About That Kiss Read online

  armed, since she was looking as if she’d like to kill something. Or someone, anyway, most likely him. He had that effect on women. “Speechless,” he said. “I like it.”

  She was hands on hips now. “I’m here in a business capacity.”

  “Disappointing,” he said.

  She let out a wry laugh. “Come on. We both know that I’m not even close to your type.”

  She was smart. Tough. Sexy. All without knowing it. She was exactly his type. “Why do you think that?” he asked.

  “Because I’m not half-dressed with oversized store-bought breasts.”

  He grinned. She was teasing him, and for some sick reason he loved it. “You’re also not all that nice,” he said. “And I really like nice.”

  “Uh-huh. I bet ‘nice’ is right up there on your list next to, let me guess . . . a good personality?”

  He laughed. “So young and yet so cynical.” He tsked, enjoying the hell out of himself. “You’re assuming the worst of me.”

  “I have a long habit of assuming the worst.” She slapped an envelope on his desk. “I need to hire you to find something.”

  Since she appeared to be quite serious, he picked up the envelope. Nothing on the outside except her name. Inside was a Polaroid picture of what looked like a wooden penguin poised to fall off the Golden Gate Bridge into the water beneath.

  “I need you to find that carving,” she said.

  He met her gaze as he slid the picture back into the envelope. “Funny.”

  “I’m not kidding.”

  He took a second look at her. Her light brown eyes were solemn and serious, with shadows both in and beneath them. Her mouth—the one he could still feel under his—was grim. She was right. She wasn’t kidding. He pulled out the photo again. “Okay, tell me what I’m looking at.”

  “A three-inch wood carving of a penguin.”

  He made a show of looking around the room, beneath his desk, behind his chair.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Searching for the cameras. You’re punking me.”

  “No, I’m not! Someone stole this from me yesterday.”

  “So call the police,” he said.

  “Are you kidding? They’ll laugh at me.” She sighed when she clearly read in his expression that he wanted to laugh too. “I want that wood carving back, Joe.”

  “Yeah? Like I wanted to buy that mirror for Molly yesterday?”

  She blew out a sigh as if maybe she’d expected this reaction and plopped into the chair in front of his desk. “About that,” she said. “Do this for me, find my carving, and I’ll build you a new mirror for Molly.”

  “So . . . we’re making a deal?”

  “Yes.”

  Interesting. He met her gaze, the color of the whiskey he’d been drinking the other night just before their infamous kiss. And he thought sure, why the hell not. Given that his jobs usually involved death and mayhem along with dealing with the bottom-feeders and scum of the population, this might be some welcome comedy relief. He could help out the cute, crazy chick, and as a bonus he’d be able to get his sister the birthday present she wanted. “Okay.”

  “Okay?” she asked, still very serious. “Okay as in we have a deal?”

  Joe might be a little slow on the uptake, but clearly there was more here than she was saying. Way more. For one thing, he realized that the shadows in her eyes weren’t just annoyance at having to deal with him. She was unnerved. She was hiding it well, but she was scared, and hell if he didn’t react to that. “When did you last see it?” he asked.

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t be here.”

  He sighed. “When did you notice it was missing?”

  She thought about it. “Last night right before I closed up the shop,” she remembered. “I last saw it yesterday morning, so it could have vanished at any point during the day. The problem is I keep my purse up front under the counter, but sometimes, if I’m in charge of the retail store, I’m in the back until a customer comes in, which I might not always notice right away.”

  “So your purse is often unsupervised.”

  “Yes.”

  He didn’t bother to point out that she was lucky something like this hadn’t happened sooner. She knew. It was all over her face. As was the fact that she hated having to come to him for help. “Why would someone steal this thing and then taunt you with it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know and it doesn’t matter,” she said. “I just want it back.”

  “It does matter.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” he said, “I feel like I’m missing all the good parts of this story. Is this going to be like the game Clue? Colonel Mustard in the library with the revolver?”

  She stood up. “This isn’t a game, Joe. And if you’re not going to help me, I’ll find someone else who will.” With that, she headed to the door.

  Which was when Joe realized he’d finally met someone more stubborn than himself. And according to his friends and family, that wasn’t even possible.

  Chapter 4

  #ICouldaBeenAContender

  Joe caught Kylie at the door of his office, barely. Wrapping his fingers around her wrist, he tugged her around to face him. “I didn’t say I wasn’t going to help you, Kylie.”

  As her name fell from his lips, her gaze went to his mouth. Just for a single heartbeat, but it told him something he hadn’t realized he needed to know.

  She most definitely remembered everything about their kiss.

  “So you will help me?” she asked.

  A missing penguin? Seriously? But the absurdity of the task was eclipsed by the way her pulse raced beneath his fingers, by how her gaze slid briefly back up to his mouth before returning slowly, almost reluctantly, it seemed, to his eyes. He’d had a taste of her and yeah, it’d been . . . off the charts. But he wasn’t a man who went back for seconds. Ever. So he was as surprised as she was when his mouth opened and he said, “Yes. I’m going to help you.”

  “In exchange for the mirror,” she said, clearly not trusting him and wanting to clarify and lay out the terms. “Nothing more.”

  He smiled. “Where’s the fun in that?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Say it, Joe.”

  He let out a low laugh. “Fine. My help for the mirror. You know, you might just be the most stubborn woman I’ve ever met, and that’s saying something.”

  “Do me a favor and don’t compare me to the women you date,” she said. “Or whatever you do with them. We all know the only reason you even remember their names is that you take them to the coffee shop in the morning and then read what gets written on their cup.”

  Okay, there’d most definitely been a time in his life when that had been true, but he was slowing down in his old age. Having just turned thirty, he was discovering that he wasn’t nearly as entertained by hooking up as he used to be. Not that he planned on admitting that. “If I’m going to do this,” he said, “I need details. All of them, Kylie.”

  “Sure,” she said so quickly that he knew she was full of shit.

  But it took someone else just as full of shit to recognize it. “Then come back and sit down,” he said. “Fill in some blanks.”

  She headed past him, shoulder-checking him as she did, which made him want to laugh.

  Even up against the wall, she came out fighting.

  She moved past his visitor chairs to his window, looking down at the courtyard below. “The penguin is a wood carving that has no value to anyone but me,” she said. “It was my grandpa’s.” She paused. “It’s all I have of him.”

  “Your grandpa . . . Michael Masters, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “He was an artist,” he said. “A woodworker like you. Is his stuff valuable?”

  “It wasn’t,” she said to the glass. “At least not until he died. Almost ten years ago now.”

  There was something in her carefully emotionally blank voice that gave her away. His second inkling that nothing about this was
a joke to her. “How many of these carvings exist?”

  “All I know about for sure is this one,” she said. “My grandpa made it for me as a toy. He said penguins stick with their families for life. Like him and me.” She paused. “I think I remember him mentioning once that there might be another, but I never saw it.”

  “Who knew this one existed?” Joe asked.

  “No one,” she said. “The penguin was a toy to amuse me when I was little. As far as I know, he never made any for sale.”

  But clearly someone else had known it existed. He watched as she turned from the window and looked at him, and he saw a depth of hidden pain and vulnerability that nearly took his breath. Shit. He was really going to do this. He was actually going on the hunt for a toy, a chunk of wood. He never made decisions from a place of emotion. At least not anymore, not since that long-ago time when what he’d had to find was his sister. Then he’d run on pure emotion and it’d nearly gotten her killed. “Tell me more about your grandpa.”

  She turned away from him again and took a moment to speak. “He died after a fire in his shop.”

  “Were you close?” he asked.

  “Yes.” There was another long pause. “I lived with him at the time.”

  Hell. He gave her a moment to get herself together and took a deep breath himself. So much for the emotional distance. “Were you hurt?” he asked quietly.

  “I wasn’t there that night.”

  Joe wasn’t completely heartless, and his chest got tight at the guilt in her voice. “Damn, Kylie. I’m sorry.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  Yeah, but as he knew, time didn’t heal shit. Just as he knew—at least in his experience—that crime didn’t discriminate. Bad shit happened to good people. “What about your parents?”

  “What about them?” she asked.

  “Why were you living with your grandpa and not them?”

  She shrugged. “They weren’t really parent material.” She met his questioning gaze. “They were kids when the stick turned blue. They weren’t a couple or anything. My dad didn’t stay around, and my mom wasn’t . . . equipped to deal back then.”

  “Do you see them now?” he asked, curious about her. He knew that she was quiet, thoughtful, creative. He’d always wondered what made her tick. Now that he knew she’d been raised by her grandfather, things made more sense, like the way she seemed like such an old soul, or could walk into a room and turned heads but never even realized it.

  “My dad works on the oil rigs in the Gulf,” she said. “He blows through San Francisco every few years. My mom’s living la vida loca in the Mission District with her current boyfriend, but we do best with a little distance between calls and visits.”

  Joe and his mom had been incredibly close before she’d died when he’d been ten. And though he never knew how to describe his relationship with his father, they were in each other’s lives, forever bound by the ties of blood and family. Same with Molly. The three of them had many faults, but not caring wasn’t one of them. They were in a love/hate and undoubtedly dysfunctional relationship, but he had no doubt they’d stand at his back in any situation, no questions asked.

  Well, okay, there’d be questions. And yelling, lots of yelling, but they’d still be at his back.

  It seemed the person Kylie had ever had at her back was gone, and though he knew she wouldn’t want him to feel bad for her, he did. It sucked. It also made her life and her success in the artistic world all the more amazing for the fact that she was accomplishing it on her own. “Tell me more about the fire,” he said, not daring to risk her wrath by offering sympathy. “His entire shop burned? And what about any inventory in it?”

  “Everything was destroyed,” she said.

  “Which would’ve have made any work of his that had already sold instantly more valuable,” he said. “Right?”

  She turned to face him, her brow furrowed. “Yes. I guess I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  “That’s why you’re paying me the big bucks.” He smiled, hoping she knew he was teasing. “Okay, we’ll start with some paperwork.”

  She looked startled. And annoyed. “You mean like forms?”

  “No, a list,” he said. “How many people knew the both of you? Anyone have anything against either of you, a grudge, a vendetta? Anything?”

  She stared at him like he was crazy. “No one had anything against my grandpa. He was the sweetest, kindest, most generous man on the planet.”

  Uh-huh. Call him jaded, but everyone had secrets. And everyone had a bad side.

  She took in his expression and shook her head. “No one was mad at him.” She paused. “Or me.”

  He went brows up.

  “Hey,” she said. “I’m a delight.”

  He laughed and she rolled her eyes. “Okay, fine, I’m a pain in the ass, whatever. Just find my penguin.”

  The way she said that, “my penguin,” like it’d been her most treasured possession, dried up his good humor. He knew what it was like to love family so deeply it hurt and he also knew what it was like to lose them. His dad was still kicking, but Joe had lost him just the same. “So you’re saying no one was pissed off at him or you.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “Then let’s try another angle,” he said. “Greed instead of revenge.”

  “Okay,” she said slowly. Doubtfully. And Joe got it. Most people didn’t give a lot of thought to motives behind a crime. Most people’s minds didn’t go there.

  He wasn’t most people.

  “It’s someone who knew the both of you,” he said. “Or someone who might have heard something from someone who knew the both of you, or they wouldn’t have had any idea that this wood thing even existed.”

  “Penguin wood carving,” she corrected him. “It’s a penguin wood carving, not a ‘wood thing.’”

  “Right,” he said. “Penguin wood carving.”

  “My grandpa was simple,” she said. “And quiet. He didn’t go out, didn’t have friends he hung out with. He liked to stay home and be with me.”

  Joe was really glad that she’d had him when it seemed as if she’d not been able to count on her parents, but he could only imagine how lonely and sheltered she’d been. “How about employees?”

  “He didn’t have any.”

  “No one? Not an office helper or apprentice? No one at all?” he asked, finding that hard to believe.

  “I handled his phones and the books,” she said, “although he did have apprentices here and there. I didn’t think about them.”

  He nodded, not liking the vision he was getting of how her younger years had gone. She’d lived lean and isolated. “Can you list all the apprentices?”

  “I think so. But—”

  He pulled out his desk chair, gestured for her to sit, and pushed a pad of paper and a pen in front of her.

  “Okay.” She bent over the pad in concentration, her long, wavy, light brown hair falling into her face. With a sound of annoyance, she coiled it up on top of her head with an elastic ribbon she’d had on her wrist. She went back to the list and wrote in silence for a few minutes before handing him the pad.

  “Here are the apprentices during the time I was with him,” she said. “There are ten. I’ve given you their names and where they were from. One was older than my grandpa and isn’t a viable suspect. Another has passed away. Two are living out of the country. And out of the ones that are left, I honestly can’t see a single one of them doing this. They all loved my grandpa as much as I did.”

  This was a biased point of view and as was habit on this job, he ignored all bias and emotion. “Is there anything else I need to know?” he asked.