“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.