“Cheeto-rubbers,” I muttered.
“What was that?”
“Nothing. You were saying?”
“You have nothing to apologize for regarding Anton,” she smiled, and picked up one of the treatments, running her fingers over a peach and ivory floral brocade wall covering. “He was my favorite lover. He was a very good
friend as well, very intelligent. He loved to talk, and appreciated anyone who would listen to his tales of growing up in Greece.” A fond smile curved her lips as she glanced around the room. “He left me this house, you know.”
I blinked a couple of times, surprised, but touched by the obvious affection in her voice. She must have loved him very much to speak so fondly of him still. I envisioned an elderly rich Greek gentleman, obsessed with Isabella’s silvery, untouchable beauty, entranced by her calm air of interest. She had obviously meant a lot to him, too, if he’d remembered her in his will. “No, I didn’t know. That was very sweet of him to remember you like that. Has he been gone for many years?”
She waved a hand and held out a treatment board. I took it, not even glancing at the wallpaper and paint samples it held. “Six years. I miss him still.”
Tears welled up at the tragic story of lovers parted by death. “Isabella, that’s so sad.” I set the treatment board down and put a comforting arm around her shoulders. “I can remember how devastated I was when my grandfather died. He was everything to me—the one person who understood me, and didn’t expect me to be anything but myself. I know your relationship with Anton wasn’t the same, but I’m sure you grieve for his loss just as I grieve for my grandfather.”
Isabella cocked her head, her silvery-blond hair swinging gracefully to the side. Bright blue eyes looked steadily at me. “Anton isn’t elderly, nor is he dead.”
I stepped back, confused. “Oh. I thought…”
She shook her head, her shoulders giving a little shrug. “He tired of me eventually, and left me for another mistress. But he was extremely generous in giving me this
house—our arrangement called only for a flat.”
Mistress? Arrangement? Huh?
“I don’t think I understand, Isabella…”
She smiled then, a bright smile that had a bit of pity mixed into it. “It’s very simple, dear. Before Anton left me this house, I was a mistress.”
I nodded. “Yes, you said Anton was your…er…lover.”
Her hair swung as she shook her head. “I wasn’t just Anton’s lover—I was a professional mistress. I maintained relationships with gentlemen of means who wished to keep an exclusive sexual partner.”
My mouth dropped open. She was a mistress? A real mistress, the kind I read about in historical romances. “A Cyprian? You were a lightskirt?”
“I am unfamiliar with those terms, but yes, I believe you’re on the right track at last. It was quite a lucrative business. I only accepted employment by very…shall we say
discerning
gentlemen?”
I just bet they were! But if she was a professional, that meant…
“Alex!”
She took the treatment board from me and handed me another. I glanced at it. The colors were red and yellow. “Ick.”
“Alexander moved in after Anton had seen to my financial security. Our relationship was one of pleasure, not business.”
The hairs on the back of my neck started to rise at her words. Alex’s pleasure with Isabella was something I really didn’t want to contemplate.
“If you recall, I told you that relationship was over a few years ago.”
“Two,” I ground out.
“Yes, two years. What do you think of the peach?”
I looked at the sample she held out. “It looks trollopy.”
She pursed her lips as she studied it. “I thought it looked warm. I’m redecorating the bedroom—oatmeal and taupe are passé—and I thought something warmer might be nice for a change. Trollopy?”
“Tart-like. Sluttish. Wanton.”
One silver eyebrow raised at my words. “Dear, you’re not upset because I was forthcoming about my relationship with Alexander, are you?”
“
Former
relationship, and the answer is no, I’m not upset.”
“Good. You have no need to be, you know. You’ve quite captured his heart in a way I never did.”
That made me feel a bit better. I let my hackles deruffle. “Oh?”
Her eyes smiled at me. Dammit, she was enjoying toying with me! “Yes, indeed. He would never have spent a day with me when he had work to do. You must present him with quite a dilemma, his desire to be with you warring with his need to fulfill his duties at the Yard.”
I hadn’t thought of it like that. It made me feel small and petty for teasing Alex and yelling at him about being a workaholic.
“Are you sure about the peach?”
“Hmm?” I looked at the color samples Isabella held out. “Oh, that. Yes, I’m sorry, it looks like something out of one of the tackier French bordellos. Why not go with the Warwick blue and champagne combination? If you’ll excuse me, I have to be running. I need to…ah…leave someone a note.”
“Alix?”
I paused at the door to her bedroom and looked back.
“Are you in love with him yet?”
“Isabella, you have a penchant for making my mouth drop open with surprise,” I said, having suited action to words. “I never know what you’re going to say next.”
She smiled a warm smile that made her suddenly look very human. “Oddly enough, I’ve heard the same thing said about you recently. Are you in love with him?”
“Honestly, I thought you Brits were supposed to be so circumspect and unwilling to bring up personal topics with people you don’t know really well.” I waved and started down her hallway.
Her lilting tones followed after me. “You should tell him, Alix. He needs to be loved. You’re not a cruel woman; don’t keep him guessing.”
“I’m not going to stand here discussing this with you,” I said as I opened her front door, enjoying the silvery tones of her door chimes. They sounded just like her laughter. “And besides, too many things can go wrong once you start talking about stuff like that.”
She appeared at the end of the hallway, the blue and champagne board in hand. “Alexander means a great deal to me, Alix. I count him as one of my dearest friends, and I don’t want to see him hurt. All I ask is that you tell him how you feel about him. Perhaps it would be easier for you if you admitted your feelings to a neutral and trusted friend.”
Neutral? Isabella? I snorted. “Oh for heaven’s sake—you’re not going to let go of this until I tell you what you want to hear, are you?”
She made a suggestive little moue. I gave in. If I didn’t, she’d probably follow me down to my flat, nagging me
all the way. I put both hands on my hips and glared down the corridor at her.
“Fine, you want to know everything? I’ll tell you everything. Yes, I’m madly in love with him. I love him so much it hurts. I can’t stop thinking about him. I’m breathless with wonder when I remember our time together.” Isabella clapped her hand over her mouth, but I ignored her attempt to contain her laughter and continued. She wanted to hear it, she was going to get it all. “He fills me with happiness and warmth and hope and all the other things that have been missing my whole, entire miserable life. He is irritating and aggravating and is without a doubt the perfect man for me, and it’s going to kill me when he dumps me. Happy now? Good. I’ll be on my way.”
I spun around, slamming the door behind me, and ran smack into a big, blocky, suit-wearing shape.
“Oh, Lord, this is all I need,” I said, hanging my head and banging it gently on the suit’s chest.
“Good morning,” the suit said to me. “Having a little chat with Isabella?”
I must have turned twelve shades of red. He heard everything,
everything.
I’d just admitted everything I had intended to keep locked away. There was nothing left now. I took a deep breath.
“Why, Alex, how nice to see you again. Home so early? Yes, indeedy, Isabella and I were just having a chat about our favorite movie actors. I was telling her how much I admired Alan Rickman, the actor.” I peeked up at him through my eyelashes. “I have a little crush on him, you see.”
His eyes glittered back wickedly at me. He wasn’t fooled. “I do see.”
I sighed. It was hopeless. “Yeah, I thought somehow you would. Are you busy?”
He shook his head and opened the door to his flat. I walked in ahead of him, determined to smooth over the mess I had just made of our tenuous relationship, but the words froze on my tongue when I glanced over at the wall that ran at a right angle to his couch. When I had been in his living room before, there were floor-to-ceiling shuttered doors closed across the wall, sheltering what I had assumed was a closet. I was wrong. The entire wall was devoted to electronics.
“Good Lord, the guys on Tottenham Court Road must love you! The one with the most toys wins, eh?”
Alex glanced over at his wall o’ computers. “Something like that.”
I pulled out a comfy leather computer chair and sat down before one of the two monitors. “Let’s see, you have a Mac, a PC, a scanner, a camcorder, something I don’t recognize, something else I don’t recognize…”
Alex tossed a stack of papers on top of a small black box with lots of knobs and wires poking out of it. “The small round one is a webcam. The black box on the right is a device you have no need to see. I think you’ll be more comfortable on the couch, Alix.”
I ignored his attempt to oust me from his computer chair and unblanked his screen saver to see what it was he did to nail those nasty child-porn guys. “Alexander!”
“Christ, I thought I’d—Alix, go sit on the couch.”
I slapped his hand away from the mouse and clung to the chair, refusing to be hustled out of the way. “Those have got to be fake, you know that, don’t you? No woman could grow boobs like that naturally. Jeezumcrow
, what’s she’s got in her hand? Is that what I think it is?”
Alex wrestled the mouse away from me and closed the browser screen. I cocked an eyebrow at him. “You know, that dull red flush gives you a healthy outdoorsy glow, the kind of glow a man who spends his days sitting in front of a monitor staring at a naked woman with jugs the size of watermelons who is holding a cucumber in a suggestive manner and leering at the camera just doesn’t naturally come by. What’s on this computer—holy cow! Now, that’s my kinda man! Geez, what is he, half horse or something?”
Alex swore under his breath as he flipped the power switch somewhere on the wall. Both of the computers went black. “Son of a…that is part of a case we’ve recently undertaken on a suspected online pornography studio.”
“Huh. I thought you only worked with pedophiles? I can see that you want to get kiddy porn shut down, that’s important, but why would you guys be spending time and money going after a woman and her trained cucumber? She doesn’t seem to me to be hurting anyone.”
He pinned me back with a glittering emerald-eyed glare. “Pornography in any form is degrading, reprehensible, and an abomination to anyone who has made love to someone they have strong feelings for.”
Oops. Guess he had strong feelings on the subject. I suppose, given the fact that he dedicated his life to eradicating perverts who liked little kids, that wasn’t surprising. Still, I’d yet to meet a man who didn’t enjoy looking at pictures of naked women. I waved my hand at the now black monitors. “So you don’t get even a tiny bit turned on by some of the stuff you see?”
He looked at me as if I were the spawn of Satan. “No, no,” I hastened to correct, “not the kiddy stuff, the adult pictures. I thought men got their jollies from looking at women with big boobs and guys who were…well…getting it on with them.”
“I don’t find it the least bit exciting, no.” It’s a wonder he could speak, his jaw was so tight. He pulled me out of the chair and up to his chest.
I tickled his Adam’s apple. “You say that like you’re a prude, but you, Detective Inspector Manly Thighs, are anything but chaste.”
His lips feathered across mine, sending little sparks of heat out to all corners of my body. Oh, what he could do with just a pair of lips!
“What we have together is not obscene or degrading, sweetheart. What we have is an honest expression of something more than mere lust.”
“Mmm,” I teased, allowing desire to ripple through me, building stronger and stronger with each warm touch of those delicious lips. “Seems to me something doesn’t quite add up right. You spend your day looking at porn…”
He narrowed those gorgeous eyes at me. I smiled against his mouth.
“And then you and I…well, you know what we do.”
“Is there a point to this?” he asked as he grabbed my hips and pulled me tight against him. Those sparks of heat he generated turned into a roaring blaze.
“Yup. My point is that you can have your cake and”—I fluttered my lashes at him—“eat it, too.”
“It’s my job, Alix, nothing more,” he growled as he gave me one last feather-light kiss, then waved me toward the couch, pulling his suit jacket off and tugging
on his tie as he headed toward the other end of the flat.
“Tough job, eh, sport?” I followed him into his bedroom, plopping myself on his bed and giving it a test bounce or two. It didn’t squeak. I held up a hand when he started to argue. “You don’t have to say it, Alex, I understand. It is your job to close those people down. I saw the police reports sitting on your scanner; I’m just teasing you a little. It’s good for you. It’ll loosen you up a bit.”
He peeled off his shirt. My jaw dropped at the sight of that glorious chest.
“Is that so?” He kicked off his shoes. My eyes followed his hand inch by slow inch as he unzipped his zipper. “I had something else in mind that would loosen me up.”
I swallowed a couple of times so I wouldn’t drool. “Hooo, baby,
do
you!”
“I’m hot.”
That
was the understatement of the year! I was feeling a bit parched myself. “I’m going to take a shower. Perhaps you would care to continue the discussion in there?”
He inclined his head toward the bathroom. I almost ripped my dress trying to get it off while removing my shoes, bra, and underwear, all the while moving toward the bathroom.
“Well, you could help,” I snapped as I stood tangled up in my dress, the hook from my bra caught in my hair, hopping on one foot and trying to shake my underwear off from where it had snagged on my sandal buckle. “You don’t just have to stand there laughing at me.”