. It's just a little overwhelming."

Concern creased his dark blond brows. "We can leave."

"No!" Emma shook her head. "I need to be here. Let's get to work."

Thomas let his hand drop away from her back as she stepped forward into the kitchen. It was odd seeing Emma here, and he watched as she moved through the brightly lit room, looking up at the ceiling for some strange reason, examining under the lip of the kitchen cabinets above the tile floor, peering under the modern black glass-and-steel dinette set.

He nearly laughed when he saw her crawl under the table and lie on her back, like Petey and Jack when they played fort.

Emma started to hum to herself, a tune he didn't recognize, and she drummed her fingers along her khakis to keep the beat. All the while she studied everything around her, the walls, the underside of the table, the tile, the chair legs.

"There's some dried urine under here. On the baseboard, the chair legs, the tile. I bet the little guy was hiding under here when it happened."

She turned her eyes to the bloodstain.

"The view is unobstructed from this angle."

She scooted out then, hopped to her feet, and smoothed out her simple cotton tee and chinos. When she turned toward Thomas, her braid slipped over her shoulder.

Thomas felt his loins clench and his body temperature soar.

"But the really interesting question is this: Did Hairy manage to stay quiet enough that the bad guy didn't even know he was here? Or did Hairy lose it like he did at your house, and the murderer just figured the dog wasn't worth worrying about?"

Thomas was unable to follow her reasoning, which was forgivable, because he couldn't stop thinking about how her breasts felt cradled in his hands.

"Uh, I'm not sure I see what you're getting at. Why would anyone worry about a dog being a witness?"

Emma nodded and smiled. "My point exactly. Someone who knew a lot about dogs, had their own dog maybe, or had trained a dog—that person might be uncomfortable with the fact that a dog had just seen them murder someone. That person might have felt compelled to get rid of the dog while they were at it."

Her smile widened, and Thomas thought about running his tongue over that tiny overlap of her two front teeth, sucking that ripe lower lip of hers into his mouth.

"But someone who didn't know anything about dogs wouldn't have cared one way or the other if a dog witnessed the murder. So the question is, was Hairy able to stay quiet?"

Emma pointed under the table. "Did he hide under here, silent as a mouse, watching the whole thing, waiting for the bad guy to leave?"

Thomas watched Emma continue to search through the kitchen, peering close but not touching any of the surfaces already dusted in lime-green fingerprint powder. She leaned into the pantry and came out frowning and pointing.

Thomas looked in. "Sure. You can pick it up."

Emma held out a small bag of dog food and grinned. "Now this is good dog food, Rugby Boy. Expensive, but well worth it for the quality protein."

He nodded. "Hand it over, Doc."

"We can take it?"

"Slick doesn't need it where he is, that's for sure."

Thomas tucked the unopened bag under his arm and then reached out as Emma shoved a set of small bowls in his hands, both emblazoned with the name Hairy.

"I wondered how you knew his name," she said, giving him a friendly pat on the shoulder.

He then followed Emma as she walked through the rest of the apartment. She stopped briefly in the living room, pointing out a little dog bed in the corner of the couch, and Thomas grabbed that, too.

She looked briefly in the bathroom and laughed when she found a plastic caddy filled with dog grooming supplies. "Again, nothing but the best." She handed it to him with a smile and Thomas realized he was running out of hands, and that against his better judgment, he was going to be removing things from a crime scene.

Also against his better judgment, he was contemplating a relationship with a woman.

Emma reached the bedroom and stopped dead. She stared at the king-sized bed covered in zebra-stripe satin and piled high with red pillows. Then she examined the floor-to-ceiling black lacquer entertainment center on the opposite wall.

"Holy moley." She bent down to peruse the video and DVD titles. "You weren't kidding that this guy was a bit on the flamboyant side."

She straightened up, put her hands on those lovely hips he'd just been staring at, and Thomas watched her face light up as she surveyed Slick's CD collection. "Wow. All disco. All the time. This guy knew how to get down."

Thomas heard himself chuckle, and it reminded him that Emma was the sweetest, funniest, most interesting woman he'd ever been around. He liked her so much. He enjoyed her company. He wanted to get his hands under her shirt so badly that his knuckles ached.

She went to the closet next. The louvered doors were already opened, also sprinkled with powder. She tamed quickly to ask him a question about what she could and could not touch when her braid went flying over her shoulder, and Thomas responded as reliably as one of Pavlov's dogs. Everything below the waist perked up and was raring to go.

"Sure. Go ahead," he heard himself saying, then nearly hyperventilated when she got down on her hands and knees and pulled out two boxes from the back of the closet.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, his maid chanted, because Emma's ass swayed a little when she reached, and swayed a little more when she scooted backward, and then got all packed nice and tight in her pants when she sat back on her heels.

Dear God, he wanted to clutch her hips and take her from behind. He wanted to open her up like a new Wal-Mart.

"Thomas?"

Emma swiveled at the waist to talk to him, her face alive with laughter and surprise. "Did you look in these boxes?" She suddenly frowned. "Is something wrong?"

What was wrong was that they hadn't talked about what happened on the porch the other night. What was wrong was that Thomas was going to lose his mind if he didn't resolve all the unanswered questions about Emma Jenkins and what he was doing paying for her consulting work, staring at her spectacular ass, needing to be in her presence.

A lot of things were wrong.

"Not a thing," he said, lowering the dog food bag over the decidedly unpleated front of his trousers. "Find something interesting?"

"Ooh, yeah. Check this out." She pulled a box across the carpet and with dainty fingers held up a tiny blue sequined garment, then a matching headband with a jaunty peacock feather. "Nice, huh?"

Thomas blinked. Oh, that box.