Bending the Rules (10 page)

Looking at the wild, soft curls erupting from the rubber band at her crown, he had a sudden urge to wrap them around his hands and do some reeling in of his own. He took a sharp step back, rubbing his itchy palms against his thighs. Christ, de Sanges, he thought in disgust. You aren’t Dad or Joe out on parole and on the hunt for the nearest willing babe.

Those fucking family genes were going to be the death of him yet.

He shook the thought aside to tune back in on Poppy’s conversation.

“We have to assume that tagging is these kids’ equivalent of a creative outlet,” she said. “I can supply them that in a way more socially acceptable and demonstrate a genuine interest in them as well. I like teenagers.” The corner of her mouth quirked up. “Which I’m sure you’d say is because I still have the mentality of one.”

Jase wasn’t sure what the hell he would say. He looked at the conviction on her face and felt all his preconceived notions about her shift.

He tried to ignore it, because he didn’t like being wrong. Hell, if you followed the rules, you usually weren’t—and he’d been doing that since he was fourteen years old and Murph had caught him with his bad-seed fingers all over those topazes. But Poppy had acted a lot like Murphy with those kids today and she was telling him stuff now that made him question what he thought he knew about her. Then there was the memory of that not-exactly-high-rent-and-definitely-security-free building she lived in. Abruptly he demanded, “Who are you?”

“Well, not the rich girl you’ve got me pegged for, that’s for sure.”

He’d been so certain…but every piece of evidence except one said he’d been dead wrong.

Shit.

Still. He rubbed the back of his neck. “That mansion…”

She blew out a gusty, put-upon sigh, but said levelly, “Ava and Jane and I met Agnes Wolcott when we were twelve. She was a fascinating lady and we started hanging out with her when she attended the soirees Ava’s parents threw. Then one day she invited us to the Wolcott mansion for high tea.”

“What’s that, something you drink on a ladder?”

“Very droll, Detective de Sanges. Ridiculous, but droll. Actually, it’s laced with LSD.”

His mouth dropped open.

“That woman had been all over the world and she knew where alllll the best drugs were.” Then she gave him a jab. “And here I thought cops were supposed to be so impervious to lies and prevarications.” She gave him a look similar to the ones she’d bent on the kids. “Do you actually want to hear this or just waste my time with your smart-ass remarks?”

Fascinated by her against all good sense, he gave her a by-all-means-proceed sweep of his hand.

“All right, then. At that first tea, she gave us our first diaries and talked to us like we were interesting people, not a bunch of kids too stupid to understand words of more than two syllables. And our friendship with her simply grew from there. She had no family of her own, so she left us her estate when she died.”

She aimed a stern look on him. “But you’ve seen the mansion. It needs work and we’re having it fixed up, which takes both time and a lot of money. Most of the latter is coming from the collections she also left us, but Jane is still working on getting the last of those cataloged and until we finish the renovations, actually sell the place and reconcile the debit column with the credit side, we aren’t exactly rolling in dough. And even then—well, while it will certainly be more money than I’ve ever seen in my life, it’s not exactly going to be untold wealth.”

He narrowed his eyes at her, half-suspicious she was messing with him. “I’ve read a little about Miss Wolcott. She was quite the grande dame by all accounts. So how would girls with no money be in any position to meet her?”

“We all attended Country Day school, me on my grandmother’s dime and Janie on a scholarship. Ava genuinely is wealthy, and the three of us were introduced to Miss A. at one of those functions at Av’s parents’ house I mentioned.”

“Okay,” he said slowly. “So what you’re telling me here is that you’re just the girl next door?”

“More or less.” She smiled wryly. “If that next door happens to be a commune.”

“You lived in a commune?” Jesus. This just kept getting stranger and stranger. But looking at her with her easy confidence and that I-can-make-a-difference-in-the-world attitude, he could sort of picture it.

“Until I was five. Then my great-grandpa Larsen died and left my folks a modest inheritance that included a little house in Ballard.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “So in other words, you don’t really have those contacts you’ve been threatening me with.”

“You think not?” She gave him a smoky look from beneath her lashes. “I hate to burst your bubble, Detective, but that school I told you I attended? It’s quite prestigious and I rubbed elbows and had adjoining lockers with the kids of all kinds of Washington power brokers. Made contacts like you wouldn’t believe.”

He shoved his hands in his slacks pockets. “Crap.”

“I know.” She gave him a commiserating nod. “Life’s a bitch, isn’t it?” Then she leveled those cool gold-speckled chocolate-brown eyes on him. “But more for some than others, I’m afraid. And, Detective, you’re still stuck playing by my rules.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Man, I so don’t like feeling this way—all shook-up and shaky. But I have a feeling I’m not going to be able to blow this off as easily as I usually do.

S
HE HAD BEEN
feeling pretty darn invincible, but Poppy wasn’t quite so insouciant when de Sanges took a hot step forward to loom over her, a storm brewing in his eyes. He had the benefit of height on his side and he used it to full advantage. Standing this close, she had to crane her head back just to look into his face.

He blocked out the mellow early spring light, all wide shoulders, dark-as-the-universe pissed-off eyes and five o’clock shadow, the latter of which suddenly struck her as probably a pretty much round-the-clock condition with him, rather than time-specific.

He was so overwhelmingly male, it was all she could do not to flinch back.

“I warned you not to mess with me,” he said with a lack of heat that was belied by those narrowed eyes.

“And just how am I doing that?” she demanded, thanking the gods for the irritation that laced her voice. It beat hell out of having it crack middeclaration like some intimidated schoolgirl, and in truth she hadn’t been all that certain it wouldn’t until she’d opened her mouth. “I stated a fact, Jack. You implied that because I don’t hail from a wealthy family I’m without resources, and I gave you the reasons why that’s not true. God, you’re a buzz-kill. I was feeling so good until you had to go and wreck it.” She slapped hands to his chest and pushed. “Get out of my way.”

He didn’t budge and she really, really wished she hadn’t touched him, but she was committed now. She wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of whipping her hands back like he was some too-hot-to-handle stud and she a big-eyed, inexperienced kid too rattled to be in his presence.

Like he was the Sheik and she was the Virgin. Uh-uh, no, ma’am. That was so two decades ago.

It didn’t help, though, that his chest was suddenly the only thing she could think about. It was warm and solid beneath his white dress shirt and narrow suspenders. Beneath her abruptly tingling palms.

To keep her thoughts off the way it made her feel, she deliberately concentrated on his retro-hip clothing. He was a sharp dresser, which was just one more thing pushing her buttons at the moment. “And another thing,” she snapped, standing on her toes to get in his face, “wear painting-appropriate clothes, for God’s sake! You’re gonna wreck your cool threads.”

She abruptly became aware of the stillness in the body beneath her hands.

But he merely said coolly, “Not if I don’t paint.”

So she figured it had nothing to do with her touch. “You don’t know much about kids, do you? They see you standing around in your sharp clothes, they’re going to end up accidentally-on-purpose flinging a little paint your way. Especially since you watch them like a hawk.”

He hitched his shoulders, renewing her awareness of the play of muscles beneath her hands. “That’s my job,” he said.

“Is it your job to act like Boss Godfrey while you’re about it?” she demanded in exasperation, giving him an even harder shove to back him up.

To no avail once again. He merely gazed down at her with his usual lack of expression. “Who’s Boss Godfrey?”

“You know, in Cool Hand Luke?” she said, fully expecting to see a what-the-hell-are-you-talking-about expression on his face.

But he surprised her when he said, “Hey, I liked that movie.” And darned if he didn’t almost display pleasure for a moment. “Which one was he?” Clearly running the cast of characters through his mind, he furrowed his brow but almost immediately it cleared. “The road crew boss, right? The sharpshooter?”

“All you’re missing,” she said dryly, “is the rifle and a pair of mirror shades.”

The slightest of smiles curved his lips and his long fingers came up to shackle her wrists. “Maybe I oughtta bring that up tomorrow—that the minithugs should refer to me from now on as Boss de Sanges.” He shot her a full-fledged grin. “It’s got a certain ring to it.”

She sagged in his grip, her knees going weak at the flash of white teeth, the crinkling at the corners of his dark eyes. She hadn’t thought the man was capable of smiling, never mind possessing an honest-to-goodness sense of humor that came complete with a killer grin.

The latter faded as he stared down at her and his fingers tightened around her wrists. Whispering a blasphemy beneath his breath, he slowly pulled her hands up around his neck, a movement that caused her inner arms to slide up his chest and their bodies to brush. Lowering his head, he kissed her.

And Poppy’s thinking processes short-circuited. Feeling his mouth simultaneously firm and soft against her lips, her head reeling with his scent, a frisson of undiluted lust rushed to her brain, filling it with heat that immediately suffused her entire body. She rose onto her toes to get closer, closer to the source, tightening her arms around his neck until she darn near had him in a choke hold, reveling in the press of that long, hard body the entire length of her own. Her lips parted beneath his, her tongue slicked over the silky inner membrane of his lower lip.

Then he was gone, his hands unwinding her arms as he stepped back, dropping them as if they’d smeared his palms with slug slime. Gone, gone, gone—his lips, his scent, his body—if not that far in actual feet and inches, still an immeasurable gulf in emotional distance, judging by the remote look in his eyes.

Red tinged his high cheekbones, but his face was otherwise expressionless. “My apologies, Ms. Calloway,” he said coolly.

She jerked her head back. What, kissing her was some big mistake? Well, it was, of course, but there wasn’t a woman alive who wanted to be told she was a mistake. Nor was she overjoyed to learn that what had completely rocked her boat hadn’t affected him at all.

She’d walk naked down Pike Street in a rainstorm before she’d let him know, however, so she merely nodded. But screw his apology. If he wasn’t affected, she wasn’t affected. She didn’t know what that brain-function meltdown had been all about, but she would’ve pulled back if Detective Hot Lips hadn’t beat her to the punch.

She was almost completely, utterly, one-hundred-percent certain about that. “Not a problem,” she said with a carelessness she didn’t quite feel, forcing a wry tilt of her lips. “As kisses go, that one was hardly worth apologizing over.”

If you discount the nuclear effect. But steel entered her spine at the covert thought. Because she did. She discounted it with every atom of her being.

She got the satisfaction of seeing his eyes narrow, which for the king of the BOTOX expression she interpreted as wild displeasure. Good. Let him be unhappy. She wasn’t feeling all that peppy herself.

Stepping around him, she gathered up her personal odds and ends and stuffed them in her tote as she said over her shoulder with studied casualness, “See you tomorrow.” Seeing as how I can’t legitimately avoid it.

Not that she would if she could. Hey, she could be every bit as professional as Robocop.

Really.

He didn’t reply and she turned her attention back to her packing, but she could feel him still standing there. Then he said brusquely, “Yeah. Tomorrow.” And walked away.

The instant he disappeared from sight Poppy stopped all her busywork and released a sharp exhalation. Glancing around, she was relieved to see that none of the merchants she worked for had witnessed her moment of idiocy—a possible consequence she would have been a lot wiser to consider earlier. “Stupid, stupid, stupid!” she spat, thunking the side of her fist against her forehead with each repetition. Then she rose to her feet, brushed off her clothing and headed for the car.

As soon as she’d climbed in and closed the door, she hauled her cell phone from her tote and hit speed dial.

“Hey,” she said as soon as her ring was answered. “I could really use a little Sisterhood solidarity about now.”

T
HEY ENDED UP
meeting at the mansion. Jane was already in the parlor when Poppy arrived and just seeing her friend back by the fireplace, her dark hair shining under the lights as she focused on a table full of antique vases, melted some of the tension she’d been holding in her shoulders.