One Forgotten Night Page 9

  Mike hadn’t decided what he was going to do after he told Nina that her case was closed. But when she had opened her door and smiled at him, so shyly and yet so happily, he’d made up his mind without realizing it. And now, after seeing the way her eyes turned smoky and a flush rose in her cheeks when he touched her, he didn’t hesitate. The police department and the FBI would have his head on a platter if he had anything more to do with Nina Dennison. But he was no longer even thinking about walking away.

  “Come on,” he said abruptly. “I want you to meet someone.”

  * * *

  At first Nina thought that Mike was taking her back to the street where she’d been shot. He hadn’t said a word since bundling her into his car, leaving her to watch the chic streets of her Society Hill neighborhood give way to the dismal warehouse district north of the Old City. She was almost positive that the intersection they had just passed was the street he’d pointed out to her as the shooting site. In the next block Mike pulled up in front of an old, seemingly empty factory building. Its windows had been filled in with cement blocks, and graffiti adorned the rusted metal door to which Mike escorted her.

  “Watch your step,” he said, and took her elbow to steady her as she circled some broken glass. He produced a heavy key ring and went to work on the door; Nina noticed that despite its apparent decrepitude the door boasted several shiny new locks.

  “This is a lovely spot to visit, and don’t think I’m not grateful,” she said, “but what the heck are we doing here?”

  He flashed her a mischievous grin over his shoulder. “You’ll see.”

  The interior was a dusty, empty, echoing cavern of a place, as rundown as the building’s exterior—with one exception. The freight elevator was clean. It carried them smoothly to the factory’s top floor. When the elevator stopped, Nina became aware of a scrabbling, thumping sound, as though something large were running across a wooden floor and throwing itself against the other side of the elevator door.

  “It sounds like a giant rat,” she said dubiously. “You’re not going to open this door, are you?”

  Mike opened the door and stepped out of the elevator, greeted by joyous barking. When Nina followed, somewhat tentatively, she found him having his face thoroughly licked by a very large, sleek black dog whose front paws reached all the way to Mike’s shoulders. Sighting a new face, the dog abandoned Mike and lunged toward Nina, tail wagging and pink tongue lolling. Instinctively she knelt down to hug it. “Good dog,” she crooned, rubbing its floppy ears. “What a beautiful doggy you are.”

  “Well,” said Mike, “looks like you like animals.”

  “You know, I think you’re right.” She knuckled the dog’s head and he grinned at her foolishly. “What’s his name?”

  “Sig.”

  “Oh. Named after Freud, I suppose.”

  “Not exactly. He’s named after the first gun I had when I joined the force. A Sig Sauer pistol.”

  Nina nodded, not looking up. This is his world, she told herself. He’s a good man, but he still lives in a world of sudden violence and guns. Like the gun that shot me. She stroked Sig’s smooth coat, admiring the sheen of the slick black fur that shaded to seal brown on his muzzle and paws. “What kind of dog is he?” she asked.

  “Doberman.”

  Of course a cop would have a Doberman. That or a German shepherd. Then she took a more critical look at Sig, who, sensing an easy mark, had flopped over onto his back so that she could rub his belly. Sig didn’t have the intent, almost ruthless look that she associated with the typical Doberman pinscher; instead, he looked sweet and floppy, like a cartoon dog. “Hey, wait a minute. Aren’t Dobermans supposed to have no tails and those little pointy stand-up ears?”

  “Yeah. They’re born this way—” Mike waved at Sig “—and later their tails are docked and their ears cropped at the vet’s. But when the time came to do it, I just didn’t have the heart.”

  “I’m glad,” Nina said softly. “I like his silly ears.” She tugged them gently, winning a look of adoration from Sig.

  “I think you’ve got a fan there,” Mike observed. “If you don’t mind, he can keep you company while I take a quick shower.”

  Nina had been so preoccupied with the dog that she had paid no attention to her surroundings. She took a quick look around, and for a moment she had the illusion that she was out-of-doors. The top floor of the building was a huge room bathed in light from the high, slanted ceiling, which was all glass. The place was a wilderness of greenery: trees and shrubs grew out of big tubs, and vines hung from the pipes and ducts that crisscrossed the space overhead and snaked down the walls.

  “What is this place?” she called out to Mike.

  “My apartment.” He vanished through a doorway in the far wall.

  The dog nuzzled Nina’s hand, and when she looked down he picked up a rubber ball and gazed up at her hopefully, tail wagging.

  “You want to play, big guy? Well, why not?” Nina winged the ball into the wide-open spaces of Mike’s living room, and Sig bounded after it. She soon realized that she had made a mistake, for Sig was so overjoyed to have found a playmate that he kept bringing the ball back for her to throw again. And again. And again. But each time he galumphed off in pursuit, Nina had a chance to look around at the place where Mike Novalis lived.

  The floor was of wood, worn and faded with long use. Nina saw that a kitchen had been built against one wall. Nearby stood a table and chairs, and a battered blue sofa and easy chair on a big red rug. Opposite the kitchen was a low wooden platform that held a bed and a shelf for a TV and a stereo. Except for this corner, the rest of the loft was empty, a big, slightly dusty playground for Sig. It was an unconventional, rough-and-ready place. Not the easiest place to live in, Nina mused, but maybe it was worth the effort. Mike’s furnishings seemed humble, almost Spartan, but the light filtering through the vast vaulted room gave the place the feel of a cathedral, and the plants gave it life.

  Paws scrabbled across the floor and slithered to a stop at her feet. Sig carefully placed the ball in her hand and waited.

  “All right,” Nina told him. “One more time.”

  “Fat chance,” she heard Mike say. She turned. He was emerging from the bathroom, wreathed in whirls of steam. Nina knew that she was staring, but she couldn’t take her eyes away. It wasn’t just the fact that Mike was wearing only a pair of tight jeans, or that his broad shoulders, his tautly muscled arms and his flat, hard belly were bare and still damp, or that droplets of water were falling from his wet black hair, running down the sculpted curves of his chest and glistening in the dark swirls of hair that dusted his pectorals. Raw masculinity, unselfconsciously rubbing at his hair with a towel. All of that would have been hard enough to handle, but what rooted Nina to the spot was a powerful feeling of déjàvu. The picture that Mike made at that very instant—laughing, half-naked, framed by potted fig and palm trees—was exactly like the image of him that had flashed into her mind on Thursday night. Down to the last detail.

  The moment was broken: Mike came farther into the room to take the ball from Sig, and Nina tried to gather her scattered wits. She had known that the flash of vision in which she’d seen Mike was not a memory, of course; she couldn’t be remembering someone she’d just met. She’d assumed that the “memory” was something her mind had made up on the spot. After the shock and exhaustion of that first long day, starting with the hospital and ending with the diary, she had been tired and overly imaginative. Mike had appeared in the “memory” because she had spent the whole day with him and had gotten used to seeing him. The reason he had appeared bare chested and smiling had been pretty easy to figure out, too—she’d been all too aware of his physical attractions. But it was strange that her subconscious mind had cooked up a scene that was so much like reality, right down to the plants that she’d seen as a forest.

  Nina shook her head. I guess it’s just a coincidence. Weird. She felt a tiny, niggling doubt, as though something were not quite
right with that explanation. Yet she could not come up with a better one. She put the matter out of her mind.

  Mike had crossed to his sleeping area and, arms over his head, was putting on a T-shirt. There was something touchingly intimate in the sight of him putting his clothes on. This is what he would be doing if we had made love, Nina realized with a jolt. She watched in silence as he finished dressing, half wanting to cross the room and stop him.

  “Why did you bring me here?” she asked when he joined her.

  “I wanted you to meet Sig. I thought you might like to take him home with you for a couple of days. He likes you, obviously, and he’s a good protector.” Seeing her eyes darken with apprehension, Mike berated himself for his lousy choice of words.

  “You think I need protection?” The question was almost a whisper.

  “No, of course not,” he lied. “I only meant that you might feel better if you had some company at home. Something to keep you from being alone.”

  She gazed at him for a long minute, and he wondered whether she had bought it. He didn’t want to frighten her needlessly, but he couldn’t shake the hunch that there was more to the case of Nina Dennison than he had been told. He’d been flamed in the past for following his hunches, but he wasn’t going to let that stop him from doing whatever he could to protect this woman. Even if she was still lying to him about the amnesia, he didn’t want to see her hurt. Or worse.

  “Okay,” Nina decided. “I’ll take him home with me.” Maybe it would be nice to have some company in that empty apartment. And maybe, just maybe, it would come in handy to have Sig looking out for her. She chuckled. She’d be willing to bet that the next person who tried to break into her apartment would get a hell of a surprise. But she didn’t quite acknowledge that there was another reason for accepting Mike’s offer. As long as she had the dog, she could be sure that she would see the master again.

  * * *

  They took Sig back to Nina’s apartment. The big dog looked a little out of place at first; he roamed anxiously from room to room, as though he missed his cavernous loft, but then he settled down comfortably on the floor, chewing at one of Nina’s sofa pillows. “Oh, let him,” she said when Mike started to take the pillow away. “It was already ruined, anyway.” Whoever had searched Nina’s apartment had slashed the pillow open, and the stuffing had begun to spill out. Sig was only speeding up the process of disintegration.

  Nina felt a new tension. She was no longer Mike’s case; he was no longer her cop. They were a woman and a man, and she wasn’t sure how to act toward him now. Or what to expect from him.

  Both of them were silent for a moment. Nina didn’t want Mike to leave. She was about to offer him some coffee when he asked, “How would you like to have dinner?”

  She looked at him and nodded, suddenly shy. “I’d like that,” she forced herself to say, knowing that she was blushing. When he helped her on with her jacket, she tingled with excitement. Like a teenager on her first date, she chided herself. Then she laughed. It was a first date—sort of. After all, she couldn’t remember any others.

  “What’s so funny?” he inquired, looking down at her. The coldness was gone from his eyes; their blue was warm and inviting.

  “I’ll tell you sometime,” she responded lightly.

  He ushered her into his car, and she noticed that the burger wrappers and coffee cups had vanished from the floor.

  “How about South Philly?” he asked. “Does Italian sound good?”

  “Pasta sounds fabulous.”

  “Who knows? Maybe we can find a place that serves spaghetti alla spodumene.”

  * * *

  Ever since he’d first seen Nina, Mike had wondered what might have happened if he had met her somewhere ordinary—maybe over broccoli at the grocery store. Now he was no longer assigned to investigate her, and here they were. Unfortunately, even the most casual contact with Nina Dennison was off-limits. Hecht and Irons had made that crystal clear.

  He shouldn’t have walked into DeFazio’s feeling proud to have someone as radiant as Nina on his arm. He shouldn’t be sitting across from her at a cozy, candlelit corner table, drinking in the sight of her, making her laugh with anecdotes about police academy and stories of Sig’s exploits. He shouldn’t be with her at all. But she was like a fire, and he was a man who’d been cold for longer than he had realized. He needed to warm himself in the glow of her company for just a little longer.

  She was so easy to be with. Mike found himself loosening up, relaxing in a way that he hadn’t for a long time. They talked all through dinner and all the way back to her apartment. Unwilling to let the evening end, pulled by his feeling for Nina yet uncertain where that feeling was leading him, Mike walked up to Nina’s apartment with her “to check on Sig.”

  Nina made coffee, and as they sat at the kitchen table, cradling the warm mugs, she said, “You know, you have an unfair advantage. You know a lot about me, but I don’t know very much about you.”

  “What do you want to know?” He stirred milk into his coffee and gave her a lazy smile.

  Everything. What you taste like, what you feel like, how you think. “Well...have you ever been married?”

  His eyes changed then. Nina felt that suddenly he was looking at something a million miles away from her, something not very pretty.

  “No. I came close once, a couple of years ago, but it didn’t work out.”

  There was a long, strained silence. The comfortable companionship was gone. To restore it, Mike knew, he had to offer Nina a part of himself. And to his amazement, he was ready to do so. He didn’t know why he felt like baring his soul to a woman he’d known for only two days, but suddenly he knew that he wanted to tell her something about himself. But not everything, he warned himself.

  “I owe you an apology,” he began abruptly. “The other night, when I was leaving, you asked about my partner. I snapped out at you. You deserve to know why.”

  He put his hands on the table, facedown, and took a deep breath. “I used to work undercover, on the vice squad. I had a partner, a guy named Jack Renzo. We worked together for four years. He was the best friend I ever had.”

  The memories Mike had tried so hard to repress were surging back, and for a moment he was afraid he would cry. Then he went on. He tried to make his voice flat and impersonal, as if he were reading a report about someone else, but he knew he was failing; he sounded ragged. “Three years ago Jack and I spent months setting up a big drug bust, working with the DEA. We infiltrated the local end of a drug ring that was bringing coke and heroin up from Texas. It was gonna be the biggest bust in department history, it was gonna make us all heroes.” He tasted bitterness. “When it came down, everything went wrong. The stuff had been moved, and they were waiting for us.”

  He closed his eyes. Darkness brought him no relief—he saw another darkness, the inside of a deserted warehouse in the middle of the night. Suddenly the darkness was pierced by the red flares of gunfire, the silence shattered by shots and cries. The loudest cry was ripped from his own throat. He opened his eyes. “Jack was hit. He was wearing a vest, but they blew both his legs off with a machine gun. He bled to death in ninety seconds.”

  Mike looked at the table and saw with a distant sort of surprise that his hands were shaking. And he hadn’t even told her the worst of it. Not by a long shot. “Since then I haven’t worked with a regular partner. I don’t like being reminded of Jack, and that’s why I reacted the way I did when you asked about my partner. That’s enough—I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  Mike fell silent, but his anguish echoed in Nina’s heart. In the past few days she, too, had become intimate with loneliness and loss. She wanted to look away from that bleak, ravaged face, but she could not. She reached out, as if by her touch she could lighten the burden he bore. Something flamed up in the azure depths of his eyes. Was it a warning? Or a plea?

  Nina’s hand dropped. For a long moment she simply looked at Mike, at his tense expression, his inten
t gaze, his lips half-parted as if he wanted to speak but could not. His grief and introspection had vanished, to be replaced by other emotions: doubt, wariness, longing. And, she saw with a thrill of purely primitive need, desire.

  Am I going to spend the rest of my life afraid to reach for what I really want? The question sounded so clearly in Nina’s mind that for a moment she was afraid she’d spoken aloud. She raised her hand again, and this time she did not let it fall. Gently, tentatively, driven by a force deeper and more real than her fears, she touched Mike’s face, tracing the line of one jet black brow with a fingertip and then, more boldly, stroking his cheek with her open hand.

  All the while Mike watched her eyes, and she could not look away from that fierce, penetrating gaze. Nina had crossed a line, and she knew it. There was no room between them now for pride, or politeness, or pretense. She saw naked hunger in his look and knew that it was mirrored on her own face, there for him to see. A delicious melting warmth spread from the core of her throughout her whole body. She was weak with longing and yet, paradoxically, knowing how much he wanted her, she exulted in her power.

  Mike rose to his feet and pulled her up with him. They were next to each other, lightly touching along the whole lengths of their bodies. Nina felt electric, alive, every particle of her reaching eagerly toward him. He tilted her face up and lowered his mouth to hers.

  His kiss explored her mouth with breathtaking gentleness. His lips brushed across hers, lightly at first, almost teasingly, and then a little harder. He captured her full lower lip, gently nipping it in his teeth and sucking it. The tip of his tongue traced the contours of her mouth and then slipped between her lips.

  Nina ached to be pressed tightly to him, but his hands gripped her waist and held her in place, close enough to feel his body barely touching hers, but not as close as she wanted to be. She wrapped her arms around his neck, tangling her fingers in the glossy thick hair that she’d been wanting to touch for so long, and tried to draw him nearer, but still he held his distance.