“Fifty credits.” He leaned over, gently kissed the tip of her breast. “You lost, Lieutenant.”
Her eyes blinked open and stared into his gorgeous and very satisfied face. They were sprawled on the rug of his private room, and their clothes, as best she could recall, were scattered everywhere. Starting at the stairway where he’d trapped her against the wall and had started to…win the bet.
“I’m naked,” she pointed out. “I don’t generally keep credits up my—”
“I’m happy to take your IOU.” He rose, all graceful, gleaming muscles, and took a memo card from his console. “Here you are.” Handed it to her.
She stared down at it, knowing dignity was as lost as the fifty credits. “You’re really enjoying this.”
“Oh, more than you can possibly imagine.”
Scowling at him, she engaged the memo. “I owe you, Roarke, fifty credits, Dallas, Lieutenant Eve.” She shoved the memo at him. “Satisfied.”
“In every possible way.” He thought, sentimentally, that he would tuck the memo away with the little gray suit button he’d kept from their very first meeting. “I love you, Dallas, Lieutenant Eve, in every possible way.”
She couldn’t help it. She went soft all over. It was the way he said it, the way he looked at her that had rapid pulses beating under melting skin. “Oh, no, you don’t. That kind of thing’s how you took me for fifty.” She scrambled up before he could distract her again. “Where the hell are my pants?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea.” He walked to a section of the wall, touched a mechanism. When the panel slid open, he drew out a robe. It was silk and thin and made her eyes narrow again.
He was always buying her things like that, and they always seemed to find their way to various parts of the house. Conveniently.
“That’s not working attire.”
“We can do this naked, but you’d certainly lose another fifty.” When she snatched the robe out of his hand, he turned and took out another for himself. “This could take some time. We’ll want coffee.”
As she went to the AutoChef to get coffee, Roarke moved behind the console. The equipment here was first flight, and unregistered. CompuGuard couldn’t track it nor block him from hacking into any system. Still, even with those advantages, finding a personal log that may or may not have existed was like separating individual grains of sand from a bucketful.
“Engage,” he ordered. “More likely his home unit, wouldn’t you think?”
“Anything on his unit at Cop Central would have been transferred, and official units record all logging. If he wanted to keep something to himself, he’d have used a private system.”
“Do you have his home address? Never mind,” he said before Eve could speak. “I’ll get it. Data, Wojinski, Frank…what was his rank?”
“Detective Sergeant, attached to Records.”
“Data on screen one, please.”
As it began to scroll, Roarke reached for the coffee Eve held out to him, then waved his fingers when his ’link beeped. “Get that, would you?”
It was the careless order of a man used to giving them. Automatically, she bristled, then just as quickly bumped aside the annoyance. She supposed the situation called for her to act as assistant.
“Roarke’s residence. Peabody?”
“You didn’t answer your communicator.”
“No, I…” God knew where it was, she thought. “What’s up?”
“It’s bad. Dallas, it’s bad.” Though her voice was steady, her face was dead white, and her eyes too dark. “Alice is dead. I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t get to her. She just—”
“Where are you?”
“On Tenth Street, between Broad and Seventh. I called the MTS, but there was nothing—”
“Are you in jeopardy?”
“No, no. I just couldn’t stop her. I just watched while—”
“Secure the scene, Officer. Relay to Dispatch. I’m on my way. Call backup as required, and stand. Understood?”